conservatism preserved

It's an understatement to say that there exists an enormous amount of controversy in this year's election over the ideal of conservatism. Should it be preserved intact? Should it change to fit new circumstances? What's special about it to begin with?

The general consensus among those of us who hold to the old school of conservative thought, however, is that conservatism will not be determined by party in this election, but by individual.
I think Russell Kirk put it best when he said:

If they are to lead this country, conservatives must appear to be, and in fact
must be, imaginative but reasonable people who do not claim that they will turn
the world upside down. Genuine conservatives know that man and society are not
perfectible; they are realistically aware that Utopia...means literally Nowhere.
It is one of the conservative's principal functions to remind mankind that
politics is the art of the possible."

That politics is the art of the possible must ever be the successful conservative candidate's message, that we do not operate in a vacuum, and that utopian ideals belong only in a utopia.

Everything from the war and illegal immigration to healthcare and tax cuts are encompassed in this category. If a candidate tries to put forward policies which do not meet the criterion of reality, then that candidate should not be a conservative's chocie.

We must first evaluate the choices set before us on the basis of our conservative ideas, and then determine the leader for the next generation of politics in Washington.

foreign policy and popularity

Lots of polls show that foreign publics have a poor opinion of the U.S. Some people argue that this means the U.S. should change its policies to make them more popular outside the U.S. Others contend that foreign policy decisions need to reflect U.S. national interests, irrespective of their popularity.

Does the popularity of United States matter and should it affect policy decisions?

The question is definitely a very provocative one, but I'm glad it's been asked. It seems that most of the comments are ignoring all but recent history, and I believe that's a mistake.

With the close of WWII, America faced a decision that every great nation has had to deal with in the history of the world. America proved herself superior to every other nation in the world economically, technologically, and in fighting force. The regimes of Cyrus II, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, or Victorian Great Britain saw the opportunity and had the capability to conquer.
Like those mentioned, the world was ours for the taking. Especially with the power of the atom bomb to enforce our demands.



Yet we said no and chose to assist Europe and Asia and Africa with their rebuilding processes.
We respected the national sovereignty of each nation and refused to control their internal affairs. In fact, we tried to prevent Russia and China from taking advantage of weaker nations and established NATO.

[Ironically, the nations of Europe who received the most of our help nearly sixty years ago (a very brief span of history for Europe) would rather criticize our efforts than help out.]

The reason we said no is because America was never built to become an empire. In fact, it's against our very nature to do so. There was a HUGE debate over the acquisition of Louisiana because the people of that territory did not have a say in the matter. The same debate reappeared during the Spanish-American war, and whether America should retain the spoils of the victor. Our philosophy of government is based upon the principle of "the consent of the governed." As long as this remains the basis of our system of government, we will never attempt to conquer and control.



Now to the present day. There are three very important things that must be understood.
1) We've fought this type of battle before.
2) This isn't the first time we've been unpopular
3) Unpopularity does not mean that we're wrong.

For the first point, I refer back to the war we engaged in with the Barbary powers. For decades, these pirates roamed their corner of the globe and preyed upon cargo ships passing through the water they claimed as theirs.The crew were captured and either enslaved or sold for ransom to the country of their origin. With the exception of Britain, all other nations were in favor of simply paying the ransom. President Jefferson, however, chose to change that policy, and Britain was the only other nation to stand with us. We fought that battle with three countries [Algiers, Tripoli, & Tunis.]



The second & third points are quite self-explanatory. The reason we feel it so much in the present, however, is because communications have become infinitely more global. With the globalization of our communications, the individual citizens of world nations submit their opinions on someone else's philosophy of government without realizing that each nation is individually different. European nations tend to lump together because their boundaries, citizens, and governments have been so very fluid over the last three hundred years. Europe's never really understood the "American Experiment" and likely never will.


So as a direct answer to the question, US popularity shouldn't matter and while it's important to know foreign policy implications, the popularity issue alone shouldn't be a deciding factor to changes in our foreign policy.

On Courage

Courage, as Noah Webster defined it, is:

Bravery; intrepidity; that quality of mind which enables men to encounter danger and difficulties with firmness, or without fear or depression of spirits; valor; boldness; resolution. It is a constituent part of fortitude; but fortitude implies patience to bear continued suffering.

