tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9087956066393516222024-03-19T00:01:20.357-05:00Known of Old"Stand ye in the ways, and see,
and ask for the old paths, where is the good way,
and ye shall find rest for your souls.
But they said, 'We will not walk therein' . . ."
Jeremiah 6: 16J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.comBlogger232125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-83707625713133378672024-03-06T23:38:00.001-06:002024-03-06T23:47:53.373-06:00The Next Level Revisited (and then some)<p><b>"So - why do you suppose God chose to make man in His image and likeness? (Assuming there is a God, of course; though you must admit, the metaphor does have some excellent uses).</b></p><p><b>"Why else? except that from the beginning He intended man to be an infinitely self-divinizing creature, who must ever be striving to pitch his tent in places of always-ascending grades of difficulty, hardship, inhospitality. Places - such as commonly denoted by terms like 'desert,' 'wilderness,' 'wasteland,' etc - places in which, no matter how strong or even dominant you are, the struggle for life is keen. Perhaps even brutal. If not utterly grueling and exhausting. Places, in short, in which fragile creatures can be neither cherished, nor respected, nor even protected - but only despised. (Including such fragile creatures as man himself <i>was, </i>at the outset of his journey.)</b></p><p><b>"But not just despised, please note, but shown nothing whatever of what - well, most of us would recognize as understanding, or mercy, or love. The point being that, if man really wants to be loved, and to render himself worthy of being loved (by God or anyone else), <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-weakness-stronger-than-man.html">he must be prepared to make himself always stronger, and stronger . . .</a> </b><i>(part I, pars. 5-7)</i></p><p><b>"How else, indeed, is he ever going to succeed in taking himself - not to mention everything else - to <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2017/09/to-next-level-mind-you-were-only-just.html">that ever-insatiable next level</a>? How otherwise, do you suppose, is he ever going to make himself 'at home' in the near-total desert and inhospitality of outer space?</b></p><p><b>"Or perhaps you thought he was going to colonize and subdue the farthest reaches of the universe by being some meek and tender sacrificial lamb?"</b></p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-43996077709821545972024-02-18T23:58:00.006-06:002024-03-08T00:43:29.416-06:00Why WOULD You?<p>Certain highly successful and influential persons of our time (who may or may not be narcissists): </p><p><b>"It's all quite simple, really: I want what I want what I want. And I also happen to be extremely good at getting it."</b></p><p>But that's just it: Why <i>would </i>you?</p><p>Why on earth would you have <i>such </i>confidence in the judgment of your own will as to believe you'd actually be happier, or better off, by getting everything (or even most of what) you want? Or even by getting most everything you've rationally determined that you <b>should </b>want? Why would you ever have such overarching confidence in the judgment and powers of your own mind, as to believe that getting what you <b>think </b>you want will make you happier? </p><p>Or if you like, never mind about being happier. Especially since - as I think by now our more globally-minded rulers have amply demonstrated - this Great Global World is not about happiness, whether their own or anyone else's. So here's a suggestion: <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2020/12/making-love-easier-thing.html">Let's do our best to leave behind, once and for all, the unedifying, unproductive, hedonistic 1960s, '70s and '80s. At least as I recall them here in America.</a> <i>(par. 3) </i>And then let us proceed to be as primly, austerely altruistic as we 21st-centurily can. So - to rephrase my question: Why would you imagine that getting even what you most rationally want would somehow make you "better," or wiser? Or more righteous, or productive? Or nobler or grander or more heroic? Or even <b>more superior?</b></p><p>Alright, I take that last part back. Because the truth is, getting more or less exactly what we think everyone should want has been known to make some of us <i>vastly </i>superior, in certain altogether measurable and quantifiable ways (wealth, votes, grants and subsidies, promotions, both occupational and sexual opportunities) over all other visible creatures of this earth. Including sometimes our fellow humans. Even if for this earthly life only.</p><p>My final question, then, is why anyone in his right mind and will would ever want that "dream come true"? That degree of, let us say, overweening advantage over practically everything else in the <i>visible </i>creation. Yes, that may be your dream. But in that case, perhaps you might want to take a lesson or two from the <i>invisible </i>creation. I mean, consider the wonderful job Satan has made of <i>his </i>utterly unprecedented - and unrepeatable - creaturely superiority over everything the Lord God had made. Can you honestly say you're pleased with the results? More to the point, do you honestly think you could go him one better?</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-41925647703893909982024-01-16T18:40:00.002-06:002024-03-07T00:09:18.418-06:00Some Right-side Bearings<p>I don't say that this is something guaranteed to make everybody happy. </p><p>But what I think I've learned, these past 15 or so years, is that there is no human satisfaction quite like moral superiority. Especially when you know - I mean, you know that you know that you <i>know - </i>you're doing your <b>very best </b>to be right. Whereas, if only you could be half-as-sure about the guy next to you . . .</p><p>Except that having and holding the moral high ground these days can be quite a challenging feat. If not positively acrobatic. And all the more so, of course, when it is the <i>politically* </i>moral high ground you're after.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*And, seriously, is there anything authentically moral that isn't also political?</span></p><p>In brief, how can you be sure that the political position you held last week, and in complete good faith, will have the same morally unassailable credentials a week from now? Or next month, or next year? Indeed, if I may venture to say: If there's one safe bet anyone can make, it is that our moral progress is only sure to get more complicated with time. And Progress. </p><p>At the same time, either there have been - across the political and geopolitical West - <b>certain recognizable patterns and consistencies these past 20-odd years,</b> or else I've grown completely psychotic (no comments please). And so, for all you tender souls who'd like nothing better than a map for staying on the Right Side of History, of course I don't have one. But here, I think, are some pretty solid ground rules all but guaranteed to please eve the purest, most globally-enlightened <i>bien-pensants.</i> But especially those of this Most Enlightened Point in All of Human Time:</p><p>1) Russia, in all she does, is never provoked by anyone <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2010/12/temperamental-genius.html">(and when she is, you'd better believe she roundly deserves it);</a> <i>(bottom of par. 2)</i></p><p>2) Islam - and in particular those revanchist supremacist anti-Western modes of Sunni Islam that have grown exponentially under the favor of the US global security establishment - is <b>never</b> unprovoked in <b>anything</b> it does; plus the provocations it suffers are always unmerited (meaning even its seemingly most disproportionate acts of retaliation are always understandable, if not completely defensible);</p><p>3) Israel, by her mere existence, is a standing and heinous act of provocation to all properly sensitive, right-thinking, rightly-discerning people (and not just to all righteous Muslims); </p><p>4) China (aka Beijing) is the world's ultimate wise and benign provocateur, apart from whose unceasing innovations, provocations, challenges, dynamism, bio-warfare researches, etc, mankind would still be living in the 21st-century equivalent of mud huts and caves.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-32243794280774519912024-01-08T18:03:00.389-06:002024-01-15T12:31:33.864-06:00The Bloodiness of Knowing Too Soon<p>If this recent Christmas season has convinced me of anything, it is that it is possible to know too much all at once - or much too soon - for anyone's good, including our own. And especially in the matter of doing God's will. For instance, you or I might be a veritable Saul of Tarsus of holy-and-righteous determination. To say nothing of bloody-minded indignation. Yet even then, it sometimes behooves us to be <b>at least as patient with God,</b> and with His time and manner of unfolding, as He is with us, and ours. Even though that Divine patience might consist, at least initially, of knocking us off a high horse or two. </p><p>In contrast, I wonder if there are any limits to the ways in which our Maker can re-make and re-direct <i>a soul properly teachable.</i> As a case in point, consider the main characters of the Christmas story. Note how, unlike with our hero Saul, God never once uses a violent means to dissuade Joseph, on the return from exile in Egypt, from re-settling the Holy Family in Judaea instead of Galilee. Nor, for that matter, does He have to knock heads to discourage the Wise Men from returning to their home countries via Herod's all-welcoming Jersualem. In the same way, although Joseph was likely none too happy about the brute (and often ugly) fact of Roman occupation, he never once considered it his calling to execute judgment or revenge upon his country's occupiers - any more than the Magi regarded the assassination or other conspiratorial undermining of Herod as part of their mission. What each of them did, rather, was to understand <b>just where his<i> </i>part</b> in the execution of the Divine plan began, and where it ended. They were not out to save the world singlehanded, or even to speed up the pace and progress of the world's salvation, but merely to be its instruments.</p><p>Of course we can all be, and all have been, very different from Joseph, Mary and Jesus. We can have what we think is the completest blueprint, or game plan, or ultimate goal or end in view. So that all we have to do, having just been passed the ball, is to take and run with it. Yet notice how soon does our pending success become hostage to something we've got in our possession, yes - but that we dare not let go of. And how sometimes that Something - that all-consuming Action - in order to achieve its all-devouring object, has literally got to <b>hack its way </b>through thickets and jungles, not of foliage, but of human innocents of every age and description. And not just the occupier's innocents, but our own.</p><p>Again, this was not Jesus,' or Mary's, or Joseph's Way. But if you like, by way of direct contrast, picture if you can a very different Holy Family. One that was always confidently demanding to know everything up front. Imagine them being overbriefed on every minutest point and detail of an itinerary already bursting at the seams: a mission pregnant, not just with the future of Judaea or Rome or the whole world of antiquity, but with the fate of all mankind. Think of Joseph knowing all that in advance. And then wrestling with, or being tempted by, the knowledge that this mission, if done right, would in fullness of time result in the expulsion <i>of the hated occupier</i> (in this case not Jewish but Roman) <i>from Palestine!</i> Picture his anxiety, his fear of failure, the temptation to self-importance, the pressure of performance "required" to bring the Child <i>safely</i> back to Nazareth. The sense, in short, that pretty much <b>everything depended on him. </b>And then consider how that might have goaded him on towards, if not a violent, surely a more forceful acceleration and consummation of a goal known in its fullness only to his God and Father: and known by Him, not just from start to finish, but in every detail and segment and manner of unfolding. How else, indeed, except by leaning in as close as they could <i>to</i> Him, should the Holy Family have escaped a planned, orchestrated massacre of epic proportions - and that, again, of innocents?</p><p>The point here being, I believe, that sometimes it is enough to wait, and watch, and trust, and act trustfully and expectantly. As opposed to being sure of knowing everything right up to the end result, and then, why, simply following through. Except that, in the latter case, as you try to "rush project to completion," you very quickly find out that it's up to you to fill in the details, to <b>try anything ("whatever works"), </b>to probe every opening and opportunity, in the ever more frantic effort to bring your devoutly wished consummation to pass. And in the meantime, watch - as your "progress" becomes steadily more protracted, more grueling, and far more stress- than grace-filled - how the bodies and the blood keep piling up. </p><p>But if I may to return to the Holy Family, with its simple, stark, uncluttered faith. Ask yourself: Was there <b>really anybody else, </b>up to that point in time (or even up till now), who could have understood and entered into, not just the will or the command, but the very heart and longing, the inmost desire and good pleasure of the Father, and more fully - more closely and intimately - than this strange, humanly impossible human trinity? See again and again how they choose to trust in, and so experience the very presence of, the Father's unfolding heart. Rather than having to know every stage of it in advance, as if it were a mere project to be executed. God rarely speaks in blueprints. And even if He should come up with one for so wise an Age as ours, somehow I don't think even the most god-submitted Hamas, or our most globally-wise US security establishment, is likely to be stumbling on it anytime soon.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-18213097663758275872023-12-18T19:06:00.032-06:002023-12-21T11:24:45.838-06:00The Things One Can Never Forgive<p>It's taken me rather a long time (as usual) to figure this out. But sometimes history doesn't seem to cooperate very well with us. Sometimes history in a given place - like, say, the Middle East - instead of moving properly forward, can seem to close round itself in a kind of loop: a loop that suggests that its God - assuming history has a god - is either sorely unimaginative, or suffering from one degree or another of incompetence, or simply one who rather desperately needs our help. And in particular our help in breaking that history out of whatever holding pattern, or pattern of unprogressive recurrence, it's somehow stupidly got itself into. But all the more so if our religion happens to be a once and final, never-to-be-replaced-or-revised monotheism, whose <b>advanced purity and austerity</b> are such as to make pretty much all its predecessors (e.g., Judaism, Christianity) retrograde and redundant. If not positively harmful.</p><p>So now imagine such a loop, if you can: A blatantly lesser monotheistic people (however ingeniously cunning and conniving) with a most primitive and unspiritual notion, both of God and of their own relation to God, who somehow manage to return to a place from which they'd been most disgracefully (not to mention deservedly) expelled many centuries ago. And most troubling of all - at least from the standpoint of <b>your own</b> rightful deserts - they somehow manage to make a go, and even a kind of success, of it. To the point where not only their own numbers, but those of your own people keep increasing as it were inexorably. And however much they may want to ensure for you the exact opposite result.</p><p>Then again, someone else might argue, what difference should it make even if <i>they were to to do the exact reverse - </i>to try to increase and prosper <i>your</i> people, as well as theirs - given that they have absolutely <b>NO <i>business being there in the first place?