Month: October 2006

Quote of the Day

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[The] determination to build Jerusalem, at once and on the spot, is the very force which is responsible for the intolerance and violence of the new political order � if we believe that the Kingdom of Heaven can be established by political or economic measures � that it can be an earthly state � then we can hardly object to the claims of such a State to embrace the whole of life and to demand the total submission of the individual � there is a fundamental error in all this. That error is the ignoring of Original Sin and its consequences or rather identification of the Fall with some defective political or economic arrangement. If we could destroy the Capitalist system or the power of bankers or that of the Jews, everything in the garden would be lovely.

Christopher Dawson (and here), Religion and the Modern State (1935), quoted in Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War. (As of p. 152, the Burleigh book is excellent.)

Partial to the The Partial Critics

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Last week, to wean myself of my television habit, I sat down to read a Howells biography, but glanced at the books piled beside my chair, waiting to be reshelved. Some I’ve ignored for decades, packing them in box after box in move after move. The one on top, by one of my old teachers, was published in 1965.

I’d never been much interested in theory; in those days, the study of literature was not yet dominated by meta-criticism. Then, I confess, literature seemed primarily a way to objectify and understand my own inner chaos. The level of abstraction required to think in terms of literary theories was just not the way I thought. But, that last spring at Nebraska, I enjoyed Lee Lemon’s critical theory seminar & the play of those conversations. Sometimes books wait for us; last week, I found myself lost in his. The Partial Critics beautifully embodies an attitude I remembered: respectful of literature & its bounty, of the critics he critiques with affection.

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Metaphors & Meaning

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Pinker reviews Lakoff & Lakoff responds. Lakoff tends to prove Pinker’s point, his defense demonstrating the tone with which some of us are quite familiar:

These questions matter in progressive politics, because many progressives were brought up with the old seventeenth-century view of reason that implies that, if you just tell people the facts, they will reason to the right conclusion — since reason is universal. We know from recent elections that this is just false.

Ah, another misunderstanding of how we reason – like grace, its presence should be demonstrated rather than asserted.