At the end of that particular definition, Webster thoughtfully placed God's encouragement to Joshua:

Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest.

-Joshua 1:7

It's often been said that we usually aren't very courageous or brave until the need arises, or at least, only on rare occasions. When we think of bravery or courage, we think of soldiers, firefighters, policemen, and well, in a broader sense, simply those who protect others regularly.

But from what Webster says, courage is also patience to bear continued suffering.

If that's the case, it means that your grandmother who lives daily with her arthritis and back problems is suddenly much braver than we thought. Your parents, who daily deal with financial issues while striving to create a peaceful and happy home environment, are heroes. The man in the wheelchair who smiles as we pass him in the aisles at Wal-Mart has the courage that is necessary to simply live.

I wonder what it would do for our perspective on life if we saw ourselves as courageous?

Another sample of courage is found in the actions in this video. To declare our faith before the world is something all Christians are called upon to do. Yet you never really hear too much about it nowadays. In the times of our Founders, something like this would have been common and given a few words of encouragement. in today's times, though, it meant the sacrifice of potential political alliances, a few votes, and perhaps a small degree of alienation. This man, however, has single-handedly reminded those present that there is a larger purpose in life, and has certainly encouraged others to do the same.

Commentary on Conservatism

I have been absent for quite sometime. I cannot say that that will be remedied at this point, but know that I start school in the fall, and somehow, I take out whatever thoughts are left over from classes and deposit them here. Why? Who knows. But I do feel better later.

Anyway, so the thoughts today run along the lines of conservatism.

For starters, I found an amusing and cute post by a blogger on the Washington Post site.

Whiny? Crazy? You Just Might Be A Conservative (Posted 03/21/2006)

You know that one loud, whiny kid in the supermarket yesterday? He's probably the future George W. Bush, according to a Toronto Star article about a study from the Journal of Research Into Personality.

"Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative," says the article. "At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals."

This story goes on to mention another study by John T. Jost of Stanford, one in 2003 that was roundly mocked by conservatives for lumping the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan and Limbaugh together as socially warped right-wingers. (Much of the mocking turned to anger when it was discovered that $1.2 million in taxpayer dollars helped pay for the study.) Whiny, socially warped, borderline insane - if that's true of conservative kids, how do red states ever find good public school teachers?

Of course, we should never question social psychologists in their line of work. They are, after all, professionals. So the idea that perhaps a small number of kids from the Berkeley area may not be a truly representative slice of the American population is just silly. Professor Jack Block, the author of the study, defends his work by explaining to the Star that "within his sample.... the results hold." Surely, his statistics professor is very proud.

Meanwhile, as the academy tells us that social ineptness, insanity, and insecurity can all be motivations for conservatism, the MSM doesn't want us to forget the other side of the scale: hence, Ruth Marcus's column in today's Washington Post. Marcus maintains that the real problem with George W. Bush is that he's too focused on being a manly man's man.

Apparently, this violent testosterone-fueled psychological imperitive - not a coherent and just strategy for defending America in response to the first major attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor - is the real reason for our war in Iraq. Oh, and Condi Rice? Don't worry, women can have manly envy, too. Clearly, Maggie Thatcher did.

If these columnists and scientists are to be believed, then President Bush is just a real-life version of Dr. Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper - blustering, impotent and murmuring about conspiracies to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, just another spineless conservative wussyboy who has to prove he's a big brave man in cowboy boots.
This is ridiculous and wrong. It's always better to just let kids be kids and keep the psychologists out of the way - to follow the dictum of an aging hippie couple I know who, despite their pacifist beliefs, still let their boys run around playing army with sticks made into guns. After all, someone has to defend America.

In closing, I leave you with the words of Russell Kirk, who certainly summed up my thoughts on the conservative/libertarian issues. [FYI, in my book of political who's who's, Russell Kirk and Henry Kissinger are pretty close in the top of that list.]