</i></b></p><p>Consider, then, what it is even to <i>share</i> that same sacred space - the second holiest place on earth, in fact, and so surely the sole rightful possession of the world's holiest religion? - with a manifestly unworthy nation, and faith. Think what it is to have to concede the lion's share of it to a people you don't just morally object to, but despise, loathe, perhaps even abominate. Isn't it true, that sometimes the hardest of such a people's offenses to forgive, among all the myriad inconsiderations, degradations, gross injustices they inflict, are not so much their cruelties as their kindnesses, not their failures (of course), but their successes, not their hardness and miserliness of heart so much as their bounty and generosity. Think what a triumph of self-vindication it would be, if only you could mark just the former to their credit, and not the latter! Indeed, given their larger, indeed their <b>prior and comprehensive</b> unworthiness - which of course can only testify to the gross insincerity and un<i>trust</i>worthiness of even their "worthiest" present acts - sometimes it isn't enough to "cancel," to bring into disrepute their physical presence in the sacred space. Sometimes the only thing that will relieve your humiliation - the disgrace of their continued prosperity, and your ongoing misery (even as you - or some of you - partake of and benefit from their good fortune?) - is to cancel, undo, eradicate even the memory of their physical existence in that space. Or if, for the time being, their physical annihilation eludes you, surely you can bring about a <i>moral </i>annihilation like no other in the history of the world? Surely, armed as you are with the right side of that history, you can enlist on your side such an overwhelming preponderance of world opinion as will make it just a matter of time before the entire globe vomits them out . . . </p><p>I can't pretend to know how far this is an accurate picture of the basic moral assumptions/quandaries of most Palestinians living in Gaza or elsewhere. But something tells me it's a pretty accurate, if broad-stroked, summary of the world-view of that infestation we call Hamas. And of those Palestinians, along with their apparently growing masses of supporters throughout the world, who have become more or less Hamasified. And as anyone, I suspect, who really <b>knows</b> the leadership of Hamas - whether pro or con, or from the inside or out - will tell you: It can never, ever be satisfied with even the most thorough and irrevocable extirpation of the Jewish state. Consider for a moment your fervently devout Hamas militant. As distinct from some more politically opportunistic supporter. For the true believer, Israel together with her allies, defenders, tolerators has arguably committed <i>the </i>great capital, and possibly unforgivable, sin against the (real) People of God. But even assuming the Jewish state's complete eradication, there remain those residual pockets of support and tolerance throughout the world to be dealt with. And even then, speaking just territorially, why stop there? Do not he and his comrades, or at any rate their closest co-religionists, have at least as good a claim to Cyprus and Crete and Greece and the greater part of the Balkans, to Sicily and Sardinia and most if not all of Spain? And those just for breakfast? </p><p>Yet even apart from questions of territory, why should your devoutly Hamas militant make Jews/Israelis the <i>most</i> blameworthy of his enemies? They almost can't help it: being who they are, and so far as they intend to remain Jews, they really have no choice but to fight to the death those who seek (at very least) their collective amnesia. In short, as unrepentant Jews bent on their own survival, they<i>'</i>re all but congenitally incorrigible. But what about the rest of us, who sympathize with, or aren't <b>wholly </b>convinced of the blasphemous absurdity of Israel's right to exist? Don't at least <b>we </b>have free will? And doesn't that make us at least criminally complicit with, and so even more culpable and deplorable than, Jews themselves? </p><p>That is why I find myself more and more convinced that, whether we know it (yet) or not, under the self-appointedly "divine" judgment of Hamas we are all Jews nowadays. And above all those of us who have no intention of becoming even remotely Hamasified. In effect we are either with them or against them: either we are Jews in effect, or else we are those who, whether purposefully or not, have become complicit in the desire for (at very minimum) Jewish collective amnesia. Or other collective suicide. As indeed I frankly wonder if I haven't myself been complicit (and, yes, to my inestimable shame), because of my delayed response to October 7. </p><p>But now recall what I hinted at earlier, regarding both Jerusalem and Israel as a whole. As some might argue, surely it's only right that the holiest place on earth (or even the second holiest?) should be the exclusive possession of the holiest and most progressive monotheistic religion. In short, by rights it both belongs to and should be mainly inhabited by <i>Sunni </i>Muslims.* Yet within such a tight, uncompromising moral framework, it is hard to see how there could ever be room, much less legitimacy, for <b>any </b>Israel, any Jewish state, or even province or reservation or autonomous region, no matter how small or "humbled," compliant or acquiescent. And once again, <i>why stop there - </i>assuming the tables have been sufficiently and irreversibly turned? After all, now you're on a roll, and feeling more than ever unstoppable. <b>"We have them on the run," </b>as I believe one Hamas militant put it some years ago. And let no one underestimate the sheer momentum of outraged world opinion.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*I suspect Iran even in its Machiavellian stupidity will learn that soon enough.</span></p><p>Given, then, that iron framework of moral assumptions, along with its accompanying momentum, the real question as I see it becomes very simple. Even with respect to a "repentant," restitution-offering Israel: once you, her sworn enemy, are possessed of <i>that</i> degree of moral certitude and contempt, of <i>that </i>sense of almost cosmic injustice and outrage, may I suggest, it is no longer a matter of what vengeance, what sadism, what <b>otherwise </b>diabolic cruelty and atrocity you become (rightly) capable of. And against those who are, after all, Allah's own personal enemies. The question rather is what vengeance, etc, do you believe you're <i>not </i>entitled to?</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-9527341971785315302023-09-24T17:19:00.024-05:002024-01-01T22:16:11.860-06:00Travails of a (sadly un-salesmanlike) Church Mouse<p>So what am I doing wrong?</p><p>Why am I having so much trouble getting volunteers for even a single (minor festival) day, involving at most an hour or two? And that requiring nothing more strenuous than keeping the church open? Just when did so many unselfish, caring, <i>conscientious</i> people - and most of them comfortably retired - become so unbreathably busy?</p><p>But here's a disturbing thought. The fact that the ministry <i>isn't</i> all that strenuous or challenging - might that be the problem?</p><p>My late father used to talk about certain things in life - however many or few - that were simply "more trouble than they're worth." In other words, not everything is worth doing merely because it's intrinsically difficult. Even in a church. And if even those ministries of the largest inherent worth can somehow be made easier, more approachable, more humanly breathable, then surely - in most cases - some measure of net gain will be secured?</p><p>Which to me only suggests, why, how far we've progressed from - what? ignorance? inefficiency? barbarism? God? - since 1970. </p><p>My point is that, in today's operational world, I suspect my father's dictum would be all but incomprehensible. And not just in corporate venues, but perhaps even more so among busy church people. No doubt our modern rejoinder should be best rephrased as a question. As in: <b>"Wait a minute: if it's <i>not</i> troublesome, then what's it worth?" </b>Or, more to the immediate point: <i>If I'm not contantly multiplying and accelerating the amount of trouble I'm enduring on your behalf, how on earth are you - much less anyone else - ever going to know how much I love you?</i></p><p>More and more it occurs to me that Love Today (even - or especially? - in its most giving modes) is not nearly so much a matter of relying and trusting - in God or anyone else - as it is of <b>proving and demonstrating:</b> proving our worthiness, our dedication, our willingness to sacrifice, our up-to-the-challengeness. And so, of course, the more visibly dramatic or even excruciating the challenge the better: the better to cover ourselves in . . . credit? respect? or even glory? </p><p>And why not? I mean, how else does one distinguish oneself in <b>any </b>organization - much more that of the Church - than by taking on more and more and more? Again, you do <i>want </i>to distinguish yourself, right? I mean, if you're not willing to take yourself seriously, <i style="font-weight: bold;">why should I? </i><span>And if nobody takes you seriously, how are you ever going to be given anything really important to do, and so accomplish real and significant good? And on the largest possible scale? (Which is where everything really counts, you know.) Finally,</span> if these are precisely the incentives that have made us most effective in the World, shouldn't we of the Church be able to at least triple their effectiveness? <i>Or what's an omnipotent God for, anyway???</i></p><p>And then simpletons like me marvel at how our Modern Acts of Charity have become so grim . . . and tense . . . and <i>strained . . . </i>and (dare I say it again?) <b>competitive.</b></p><p>Now remember, the point of competing is to win. By winning, we at very least demonstrate our competence, possibly even our fitness to exercise authority. Or even to wield power? Indeed, what good is virtue - necessary as it is - apart from the power and authority required to make it effective, and authoritative? </p><p>The real question, I suspect, is whether and how far the most effective - i.e., the most loving - kinds of power are primarily external. Does our Maker more convictingly demonstrate His might by changing governments, or systems, or technologies? Or by changing hearts? </p><p>Which latter is, of course, an immeasurably more gentle, osmotic, insinuative power than anything we mere humans have so far achieved. Yes, even with those we profess - and strain - to love. </p><p>My final point, then, concerns the nature of power at its most inward. The kind of power that, before it does anything of a mere external nature, somehow actually manages to reach into, and enter deeply the silence of, and therefore change, our hearts. Why, if I'm not mistaken, there's even some fairly solid Scriptural evidence for it. Indeed, as the present Church liturgical season - now called Ordinary Time, but which some used to call Pentecost - ought to remind us: Power at at its most love-full (awful phrase, I know) should not be understood as something <i>taken</i> at all. It is not something that you win, or gather, or amass, or earn or summon or conjure. Power at its most godly, and thus humble, and thereby effective, is above all something you receive.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-41649252701823312742023-09-16T16:33:00.004-05:002023-09-18T00:38:06.512-05:00Some Post-Covidity Realizations <p>Oh yeah, and one more prayer (remember, I'm nothing if not monotonous):</p><p>God save us from what I like to call a <i>morbidly</i> global globe. God deliver us from a world so morbidly intent on its pre-set, sacred agendas - whether of Life As Radically Reset, or of Business-As-Rigidly-Usual - that it becomes unable to see a genuine interruption clearly. Like, for instance, Covid. Imagine having been able to see even Covid clearly. Which is to say, prayerfully, trustfully, <i>proportionately </i>for <b>what it</b> <b>is. </b>And not merely for what we can make of it, according to your, or my, preferred political narratives. God heal us, too, from a world that, in its twisted obsession with global scale, finds it even harder to see how the proportionateness, the fitness of a given pandemic response both can and often should vary - from country to country, region to region, locale to locale, etc.</p><p>A little late for all that, I know. </p><p>And of course you and I can debate till our Lord comes home about how the whole mess was prearranged, more or less conspiratorially. My point is that even the most brutally unexpected interruptions can be exploited to death, once we crafty humans get our bearings. Worse yet, they can be brazenly orchestrated and manipulated - yes, sometimes even towards the death of Freedom As We Know It. Which does not exactly prove that some omnicompetent Blofeld had it all planned from the start. On the other hand if, as in this case, the ground zero of interruption - our very own corporately most holy and godlike Beijing (to whose wisest precautions how could we all <i>not </i>defer?) - if even the Mighty Interrupter Itself was, shall we say, hardly prepared for pandemic, how much less the rest of us mere mortals?</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-72301729730849734402023-09-04T14:38:00.014-05:002023-12-08T13:05:30.815-06:00Our Strange Pan-human Journey<p>Just some bizarre, rambling and (to some) possibly incoherent thoughts as one might expect from me following another ridiculously long - nearly four-month? - sabbatical. Or if you prefer, consider it a further exploration of certain points and themes raised in <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2023/04/a-most-unruly-god.html">my last post but one.</a> Anyhow: </p><p>As I understand the Scriptures, we humans one and all come from one God, whether we like Him or not, who also made all the other creatures of our common universe, whether we like <i>them </i>or not. (And we humans can be quite finicky about these things). Neither does the story just go on from there, forever and ever - open-endedly, as it were - as if our Point of Origin, did we so choose, might be one to which we will <b>never</b> return, even as we continue to move onwards and upwards, to bigger and better (yet strangely God-free?) things. </p><p>Rather, the point is that, just as we've all come <i>from</i> God, so one day we shall all return to Him, whether for mercy or for judgment. Please note, then, that the bounds of this whole cycle - its starting- and end-points - are not just one and the same God, but are both quite involuntary: we did not choose them, and again, we may not even much like them. We may indeed wish we could go much farther - or even infinitely far - to places supposedly unbounded by God. And the whole time doing it pretty much on our own: with our Maker barely a memory, or having left Him once and for all "in the dust," as they say. But we have no choice in the matter.</p><p>On the other hand, I've been told, on good authority, that as we become reconciled to what we can in no wise change - when we <b>choose </b>to embrace, with love, That over which we have least power or control - we sometimes encounter a kind of blessedness altogether unique: one containing a core of rapture, indeed, so <i>not </i>of this earth as to be both "boundless," and boundlessly satisfying.</p><p>But if that be so, then clearly our human problem lies not with our start or finish - our Alpha and Omega, so to speak - but with what happens, and what we choose, in the meantime. I.e., between our birth and our death. In a nutshell, our common problem is this: In our various highly individual journeys of return to the God who made us, we often run into other gods along the way, many of whom represent themselves as being either the real terminus of our journey, or as some genuine if not indispensable help in getting there. Almost as if <i>the </i>God were using them as tentative-yet-necessary intermediaries, or guideposts, or way-stations of refreshment and renewal, to help and speed us along. And yet we know, quite to the contrary, that His Word is altogether adamant in its warnings against precisely that: <i>against</i> following, not just gods other than the Creator and Redeemer of Genesis and John, but even "an angel from heaven" (if such a thing were possible) come down to preach to us some other gospel of supposed redemption.</p><p>Right now, though, I'd like to draw your attention to one very specific and distinct "other god." I would like to pray with all my heart our Maker's protection - for all of us - against one kind of very familiar, most ingratiating, and possibly ubiquitous deity. One <i>so</i> familiar as to be, as often as not, some version of our own "best," or most sacred, or heroic, or productive or progressive Self . Plus - as if all that weren't enough - one who very generously bothers to meet us half-way, as it were. And all for no other reason than to hasten us on down the right Path. As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?</p><p>So what is my prayer?