A Beautiful Man Is Hard to Find

 

Women and men are different.

This should not be controversial. It seems to me that anyone finding this controversial is shockingly lacking in empathy.

Since the Sixties and feminism, we have been fighting against this truth. Feminism insisted that any difference was just a role forced on women by society.

Perhaps the rise of the “transgender” movement is at least in part the inevitable rebellion against this claim. Its insistence on “gender” as a core of one’s identity is a direct contradiction to feminism. To feminism, “gender” is not a trait you are born with, but a set of arbitrarily behaviours forced on you. Otherwise feminism makes no sense.

Transgenders insist there is a female or a male soul. Otherwise you could not be “trans.”

Leave aside the other questions raised by transgenderism: whether gender is independent of sex, and whether one can be “born into the wrong body.”

There are three transcendental values: truth, good, and beauty. They are the goals of existence. They bring value to life. We are created in order to seek these three things, and to express these three things.

Of these three, it is obvious that women, not men, are most responsible for beauty. Women are more visually attractive than men; women care about being attractive; men don’t. This is not just to attract men sexually; women definitely also dress and make up for other women, for the sake of abstract beauty. Both men and women would rather look at a woman than a man on a magazine cover.

If you introduce a woman into a home or office or business, she will instantly go about trying to make it more beautiful, more comfortable. You leave men on their own at a workplace, and it will be functional, no more.

Cultures that devalue beauty, like Protestantism, or Islam, will devalue women. Cultures that value beauty, like France, Italy, or Latin America, will value women more highly.

This is why feminism began in the Protestant countries. It was here women were devalued. Although it has since spread to Catholics as well; due to the overwhelming cultural influence of America.

And why does a man marry a woman? The question has come up online recently: MGTOW. Is it worth all the insults, demands, and worries, the risks of ruinous divorce, “just for a vagina”? What else does a woman bring to the relationship?

This, after all, is what feminism has left us with.

But properly, a man marries to bring beauty into his life. To make his house a home. Not just her physical beauty, but her charm, her attitude—for this is her proper role, to be supportive, “inner beauty.” And her ability to decorate the living space. And her ability to cook, which is a form of beauty, appealing to the sense of taste. If she is a good wife, she brings grace and comfort to his life. Along with the joy of children.

This is what a good wife should do. Feminism has devalued it all, and women have come to neglect and distain all of this. Reducing them to no more than second-rate men with vaginas.

And now we must acknowledge that men too have their role in civilization and the human enterprise. As feminism would deny. They are more than bicycles, more than a means to an end.

Women are the guardians of beauty; men are the guardians of truth. Men are born with an internal compass that points towards the North Star. Women will believe anything; men will want proof. This is why Jesus, who obviously knew what he was doing, chose only male apostles. We should not second-guess God. And this is why St. Paul said women should be silent in church. It is not their role to lead and teach, any more than it is the role of a man to wear makeup and give fetching smiles. Either has gone off the rails.

Not incidentally, we have made a grave mistake by giving the teaching profession over almost entirely to women. This is not their role. Notice that, in the New Testament, Jesus’s genealogy is traced back to David through Joseph—even though Jospeh is not his biological father. This is because the role of the father, of he man, is to guide and educate, to pass on truths. In this sense, Joseph and his genealogy are fully relevant.

If we value truth, but not beauty, as in Protestant (and now secular) Northern Europe, this will look like a misogynist view. If we value beauty as well as truth, it will not. It is both received and revealed wisdom. It is common sense.

And what of the third transcendental value, the good? Indeed, this is the central of the three: “and the greatest of these is love.” We were created to choose the good, of our free will.

Men and women seem to have an equal role here; but being good means different things for each. Goodness means justice, on the one hand; mercy on the other. In America, to say someone is good, you say “he is honest.” In China, you say “he is kind.” And these are different things.

Good women are kind and merciful. Good men are honest and just.

We need both. We need both men and women in our culture, and in our individual lives. And we have lost this.

Who Killed the Counterculture?

