Some Aphorisms
Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.
The problem with the open society is that you can’t get dirt on anybody.
If there’s one thing that I know boomers love, it’s free ziti.
Traditionalism is to tradition what a decapitated body is to a star athlete.
One should love God’s moral law in the way that one loves one’s most boring relative.
Just as the sun sets in the west, so the moral sets into the political.
In languages that have no gnomic aspect one cannot understand religion.
While I’m not sure whether or not I’m willing to fully subscribe to it, there is a robust public health and consumer safety argument for suplexing TikTok and similar algorithmed-to-hell-and-back short-form-video-oriented platforms into the fires of Orodruin whence they came, an argument that has nothing to do with what foreign dictatorships they do or don’t have servers in.
The Victorians were the last civilization to understand that human life is not actually very secure as a matter of course, which covers a multitude of their many other sins.
The modern tendency is to stress marriage’s exclusivity more than, and sometimes over against, its permanence. It is socially destabilizing and still morally imperfect, but not necessarily morally worse. What were once abuse victims’ (mostly women’s) problems become the community’s problems. Strong arguments can be made for that.
Moreover any situation that one is “allowed” to leave is going to look similar to this.
At least on the level of cultivating personal virtue, casual sex might actually be less immoral than plenty of what passes for normal heterosexual relationship behavior in the secular world. Casual sex is, whatever else can be said about it, at least a straightforward way of addressing a very common type of physical desire and frustration to which most (not all, but most) people can relate. With practices like hanging on in vague situationships with people one neither likes nor respects because of the perceived social censure that comes with singleness, or rebuilding one’s entire social circle from scratch every time one starts or ends a romantic relationship, other areas of life are implicated and it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that an idol is being made of sexual practice itself, as long as that practice is dully heterosexual in character—and yet irreligious heterosexual people are at least as likely to behave this way as religious ones, to the point that I have known people who have left their childhood religions for the sectors of secular society that behave in this way! Received-wisdom heterosexual relationship behavior takes an axe to almost all the virtues, not despite but because of how socially normative it is.
The thing about Jesus the “moral philosopher” (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?) is that he’s really not unique and he’s certainly not uniquely admirable. The “historical Jesus” is a self-aggrandizing and occasionally even violent apocalypticist who swings back and forth between preaching what was actually within the mainstream of Pharisee moral theology at the time and demanding that people abandon their families and economic obligations to follow him around listening to more of this. The “Christ of faith” is the only Jesus Who’s still a convincing moral exemplar once you dispense with the presupposition that you have to like the guy.
Even the southwestern tip of Connecticut really is New England at heart—its deep history, landscape, and lieux de memoire are all pure New England. It has not so much sold its birthright as had that birthright bought out by rich people who have thrown up tacky mansions all along the shoreline and raise their children to root for New York sports teams. One need only visit an old burying ground in Greenwich or Darien to understand this.
The American right from Reagan onwards, arguably from Goldwater onwards, has had one important point of similarity with fascism wisely expounded: it is not so much any form of “conservatism” as a Revolutionary Right ideology, which seeks not to preserve an existing or even restore a former social structure but to create a new type of society entirely. This society keeps nothing of substance from the past and owes nothing to the past other than as a wellspring and storehouse for its aesthetic imaginary. In the recent vicissitudes of the American right under its Tea Party, alt-right, and MAGA guises, we see this in the promiscuous cribbing of aesthetic signposts that in the past pointed to very different and often mutually hostile sectors of American society, not all of them reactionary at the time: Southern Redeemers and Neo-Confederates, “Main Street” small businessmen in the Northeast and Midwest, anti-authoritarian frontiersmen, many-relationed immigrant Catholics and religious Jews, blue-collar tough guys whose fathers or even whose younger selves were the “Resistance libs” of the Reagan years. The resulting historiography, or fantasia on themes from American historiography, is starkly nationalistic, but eclectic enough to have a certain crossover appeal to people disillusioned by or unwelcome in previous American nationalist spasms.
In the end, all non-absolute moral theories are the friend-enemy distinction in drag.
Added November 19, 2023: When one is parched beyond belief in a bone-dry airplane cabin and the drinks cart is ever-so-slowly inching closer, closer, closer—this too is a manifestation of the unsatisfactoriness of things. I have heard that in previous days it was not like this—but, then, almost nobody could afford it back then.