</p><p>God save us, I pray, from the kind of god who, no matter how well-intentioned and compassionate he may be - and however much real, tangible power he may be able to gain over maybe the better part of the universe - nonetheless <b>did not create it. </b>And so is not really capable of understanding it. At least not in what we might call its real depths: those strange, often hidden deeps of meaning, resonance and longing ("secret as the soul") in which it too both desires, and finds its only satisfaction in, its Maker. God save us, in other words, from that god in relation to whom the Universe itself, just because it is powerful, yet rarely if ever seems benevolent or compassionate, can only be one degree or another of obstacle. Or competitor. Or enemy. Indeed, one suspects that the relation between them - between this god and this universe - can <b>only</b> be one of the most hardened enmity, and that for two reasons. First, because on the one hand, again, this god did not create this world, and so has no hope of really getting inside it - getting to know it "from within itself," so to speak. Yet on the other hand, he clearly is (or at any rate seems to be) the hands-down moral superior of this most cruel, uncompassionate creation. </p><p>At the same time, precisely because this same god, no matter how he may love or want to help <i>us,</i> did not create us either - any more than he created the world - neither can he really get inside of us; his life cannot flow through us, because our own life hinders it. We can never be <i>his</i> vessels, or <i>his</i> members, but at best only his partners or his instruments. Or at worst (some would argue) his puppets. Indeed, it may be contended that - even if one assumes him to be completely "outside of" us* - still, he depends no less on us than we on him, and possibly more so. As powerful as he is or is able to become, his power shall always be limited by what he did not create, and so cannot ever really know the heart and soul of. Neither can he ever be secure and without fear in his relation to the universe, in the way that, say, its Maker is; indeed, precisely because he can neither satisfy its desire nor gain its trust, there is but one way he can "overcome" the creation's enmity: it is through power, and ever more power, control, and ever more control.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*N</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">ever a safe assumption in any circumstances.</span></p><p>But while this god's power is clearly limited, we humans can, if we wish, extend it. We may have no more hope than he does of understanding this creation - at least not apart from the grace of <i>its </i>God. But we can nonetheless be partners with him in his project of taming and subuing it. Or failing that (and remember this is - at least from one standpoint - a <b>most</b> unruly, wicked creation), we can terrorize, eviscerate and beat it into submission. Much as you would any rudely obstinate and dangerous monster. After all, it may be argued, since when has want of real understanding - <i>of anything - </i>ever really interfered with Man's ability to control it, to utilize it, to turn it to good, sound, productive purpose. Oh, granted it has sometimes. But not, surely, when that purpose is comprehensively, <b>technologically</b> rational, unpoetic, unromantic, unsentimental, and above all, soundly utilitarian? Which is to say, when Rational Utilitarian Man is the One most utterly <b>in control,</b> both of himself and of his surroundings. On the other hand, if even our most rational purposes sometimes turn us to violent methods - due, again, to the obstinacy/unruliness/wickedness of the universe - or seem unduly harsh or cruel even to ourselves and to our neighbor: honestly, what else are we resourceful humans supposed to do? Be oppressed, so as not to oppress? And who is to blame us? or stop us?</p><p>The problem, as I see it, with this kind of god is that he cannot stop. He seems to be humble enough, because of his poignant awareness of his own insufficiency, and because he's forever imploring us to go beyond him. In a sense he's a very American sort of god; his first, his foremost, perhaps his only commandment is threefold: <b>"Impress me. Surprise me. Surpass me."</b> The implicit point being that just as <i>he </i>is not enough, but needs us to complete and go beyond and make him redundant, so do we in our turn need other things, that we in a very real sense <i>have</i> made (or at least much more than he can be said to have made us), to complete and go beyond and make <i>us </i>redundant. </p><p>Are you with me so far?</p><p>But here to me is the most galling thing: The more has-been, obsolescent, redundant we <b>all</b> become - this modish yet all-too-soon-outmoded progression of gods - somehow <i>the less </i>we seem able to subdue, or pacify, or control, or even conciliate (much less be reconciled with) this growingly obstinate universe. Or even just this earth. Which latter no doubt will become the very soul of compliance and cooperation once we mere <b>un</b>enhanced humans - or most of us - have been duly superseded, and its new overlords are free to take our progress-so-far to the legendary "next level."</p><p>Now you can make of that likelihood whatever you like. For my part (and to return to my original prayer) I say: God save us from any intermediate, transitioning, ever-so-kindly-tentative god or series of gods. Yes, even when they all boil down to nothing more than our "very best" selves doing their best - or to that "sacred self" in each of us which most longs to please, or be closest to, or even "most like" God. God save us from that zealous deity who, however much he may strive or presume to love both God and man, cannot ever <i>really</i> (which is to say, lovingly) understand us humans: can never know us as <i>me,</i> but only as <i>I; </i>never as passive, or receptive, or contemplative, but only active; never as creat<i>ion, </i>but only as creat<i>ing; </i>can never know that inmost wellspring of need and longing, in you and me and every creature, which is all that waters and irrigates, solaces, refreshes and renews even our seemingly most independent creative acts. And just because he cannot know that in any creature which only its Creator knows best - cannot know its peace, but only its fear, defiance, ambition, aggression - so naturally he looks out on all nature, whether human or subhuman, and sees only a war of all against all. Hence, too, his own strange peace, which somehow always seems to resolve itself into one or another degree of violence, suppression, distortion, disfigurement: both of "nature," and of our own nature. Even as this same god proceeds, with the "very best" aims and intentions, to wreak or expedite the sort of havoc - climatic, economic, geopolitical, thermonuclear, what have you - which comes every month, every day* closer to the doorsteps of each one of us. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Or am I once again grossly overreacting? After all (as I've been told more than once), one singularly brutal and ugly global summer does not a climate-crisis make.</span></p><p>In short, God save us from that god who, as often as not - at least when he's not your and my most bravely self-transgressing, self-transcending Egos in disguise - is really the Devil. Which is to say, that One who, while he's not inaptly termed the god of this world, nonetheless did not create it, and so can never redeem it. </p><p>On which note, once again, if I may: </p><p>Pray for the peace and sanity of Kyiv. And the return to sanity of Moscow.</p><p>But above all, </p><p>God deliver, cleanse and and heal America.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-65121425455460677652023-05-06T15:37:00.006-05:002023-05-13T15:10:33.042-05:00More Travails of Modern Love<p>No, I'm probably not one of the most giving souls ever to enter the doors of a church (much less the Order of Secular Franciscans). </p><p>But from my observing of others who genuinely do give of themselves - along with the various hardships they encounter - may I hazard a speculation? </p><p>This has got to be, I think, one of the most treacherous dilemmas facing anyone who's ever tried their best to love bitter, hardworking, self-consciously sacrificial people (which latter may be - let's face it - <i>the great majority of us nowadays,</i> in one busy venue or another?):</p><p>Namely, how you are to show them <b>enough </b>of the love they need, without making them either:</p><p> (1) resentful of the obligation incurred; or </p><p> (2) jealous of your supposed moral high ground. </p><p>Nor are they necessarily being petty or mean-spirited in thus responding. Much less Pharisaic. After all, <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2023/03/understanding-love-today.html">even in charitable love</a> - if one's aim is to obtain the very <i>best </i>results - <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-sheer-excitingness-of-obsessive-and.html">can one ever be too competitive?</a></p><p>Pray for the peace of Kyiv.</p><p>God heal America.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-48656868745721763192023-04-24T00:51:00.017-05:002023-05-13T14:45:44.000-05:00A Most Unruly God<p>For all our modern advances, even today the universe can seem like a scary place. One that even now seems more than capable of swallowing us whole at a moment's (or an asteroid's) notice. </p><p>And so of course, in an unruly - yet by no means uncontrollable - material world, hey, thank God for science, right? And for all the micro-burrowing, omni-excavating technologies that increasingly make the Progress of Science possible. If not inevitable. Thank God for those god-like atom-smashers, asteroid-deflectors, face-recognizers, fMRI scanners, etc, to whom all hearts (and guts) are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets of the universe are hid. I mean, even on the odd chance that we ourselves should wind up getting smashed, surely the risk incurred is one worth taking?</p><p>I'll admit, nowadays this expanding cosmos can often seem like that. Like some Ultimate Megahazard against which no insurance is ever too costly. Like a place not just overwhelming, but almost maliciously confusing in its infinitude, its elusive complexity, its wildness and callousness and treachery to whatever is human. Or whatever is "sentimentally" human, in any case. In short, a cosmic jungle, that not only offers no haven or even foothold for innocence and trust, for surprise and wonder (much less delight), but which only the most proudly, ruthlessly sophisticated human minds can ever hope to map and control, organize and productivize. And so, of course, "really" know. So that if, say for instance, modern America is fast becoming the sort of place that is "no country for old men," even so our wider cosmic habitat - the more we study and explore it - is more and more revealing itself to be no universe for little children. Not even children "in spirit." And just as our once seemingly limitless American wilderness may have demanded </p><p><b> "men for [<i>commensurate</i> with] my </b><b>mountains,"</b></p><p><b></b> so now our one hope of intergalactic survival may be to become the sort of self-transhumanizing species that can indeed "equal" an expanding cosmos - but only to the extent that we control it. And - perhaps just as likely - only control it in the degree that we despise, and brutalize it? Remember, no sophistication without an ever-so-knowing, <i>withering</i> contempt. And surely most of us are familiar with those adult "real life" situations (<b>most</b> of real life, actually?) in which it all comes down to a choice of eat or be eaten, torture or be tortured, etc.</p><p>We "Biblical" theists, of course, continue to admit there may be room for a slightly different perspective. That is, we continue to confess to a more or less Biblical Creator. I.e, a deity who not only created <i>every </i>thing, but who persists in being on the most searchingly, yet respectfully, intimate terms with every thing He created, however glorious or "insignificant." To such an extent, indeed, that He alone is able, not only to "take the edge off" our creaturely propensities to answer terror with terror, torture with torture, etc, but actually to find an older, deeper place within each of us. A place where "deep calls unto deep" - even, say, between man and rodent? - precisely because each one of us creatures is no longer seeking merely its own territorial power, but somehow also the presence - and so maybe the peace - of its God? </p><p>In brief, we still confess to the sort of Maker who's no less mindful, and patient, and lovingly accepting of each being's vulnerabilities than of its strengths. And who knows that sometimes a creature is never more vulnerable than when it's trying to be most "in charge," and self-transcending. Or terrorizing. The point here being that there is nothing human (or even transhuman) that can exceed not just His grasp, but His wisdom, and empathy. And Final Judgment. So that if - just maybe - there's some vestige of wistful innocence in even the unpromising soul of a tiger, or a Titan, or a Donald Trump, surely He, if anyone, will be the One who can show us how to find it? Or at any rate, far more effectively than the most arrogant transhuman worldliness could ever beat or torture it into submission.</p><p>The question, I suspect, on the minds of today's more globally-minded technocrats (so far as they think of God at all) is whether He's still up to that job. That is, the job of being "on top of" the <i>whole</i> universe, not just from top to bottom, but from start to finish. Can even He keep up with its ever-unfolding, infinitely multiplying strangeness and perversity? Or even our own? Much less with our own ever-exploding human science and technology? </p><p>Or do we still, just maybe, have a Biblical God who remains what He always said He was? Who knew every conceivable crook and crevice of an expanding universe long before there was a human, or even a human science, to map and "conquer" it? A God who is every bit as "superior" to us at the end of our vast sojourn of progress as He was at its beginning? An author and a finisher so wholly <b>in</b>commensurate with every other "greatness," and yet so utterly childlike to the very core of His being (be He never so "adult," vast and wise), that our mere human pretensions to adulthood and maturity, to superiority and hierarchy, to greatness and progress and self-transcendence all boil down to one humongous joke from Hell?</p><p>Pray for the peace of Kyiv.</p><p>God heal America.</p><p>(Edited.)</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-14504397235378525472023-04-08T22:52:00.013-05:002023-04-17T17:43:33.228-05:00A Risen Humility<p>Almost 2000 years ago, the shattered body of the One (and only) God-man was taken down from a hateful instrument of torture, and placed in a most lovingly prepared tomb. And all by the same species that had Him crucified. Clearly, quite a radical departure from what we did when we killed Him. In any case, at least we got the burial part right. </p><p>But now imagine us, even as a species, becoming rather more hopeful than that. Or more brazenly ambitious, as some might prefer to call it. Imagine us, or some of us, actually trying to revive the body we had buried, by the ingenuity of our own mere human devices. Of course, it's hard to picture anyone in AD 33 envisioning that prospect with any degree of confidence. But today? . . . </p><p>Now note: Our Lord had to be fully human in order to die. It takes a fully human body to be well and truly dead. But it takes nothing less than the God-man who indwells that same body to know, and to <b>accept</b>, that it is in fact broken beyond <b>all</b> hope of human repair. Broken, indeed, beyond anything but what a fully Divine restoration can accomplish. Left to our own human devices - even with the best of intentions - we would still, even now, be trying to resuscitate it. Or transhumanize it.</p><p>Again, a <i>wholly</i> Divine restoration. And grace. And tenderness. And solicitude. </p><p>Of course I'm not expecting that this same human race is somehow - and at this late date - going to discover a humility (or even a tenderness) in any way approaching that of a Divine Father and Son. But may the shattered, <i>self-</i>crucified body of this world please note, and take heed: It can no more repair <i>itself,</i> than the best intentions and ingenuities of 1st-century mankind could have revived the body of its Christ.</p><p>Happy Easter.