 

On a recent JRE episode, Joe Rogan and Bill Murray reminisced sadly about the counterculture of the Sixties. They read a piece by Hunter S. Thompson that described it as a wave that suddenly broke and disappeared. There was a magical spirit of confidence then that was lost, and both pondered why. We all knew we were going in the same direction, we were in the right, and victory was inevitable. But at the same time, we did not know where we were going.

They seemed to agree that spirit died when the Nixon administration made LSD illegal in 1968.

That might be so; but it seems to me there were still plenty of psychedelics around after that date. And LSD was already illegal in Canada in 1962, and the same counterculture throve in Canada, in the same years. We had the Georgia Straight, and Yorkville, and Rochdale, just when America had Haight-Ashbury and The Village Voice. And our hippiedom died around the same time the American scenes died.

I think it was something else, something that came later. LSD was only a gateway drug. It did not account for everything. There was also that excited hopeful spirit in the folk boom of the early Sixties, in early rock and roll, and in the Beats, before drugs became generally involved. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” 

The counterculture was actually the rebellion against modernism. The culture it was countering was modernism and scientism. It began in the old Victorian walkups of the Haight, which were being stripped of their ornamentation to conform to the modernist style: “a house is a machine to live it.” Hell no. In reaction, hippies moved in and preserved the old Art Nouveau ornamentation they found preserved from the general rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. And that same Art Nouveau style inspired much of the art of the counterculture. Natural, flowing, organic forms. Avoid geometry and hints of the machine. We are more than machines.

It was a rebellion against the emphasis on STEM in American education in the early stages of the Cold War and the technological race with the Russians; the popular hysteria over Russia getting the bomb, and then sputnik. I recall my college buddy’s Firesign Theatre albums mocking “More Science High.” And we all knew what they were talking about. Science and math were soulless. We wanted “more poetry in the classrooms.”

And what, after all, was the predictable end point of all this emphasis on science and on competition and on material progress? Mutual assured destruction. Our leaders said it themselves.

Hell no; we won’t go.

And the apex of all, the arch-villain, was B.F. Skinner and behaviourism. Which saw us all as lab rats condemned to a meaningless life on the exercise wheel. “Beyond Freedom and Dignity.” Skinner said we had no soul.

Psychedelics were significant because they were the disproof of all that. Psychedelics were not fun. They were omore often terrifying. There were inevitably “bad trips.” Why would anyone actually volunteer to, in effect, go temporarily mad.

They were a necessary gateway because they proved there was a world beyond the material. People dropped acid to see God. 

But there was of course a contradiction here too: drugs were a material means to transcendence. It was kindergarten. Relying on a chemical was still not making the leap. 

Some made the leap with suicide. Hence Heaven’s Gate. Hence the 27 club. It seemed to make sense. The rocket ship to heaven. 

The majority chickened out, and became yuppies. Back to the exercise wheel and shut up.

But the logical move was to religion: the Jesus Freaks, Transcendental Meditation, the Hare Krishnas, the Moonies, those exploring Eastern mysticism.  We were heading for a Great Awakening.

And what killed it then was not the banning of drugs; most people lost interest in psychedelics naturally once they’d done the experiment. It was the popular anti-cult hysteria of the seventies and eighties. This was the empire striking back. Waco was stormed. And, of course, Charlie Manson, or the People’s Temple, and other frauds, did much to discredit the cults.

Young people who joined the new religions were kidnapped by professionals hired by their parents and “deprogrammed.” Whether or not the religious groups they’d voluntarily joined were brainwashing them, these professionals certainly were. 

That’s what killed it; or at least, threw the rebellion against materialism into a coma for a few generations. 

There are signs we see at last a revival. There is a reason people like Rogan and Murray are looking back now with nostalgia. We are beginning to understand we took a wrong turn, and lost something.

I hear strange echoes of the Sixties when I listen to RFK Jr.; and I begin to remember and feel within me the spirit of that age. Although he is talking about food and drugs, his tones are overtly moral and spiritual. J.D. Vance publicly refers to Catholic moral teaching. Candace Owens converts and declares “Christ is king.” The “New Atheists” of a few years ago seem to have been defeated in the public arena. Bishop Barron and William Lane Craig, their conquerors, have become the more prominent public intellectuals. Jordan Peterson is slowly converting in the public eye, and bringing many followers with him. 

