Opus 2023-026: Painful Solution

We live in a day of experts and specialists.  We go to them for answers.  Fie on us.  While they have, or should have, a depth of knowledge on their own field, what they lack is a breadth of knowledge and how the world works together.  

We see this in the medical field.  I always get a kick out of a doctor telling me that I need to cut out all alchohol.  I never cut in alcohol.  I probably had more alcohol in Robitussin when it was still leaded than I have in all the beverages I have ever consumed.  I also like it when they bring up salt.  If salt was bad for me I would have never survived elementary school.  It makes you wonder what you can believe.  Then you add in how the medical profession has thrown us under the bus over a virus.

G.K. Chesterton made an intersting comment.  I need to point out that he was talking about experts in history and related fields rather than medicine, but the observation still applies.

“I, who am not one of the learned, cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a little rusty from want of use.”  p. 75

Common sense was a term that used to mean you look at the facts, think about what you see and come to a logical conclusion.  If your conclusion sounds ridiculous, you think about it again.  Since the advent of experts we have thrown our ability to think out the window.  We need to remember that for a surgeon everything involves a knife.  For a mechanic you always need to replace something expensive.  For a psychologist you need to share your feelings.  For the government you need to be told what to do and pay more taxes.

Get in the habit of thinking.  It can be painful but might keep you alive.

Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man.  New York:  Image Books, 1955, originally 1925.

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Opus 2021-174: Tired Democracy

I was looking through my notes from a book by G. K. Chesterton called The Everlasting Man.  I came across this paragraph that seems to apply to where we are today.

“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”  

Chesterton wrote this a few years after World War I.  I don’t know if that was on his mind.  Ignore the point that neither Great Britain or the United States were or are democracies.  That is not what he is discussing.  The description does describe the public ethos today.  We have been asleep at the wheel for a long time.  What we see happening in Washington is not something that developed overnight.  Woodrow Wilson used the first world war as an excuse for a lot of Progressive policies.  FDR used the depression and World War II to implement sweeping power grabs for the socialist with a long view.  His administration was riddled with communists and Soviet agents.  If it had not been for people like Whitaker Chambers and Richard Nixon they would have not been driven back underground.  LBJ used the civil rights movement to advance massing expansions of welfare and government control.  They are now emerging again.  This time they have used a flu virus to panic the masses into subservience.  

My hope and prayer is that there will be enough righteous people left in America for God to work a miracle.  It could be one leader.  It could be a mass revival.  It could be almost anything but if the Democrats do away with the filibuster or the Republicans are again betrayed by RINOs we are in for some despotic times at least.

Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man.  New York:  Image Books, 1955, pp. 57-8.
Project Gutenberg Australia, Kindle Reference 718-721.

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Opus 2011-221, Elitism, Anyone?

I am a teacher.  I home schooled my children. We started the process before I became a teacher.  During the process we lived in constant fear that some social worker, knowing what was best for us, would break into our home and take our children.  It happens.  The world is full of well meaning elitists who believe that they know what is best for you.  We used to call them Liberals.  Now they call themselves Progressives.  As time goes on we have realized that there are elitists even in the ranks of the Conservatives.  They are everywhere.  They know no political limitations.  They know what is best for us.

Thomas Sowell addresses these elites who have what he calls the “unconstrained vision.” 

“...in the unconstrained vision, the best conduct of social activities depend on the special knowledge of the few being used to guide the actions of the many....Along with it has often gone a vision of intellectuals as disinterested advisers.”  Sowell, p. 41

There are some people who are simply superior in intellect and ability.  At least they think so.  They believe they have the duty to impose their superior ideas on others.  It is always for their own good, of course.

G.K. Chesterton touches on this also. 

“It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behaviour (sic) of so many great geniuses in history.  Their behaviour (sic) was so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious.  Hence people say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.  The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire.” Chesterton, p. 76. 

The reason this jumped out at me is the Shakespeare reference.  In case you are not into Shakespeare there is a roaring debate going on about who wrote his plays.  Those of us with a simple mind assume the question is on the same level as, “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?”  But the intellectuals among us, those who need to publish or perish, are trying to find the answer to this.  Most of their suggestions are people of a higher class than Shakespeare.  He was a commoner and these people don’t believe that common people are capable of excellence.

These same people break the book of Isaiah into at least three authors.  They pick and chose among the teachings of Jesus.  They tear apart the letters of Paul.  They consider themselves above the average man and I guess the average apostle.

Beware of elitists.  Beware of anyone who wants to do your thinking for you.  Understand that the consequence of such an attitude is thinking.  That requires reading, asking questions and actually putting your mind in gear.  Even when it comes to Bible teachers.  Listen to the pastor with your Bible open.  Ask yourself, “Is that really what it means or just what he wants it to mean?”  Don’t be afraid of hard questions.  I am sure that God has the answers even if the guru doesn’t.

Chesterton, G.K. Heretics.  Gutenberg Project.
Sowell, Thomas, A Conflict of Visions, New York:  Basic Books, 2007.

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Opus 2011-220, Spiritual Temperament

One of the authors I am trying to expose myself to is G.K. Chesterton.  Currently I am working through his book Heretics.  Since it is a download from the Gutenberg Project, I will give page numbers that are on my word processor.

He is discussing a famous author of his day and makes this comment on page 75:

“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.”

I have been around a lot of people who are wannabe’s.  They want to be musicians.  They want to be writers.  They want to be basketball legends.  Often what they succeed in being is pains in the neck.  Chesterton goes on and says,

“Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily.  But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.”

They tend to be moody, mercurial and unreliable.  I remember when I was supplying the music in our church for the five year old's.  I am not someone who needs snotty nosed little kids hanging all over me but I can be civil for a period of time.  I took my guitar and we had a great time singing and jumping.  To this day the mention of “Father Abraham” makes me shudder.  One time the children’s pastor came to me and said that some people from the music department wanted to come and help.  It was fine by me.  They came in the next Sunday.  These people were gifted.  I felt very comfortable taking a back seat.  I honestly had hopes it would work, but I know people with artistic temperament.

So I brought my guitar the next Sunday.  You see, I know that people with the artistic temperament have a tendency to not show up when there is little applause.  They are great at singing solo’s but tend to be AWOL when toilets need to be scrubbed and doing music for children is closer to cleaning toilets.  The appreciation of five year old's isn’t a real high.  Sure enough.  None of the artists showed up.  We went on as usual.  I am sure that they were able to talk about how they were involved in the children’s program for weeks.

Chesterton continued,

“There can be no stronger manifestation of the man who is a really great artist than the fact that he can dismiss the subject of art; that he can, upon due occasion, wish art at the bottom of the sea.”

Then my mind made a jump, as it is wont to do.  I started thinking about how often we as believers develop what I might call a “spiritual temperament.”  We sometimes have a tendency to look at ourselves as spiritual and it becomes the tail that wags the dog.  We become people that like to lecture others on right and wrong.  We become holier than thou.  We have a tendency to become authorities in public.  I know people that I dread to talk with.  If you say it is a nice day they are soon giving a lecture on how we will one day be in the City that needs no sun.  If I mention going to get a cup of coffee they wax eloquent on the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.  They love to find you in corners where everyone else in the room is glad to leave you as the libation to the gods.

I think we need to be like true artists.  We can live it and we know how to talk about it, but we just need to be normal people with a holy seasoning.  We need to be salt, not habaneros.  Yes, we need to talk about Jesus but it needs to be a natural outflow of our personality, not a forced caricature.

Be a blessing.

Chesterton, G.K. Heretics.  Gutenberg Project.

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