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-53019459348614124982023-03-18T23:59:00.010-05:002023-12-30T11:07:46.503-06:00Understanding Love Today <p>Tell you what: Do you want to be a <i>better </i>person? One that's more truly, assertively, progressively <i>loving? </i> But above all, loving of that priceless quarry, the Sacred (preferably immigrant or refugee) Stranger??? </p><p>Well, you've heard it said there's no time like the present. In the same way, there's no better place to begin than your own backyard. I.e., among those most familiar, nearest and dearest of your immediate circle. You know, precisely the ones most (understandably) apt to get on your altruistic nerves. </p><p>That being said - and assuming you're serious: </p><p>Here, at last, is one seriously big, bold, brazen, progressive, take-no-crap-from-Russia list of GLOBAL criteria, not just for <i>recognizing </i>Authentic Charity - besides rigorously applying it to the most devil-detailed spaces of your personal lives - but for sifting it from all the milksop lily-livered counterfeits out there. Anyhow, here goes:</p><p><b>(Modern) Love is . . .</b></p><p><b>Whatever, in any given opportunity for help or concern, makes you feel you've got to DO THE MOST, and make the biggest fuss (because remember, Life at its best is a strenuously busy thing). In short, whatever makes you most feel like everything depends on YOU. </b></p><p><b>Whatever makes you feel - nay, <i>believe </i>- that the most diligently strenuous, conscientious interference ALONE is the thing that can (1) best help any creature, and (2) best overcome any obstacle, whether "natural" or spiritual. That's right, even if your zeal-to-interfere sometimes pushes you uneasily over the borders of what an ignorant observer might call violence.</b></p><p><b>Whatever makes you feel least at peace about leaving any creature in peace. Even for a minute or two (remember, you're probably all that's keeping them safe and occupied). <i>Any </i>creature - whether it's your pet, or the stray cat, or your child, or parent, or spouse or significant other. Or your parishioners/congregants. Or even those otherwise stupid and worthless employees of yours whom you know you depend on, but who can't seem to do anything right by themselves.</b></p><p><b>Whatever makes you put yourself and your action, and your motives, and the purity and progress of your spiritual state, at the ABSOLUTE CENTER of whatever act of goodness you are performing. As opposed to placing your focus primarily on that creature who is the object of your good act. Or worse, on that creature's supposed "nature" and "needs" (which, in any case, one can hardly know or be sure of anyways). Remember, love is not an act of knowledge but of pure, naked WILL. By your sheer force of will you should be able to move, not just mountains, but hearts, souls, nations, productivities, profits, even genders. But if that's the case, then why should understanding - <i>of anyone, or any thing</i> - be any part of it? Shouldn't my sheer drive, determination, discipline, self-denial and PURITY OF INTENTION be enough to love them all effectively? Since when has love ever not been enough? And if we know it is, then <i>what's knowledge or wisdom got to do with it?</i></b></p><p> * * * * </p><p>So what do you think? Am I (once again) grossly over-reacting, or exaggerating? Or just might <i>that</i> - all of the above - be the one most discouraging, most crippling handicap of the way we love today: namely, that it is all but indistinguishable from the way we work. And further - and at the risk of being a broken record (my stock in trade) - that we <b>do both our love and our work badly,</b> because we treat them both as if they were almost entirely the products of our own will. </p><p>But now imagine we took the prayerful time to see where our acts of charity actually <b>come from. </b>Yes, even those that seem most purely of our own resolve and determination.</p><p>Whatever else we might glean, I think we would know, at long last, that our charitablest acts are far more a matter of self-yielding than of self-assertion or self-conquest; of releasing and refreshing, rather than regimenting and rigidifying our souls; of a kind of childlike trust, far more than even the most fiercely grown-up decision and determination. Because if we cannot be children even before God, how do we keep from <b>adult</b>erating, from brutalizing, even our sternest, moralest, most determined resolutions? And if we don't <i>ourselves </i>know how to be needful - to be hungry - in the presence of God, how shall we ever hope to understand the <b>needs and hungers </b>(as opposed to the whims, wants, ambitions, resolutions, etc) of anyone else?</p><p>Pray for the peace of Kyiv. </p><p>God heal America.</p><p>(Edited.) </p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-38346277896555166942023-02-28T00:19:00.192-06:002024-01-20T11:44:54.800-06:00Loving God with Only Half of Ourselves (at most) <p>I've said it before, but it bears repeating: </p><p>These are intensely, even savagely purposeful times. Which is to say, most of us tend to take our "higher" purposes - moral, political, theological - very seriously. And in particular those on which we've duly <b>and morally</b> deliberated. The apparent assumption being that<i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>we, as a Radically Enlightened <i>Aggregate</i> Globe,* are <b>finally </b>getting on the Right Track, or Right Side, or whatever. Which can further mean that, depending on how enlightened and virtuous we deem our Purpose to be, most of us don't take any too kindly to things <i>not</i> turning out the way we intend. Especially when we've already pre-determined what the proper course of events and outcomes should be - like, again, say, a Right Side of History. Not to mention how our own actions - and yours too, for that matter - should ideally reflect and reinforce that right pattern. With no exceptions or deviations. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Whatever the grosser deficiencies/sins/errors of individual nations and states: Hungary, Florida, etc.</span></p><p>And yet, as much as most of us would like to do <b>exactly </b>what we intend to - with not so much as the slightest deviation arising from impulse, perplexity or circumstance - the fact is that our actions don't always conform perfectly to our intentions. Being human and fallen, we often fail to live by the things we profess. Or else certain other things get in the way - often despite our own best efforts - leaving us frustrated, or discouraged, or chastened. Sometimes even humbled. </p><p>Yet even then, I think, far too often (but especially in these Russo-Ukrainean times?), the solution for far too many of us is simply to double down on the Original Aim. As if conforming our actions perfectly to Its requirements was a mere matter of greater discipline and tenacity. Of putting <b>all</b> our mind and will to it, and thus getting exactly what we intend. To the point, indeed, where not just our own Best Selves, but whatever god, superior being, higher power or larger purpose we esteem ourselves to be serving, is presumed to be in fullest agreement with our tenacity. And even with our "stubbornness," if you will. And self-frustration. And self-disgust. Almost as if this Higher Power or Purpose were not just requiring nothing more <i>of </i>us, by way of command, but could offer nothing more <i>to </i>us, by way of grace, and help. Other than maybe <b>"That's right, do it <i>again! </i>But this time DO IT RIGHT!" </b></p><p>And seriously, what's the use of any god that's unable to be gracious? or even illuminating? What's the good of <b>any</b> supreme being, power, purpose, plan, etc, that merely rubberstamps all our most self-obsessive moralistic compulsions?</p><p>So, again, I find this to be an Age that fervently believes in and swears by discipline - indeed the all-but-limitless power of disciplined self-invention and self-command - to open just about every door, and to remove practically every obstacle. Including those involving what some would call - or used to call - nature, or gender, or national identity. Or even, sometimes, the barest semblance of national, regional or local autonomy, and self-determination. After all, if truth is Truth - and how much more our hard-won truths of self-creation and self-discipline? - and if our Truth be such that it must be expounded not just economically but militarily throughout the globe - then why should it be constrained by borders of any kind, whether geographic or biological? </p><p>An older generation - one, say, more conscious of its debt to German moral philosophy - might somehow feel like it's been here before. Might even recall lots of stirring talk about the Power (or even the triumph) of the Human Will. And by no means only among those German belligerents, along with their many admirers, of the <i>Second </i>World War. But however we like to phrase it nowadays, I find this generation to be one that believes in the power - the almost boundless power for good - of choice, decision, resolution, DISCIPLINE. </p><p>At the same time, again, we all know how even the best-laid and most disciplined resolutions can fail us. What we often fail, I think, to realize is how sometimes even our best decisions can have outcomes worse than failure. How not just the worthiest, but the most successfully-carried-out resolves can warp, distort and denature our actions. To the point where, even with some of our apparently most successful executions of aim, the result becomes something different - indeed disturbingly different - either from what we intended, or from what those most affected by our actions might have wished we'd intended.* But either way, the result is revealed to be something deeply disappointing. If not downright brutal and ugly.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Just think of all the civilian populations of Libya, Syria and Yemen who during these past twelve years were terrorized, oppressed and dislocated, either by ISIS, or by what were very likely ISIS- or al Qaeda-fellow travelers or competitors. And who now have every reason to wish that the intentions of US policy-makers had been either very different, or very differently executed.</span></p><p>But, again, this is nothing if not an Age of fierce, even implacable resolution and determination. And so nowadays we have all sorts of people, professing a wide gamut of religious and quasi-religious beliefs, who are firmly resolved upon loving (what they take to be) God and neighbor, as if the matter depended entirely on their mere strength of resolution. And determination. And DISCIPLINE. </p><p>My question is, How's it all really working? And working out? To what extent is it making us more <b>effectually </b>charitable, and compassionate? And in a Way that actually changes us <i>for the better?</i> And not just for the more staunch and resolute? And up-in-arms? And confrontational?</p><p>What I think we've been learning, but especially today - and that from the hardest of teachers - is what a miserable thing it is to try to love God with only a part of oneself: what an angry, barren, recriminatory thing it is to resolve, and strive, and <i>strain</i> to love God with <i>all</i> one's mind and strength, before we have first yielded to Him our heart.</p><p>Now of course no moral act is ever a matter of mere emotion - as this Righteous Age never tires of reminding us. But that doesn't mean our emotions cannot be allies, and even conduits and instruments - <i>imagine it!</i> even of the God who made them. And of course there is more to us than our hearts, nor are they all of us that matters. But personally I know of no better portal to the soul than <b>the affections</b> - at least when we have allowed them to settle, so that our oldest, most secret desires are at last visible from the pond's surface: no clearer sounding into that Depth of us which hungers most desperately and ravenously, as it were, for God. In any case, and whatever the passing deceptions and superficialities of our hearts, they reveal a very different - if I may say, a far more childlike? - face, as we allow God to be their molder and sculptor. And lover. They may even point the Way to a soul we hardly knew was there, much less realized that <i>it,</i> too, has a voice, and a longing, and a wisdom. <b>"Oh, but who could have imagined it? I mean, just what exactly does the soul DO?"</b></p><p>Well, I can hardly claim to be anything like an expert on the soul's <i>actions.</i> But if nothing else, <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2011/10/some-earthly-good.html">I suspect it knows a far gentler and surer path to love, whether of God or of neighbor, than even our most staunchly convictioned vehemence of intellect and will.</a> Not to mention - provided we let God be its searchlight - it tends to know and search <b>us. </b>And far more thoroughly, I believe, than all our most brilliant combinations of heart, mind and strength could know the life of a mouse. Much less that of any man or woman. And maybe least of all a child's?</p><p>Pray for the peace of Kyiv.</p><p>God heal America.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-7244281682226224632023-02-27T00:49:00.022-06:002023-04-10T17:54:44.003-05:00Why Klaus Schwab is My Favorite Modern Poet<p><b>I</b></p><p>Unhappy First - <i>and please God </i><b>last?</b> - Anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainean Mutual Madness. </p><p>And pardon, again, my disgracefully long hiatus.</p><p>It's not that I didn't write anything. But even those scribblings of mine that attempted a holiday (much less a holy season) mood were pretty much desiccated by what I'd like to think of as my driest, deadeningest, most desperate-for-a-glimmer-of-hope Christmastide in memory. It was, in short, exactly the sort of "Antichristmas" all too appropriate for a world skating merrily on the brink of - <i>but wait for it </i>- potentially thermonuclear escalation. (Can't get too much of a <b>righteous</b><i> </i>thing, you know.) And that, of the most epically wicked, apocalyptically insane war ever instigated by two equally mad - and I suspect more or less evenly wrong - "great" powers. </p><p>Then again, I've heard it said that every global generation gets the kind of Russia it's worked hardest for, and so most deserves. Plus, the renewed threat of an expectedly odious Moscow usually means some rise in the political stock of Washington. Making it all the more likely the same globe will end up with the kind of America it's worked hardest to appease and mollify - to say nothing of idolize? With the overall result being one any fool could predict: the whole world gets exactly the sort of omniconfident Hyper-america, and criminally paranoid Russia, everyone <i>else</i> most dreads. </p><p>(Meanwhile a benignly[?]<i> </i>futuristic Beijing - much like the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43914/the-walrus-and-the-carpenter-56d222cbc80a9">Walrus in the Lewis Carroll poem</a> - sheds a bitter tear for us both. And then proceeds to sort out for itself the oysters - both Russian and American - of the largest size.)</p><p>But now recall how I described my latest Christmas: "driest, deadeningest, most desperate for a glimmer of hope." I'm not perfectly sure why. But I believe it has something to do with - and may even be a near-perfect description (if not indictment) of - <b>our language today.</b> And in particular that language we use to explore, and advocate, and celebrate those things dearest to us. Or that we profess to care most about. Or even such as we might have been tempted, once upon a time, to "wax poetic" about, as we used to say. Tempted, in other words, to try and find the most concise, musical, evocative words, and those "in the best order,"* with which to express our joys, and to "bring to life" those things we most delight in. Things, you know, like Christmas. Or, on a much more comprehensive scale, like the Future Peace, Progress and Prosperity of the World. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*To paraphrase Coleridge's definition of poetry.</span></p><p><b>II</b></p><p>Which brings me to the subject of my title. Because if Mr Klaus Schwab, founder and presiding genius of the World Economic Forum, hasn't devoted the better part of a lifetime to caring about what he understands to be those latter things - Peace, Prosperity, a Global Progress seemingly defiant of all human limits and constraints - I'd like to know who has.