Order, Justice, and Freedom

Yet the fact remains that this conservative movement does not march in lockstep. In one respect, this lack of unanimity is a virtue: it means that conservatives are no ideologues; they believe in diversity and individuality. Utopianism, oddity, and extreme positions, nevertheless, are not conservative virtues. Those failings are easily discerned in various aspects and factions of the growing drift rather clumsily labelled "conservative." Permit me to touch briefly upon some of these excesses.

One of them is the continuing obsession, particularly among some people well endowed with the goods of fortune, with economics. I do not mean to denigrate the Dismal Science. A good economic system has produced America's prosperity; and, still more important, it is closely connected with America's private liberty. Those "civil libertarians" who somehow fancy that we can reconcile an extreme of personal freedom with a servile and directed economy simply do not understand the great mysterious incorporation of the human race. And, as Samuel Johnson put it, a man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money.

But economic activity is no more the whole of the civil social order than wealth is the sole source of happiness. Economic success is a byproduct, not the source, of America's success as a society. The sort of ignorant understanding to which I refer may be illustrated by one of the inimitable anecdotes of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. On one occasion, that compulsive traveller was addressing a gathering of Catholic businessmen in Detroit. At the conclusion of his remarks, a gentleman in the audience inquired, "Doc, do you know what history is?"

"Why, no," Kuehnelt-Leddihn replied. "Can you instruct me?"

"Sure. History is just economics, that's all just economics."

In the mind's eye, one may see the ironic Kuehnelt-Leddihn replying: "Indeed? Tell me, sir, are you a Catholic?"

"Sure. I just made a novena."

"What a pity, sir, what a pity."

"Why is it a pity I'm a Catholic?"-this belligerently.

"Because, sir, if you were not a Catholic, you might be made a professor at the Marx-Lenin Institute."

To embrace Marxist materialism and determinism in the name of another abstraction called "capitalism" is to deliver up one's self bound to the foe. Conservatives do defend a free economy; they defend it, however, as bound up with a complex social structure of order and justice and freedom, founded upon an understanding of man as a moral being. To reduce ourselves to economic determinists offering sacrifices to the great god Mammon is to ruin the prospects of all of us.

Sometimes allied with this economic obsession is the mode of belief which calls itself "libertarian." I willingly concede that there exist some very sensible and honorable men and women who allow themselves to be tagged with that label. Both F.A. Hayek and your servant reject the term; and we have our reasons, as men who have learnt considerable from Burke and Tocqueville. Those reasons, as applied to current controversies, have been sufficiently detailed recently in National Review by Ernest van den Haag.

Let me say here only a few words by way of general principle. Any good society is endowed with order and justice and freedom. Of these, as Sir Richard Livingstone wrote, order has primacy: for without tolerable order existing, neither justice nor freedom can exist. To try to exalt an abstract "liberty" to a single solitary absolute, as John Stuart Mill attempted, is to undermine order and justice-and, in a short space, to undo freedom itself, the real prescriptive freedom of our civil social order. "License they mean, when they cry liberty," in Milton's phrase.

John Adams and John Taylor of Caroline carried on a correspondence about the nature of liberty. Liberty as an abstraction, Adams said in substance, is either meaningless or baneful: there is the liberty of the wolf, and there is the very different liberty of the civilized human being. We owe our American freedoms to a well-functioning civil social order that requires duties as well as liberties for its survival.

I find it grimly amusing to behold extreme "libertarians," who proclaim that they would abolish taxes, military defense, and all constraints upon impulse, obtaining massive subsidies from people whose own great affluence has been made possible only by the good laws and superior constitutions of these United States-and by our armies and navies that keep in check the enemies of our order and justice and freedom. There is no freedom in anarchy, even if we call anarchism "libertarianism." If one demands unlimited liberty, as in the French Revolution, one ends with unlimited despotism. "Men of intemperate mind never can be free," Burke tells us. "Their passions forge their fetters."

Some momentary encounters become images that fix our future thought. When a college freshman, debating in Indianapolis, I happened to stroll into the great railroad station in that city, with my freshman colleagues; and we watched from high above the intricate shuttling of long trains in and out of the station. Because my father was a railroad engineman, I understood what care, precision, and complex scheduling necessarily were involved below. The functioning of a railway station, like the functioning of the American economic apparatus generally, like the functioning of the whole American society, was dependent upon a wondrously high degree of duty, discipline, and complex cooperation. I pointed out to my companions that ineluctable truth. The libertarians still have not grasped that point. It was well for the safety enjoyed by railway passengers that my father and other railwaymen were not libertarians: they did not permit their private interests, such as a glass of beer, to conflict with their duties. Yet those railwaymen were freemen, not ashamed of the American constitution.

