The Problem With “Progressives”

The battle line between good and evil runs through every human heart, said Solzhenitsyn. Those who attempt to bleach the world of sin are sinners themselves, and the more ambitious they are, the more swaddled up in pride and ignorance they become. People who want to bring heaven up on earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the something they cannot do, which is to cure themselves. If we are to be healed, we must walk the way of the Cross. the progressive cannot diagnose his own disease. But that does not mean that he rejects the way of the Cross entirely. He makes everyone else walk it. It is the rule of what the Catholic anthropologist René Girard tabs as the default position of mankind. Do not give up your lusts. Do not sacrifice yourself. Sacrifice the other. Other people must be to blame.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Jabba the State

It is not that everything has been politicized. Everything has been stolen from the polis and given over to Jabba the State – bloated, disgusting, corrupt, without conscience, accountable to no one, and voiding the results of his meals into the land and the drinking water and the air that everyone has to breathe.

We want our authority returned to us – or we intend to take it up again – because it is ours by right. We want not to be reduced to idiots and barbarians with a nominal and trivial vote. Our opponents here talk a great deal about diversity, which seems only to refer to the variously mottled patches of flesh over Jabba the State’s tumid paunch. We want a diversity that strikes terror into their hearts: the natural diversity you get when the school board of East Springfield hires and fires and orders books with a different plan in mind from that of the school board of West Springfield; or when the Christian baker conducts business by his best lights, and the Jewish baker by his; or when men congregate to do something more conducive to the common weal than watching a ball game and getting drunk; or when women organize a father-daughter dance and do not thereby mean a mother-daughter dance or anything else besides what the words obviously denote; or when the citizens of North Springfield begin their meetings with a prayer; or anything else, Jabba, that is not your business, or yours, Jabba’s creatures otherwise known as lawyers, college professors, social workers, and judges.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Barbarians or Idiots

Whatever is good about democracy rests upon a simple assumption. It is that ordinary people are capable of managing their ordinary affairs, as individuals, as families, as members of a neighbourhood or a parish, as local businesses, and as citizens of a village or town. If they are not permitted to do so, they have been reduced to what the Greeks called barbarism. If they are unwilling to do so, they have reduced themselves to what the Greeks called idiocy.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

The Dignity of Unpaid Work

But where does it say that the dignity of work depends upon being paid for it? If that were the case, then a whore selling her wares on a seedy street corner would claim greater dignity than my grandmother could who stretched a poor income to clothe and feed and in innumerable unnamed ways to bless my parents and their fourteen siblings between them. That makes no sense.

Anthony Esolein in Out of the Ashes

What is life for?

What is life for? Why do we work? If Christians cannot remember the answers, then we are lost indeed. Work is not something you are supposed to balance against the claims of your family. Unless you are one of those few whose talents are required in a broad way for the common good of multitudes, if you are not working in the first instance for your family, then something is severely out of order. We live in comforts that the richest aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child to too, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony Esolen – Out of the Ashes

A Mass of Contradictions

Consider what a mass of contradictions we are. If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop. If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living – if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town – we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent. if a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall. But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents. Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

The Worst of Both Sexes in Our Politics

It appears to me that our politics now reflects the worst of both sexes, not the best: the violent passions and ambitions of unscrupulous men and the shrillness and manipulative emotion-mongering of meddlesome women.

Anthony Esolen from Out of the Ashes

Masculinity

…we must cease the destructive chatter about “gender roles,” as if they were thoroughly arbitrary and not built upon nature….A role is something we pick up as actors, and we can exchange one role for another. A man can act like a dog, but not very well, because in fact he is not a dog. A man can act like a woman, but not very well, because in fact he is not a woman. When a man is a man, he is not simply playing a role. He is fulfilling his being.

Anthony Esolen in “Out of the Ashes”

Bring Back Beauty

Our young people are not only starved for nature. They are starved for beauty. Everywhere they turn, their eyes fall upon what is drab or garish: their schools, their music, new books for sale, the fast-food joint, a baseball stadium (where you can hardly talk to the fan sitting next to you, for the noise roaring out at you from the loudspeakers), and, of course, their churches. Saint Paul wanted to be all things to all men, to save some (1 Corinthians 9:22). We have applied his dictum to what surrounds us. We are drab with the drab, garish with the garish, inane with the inane, and we save nobody at all.

Anthony Esolen from “Out of the Ashes”

Are you serving your children up to cannibals?

There are only two things wrong with our schools: everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do. The public schools, with their vast political and bureaucratic machinery, are beyond reform. That does not mean that persons of goodwill should not offer themselves up as missionaries of truth and goodness and beauty, to teach there, as in partibus furibundis. But we would be quite mad to send our children there, We send missionaries to cannibals. We do not serve the cannibals our boys and girls.

Anthony Esolen on schooling in Out of the Ashes