</p><p>Still, the question has been raised as to why - in that case - he hasn't chosen livelier, more compelling, more humanly-accessible words to exhort us towards these goals. In a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/06/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-by-klaus-schwab-review"><i>Guardian</i> review of his 2017 prognosis <i>The Fourth Industrial Revolution,</i> </a>Stephen Poole writes: <b>"It is composed in the deadening language of executive jargon, addressing 'leaders' who want to know how to navigate an era of 'exponentially disruptive change'." </b></p><p>He goes on to write: <b>"</b><span style="color: #121212; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"><b>As usual, this high-management style contains much fashionable vacuity (we should avoid 'linear thinking', it says, which is meaningless however you interpret it), and also a weird kind of imagistic brutality – the 'gig economy' companies such as Uber or Taskrabbit are 'human cloud platforms', as though the serfs who work for them are euphoric angels playing harps on a bed of cumulonimbus. To complete the style, just add a heavy dose of tech-utopian boilerplate, such as the claim that 'digital technology knows no borders', which of course it does: witness Facebook’s recent decision to comply with China’s censorship laws so it can operate there."</b></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"><span style="color: #121212;">Poole qualifies this criticism by adding: "<b>To be fair, Schwab shows in an appendix that he does know that the idea that 'digital technology knows no borders' is simply false, and throughout he is careful to be even-handed about the upsides and downsides of every technology he discusses. Artificial intelligence might be super-useful, or it might constitute 'an existential threat to humanity'. Biotechnology might cure all diseases, or it might create a schism of bio-inequality."</b></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;"><span style="color: #121212;">In keeping with that more qualified assessment, I'd like to submit the following direct quotes, as further evidence that Mr Schwab is no dry and brutal technocrat. Rather do we find him able to bring to his favorite topics not just nuance and sensitivity, but a very balanced concern for the possible human downsides of an exhilarating, yet also conceivably terrifying Age, and pace, of change. </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><b><a href="https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/VWc6DalGKGJs7EuuJwinpO/Shaping-the-Fourth-Industrial-Revolution.html">"The Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to empower individuals and communities, as it creates new opportunities for economic, social, and personal development. But it also could lead to the marginalization of some groups, exacerbate inequality, create new security risks, and undermine human relationships."</a></b></span></span></p><p><b><a href="https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/VWc6DalGKGJs7EuuJwinpO/Shaping-the-Fourth-Industrial-Revolution.html">"As the novelty of wearable tech gives way to necessity - and, later, as wearable tech becomes embedded tech - will we be deprived of the chance to pause, reflect, and engage in meaningful, substantive conversations? How will our inner lives and ties to those around us change?"</a></b></p><p>Now call me a blithering literary ignoramus. But the more I study the matter, the more I find Mr Schwab, even as a prose-writer, to be one of our finest contemporary poets. Or at least to the extent that nuggets of real and excellent poetry, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1937/03/28/archives/poetry-prose-and-walter-de-la-mare-poetry-in-prose-by-walter-de-la.html">as a writer wiser than myself has suggested,</a> can be found lodged in even the stubbornest, most calcified prose. None of which latter terms, I think, fairly describe the bulk of Mr Schwab's writing. Just consider for a moment what he has succeeded in doing, and how it puts him leagues ahead of the pack of some of our most serious living poets:</p><p> 1) he is more or less intelligible and straightforward; </p><p> 2) he has something to share with the general public, and not just with some enlightened coterie of chosen colleagues and fans; </p><p> 3) the things that he says are heartfelt - they concern those matters he most unabashedly cares about and hopes for (as opposed to finger-wagging and sneering at); </p><p> 4) he manages to write, on topics and prospects that might otherwise be either hideously dull or horrifically alarming, with not just a certain elegant conciseness, but with a measured enthusiasm, caution, even a kind of compassion.</p><p>So why, some have asked, hasn't he chosen better words for the job? If these are the things he cares most about - indeed is most viscerally passionate for - why can't he convey their urgency in words that are <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2012/04/oldest-obsolescence-of-all.html">more visceral and vital: that go, so to speak, to the very roots of our being? Which is to say, those roots that suggest we humans might even have a life beyond this present one?</a></p><p>Not, of course, that he's by any means impervious to the religious dimension of human progress. Poole himself admits: "<b>Indeed, the book climaxes with a rather lovely plea for everyone to work together in a 'new cultural renaissance' that apparently will depend on some kind of cosmic spirituality. The fourth industrial revolution might lead to a dehumanising dystopia, Schwab allows soberly. On the other hand, we could use it 'to lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared sense of destiny'." </b></p><p>My question is, Do all these possible outcomes - even the happiest - have to depend solely on our unaided human efforts? And in the unsettling event that they <b>don't,</b> could he not be more specific, or at least suggestive, about some of the possible alternatives? And in particular, on What - or Whom - <i>else</i> we might be depending? Suppose, let's say, that there really is an intelligent pre-established End as well as Beginning to the history of this vast universe. A blessedly unmovable Omega as well as Alpha, such as even we ever-dynamic human can't alter or derail. Or deter. And yet One who also has a kind of plan or goal or consummation, even for us. Could not he - Mr Schwab - then, have tried to give us a more vivid and compelling sense of our human place and mission within <i>that </i>spiritual<i> </i>journey, and <i>that</i> promise of fulfilment? And if not, what is it that prevents him? Is it primarily the limitations <i>of the man himself</i> at work here? Or more those of the time and intellectual climate he lives in? (Allowing, let's not forget, that Mr Schwab may have played as large a role in the shaping and sculpting of our Age - at least of its distinctness and peculiarities - as any single human being living.)</p><p><b>III </b> </p><p>But before I go on, an apology. My point is not to hold up poor Mr Schwab for either excessive admiration or undue belittlement. Whatever else, he is above all a man of his time - an Age which some would argue has never been more verbally limited, if not downright impoverished or straitjacketed. Certainly, whatever else this glorious Era may excel in, it is no Golden Age of Poetry. Or at least no poetry that's readily accessible, or encouraging - or even approachable? - to the moderately literate reader. I mean, after all, there's only so much verbal challenge/stridency/cacophany/agony even a modernistic ear can tolerate, much less the rest of us. And granted, we <b>all</b> may still on occasion experience the need for lilt, flow, grace in our written and other words. But unless we are gluttons for disappointment, we don't as a general rule go hunting for it in the jungles of today's verse. </p><p>And so, lacking pleasurable - or even intelligible - alternatives, it's no wonder we Global Moderns have made a kind of god-of-all-work of the prosaic. Or of the Wisely Practical, as some might prefer to call it. I.e., of all the busy things we think, do and use, in short, which are best accessed by types of language that are - <b><i>what?</i> </b></p><p>Most practical, to be sure. And workaday. And relevant (that sacred modern word). But anything else - in effect, if not intention?</p><p>I don't know - most clunky? flat-footed? ham-fisted? Or else, at the other extreme, most rigidly "fashionable," and present-normative? Or even Present-worshiping - and by implication past-despising? And so, in a word, <b>least</b> like poetry, whose own memory, and uses for memory, are far, far different things from any present-bound speech. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if a good poem can ever garner enough memory: can ever reach back far enough into the Past: can ever be more than restless until it rests, as it were, in that Presence which is the beginning of all things, and all words. Or so, I think, do our most resonantly-timed and -measured words - whether of verse or prose - lead and draw us on inexorably, even to our own farthest origins, if you will. And that regardless of our own religious beliefs or non-beliefs.</p><p>So what do I mean by Modern Prose? I mean all those realms of language whose sheer ironclad utility demands that they be almost the express opposite of any good poem: i.e., <i>least</i> dependent on music, and memory, and resonance, on loss and exile, on imagination and yearning. Modern prose is precisely that speech most required by the surface frictions of our lives, and by the Selves in each of us most occasioned by those surface conflicts and tensions. Those Selves, that is, which tell us that we humans really haven't got much of - well, anything to remember. And really nothing much to hope for. Whether of Alpha or Omega. But somehow, <b>everything to do. </b>And that done yesterday, if not last week, or last month. Modern prose belongs most to those selves we "have to be" - or need to become - in order to thrive and prosper in, and progress beyond, the stresses of this mad world we mutually create. As distinct from those other Selves for which we (secretly) yearn, and which our restoration, and the creatures of its Garden, most eagerly awaits. </p><p>Now of the two, our prosaic self is of course the most outward, and so easiest to recognize, in both ourselves and others; and thus we see and collide, confront and compete with it all the time. The other is most inward, and so we see most seldom if at all; indeed the great majority of us would hardly know what to do with it if we did see it. Our first reaction would be to dismiss it as utterly useless. Or worse, as irredeemably primitive: something our human evolution in its wisdom should have canceled ages ago. </p><p>And so I suspect we largely do, most of the time. Except, of course, in the measure that our modern language - even our most desertified everyday, workaday speech - still thirsts for some forgotten rivulet of verbal music from old Adam's oldest wellsprings. But that's just it: even if we did so thirst, and <i>all</i> the time, how would we know it? And especially Today, of all practical ages? The most tin-eared, leadenly-unmusical prose is so much simpler and ready-for-use, for <b>everything</b> we do (except of course for those moments when, in its often brutal zeal to over-simplify, it complicates everything). </p><p>But even allowing for its occasional mis-steps and barbarities, where would we be without our Modern Prose? It explains, it functionalizes, it creates whole agendas and projects for the almighty frictions and future-drivenness of our lives. So what if it doesn't understand the periodic need of those same lives for peace, and recollection? We've gotten along just fine, using it as our maid-(if not god-)of-all-work these past 50-odd years, thank you very much. Yes, even as our "poetry" has grown more ponderously esoteric and dark, violent and dissonant. Which makes sense too, I suppose, when you (merely) think about it. I mean, what's the use of any modern poetry that can't compete point for point - or even tooth and nail? - with our best Modern Prose? Hence, again, our Global Modern intoxication with the utility and power of the prosaic, and our incapacity to find any use, or even beauty, in anything remotely poetic, whether in prose or verse. </p><p>Right. And this is the sturdy "practical" language with which we're supposed to find the tender, exquisitely compassionate words to encompass every conceivable human condition and confusion, and (gender-)reconfiguration. We don't even care to know how, or why, this or that soul has been made the way it is. Or even if it has a maker. And we're the ones who are going to pontificate - wisely - on how its body both needs to, and <i>must, </i>be remade?</p><p>Meanwhile, pray - and fast - for the peace and sanity of Kyiv. And the return to sanity of Moscow (and the rest of us).</p><p>God heal and deliver America. </p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-136377652172928282022-11-08T10:11:00.001-06:002022-11-08T10:59:09.641-06:00A Brief Plea for Sanity<p>Talk about the most transparently obvious advice ever offered regarding a US election (and this one in particular):</p><p>VOTE FOR CHANGE: <b><i>Stop the <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-maddest-holiness.html">Madness</a> </i>(<a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/05/another-day-of-life-in-pu.html">at home</a> and <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/01/a-serious-proposal.html">abroad</a>). </b></p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-63602853190361497802022-10-30T23:12:00.008-05:002022-11-03T11:31:25.108-05:00The Maddest Holiness<p>These past few years have found me complaining, more than once, about what I like to call the <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/03/a-confession.html"><b>growing religiosity</b> of our global politics <b><i>(pars. 4-6)</i></b>.</a> Meaning that nowadays many of us - but in particular many of our most credentialed and powerful global interests - seem to be approaching age-old political questions in a rather dramatically final way. Almost as if we had Just Today discovered - as never before - the means of firmly resolving <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2021/10/unkinder-and-ungentler-not-too-cynical.html">various ancient-yet-key political issues. Like, say, the Most Progressive and Enlightened Meaning of Compassion. Or Equality. Or Sovereignty. Or Freedom. </a></p><p>Again, <i>firmly </i>resolving them. And not just pragmatically, and, say, for the next few years or decades, but <b>ideologically</b>, and for all time (or even all of eternity). Almost as if we all - but we Westerners in particular - had at last got hold of <i>the</i> fool-proof method for not just finding, but staying on, the Right Side of History. And that the better part of keeping to the Right Side consisted of knowing definitively - irrevocably, as it were - its moral weights and balances. But above all, that at the heart of this unprecedented enlightenment lay a discovery unimaginable to previous generations: namely, that the overwhelming share of human history's villainy, injustice, cruelty and oppression lies with the Christian West. As distinct from certain non-Western, and even more so non-Christian, religions and civilizations. </p><p>So let me be clear on this point: It's not that we Global Westerners are against - or even dismissively skeptical of - religion as such.* <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2021/10/unkinder-and-ungentler-not-too-cynical.html">Indeed I notice how many seem to have an especial tenderheartedness for certain rather militant, activist, and even anti-Christian forms of Confucianism and Islam <b><i>(Part II, pars. 4-5) </i></b></a> - but more on that presently. In fact so much, it seems to me, has a spirit of religion infected even the methodology of the way we do world politics, that I'm moved to say, with very little exaggeration, that we're starting to "religi-ossify" socio-political questions - and causes - such as were never meant to be religious at all. Much less settled once for all time - in Heaven even as they are on earth, so to speak. Indeed, I notice a "sacralizing" of our answers to such an extent that today, many are prepared to censor or even anathematize <b>all</b> dissenting views on certain broad topics, whether past or present. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*Although, to be fair, many of our more globally-minded seem have a burning contention with not just the Christian West, but Christianity itself, at least in its more or less orthodox modes.