That the revival seems to be rather Catholic is, I think, significant. Catholicism is the most spiritual and least materialist form of Christianity. It is the home of Western mysticism. No “Protestant work ethic”; no “prosperity gospel”; an emphasis on beauty. And, unlike the cults of the Seventies, it has a well-established system of oversight and authority, however imperfect, to prevent scandal, charlatanry and exploitation.

We may, at last, be achieving liftoff.

The Tea Party

 

I think a tea party is the multimedia confluence of all culture. Everywhere it goes, tea inspires ceremony and art. Coffee is similar, but more exciting and less soothing. Coffee houses are fine places for slam poetry and to plan revolutions. Tea culture is more refined.

There is the English tea, and tea gardens, and fine China, and dressing in your finest, and finger sandwiches, and polished silver, and parasols. 

And then there is the Japanese tea ceremony, and meditation, and tea rooms with some featured objet d’art and a garden view. One is supposed to contemplate the cracks in the teacup. 

There are similar Chinese and Korean tea ceremonies and tea gardens. Suzhou is famous for its tea gardens; there is a fine one recreated in Vancouver. In China, the ideal is a white porcelain teacup so thin in spots that you can see the tea through the porcelain. In Korea, tea is served in thick green celadon cups. There must always be an odd number of cups, and guests. The tea houses of Insadong are famous; each has a theme. One has an actual stretch of railroad track inside. Every village had its tea house, where you would go for philosophical discussions or just to catch the news. 

In Russia, there are the traditions of the samovar; and reading fortunes in the tea leaves. 

In Thailand and in Kashmir, there is an elaborate dance to aerate the tea. Watching the performance is a large part of the experience. 

In India, there is masala chai, with cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger, and pepper. I’ve learned how to make it; but it is an elaborate production that easily takes half an hour. 

In Tibet, tea is served with pink yak’s milk and salt. It is a taste I have not acquired, but perhaps leads to enlightenment. 

In Morocco, it must be gunpowder green tea with mint and much sugar. In brightly coloured cups.

In the Southern US, if you give them something hot with milk or cream, they’re shocked. Tea is cold in a high glass with ice and lemon.

In England, debates about how to make a perfect cup of tea have gone on for decades, centuries, and include essays by famous writers like Charles Lamb, George Orwell, and Douglas Adams. Milk first? Warm the cup?

I think tea gathers culture around it because it soothes and concentrates the mind. One is open to philosophical ponderings and aesthetic appreciation. It is the thinking man’s drink. It comes to us originally from Buddhist monasteries.

I’m totally into it. In vino veritas; but in eternity, you hear the sound “tea.”

More than Meets the Eye

 

Picture this.

Jesus told his disciples a parable,
“Can a blind person guide a blind person?
Will not both fall into a pit?
No disciple is superior to the teacher;
but when fully trained,
every disciple will be like his teacher.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?
How can you say to your brother,
‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’
when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?
You hypocrite!  Remove the wooden beam from your eye first;
then you will see clearly
to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.
“A good tree does not bear rotten fruit,
nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.
For every tree is known by its own fruit.
For people do not pick figs from thornbushes,
nor do they gather grapes from brambles.
A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,
but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil;
for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”

 Luke 6: 39-45

This was today’s mass reading. 

That familiar saying about the splinter in your brother’s eye, and the log in your own, is commonly taken to advise us against criticizing another’s sin. 

Bu this actually does not make sense. If this is meant, there is no reason for a metaphor. And a good writer, a good communicator, does not use a metaphor when plain speech will do. It would be easy to say, “flaw in your behaviour,” or “sin.” So why this business about the eye?

Then notice that sight is an extended metaphor in this “parable”: it begins with the image of the blind leading the blind.

But it is also not about physical sight. Note the image of a “beam” in the eye. This is physically impossible: this tells us the realm of which we are speaking is the realm of imagination, the “inner sight,” the imaging faculty.