Some of the people who style themselves libertarians, I repeat, in fact do subscribe to the body of common beliefs I mentioned earlier. What's in a name? Actually, they remain conservative enough. But as for those doctrinaire libertarians who stand ready to sweep away government and the very moral order why, that way lies madness. If the American public is given the impression that these fantastic dogmas represent American conservatism, then everything we have gained over the past three decades may be lost. The American people are not about to submit themselves to the utopianism of a tiny band of chirping sectaries, whose prophet (even though they may not have much direct acquaintance with his works) was ~ean Jacques Rousseau.

If they are to lead this country, conservatives must appear to be, and in fact must be, imaginative but reasonable people who do not claim that they will turn the world upside down. Genuine conservatives know that man and society are not perfectible; they are realistically aware that Utopia-including the dream-paradise of absolute, unfettered liberty to act just as the individual pleases-means literally Nowhere. It is one of the conservative's principal functions to remind mankind that politics is the art of the possible.

Killing Time...

Dear Finals,

In a word: I'm terrified.

You possess the qualities of a tyrant without even trying, and trying to defeat you is a daunting chore. (I think you must have taken lessons from Machiavelli.)

You are omniscient because you often know the answers when I do not. You are omnipotent because you manage to consume at least two weeks of my life without even trying. You are omnipresent because you exist as a looming and impending occurence from August to December, from January to May, and in some cases, from June to August. Always, always always...

You invade my subconscious mind much like the barbarians invaded Rome (which was sacked in 410 BC); slowly but surely deconstructing my cognitive powers and making certain that I will retain absolutely nothing of value or relevance on the day you arrive.

Like the division of Europe during the Religious Wars (from 1562 to 1648) you divide my mind into several pieces and leave me to reconnect them. Once I've sketchily reconnected the thoughts you've scattered here and abroad, I seem to be predestined, elected, and chosen by you to a degree of everlasting tormet determined by the amount of studying I've completed by the time you requre an account of myself.

Finals, I. will. not. give. up.

My efforts for success will not be as futile as those of Guy Faulkes in the Gunpowder Revolution! I shall, like Augustus in 31 BC, piece together my scattered pockets of knowledge and connect them with thoughtful roads of wisdom and insight that will so astound my professors, that my finals will turn tail and run in the face of so formidable a Reformation!

I shall emerge triumphant, and on Tuesday, at 11:59 pm, I shall shout: IT IS FINISHED!!!!!

Sincerely,

- Rachel



P.S. Be nice to me. Please?

The Lord is "all that?"

The New Book of Common Prayer
As I was lazily perusing the web on this delightful Sunday afternoon, this caught my eye. Apparently, the book of Common Prayers are no longer so very common, so the Anglican Church has decided to go with a much more "hip" version; specifically, the Hip Hop Prayer Book. To me, the title sounds a bit like something out of Dr. Seuss, but I'm certain no one minds that.





In late 2002, Reverend Holder identified the problem in his South Bronx Parish:
Since men in the South Bronx have a close to an 80 percent chance of being incarcerated at least once before they're 40, it's crucial to train the youngsters. But in the South Bronx, he encountered a bit of a relevancy barrier. It wasn't long before he proposed offering the first hip hop mass to his bishop, who promptly agreed.
According to a Beliefnet article, this movement isn't limited to the Episcopal.

He worked with Episcopal, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic clergy and lay people to create seven Friday masses in the summer of 2004, with the theme, "The word was made flesh and dwelt in the hood," adapted from the Gospel of John.