</span></p><p>So whence comes, do you think, this hunger for final, definitive, irreversible answers? And these on previously tentative subjects like not just politics and economics, but everything from global disease control to global gender studies? </p><p>For me, it's as if we were craving a new kind of sanctity, or holiness, or consecration. One that is in fact striking in its novelty: that has its roots in, and draws its strength from, not a world beyond this one, or a life to come, or a God beyond ourselves, but rather in having found the right answers - for all time and everywhere - to various "here and now" questions. Including some that have hitherto been approached with a certain provisionality, a measured caution and suspense of mind. Questions like the final moral status of the historical records of Christianity, and Islam, and even Russia. Almost as if we Global Westerners were in the process of submitting all three entities to some kind of final judgment at the bar of history. A judgment which, so far as we believed ourselves entitled to make it, would be presuming a great deal about our own Western holiness, virtue, righteousness, etc. </p><p>Indeed I wonder if there isn't a kind of, as it were, craving for holiness that somehow unhinges the craver: a yearning for absolute moral clarity even in politics - i.e., for holding the moral high ground, for being <i>the good guys </i><b>for all time - </b>that slowly, inexorably makes one mad. And in particular when one doesn't know where to begin to look for holiness, and how to recognize it. </p><p>In any case, I'd like to make a suggestion.</p><p>This present globe will understand the point of true religion only when it grasps what it means for any human being to be holy, or set apart, or consecrated: what holiness consists of, and what makes it desirable. The point is that we mere humans cannot consecrate ourselves. We can never, by mere force or act of self-will, make ourselves better than, or better-suited than others to transform or purify, the great mass of unholy mankind. We may succeed, after a fashion, in making ourselves better than others according to our own estimates, and for our own purposes. But never for the purposes of God. Only God can consecrate us; only our Maker can remake us, and lift us up; and if He does so, it will always be for His designs, never ours.</p><p>Now this latter point - this business of knowing and doing God's designs - may seem like a straightforward enough proposition, until there comes a time when it isn't. <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-not-to-work-with-other-humans.html">Because no matter how well we think we may be able to know or learn the purposes of God, there is nearly always something about them that's sure to surprise us, that's bound to catch us up short. I may (think I) know a given Divine plan inside out, and yet be surprised, or even alarmed or dismayed, by the person He chooses to implement it, or to be its chief instrument <b><i>(par. 7)</i></b>.</a> Or even the way He chooses to go about this project, which may seem to show scant regard for the priorities closest to my heart. In short, our capacity to be made holy often involves our willingness to laugh certain things off: including a good many things that we in our wisdom were most rigidly, and in our view rightly, expecting. Or at least expecting to go a certain way. And what is true for each one of us is at least as much true for this busy, ambitious, <b>hungry</b>-for-encompassing-answers modern globe. </p><p>Take, again, our modern globalizing West. It may be passionately "religious" - supremely confident of its ultimate vindication by history - in its ambition to exalt and glorify a "fully sovereign" Ukraine;<a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/02/all-i-can-say-is.html"> to punish, destabilize or anathematize a renegade Russia;</a> to understand, condole with, and tenderly conciliate even the most anti-Western, revanchist interpretations of Islam. Or even a revanchist, anti-Christian People's Republic of China (and that for all our perfunctory saber-rattling to the contrary). Our Global West may be no less fervent in its desire for a kind of (secular?) holiness: for a separating, from within its own ranks, of wheat from chaff, righteous from unrighteous, progressive from reactionary, woke from unwoke. But it will never recognize the genuine article except as it understands holiness as something more than just fervor, or zeal, or even righteous anger: until it embraces holiness as a thing inseparable from humility, and humility as something wholly inoperative, indeed a mere dead letter, apart from a certain human capacity for surprise and humor. Yes, even about myself, and my fondest ideals and agendas. And yours.</p><p>In other words, this present globe, at the present rate it is going, seems to have very little prospect of acquiring or even understanding real humility. Which means it likely has no hope of ever understanding the point of true, (<i>God-, </i>and not man-) centered religion. Much less true holiness. At least, not any time before the return of Holiness Himself.</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-21977254541989604422022-10-06T10:46:00.018-05:002022-10-18T13:30:18.580-05:00A Queen's Legacy (and its enemies)<p><span style="background-color: white; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>"My own association with the Commonwealth has taught me that the most important contact between nations is usually contact between its peoples. </b></span></span><b>An organisation dedicated to certain values, the Commonwealth has flourished and grown by successfully promoting and protecting that contact. </b><b style="text-align: justify;">At home, Prince Philip and I will be visiting towns and cities up and down the land. It is my sincere hope that the Diamond Jubilee will be an opportunity for people to come together in a spirit of neighbourliness and celebration of their own communities. </b><b style="text-align: justify;">We also hope to celebrate the professional and voluntary service given by millions of people across the country who are working for the public good. They are a source of vital support to the welfare and well-being of others, <i>often unseen or overlooked.</i></b><b style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"><i>" </i>[Emphasis mine]</b></p><p><b style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"> <i>- Queen Elizabeth II, Diamond Jubilee Speech, Westminster, </i></b><b style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; text-align: justify;"><i>March 2012</i></b></p><p>But before I say anything else:</p><p>I know it's been a <i>good</i> while since I've posted anything (assuming - again - anyone really cares). I also know that, lately, I seldom seem to do much of anything post-wise other than to pose what some may dislike as stupid, nitpicking, impertinent questions. Ones usually directed at, or about, our Globally Enlightened American Establishment. Who, as everyone knows, should rarely if ever be questioned about much of anything, under even the direst circumstances. Conditions like, for instance, our country's current frolicking on the brink of what may be an unprecedented abyss: that of a steadily escalating nuclear exchange between our globe's two indisputably foremost nuclear powers. </p><p>Not, mind you, that any of us need be prematurely alarmed just yet. Especially seeing we're in such capable hands. After all, what's the worst that could happen? Even if we should embrace the risk - or skirt the brink - of permanently enfeebling or eviscerating or dismembering vile old Russia, what's the worst we should expect by way of retaliation? I mean, surely old Vladdy's not mad enough (or else too much of a cowardly scoundrel) to do something <i>really</i> desperate? </p><p>But now - if you can - please try and put up and with me and my questions a bit longer. Because I've got a few more.</p><p>First off, notice how different were the late Queen's <b>stated </b>priorities from those of our present rulers. She spoke of contacts between not just nations, but those nations' <b>peoples. </b>Including presumably all sorts of everyday simple ordinary folk from all walks of life. In other words, "contacts" should not be confined to those ultra-sophisticated, influential, hyper-credentialed types - corporate, military-industrial, think-tank, NGO, etc - most eager to establish <b>deep </b>connection, if not outright collusion, with their opposite numbers in other countries. (Almost as if these latter together should constitute a kind of global "super-country" far above and beyond the needs, concerns or even the votes of the mere countries of their fellow-citizens.) </p><p>Indeed, she almost seemed to imply - again, taking her literally - that leaders within a nation exist <i>for the sake of</i> their people, and not the other way around. And that even contacts<i> between</i> nations should be assessed by more or less the same yardstick. </p><p>Whereas today it seems the great bulk of the world's leaders approach the same question - how best to ensure the well-being of every nation's citizens - from a rather different standpoint. Today it is widely believed that the most important contacts between nations are those which most reduce the risk of what is technically known as <b>symmetrical war </b>between the globe's major powers.<a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/"> And that the most reliable mechanism for the prevention of symmetrical war is a kind of solidarity of global leaders whose overwhelming power, wealth, prestige, command of technology, and access to <b>private </b>security tend to make them:</a></p><p><a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/"> <b>(1)</b> <b>very little </b><i><b>invested</b> <b>in</b> </i>the welfare, security and prosperity of their own nations; even as they steadily become </a></p><p><a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/"><b>(2)</b> <b>very much </b><i><b>insulated</b> <b>against</b> </i>the fates, troubles, fears and uncertainties of their nations' peoples.</a> </p><p>And all of it for their respective peoples' own good, of course. All so that they can view their own citizens' concerns with less emotion and prejudice - which is to say, more distantly, rationally, dispassionately. Nowadays what we've discovered is that you cannot view the hardships, fears, anxieties, etc, of your own nation with too much distance and dispassion. Whereas you can very easily become blinded by tribal sentiment and prejudice. But especially in what we've come to recognize as the really elemental, nitty-gritty, rubber-meets-road departments of life. As in, of course, matters of Global <b>Aggregate</b> Economic Growth. Along with its accompanying <i>vital</i> questions of profit-and-loss for the really big, <i>vital</i> players in the game. </p><p>Take, for instance, today's more or less Amazonized commercial and workplace culture in many of our Western countries. No doubt it's highly reassuring, for many of our globally-minded leaders, to be able to view even some of <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-gospel-of-amazonia-or-what-were.html">the most unpleasant (if not downright ugly) Economic Truths of our Time - e.g., truths about workplace regimentation, or worker motivation and morale - with a coolly dispassionate rationality. After all, that's just the way real, <i>productive </i>Life is. </a></p><p>Anyhow, my first question is: </p><p>Can our leaders' altogether rational and justifiable removal from the mundane concerns, fears, etc, of their ordinary constituents carry with it some unintended - or even disquieting and destabilizing - effects? And those upon pretty much everybody? In their zeal, say, to make the world safe for the freedom of our various (most rational and necessary) Amazonias,<a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-highly-stoic-unpreparedness.html"> do our otherwise rational leaders run the risk of becoming themselves fanatical - i.e., losing all sense of proportion and restraint? And all the more so in the legitimate pursuit of something good? To the point, in fact, where their zeal takes on an almost religious or even apocalyptic coloration? </a><b><i>(final paragraph only) </i></b></p><p>But in particular in trying to "bring to heel" certain recalcitrant, backward, reactionary or "fascistic" parts of the globe? Or even - dare I say it - certain countries that simply don't care to be Amazonized to the <i>n</i>th degree?</p><p>And so I come to my final set of questions for the world, as we enter, in the wake of the Queen's death, what may more and more prove to be <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-smarter-russias-opportunity.html">a post-Commonwealth (if not an <i>anti-</i>Commonwealth) Age</a> <i style="font-weight: bold;">(paragraphs 6-7)</i>. And that not just for Britain but for the world at large. </p><p>Will it also be a more fiercely "convictioned" and ideological Age, at ever higher levels of global power, wealth, expertise and influence? Which is to say, even in our otherwise most rational/pragmatic citadels of real power? </p><p><a href="https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_madness_of_americas_ruling_class.html">Will it be an Age in which - in the effort to govern more uniformly and "globally" ever more diverse and disparate regions of the globe - there's less and less virtue to be seen in either patience or restraint? Or even nuance? An Age in which the humility, resilience and conciliation of Compromise are steadily replaced by the arrogance, fixity and intransigence of Principle? </a>To the point where, say, even some of our most credentialed, wealthy, powerful and influential elites contemplate an escalating nuclear exchange as just one of several "unfortunate but necessary" calculated risks? Or policy options? </p><p>And not just elites in - obviously enough - Moscow or Beijing. But possibly (even more so) in Washington, or post-Commonwealth Westminster? Or Warsaw? Or righteous Kyiv?</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-74442098311708578682022-07-04T16:29:00.006-05:002022-07-19T11:37:06.548-05:00American Greatness Revisited<p>Call me a 4th of July Scrooge. </p><p>No doubt it's simply the national occasion, and my (as usual) excessive sensitivity. Or paranoia, as some might say. It's just that I can't quite get over how often, in even some of our most <i>non-</i>political online media - hobby-and-interest-themed websites, etc - the glory of <a href="https://www.heritage.org/american-founders/commentary/why-american-exceptionalism-different-other-countries-nationalisms">American exceptionalism</a> somehow manages to creep in. Or, as often as not, comes out screaming in one's face. </p><p>How it is that I can't explore, say, <a href="https://www.jazzweekly.com/2022/07/is-this-a-great-country-or-what-2/">even a jazz review </a> blog these days, without being reminded of how insufficiently exceptionalist I am. Or how lukewarmly "proud of America." Without being immersed, I mean, in some heart-warming litany to all the countless ways in which the United States is not just <b>an indisputably great country</b> (a proposition I can fully understand and accept), but, in true Muhammad Ali form, THE GREATEST. </p><p>The first question that comes to mind: </p><p>Just how do you believe and profess that statement literally, and with all your heart, and <b>not</b> find yourself - <i>without in the least intending to, of course</i> - mentally consigning all sorts of harmless non-Russian, non-Chinese countries to a growing redundance, irrelevance and invisibility. And especially those that aren't <i>quite</i> fully on the same page with US-driven agendas: that are perceived as not <i>fully</i> sharing, or as indifferent to, our Western Establishment consensus of "market-driven" growth, globalization, regime-change interventionism and <b>radical</b> (i.e., post-gender) self-determination.</p><p>Imagine you're a person of real clout - perhaps even global-scale geopolitical power and influence - who fully subscribes to this grand consensus. How do you <b>stop</b> from finding yourself - again, perhaps against your better <i>initial</i> judgment - more and more treating even "important" individuals from these countries in ways which to you may appear entirely reasonable, but to their unenlightened non-Western minds may seem cavalier, callous, disrespectful, demeaning? Or even oppressive? Granted, that exact sort of outcome may be hard to imagine in Today's Enlightened Globe, given the careful humility, deference, patience, etc, with which our globalist Best and Brightest normally conduct relations with non-Western states (/sarc). But if we could try to see farther<b> </b>down the road . . . as opposed to just kicking the can . . . ?</p><p>A few more questions, addressing the same issue on a more abstract level, and putting to one side peculiarities of our American history: </p><p>When any nation more and more deems itself, not just <i>a</i> great, but THE greatest nation, culture, civilization, etc, ever to have existed, <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-state-of-our-disunion.html">what might be some probable - albeit unintended - consequences down the road?