Sight is the obvious metaphor for imagination.

 We are told that the blind man is like the uneducated, the untaught. And one should, after removing one’s own beam, instruct one’s brother. But in the case of ordinary knowledge, it is indeed possible for the student to exceed the teacher, and a teacher hopes for this. It happens often. Augustine exceeded Albertus Magnus. This is something, some knowledge, in which the student cannot so excel the master.

So the passage tells us imagination, our inner vision, can be either better or worse, clear or clouded by splinters or beams. Perhaps this represents material things, material concerns, the things of the senses.

And this is true. This is the experience of the artist. He does not compose or create: he sees. Michelangelo said that in sculpting, he discovered the form in the marble block. Steven King says writing a story is like an act of excavation. You hope you get it out intact.

The disciple cannot exceed the master because the master, the source of inspiration, is God himself. The world of the imagination is the kingdom of heaven.

And the business of the true disciple is foremost to express his own vision, not to criticise the work of others. As Blake put it, “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

Now we speak of fruits: of good trees bearing good fruits. Again, this cannot mean, as commonly thought, moral acts. For one thing, bad people can indeed perform good deeds. They commonly dd; beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

No; the passage says clearly that it means what “the mouth speaks.”

What does it mean to say that a given speech is “good”? Again, not that it advocates good behaviour. The worst Pharisees and hypocrites advocate good behaviour. Anyone can. 

No; it has to mean “good speech” in the sense of beautiful speech. Artistic expression.

Good morals can be faked. Truth can be falsified; anyone can lie. But the perception of beauty is perfect and immediate and cannot be achieved by trickery. Beauty is the test.

Zelensky and Trump Come to Blows

 

I was appalled by the scene yesterday in the Oval Office. That is not the way to conduct diplomacy, and that is not the way to treat a guest. It seemed to give succor to Putin, and looked like two-on-one bullying.

The first thing I thought of was Hitler’s bullying of Czech president Benes and the Munich Agreement.

BUT: A lot depends on who started it. Did Trump invite Zelensky to the White House, or did Zelensky ask to come? Trump says it was Zelensky’s idea. Did Zelensky challenge Vance in front of the cameras to begin the row? I can’t sort that out. I can never tell whether I’m being shown the full exchange. This might have been Zelensky trying to push Trump around, grandstanding for the cameras to gain support in Europe. 

Sounds suicidal, but I think we have seen other European leaders try to do so. Macron publicly contradicted Trump before the cameras and in the latter’s presence a few days ago. Starmer was about to visit. If this was happening, Trump had to respond sharply, right now, before things got out of hand, to establish his authority. Better to go against Zelensky, now, than have a big diplomatic row with France or the UK later. You kill the chicken to scare the monkeys, as they say in China.

Trump is doing now with Zelensky just what NATO should have done when Russia invaded Ukraine: a quick and powerful response. It is because they did not, that we are in this mess now.

To state the obvious, Russia is in the wrong in this war, and Ukraine is in the right. Russia invaded Ukraine. All other considerations are a distraction and an alibi for not helping. Down to and including objecting to Zelensky not wearing a suit to visit the White House.

At that point, when Russia first invaded, it was the moral duty of all other nations to support Ukraine. But instead of reacting quickly and resolutely with massive support—they should have sent in air cover and declared a no-fly zone, then shipped in tanks and missiles--they kept giving Ukraine aid in dribs and drabs, just enough to continue the war, but not enough to win it. 

Their argument was that they did not want to escalate for fear of starting World War III. This made no sense: if Russia could not handle Ukraine alone, they were not going to expand the war and take on all of Nato. Go nuclear? Not unless they were suicidal. Mutual Assured Destruction. This stance simply allowed Russia to escalate at will, confident Nato would not allow them to lose. It forced both sides into a never-ending state of war. 

Makes you wonder about that old saw, the "military-industrial complex."

This stalemate has to be broken one way or another. Huge numbers of lives are being lost, daily, for nothing. Ukrainian lives matter. Russian lives matter. These are all innocent victims.