Dwelt in the Hood?
The Gospel is the Gospel whether it be hip-hop, the New Living Translation, or the King James Version, according to the philosophy of Reverend Holder. Yet I wonder...while I think there's some merit to making the Gospel easily understood, I'm not sure that I believe scriptural doctrine or continuity is going to remain the same when the words used now create drastically different connotations. Take for example, Psalm 23:

Psalm 23 as adapted by Ryan Kearse
The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.
He allows me to chill.
He keeps me from being heated
and allows me to breathe easy.
He guides my life so that
I can represent and give
shout outs in his Name.
And even though I walk through
the Hood of death,
I don't back down
for you have my back.
The fact that you have me covered
allows me to chill.
He provides me with back-up
in front of my player-haters
and I know that I am a baller
and life will be phat.
I fall back in the Lord's crib
for the rest of my life.

Saying that the Lord is "all that," connotates a different meaning than saying the Lord is "my Shepherd." The use of shepherd analogies, parables, and symbols are heavily utilized in Scripture and describe a picture of Christ. The Lord truly is "all that," but the phrase doesn't give you the same image and certainly doesn't tie key portions of Scripture together in the same manner the word "shepherd" does. There's more value in Scriptural diction than mere poetics.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt?
The Reverend's desire to communicate to his audience through all this is admirable, and it doesn't seem to have changed the concept of the passage. But before we all go chillin in God's hood, let's remember to not accept things at face value without first checking our facts. Sometimes, the common is much more extraordinary than we think.


Ya dig it ma homies? :-)

Of Wisdom and Knowledge

Well, it is that time, once again.

Summer ends August 21st, and as of August 22nd, I will be the proud student in two classes: Theology of the Bible I, and History of the Western World I.

The thrill of random UPS packages showing up on my doorstep with return addresses to Amazon.com has certainly not diminished a bit since I wandered into the realm of higher education two years ago. All of them sound exciting, and I've already started a few of them.
[Yes, many at one time. *nod* That's the way to get 'er done.] One of my books, however, surprised me. just a little.

While reading the introductory chapter of "Western Heritage" by Kagan, I was bombarded with evolutionary statements of fact on the origins of civilizations that recalled images of grunting, half-naked cavemen with clubs. While I can't say that I've been forever scarred, it certainly made me wary of any other statements that made be projected by the author as truth.

Rather than ranting on the evils of darwinistic books in Christian educational institution that prescribes to a literal six-day creation, I'd like to take this moment to comment on truth in academic circles.

Some say truth is subjective, but since I will likely not face that viewpoint for some time, I won't address it here.

See, in this book, truth is an absolute. In fact, it assumes that I have been familiarized with the terms: paleolithic, neandrathal, and primordal soup and that I have already accepted the veracity of these very terms. Assuming that the author of this book were teaching my class, he would likely raise his eyebrows sympathetically at the naivette of the young lady who dared to comment on the lack of evidence for this primitive state of man. It is likely that he would not take the question seriously, for hasn't he been carefully perpared for it in his classes leading up to receiving his doctorate?

O the arrogance of a man who would assume that his words are truth because that is what he was taught!

Perhaps I seem over-hasty in condemning the author of our textbook to mere arrogant ignorance.

Yet put the situation to the test! The proud owner of a certificate proclaiming his status as a P.H.D. has undergone careful conditioning by the institutions he has graduated from. He has been taught to question all; to not place his confidence in what others know, but to know it himself. In short, he has been taught to be confidence in his own knowledge.

Of course, there are many exceptions to this rule. These are the men I fondly call the Moses of the academic world. Why? Because even in their education, they remembered humility, and that they are not to be confident in either the knowledege of others, or their own knowledge.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth for ever.

-Psalm 111:10

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

-Proverbs 1:7

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.

-Proverbs 9:10

Of course, this is not to say that we should all go off to seminary. No rather, we should seek first a knowledge that is higher than the ordinary, and apply the principles we learn there to the knowledge gained from college or the "higher" education.

Moses obtained his degree in the backside of a desert and was qualified to confer in diplomatic talks with one of the most powerful rulers of his day.

David obtained his degree while at the Shepherd's School of Hard Knocks and became one of the most well-known kings in history. Who doesn't know who "King David" was?

In the end, it doesn't matter how many initials you have after your name. What matters most, is how that head knowledge is applied. Will it be applied in arrogance? or in humility?

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

-Colossians 2:8