</a> Is that sentiment likely to make it more tolerant and accepting of other countries notably different from itself (including those countries <i>not </i>trying to undermine that glorious nation's strength, or question its prestige, but simply asking to be left alone)? Or is it just as likely to make it less tolerant and accepting? Is such an attitude most apt to make the Superior Nation more respectful and appreciative of the (non-threatening) differences in other countries, and other cultures? Or more impatient and dismissive? And is its sense of its own <b>vast </b>superiority - but particularly if that excellence is based on <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2009/08/monstrous-future.html">some universally-wise-and-applicable Idea</a> - liable to make it more inclined to let other countries go their own way, and make their own mistakes, that they might see the error of their ways (and the truth of ours) <b>for themselves?</b> Or might it make this Superior Nation just as easily tempted - say, for certain humanitarian reasons - to apply this universal Idea zealously, and rigorously, to less fortunate regions of the planet? By various subtle and other means of pressure, wherever possible - but even by force, if necessary? </p><p>Finally (and to get specific again): </p><p>Why is it that the more a Superior Nation (like, say, America) boasts, and swaggers, and congratulates itself on having both MORE FREEDOM, and more unique and cutting-edge freedoms than anywhere else on earth - somehow, the less free it seems to become? And how is it that the same "elite" US interests most deeply invested in advertising, marketing, exporting, perhaps even enforcing these unique cutting-edge freedoms abroad, are also the ones most intent on abridging and circumscribing ("ideologizing?" politically correcting?) the exercise of certain much older, more time-honored freedoms here at home? </p><p>Could it simply be that, in the words of Hamlet's immortal Gertrude: </p><p><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lady_doth_protest_too_much,_methinks">"[Methinks] the lady doth protest too much?"</a></b></p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-85085318508155670952022-05-28T17:31:00.212-05:002022-06-10T12:05:20.597-05:00Another Day of Life in PU<p><b>UVALDE, TX</b> - Right now, just a couple of issues that I was wondering if someone might help me clarify: </p><p><b>First off:</b> Just how is it that we got<b> </b>here? (Nice, modest start to the discussion.)</p><p>How is it that, in a modern US society that vaunts, parades, brandishes, <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2021/10/unkinder-and-ungentler-not-too-cynical.html">even weaponizes its compassion as never before</a> (at least in my 63-year lifetime?) - a society that boasts a never-more-<i>laborious </i>concern for the seeming infinitude of possible human conditions, predicaments, choices, self-creations, -revisions and -transformations (gender- and otherwise) facing young people - how is it that, in such a fiercely, <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-man-and-his-dog-love-story.html">strenuously <i>loving</i></a><i> </i>America, school bullying is not just alive and robust as ever, but seems to be intensifying its multimedia presence and pressure on a growing number of fronts. And even if we comfortably assume, in this post-Cold War world of <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-roots-of-our-problem.html">Pinkerian Utopia (PU)*,</a> that the bullying of today is not only less frequent, but actually far less cruel and more humane than it was, say, a generation ago, a question remains: why does it continue to provoke such horrific extremes of compensatory reaction - whether of rash suicide or, worst of all, of carefully orchestrated suicide/mass homicide?</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*I.e., a place where - to use a very broad brush - basically everything is better, because practically everyone is so much richer (or was, until Trump, Putin, Orban, etc, came along).</span> </p><p>In short, if today's bullying is in fact so much "milder," do its repercussions <i>have to be</i> so much uglier and more tragic? And even if we concede that our advanced, omnipresent media technology is the main driver, what about other, more or less buffering means of recourse and refuge for our young people? Again, in this <a href="https://utopiaordystopia.com/2018/01/01/escape-from-the-body-farm/">Pinkerian best-of-all-yet-possible-worlds</a>, there seems to be no shortage of concerned adults eager to smooth our children's bumpiest gender and other identity transitions. Do we really, then, have <b>so</b> few other mature grownups both trained and ready to ease the more conventional passages of adolescence?</p><p><b>Second of all:</b> In a Western world never more loud and vehement in its claims of being <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-real-point-of-our-inextricable-us.html"><i>the </i>force for peace and stability across the globe,</a> how is it that its principal leader - America - continues to lead the world in entertainment products more or less saturated with violence? I mean here not just horror/slasher vehicles, or the more luridly "amoral" kinds of crime/murder/suspense dramas; in particular I'm thinking of stories - often working from a rather brutally stark good-vs-evil premise - that at times seem to celebrate an especially intensive and ugly kind of violence. And even where "celebrate"<i> </i>is too strong a word, how often is large-scale horrendous carnage made not just one of the main <b>problems</b> of the storyline, but far too often (and usually in the form of a spray of firepower) the one <b>most</b> decisive and effective resolution? </p><p>All of which constant barrage of images and themes has - we can safely assume - virtually NO effect on the ways our already-troubled youngsters learn to "resolve" issues of loneliness, insecurity, rejection, media manipulation, harassment and (more and more these days?) even organized persecution. </p><p>Right, so that's settled. But I do have a third question. Is it possible that, in spite of all our state-of-the-art, <i>customized-as-never-before</i> Global Compassion, our children are really no happier than their counterparts of twenty-five years ago? But if anything, rather <b>more</b> confused, isolated, frustrated, adrift, angry? Or even simply less happy? </p><p>Then again - somebody else might argue - <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2020/12/an-honest-sermon-from-our-times-for.html">it never really was about happiness,</a> was it?</p><p><i><b>(Meanwhile, continue to pray for the parents, siblings, schoolmates, teachers and others who are mourning the victims, and in particular for their mutual prayer, support and availability to each other.)</b></i></p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-78641790744949379932022-05-13T19:30:00.004-05:002022-05-16T12:19:53.753-05:00Demonizing Simplicity<p>A going-away reception. </p><p>"Yes sir, and it's all quite simple really [me talking to myself, at least initially] . . . you just get a gift . . . oh but don't forget the card (hey, what's a gift without a CARD - <i>but remember, it's gotta be the </i>RIGHT<i> card) . . . and don't forget it's a buffet, so, again, a </i>NICE<i> bottle of wine . . . but what's wine without dessert . . . preferably something you made yourself . . . I mean, you do</i> CARE<i> about this person, don't you?!! . . ."</i></p><p>But if that's just Neurotic Me (who's merely attending) getting all bent out of shape, imagine what it may be like for even the more or less sane hosts/organizers?</p><p>It has got to be, I think, one of the more brilliant ingenuities of that <b>Other </b>Spiritual Realm, to take what might otherwise be - by Divine grace - a simple, kindly, unaffected human act or event of appreciation, and somehow grind it into something grimly intense . . . and perfectionist . . . and operationalized . . . and even oppressive . . .</p><p>In short, to take what might easily be a light (and yet strangely deep?), joyful, <i>un</i>burdening occasion, and make it into something awkward, pompous, over-cluttered and miserable.</p><p>Of course, again, that's just Neurotic Me talking. Along with that more or less tiny percentage of folks just like me. Because it can't possibly have anything to do with this never-more-laid-back, graciously diplomatic, loath-to-take-offense Global Age we're living in . . .</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-86952137395659179482022-05-09T17:24:00.006-05:002024-01-14T22:09:19.804-06:00Indiscreet Confession of a Drunken (or otherwise de-inhibited) American Blobster <p>Well anyhow, here we are into the fourth week of Eastertide (Western calendar). With not so much as a glimmer of light at the end of the Russo-Ukrainean tunnel (assuming anyone important is actually looking, of course). So, knowing me as you do, you know I can hardly help but think: </p><p>How brutally, <i>dismally </i>ironic. I mean, that our liturgical feasts of our Lord's Resurrection - both Catholic and Orthodox - should coincide with the ongoing crucifixion of Ukraine. (Or is it really more like the utter self-humiliation, and soon-to-be self-crucifixion, of Russia? It's getting a bit hard to tell these days.) </p><p>And yet - in its own way, do you think - also fitting? Fitting, that this same overweeningly overconfident globe of the past 25 years, that somehow could not begin to muster a coherent, unified, unpolitical, rationally <b>proportionate</b> global response to global pandemic, should be no less cluelessly unable to preserve its own peace. But instead, and I suppose in keeping with its ever-mounting overconfidence, should insist on playing an unprecedentedly "chicken" game of brinkmanship with not just with Russia and Ukraine, but World War III. Almost as if we had learned - what, NOTHING? - from Covid? Nothing of our own - <i>even our own Western - </i>utter littleness, helplessness and vulnerability to vast events that, most of the time, we can only presume to control. And even then, mostly to our own immeasurable peril.</p><p>So now what? So far - and assuming I'm reading our mainstream media narrative correctly - we're using Russia's spiraling madness and moral disgrace as proof, if anything, of our own <b>in</b>vulnerability, and impregnable moral high ground. Or maddest of all, as proof of our own unique moral fitness to rearrange and rule an increasingly <i>un-</i>ruleable world. Talk about breathtaking, if not suffocating, ambition. </p><p>Golly. And here I'd imagined that, by now, our smarter-than-all-previous-history, globally-<i>sensitive</i> overlords would be dancing whole circles of diplomatic brilliance round everyone from Metternich and Talleyrand, to Bismarck and Salisbury, to George F Kennan and John F Kennedy. (Then again - one might argue - when you have already for a generation been managing a global economy of near-seamless just-in-time co-ordination, <i>who needs diplomacy anymore? </i>Who says the most hamfistedly arrogant corporation isn't ten times more clever than the subtlest, shrewdest country? And if so, then who needs the patience, much less the humility and vigilance, required to negotiate anything with anyone? In short, who needs anything but ever more flawless, seamlessly global co-ordination, technique and procedure?)</p><p>On the other hand, it just might all prove to have been worth it. Yes, even at the glowing risk of global conflagration. What's a little wind-borne radiation compared to the chance of securing, once and for all, a seriously just-in-time-commercially-integrated world empire? But now indulge me, if you can, a bit further: Suppose that the one missing centerpiece of that empire should be the <b>once-and-for-all devolution/dissolution of Russia.</b> For my part, I've long held the notion that the soundest cornerstone of a unified globe was a seamless, borderless Euro-Asia. Meaning, in plainer English, a greater Eurasian land-mass at least as open-bordered and well-integrated as say, the United States, Canada and Mexico. And that the surest means of securing this blithe utopia was <b>not</b> the renewed expansion and reconsolidation of Russia, but rather its gradual-yet-steady impoverishment/isolation/vassalization: the latter preferably at the hands of a Russia-"friendly," Russia-invested, but overall not really <i>anti-</i>Western China. Which would, I suspect, go a long way towards explaining our Western reluctance to try and isolate Moscow "completely." I.e., by openly teaming up with Beijing - much as we might like to. After all, in this age of still-unfolding pandemic fallout/recrimination, it is one thing to be <i>corporately </i>close to Covid's birthplace; quite another to be openly and politically close. And we'd be still more unwise to dilute what remains of Moscow's own residual trust, however unmerited, in Beijing. </p><p>So what am I getting at? Well, first let's page back a few years. Suppose that, from the very start of the Sino-American "rift" (c. 2012?), our Western global elites had wanted not nearly so much to counter China as to constrain, thwart and "hem in" Russia. But in that case, surely there could be many - perhaps conceivably quite subtle - ways of achieving that result? </p><p>What if our real Western national interests - or rather, and more precisely - our Progressive Global Interest, did not require us placing China and Russia<i> at loggerheads at all?</i> But something quite the reverse? What if the most intimate and trustful collaboration between Beijing and Moscow - or even an advanced degree of eventual symbiosis? - were to prove, in the long run, a far more crippling constraint upon Russian freedom of action than the West trying to effect that outcome directly?</p><p>The key, as I see it, was for the US to appear to be as far at odds as possible with China, without seeming to want to get closer to Russia (which latter move, after all, might suggest our wise global elites were <i>really</i> in earnest about getting tough with China).</p><p>The real question, so far as I can tell, is how far the Western establishment has been actually welcoming the growing closeness of Beijing and Moscow all along, while seeming to oppose it. And mostly on the not illegitimate assumption that, the closer and more inseparable the intimacy, the more deadly the inequality of power and advantage between them: it being only a matter of time before Dragon entwines, slowly constricts, and (perhaps assisted by the careful ministrations of a "neo-Ottomanist" Sunni pan-Islamica*) eventually crushes Bear. In short, there might be technically no limit to how far the <b>right</b> powers should be encouraged to embrace and one day engulf Russia, so long as the US and Europe continued to maintain their own proper outrage and "principled" opposition to Putinist autocracy. Not to mention the ever-popular economic pressure. Or, as some might call it, strangulation.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*E.g., Erdogan's Turkey, ISI's Pakistan, etc. </span></p><p>Which brings me back to the otherwise inexplicable title of this little exercise. Another <b><i>confession,</i> </b>as I indicated. Not mine this time, of course, but rather that of my hypothetical and highly-placed American Blobster, over a period of, say, the past five-to- ten years leading up to Putin's criminally insane invasion. </p><p>And what sort of confession? I wish I could be sure. But maybe something on the order of:</p><p><b>"By all means let the Russians get as close as they like to China - and even to countries like Turkey and Pakistan. In fact, provided we ourselves maintain the most co-operative ties with both Ankara and Beijing (cautiously friendly</b><b> in the case of Turkey, as covert as possible regarding China), why not gladly drive Moscow into the waiting arms of both? I mean, what's the worst that can happen? Think what rapid progress these two can make with those stupidly trusting Muscovites. And then when you factor in good old Islamabad . . . maybe even Riyadh . . . why, between the three or four </b><b>of them, lodged as they are in Eurasia, don't they have a much better chance in the long run of making a clean, graceful, efficient 'short work' of Russia? Or surely, at any rate, better than us Yanks, based as we are in North America?"