The "Virtues" of the Internet: Think Again

Evgeny Morozov says:

They told us it would usher in a new era of freedom, political activism, and perpetual peace. They were wrong.

"Et in Arcadia ego." Sin and death follow all of our best endeavors.

Read article here.

Hat tip: The Young Fogey

Presidentialising the Prime Minister

From Taki's Magazine

The PM’s job was long more human-scale job than the president’s, less insulated from normal life by security and by deference (which in Britain was paid instead to the Queen as head of state). For example, when I attended a conference with ex-PM Margaret Thatcher in 1999, she showed up accompanied only by a secretary and a bodyguard, wearing an old dress that had been mended with needle and thread. Tony Blair and his money-hungry wife Cheri were the first to indulge fully American superstaritis.

Read the entire article here.

Hat Tip: The Young Fogey

Russell Kirk's Wariness of Neoconservatives

From The Heritage Foundation

In their publications, the Neoconservatives thrust upon us a great deal of useful information, and obviously are posse ssed of considerable knowledge of the world about us. But in the understanding of the human condition and in the apprehension of the accumulated wisdom of our civilization, they are painfully deficient.

Infatuation with Ideology. An instance of this lack of wisdom is the Neoconservatives' infatuation with ideology. Some of you ladies and gentlemen present here today may have heard some years ago my exchange, on this very platform, with Mr. Irving Kristol, concerning ideology. He and various of his colleag u es wish to persuade us to adopt an ideology of our own to set against Marxist and other totalist ideologies. Ideology, I venture to remind you, is political fanaticism: at best it is the substitution of slogans for real political thought. Ideology animate s, in George Orwell's phrase, "the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets."

Read the entire article here.

Democracy and Universalism

Article by Fjordman, in The Brussels Journal: The Voice of Conservatism in Europe

Not only did Bush perceive his country to be a “democracy,” despite the fact that it was founded as a Constitutional Republic; he perceived it as being “universal.” Every person on planet Earth from whatever cultural background can move to the United States and become an equal citizen. The USA is thus a “universal” nation, and its universal democracy should be exported to all countries around the world. This version of “universalism” would have been profoundly alien to the ancient Greeks, yet has become a prominent feature of the post-Enlightenment West. “We no longer consider any human action legitimate, or even intelligible,” wrote the French late twentieth century philosopher Pierre Manent, “unless it can be shown to be subject to some universal rule of law, or to some universal ethical principle.”

Where does this notion come from?

And the concept's connection to the Scientific Revolution?

Read the whole article here.

Hat tip: American Monarchist

Sonoma County's War against Voluntary Association and Property Rights

Two elderly gay men are forcefully separated by the Sonoma County authorities, and their property is auctioned off. Read the story here.

I take a traditional, biblical view about what constitutes marriage: a man and a woman in a covenantal union blessed by almighty God. Homosexual relationships fall short of this, and are sinful.

That being said, this is no grounds for taking away anyone's property! This is a clear attack on property rights and free association.

The Early Modern State, the Catholic Church, and the Sum of Disunities

This article by Arturo Vasquez reminds me of Nicholas Henshall's book, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy, especially this passage: Only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were legal customs written down, and even then there was no attempt at uniformity. In the eighteenth century Voltaire remarked that a traveller changed laws as often as he changed horses. (p. 8)

Up until the nineteenth century, people paid homage and loyalty to their towns, communities, their families, their regions or states, their lords and their kings, but hardly ever to their "country." This was especially true in the U.S., where, up until the Civil War, when men spoke of their "country," they were making reference to their state, not to the federal union.

Arturo's reflections here are especially worth pondering:

Modernity in its highest phase thus equals the death of the local. Local accents die, local foods die, local tales are cast into the oblivion of anthropological scholarship. They either die, or they are assimilated into the “national whole”, just as foods and language are changed to “fit into” the ethos of the dominant culture. (American “Italian” or “Chinese” food for example.) This is not so much a “tragic” thing, as an inevitable thing. I am not one to be reactionary for reaction’s sake, nor “localist” just for the sake of romanticist provincialism. After all, every time honored tradition is at bottom an adaptation of something else that has its origin in a not so pristine past.