Or not quite a stalemate: someone I said this to recently pointed out that, in fact, Russia is slowly gaining ground. In a war of attrition, Russia can expect to eventually win. They have more population than Ukraine to send to the front to be ground to blood and powder. And they have oil to finance it.

The principle of the just war applies. You have a duty to self-defence, to fight for justice, and to defend the victim. But only so long as there is a real prospect of victory, and the suffering and death from war is less than the evil being threatened by the aggressor. Jesus told his followers to buy a sword. But when a large contingent of Roman soldiers appeared to arrest him in the garden, he told Peter to put away the sword. People would die, and the final result would be the same.

As an aside, this is why it is immoral for Canadians to speak of armed resistance should Trump invade. There is no way it is worth killing people just to avoid being ruled from Washington instead of Ottawa. Similarly, is it so much worse being ruled by a kleptocracy in Moscow than by a kleptocracy in Kiev? Worth killing an entire generation of men?

That is where we are in Ukraine; unless NATO is prepared to come in with much more at this late hour. I’m not sure they can; they’ve frittered away most of their available armaments now, and most of the Ukraine’s fighting-age men. If they can, I wonder if it would still be worth it; it would be far more costly now than it would have been in 2022. 

Perhaps Zelensky is calculating that they can and will. Perhaps Europe now has the confidence to go it alone. This itself would be a good thing, should they succeed. Trump may be happy enough to see Europe go ahead with it—he has been urging them to take more responsibility for their own defense. 

Failing that, it’s time to cut a deal. Trump was apparently upset that Zelensky was still badmouthing Putin and trying to get Trump to do so. Not good strategy if you want a deal. You need to preserve the other guy's dignity. And, if Zelensky is not prepared to coo a little at Putin, perhaps Trump's best course for peace is to disassociate himself, so that he looks to Putin like an honest broker. I half believe this confrontation was deliberately stage-acted in front of the cameras to let Putin save face while accepting a Trump-brokered deal.

Zelensky is, sensibly enough, concerned that Putin cannot be trusted to keep any peace agreement. All very well for Trump to make a quick bargain for "peace in our time"; he’s protected by an ocean from this incipient Hitler. For Zelensky, this is life or death. A ceasefire or a peace may only give Putin the opportunity to rearm and come at him again in a few years, making all of Ukraine’s present sacrifice futile. Putin has been a serial aggressor. Trump says “He won’t dare break a deal with me,” but even if this is true, Trump is only in office for four years.

A knotty problem. I feel for Zelensky. But I think Trump is right on the broad picture. The best course now is for Ukraine to take the deal, and surrender most of the ground lost, in return for European “peacekeeping” troops in Ukraine.

We must hope Putin’s nose is bloodied enough that he is deterred from further aggression.

Where There's a Will ...

 

The wheel of karma

A Chinese student asks me if I believe in fate. He says everyone in his class does.

This is interesting, and I’ve pondered it before. There are not many theists in China. Yet even those who do not believe in God believe in fate: in karma. They believe in karma throughout East and South Asia.

Yet how can there be fate without God? Fate implies the existence of a cosmic, omnipotent and omniscient will. Without a God, the universe should be random and meaningless. There should be no justice.

My student, presented with this assertion, agrees.

In other words, everyone is really a theist. All believe in God’s existence, and all see God as a will; which is to say, a person.  We are divided only by semantic confusion. And by denial of what we know in our hearts to be true.

Why Artists Lean Left

 

Cultural workers of the world unite!

Why are artists and writers always on the left?

I just figured it out. It’s the hope of no longer having to work at some pedestrian job like plucking chickens or negotiating contracts for a living. In the Marxist dream, the socialist/communist state, artists expect they will be supported while doing the work they choose.

For another this might be laziness. Not so for writers and artists. They are driven to do a job for which there is little demand. They already work without pay. And they would be happy living on a minimal salary, so long as they could do their work.

It is sadly a fantasy. Artists and writers do not do well in actual socialist economies. If they are good, they seem to find themselves in prison. Governments cannot understand art, but they know it is a danger to them. It looks subversive. Plato wanted to ban poets from his Republic.