</b></p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-45684673397105796852022-05-05T22:21:00.027-05:002023-04-09T01:55:25.896-05:00The Sheer Excitingness of Obsessive and Indiscriminate Competition (in this Russo-Ukrainean Globe)Why not take a moment (if you can) just to imagine you, yourself, as you are. And as you might be.<div><br /></div><div>Imagine yourself becoming something <b>very </b>different from what most of us want to be, in our striving grasping hustling, <i>self</i>-promoting everyday lives. Or think<i> </i>we want to be, at all events.</div><div><br /></div><div>Imagine you could be that rare sort of humble, rich, heedfully attentive Soil - that quietly compos(t)ing, undemanding, unpresuming, pinprick-silent Presence - in which every human soul within the perimeter of your routine life could <b>flourish and thrive, </b>as never before. Could thrive <i>so</i> unprecedentedly, in fact - and so completely, in its assurance of its own nature, giftedness, grace, inmost self - that it had almost no further wish to compete, almost no desire to compare itself to any other human souls, whether "superior" or "inferior." No wish, in short, to be anything <i>but</i> itself. Even as it experienced, too, an all-but-irresistible longing to know just Who it was who was engracing and empowering him or her - or (it may be) you or me - to be ourselves in so strange a Way. A way of being oneself, on the one hand, so utterly and deliciously satisfying: yet one that also draws, entreats, entices, even goads this creature onwards, to become <i>all the real fulness of itself,</i> so to speak (hope I'm making sense). </div><div><br /></div><div>Again, all its <b>real </b>fulness, as only its Maker can know and make it. Or yours, or mine. Almost as if this same God knew this creature's inmost soul unsearchable oceans of time before it knew it even had a soul. Even to the point where this human individual - of whom <b>you are the soil,</b> mind you - felt practically no need, no compulsion, either to be co-diminishing ("competitive") of others, or to feel diminished, or threatened. Or even defensive and "insecure"?</div><div><br /></div><div>Imagine yourself, then - just as you are - becoming that same strange soil, in which this strange God can take root, and in which your neighbor can flourish. </div><div><br /></div><div>I know. How boring. Not to mention how deplorably inefficient. In contrast to this most excitingly competitive, murderously efficient Russo-Ukrainean globe of ours.</div><div><br /></div>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-40162506935881912552022-04-17T19:29:00.005-05:002022-06-22T23:23:40.074-05:00Magdalene at the Tomb (in the wee small hours . . .)<div class="articlebody" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><b style="font-family: inherit;"><i>"Whom seek you here, sweet <a href="https://internetpoem.com/walter-de-nbsp-la-nbsp-mare/mistress-fell-poem/">Mistress Fell?"</a></i></b></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"One who loved me passing well.</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Dark his eye, wild his face -</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Stranger, if in this lonely place</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Bide such an one, then, prythee, say</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>I am come here to-day."</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"Many his like, Mistress Fell?"</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"I did not look, so cannot tell.</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Only this I surely know,</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>When his voice called me, I must go;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Touched me his fingers, and my heart</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Leapt at the sweet pain's smart."</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"Why did he leave you, Mistress Fell?"</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"Magic laid its dreary spell. -</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Stranger, he was fast asleep;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Into his dream I tried to creep;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Called his name, soft was my cry;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>He answered - not one sigh.</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"The flower and the thorn are here;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Falleth the night-dew, cold and clear;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Out of her bower the bird replies,</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Mocking the dark with ecstasies,</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>See how the earth's green grass doth grow,</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Praising what sleeps below!</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>"Thus have they told me. And I come,</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>As flies the wounded wild-bird home.</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Not tears I give; but all that he</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Clasped in his arms, sweet charity;</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>All that he loved - to him I bring</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>For a close whispering."</i></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div class="articlebody" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 25.6px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b> - Walter de la Mare</b></span></div><div style="font-family: Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></div></div>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-25937041127462171582022-03-02T17:43:00.021-06:002024-01-14T22:12:34.960-06:00A Confession<p>Ughhhh. So this "graduated" Russian invasion is turning out to be the bear hug from Hell. Big surprise that, and God help us <i>all, </i>starting with Ukraine, of course. And in the name of everything holy, pray as you've never prayed for anything in your whole life. </p><p>Mind you, as psychologically prepared as I tried to be for all-out war, I wound up stumbling on a discovery that actually surprised me. I never thought I'd find myself feeling seriously, wistfully nostalgic for much of anything about the Cold War Soviet Union. As distinct from our exciting <i>post</i>-Cold War Russia.</p><p>Except that, come to remember it, I <i>did </i>feel very much that way, and was very nostalgic. Especially for the <b>post-Khrushchev </b>Soviet Union. </p><p>Not too many years ago, <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2017/09/an-older-prayer-for-peace.html">I laid it all out very explicitly in a single post:</a> how much I missed the - for want of a better word - predictability(?) of the <b>later </b>Cold War era. Along with the seemingly more measured, cautious rationality of its principal actors and operatives. Though, looking back on it, a better phrasing might have been the greater political <b>secularity</b> of the era.* And in particular one highly secular assumption, that seemed to be widely shared among both East and West: </p><p>Namely, that there is <b>NO</b> place on earth, and in time, that is <b><i>so</i></b> holy, so utterly joined to heaven and eternity, as to be worth risking nuclear war in "defense" of. Or worse yet, in order to possess it exclusively. Perhaps not even Jerusalem? But certainly not Kyiv. (At all events - <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-fixers-utopia-some-thoughts-on-our.html">as I've posted elsewhere</a> <b>[last 4 paragraphs] </b>- one really has to ask what kind of love is it anyway? that loves most fervently by hovering, clutching, choking, destroying.)</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*As opposed to the greater political <i>religiosity </i>of our era, actors, operatives, etc.</span></p><p>My point, in sum, being that Heaven is Heaven, and earth is earth, and it's not that<i> </i>the twain shall <i>never </i>meet; however, that fruitful consummation must always be understood as being in the hands and at the discretion of God, <b>never of Man.</b></p><p>Again, a <i>post-</i>Khrushchev Soviet Union. Neither did I envision it as continuing indefinitely in that pitiful-yet-toxic Brezhnev-through-Gorbachev state. Rather, what I imagined was a Russia "duly de-Communized and de-toxified," <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2017/09/an-older-prayer-for-peace.html">as I wrote in the same post <b>(par. 4).</b></a> In other words, no longer even remotely or aspirationally Marxist; yet still hardheaded, pedestrian and <i>secular</i> enough to grasp that, in this exciting, excitable globalized world of ours, no country can afford to be too sentimental - much less hysterical and confrontational - about some holy ancestral hearthland like Ukraine (Russia's Kosovo?). </p><p>Anyhow, what I felt most nostalgic about was the (best I recall) relative simplicity, clarity and straightforwardness of a bipolar world in which, in any case, nuclear proliferation was certainly far less easy than today. Or so it was made to be, on <i>one </i>of the two sides - the Soviet - if not both?</p><p>Still, and however much I'd prefer it otherwise, the fact is that today we live in <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/07/a-yet-stranger-prayer-for-peace.html"><b>self-anointedly </b>apocalyptic</a> times <b>(par. 9)</b>. Ours is a Great Global World in which, as often as not, the most secular differences of opinion can take on an epically religious, or even sacredly end-time, "heaven-and-hell" solemnity and ferocity. And then we wonder why it's so cussedly hard to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction.</p><p>So of course even now we have those who, whether they love or hate it, regard Putin's Russia as an almost Biblically-fated tool of Babylonian chastisement of a wayward - or at least feckless? - Modern West. And you know, in all fairness to them I can think of no time in history, like the present, when we in the West have been more <i>Biblically </i>wayward. If not apostate in the Christian sense. At the same time, it would be hard to imagine a modern Nebuchadnezzar more brutally blundering than Vladimir Putin, or one more likely to teach the exact opposite of what we Westerners are supposed to learn. Or a despot better designed, if anything, to <i>reinforce</i> <i>and confirm </i>the stubborn waywardness, smugness and sense of moral superiority of the "Israel" - aka America - in question.</p><p>In any case, assuming it really is a steadily tightening, and deadly, ring of encirclement that Putin sees himself as breaking out of, he could hardly have chosen a method of breakout more conducive to the self-vindication - if not self-righteousness - of his encirclers. Or a means of "escape" more horrifically dangerous to the peace and security of his own country (to say nothing of the rest of us). In fact I suppose I couldn't have done better myself, if my intention had been to "blacken permanently" the name of Russia in the eyes of the world.</p><p>Meanwhile, it appears we Global Moderns have well-nigh reached the limits of a certain nothing-if-not-ambitious, <i>post-</i>secular, <i>post-</i>Cold War project of our own: one we've been engrossed in, if memory serves, for roughly the past generation. I mean the project of trying to <a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-prayer-we-live-sort-of-post-fathers.html">bring Heaven down to earth,</a> as it were, by forcibly anchoring it to some place, people, ideology, or Idea-masquerading-as-country of our own idolizing (whether the idol be Washington, Beijing, Mecca, Jerusalem, Brussels, Moscow, etc). But is it really too late, do you think, to do something quite the opposite? </p><p>What if we fervently prayerful Catholics, and countless other Christians, were to turn a decidedly different page in our devotional lives. Suppose that<a href="https://knownofold.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-not-to-work-with-other-humans.html"> we were to become rather less heavy and solemn, less full of our own hard-won importance, less weighted down by our own works, achievements and sacrifices. Such that, like any child, we almost seemed to have no past at all?</a> <b>(3rd, 4th and 5th pars. from bottom) </b></p><p>What if we were to become <i>so</i> light and buoyant, so humble and childlike and <i>un</i>selfconscious - yes, even of our great and good deeds - as to be able to float right up, as it were, to Heaven? So that our own feeble prayers might at last be joined inseparably with those wisest and most potent of all human intercessions - those of Jesus' own Mother, and ours? That same Mother of the Church who pleaded with us, in Portugal more than a century ago, to pray - not for the humiliation, devastation and judgment of Russia, however "deserved" - but for its complete consecration to her Immaculate Heart, and therewith its <b>full </b>conversion to her Son. And likewise to believe her, and to trust in Him, for the "period of peace" that would surely follow. Our persistent Catholic disregard of that appeal over these past 100+ years - can we honestly say we've been satisfied with the results? Is not the present spiraling disaster more or less exactly what she foretold? And are we so sure that this same Mary, who so accurately prophesied the conclusion of one war (1918) and the conditional-but-likely onset of another still worse (1939), is <i>utterly </i>powerless to mitigate and defuse, to subdue and cleanse and heal both Russia's present madness, and our own folly?</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-908795606639351622.post-48584224017895351072022-02-22T10:20:00.017-06:002022-02-25T11:42:26.821-06:00All I Can Say Is<p>Well, it's begun to happen. Russia is now officially invested in the full separation of the Donbass region from the rest of loving, caring, supportive Ukraine (talk about wrenching a child from the arms of its mother). And mostly, from what I gather, at the instigation not of Putin himself but of a majority of that beastly, dastardly Russian Duma. And here I was thinking he was the globe's most absolute autocrat outside of North Korea.</p><p>And yet . . . I continue to hope, pray and even fast - however foolishly (wouldn't be the first time) - for . . </p><p>What? </p><p>I pray - you guessed it - that poor beleaguered, besotted, befuddled Vladimir doesn't take the <b>real </b>bait. I mean, of course, the bait of launching a full-scale invasion of <i>non-</i>separatist Ukraine.</p><p><b>"And why <i>pray,</i> idiot?" </b>you ask. Because I also continue to suspect that - whatever may be <i>Putin's </i>real impulses, fears, ambitions, hysterias - there are some Seriously Progressive and Enlightened Folks here out West, too, who don't just <i>want </i>him to launch all-out war (any moment now?), but <b>so </b>badly, they can all but smell and taste it. Which is to say, at least as much as he (supposedly) does. </p><p>I'm thinking of venerable foreign-affairs icons like Chatham House, the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and God knows how many other hand-wringing, pearl-clutching congregations of souls who no doubt would howl in outrage at the mildest imputation of being Russophobic. And yet who still, from everything I can determine, really believe that not just Putin but <b>Russia herself</b> is beyond redemption. At least for the foreseeable future. I.e., so long as she remains recognizably Russian.* And who further reason that, Moscow being the last <b>geopolitically serious </b>holdout of barbarism in our Gloriously Unfolding Sino-Western Corporatopia, why not goad her into "finishing the job" by doing something really stupid and nasty? Thereby confirming both our worst "we-knew-it-all-along" expectations of Muscovy, and our noblest vindications of ourselves? To say nothing of further hardening, solidifying, but above all ideologizing NATO. And in particular its most devoutly anti-Russian elements.</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">*As opposed to her becoming Progressively more and more Chinese, or Islamic, or Germanocentric (depending on the Russian region in question).</span></p><p>After all, can a truly Progress-Infatuated Globe (PIG) ever have enough reasons for loathing, despising, frustrating, isolating, anathematizing such a wicked old vestige of empire <b>(Long live the POST-imperial West!) </b>as Russia?</p><p>And who knows? The eagerly-awaited invasion may be taking place even now, as I write. </p><p>More on this later . . . possibly even within the same post . . .</p>J R Yankovichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14562282046701095946noreply@blogger.com0