But neither should we overlook the dangers of this drive to unify everything. Especially in our deepest philosophical and theological beliefs, we cannot disregard the fact that we function under a daily regime where difference is to be stamped out in the name of societal harmony. Even in the most “postmodern”, politically correct acceptances of “diversity”, there is a subtext of totalizing liberalism: it’s okay to be diverse, as long as you are diverse “like us”.

How do these reflections apply to the state of the Catholic Church today? Read the rest here

I leave it to my fellow Orthodox readers to draw conclusions about some attitudes concerning Western Orthodoxy for themselves.

Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia's Easter Message

Image credit

The great day of the Resurrection of Our Lord is upon us. The great day, that enlightened the world with joy and gave the purpose to our existence. The day above all days and the feast above all feasts. I am joined by my wife Crown Princess Katherine, sons Hereditary Prince Peter, Prince Philip and Prince Alexander in wishing that this Holy Day remind us that we are all God’s children and that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is a call to find within ourselves what is good, for our sake and for the sake of general salvation.

We pray to the Lord to give us strength and wisdom to overcome all pain and trouble. We pray that we will work together for the benefit of Serbia and everyone in our country for today’s and future generations. We pray that during these days, when the global economic crisis and various natural and human-inflicted disasters caused by negligence are threatening countries and nations all over the world, that people who are elected to govern will have the wisdom, strength and responsibility to envisage and implement measures of recovery, peace and progress during these difficult times that are upon us and that eventually await us in the future.

We pray to Lord Resurrected to bless and save our devastated compatriots in Kosovo and Metohija, and everywhere in the world where there is suffering, pain, injustice and violence.

Let Easter resurrect in us the noblest virtues that will make us endure as nation and as people. These are qualities of love for our neighbours, justice for every wrong, peace for the troubled, strength for the weak, help for the poor and needy, and unity to enable us to live and work together.

The resurrection of Jesus offers us a message of hope, love, and grace. Once again my wife and sons join me to extend our warmest wishes, and we do so in the very same spirit of Easter.

Christ is Risen!

Indeed, He is Risen!

ALEXANDER II

Government Health Insurance and Catholic Social Doctrine

Richard Aleman of The Distributist Review asks a key question: Is it a coincidence that, while critiquing largesse government, none of the bishops of these nations have ever objected to socialized medicine, which according to conservatives conflicts with the doctrine of the Church?

Read the whole article here.

On the Dangers of Unchecked Federal Power

From Ludwig von Mises Institute Blog

Abel Parker Upshaw (1790-1844) critiques Justice Joseph Story's Commentaries on the constitution of the United States and its support for expanded federal power. The expansion of federal power on the part of the Neo-Conservatives and the Liberal left has all but wiped out subsidiarity today, and Upshaw's warnings give us a sense of how we got to this point.

It is too late for the people of these States to indulge themselves in these undiscriminating eulogies of their Constitution. We have, indeed, every reason to admire and to love it, and to place it far above every other system, in all the essentials of good government. Still, it is far from being perfect, and we should be careful not to suffer our admiration of what is undoubtedly good in it, to make us blind to what is as undoubtedly evil.

When we consider the difficulties under which the convention labored, the great variety of interests and opinions which it was necessary for them to reconcile, it is matter of surprise that they should have framed a government so little liable to objection. But the government which they framed is not that which our author has portrayed. Even upon the guarded principles for which I have contended in this review, the action of the whole system tends too strongly towards consolidation.

Much of this tendency, it is true, might be corrected by ordinary legislation; but, even then, there would remain in the federal government an aggregate of powers which nothing but an enlightened and ever-vigilant public opinion could confine within safe limits. But if our author's principles be correct, if ours be, indeed, a consolidated and not a federative system, I, at least, have no praises to bestow on it. Monarchy in form, open and acknowledged, is infinitely preferable to monarchy in disguise.

Read the entire article here