“No race or people ever accomplished much who pursued tactics of an adhesive and centrifugal nature, but all great races and peoples have been given to cohesive and centripetal practices.

Houston Informer (July 23, 1927)*

The Houston Informer was a black newspaper and the editorial containing the line quoted above was its excoriation of the decision by black voters to dissolve the city of Independence Heights.  Independence Heights was located fifteen miles north of downtown Houston and had been incorporated, twelve years earlier, as a self-governing “colored municipality.” Located at the end of a streetcar line, Independence Heights was exclusively black and had been incorporated by the almost unanimous choice of its resident black voters.**  The “independence” its name declared was their independence from wily white businessmen and negligent white politicians.  No matter the color of its residents, the word “heights” in the name of a Houston neighborhood is entirely aspirational.

It seems there are churches in which the staff spends much of Monday cutting the video of Sunday’s sermon into “clips.”  These clips are then spliced into one of those staccato sensations that the sportsworld calls “highlights,” the movieworld calls a “trailer,” and the churchworld calls—I don’t know—perhaps a “super sermon sampler.”  In any case, Gloocontent studio is now marketing an AI to clip and splice the weekly super sermon sampler, thereby freeing church staff to spend Mondays—I don’t know—perhaps cleaning the popcorn machine.

“When the spring sun has gained so much power that the snow-fields of the mountains begin to send rivulets into the valley, destruction threatens from every cliff and crag. The report of a gun, a loud call, are said to be sufficient to push over the ridge a small mass of snow, which as it falls grows to an avalanche, and may cover up whole villages. In the same way it happens sometimes in the life of nations that things have been slowly growing ripe for a catastrophe, which is finally brought about by a deed whose significance, considered in itself, stands in ridiculous contrast to its world-wide effects.”

Hermann Von Holst, John Brown (1888)*

When a small deed triggers an avalanche, we call it the catalyst of the great disaster.  To catalyze is to break down or dissolve (cata [down] + lyein [to loosen, divide, cut into pieces]).  It is of course closely related to the word catastrophe, which is a sudden downturn, and more strictly speaking a reversal of fortune by which everyone is greatly surprised (cata [down] + strephein[turn]).  

The unexpected dissolution and destruction of a world is a catastrophe and the spark that ignites the holocaust is the catalyst of that change.

Herman von Holst was a German professor and the catalyst of which he speaks was John Brown’s plot to seize the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, arm neighboring slaves, and commence a slaughter that would catalyze a catastrophe that would, Brown hoped, change the world.  After the war, Yankee mythologists said Brown’s design in arming Virginia slaves was to “lead them quickly along the Appalachian chain to Canada,”** but today even Wikipedia concedes that Brown’s design was to “move rapidly southward, sending out armed bands along the way that would free more slaves, obtain food, horses, and hostages, and destroy slaveholders’ morale.”

The morale of the slaveholders was not all that Brown would have had those armed bands of ex-slaves destroy.  His aim, which many Yankees subsequently stricken with amnesia very well knew at the time, was to catalyze a slave revolt by which the Southern world would be dissolved in a holocaust of blood and fire.  His aim was to trigger what historians of old called a bellum servile or a servile war.

Very little output, apart from our workhorse JMSmith, so show him some love! (I’m channeling my best American rah-rah manner). Unlike me, he repeats himself very little, which is quite an achievement, often finding some obscure 19^th century pamphlet and the like, of true antiquarian provenance, to comment on. One can picture him rifling through the discard box of some neglected library in Texas somewhere or some forgotten archive.

Its writers share what Thomas Sowell calls the tragic vision of life, which distinguishes the conservative disposition from the utopian. The utopian travels on a sea of blood and never reaches his destination someone wrote.

JMSmith has called us glum sourpusses, or something like that. Curmudgeonly malcontents ripe for satire might work, too.

None of us have any solutions to the problems that face us, but sit on the sidelines heckling. Continue reading →

“Material improvement is closely linked, in the early days, with intellectual ascendency.  It continues, however, after the ascendancy has been lost.  For one thing, it is quantitative, the later railways being merely copies of the first.  For another, it is transmissible, people being able to import what they could never invent.  With foreign aid they can also import what they could not otherwise afford.  Governments based upon practically illiterate populations have their own television and radio.  Aircraft of identical pattern bear the brightly painted insignia of Mumbojumbo Airlines and Air Nitwitzerland.” 

C. Northcote Parkinson, Left Luggage (1967)

As a man of advancing years and declining powers, I am naturally disposed to see my melancholy condition reflected in the world around me.  The poet Wordsworth noted a counterpart disposition of ebullient youth to see in the world the progress and promise they feel bubbling up in themselves.  Thus, to ebullient youth, the bloody beheadings in revolutionary Paris were a hopeful sign of good times that were right around the corner—even severed heads being signs of hope to hopeful youth.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.”

Whereas to hopeless old men of advancing years and declining powers,

“A darker shadow falls upon the gloom,
Like I, the world quakes with impending doom.”

Continue reading →

“A class in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated, so soon as it has risen up, finds directly in its own situation the content and the material of its revolutionary activity . . .”  

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (1851)*

I spotted this living irony in the Houston airport last week.  We live in an age when the people in the First Class cabin dress in tee shirts and plan to burn the world down.

*) Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 42-43.

“’Tis Greenland! but so desolately bare,
Amphibious life alone inhabits there;
‘Tis Greenland! yet so beautiful the sight,
The Brethren gaze with undisturb’d delight:”

James Montgomery, Greenland (1819)

Greenland, as everyone ought to know, is a large but inhospitable island in North America’s far northeast.  Its capital, Nuuc, lies just over two thousand miles from Washington, D.C., although the traffic between those two places has always been meager.  Nuuc is slightly closer to Oslo, Norway, capital of the first European power to plant a colony on that frigid and forbidding shore.

This was in 982 when Iceland got too hot for an obstreperous Norseman named Eric the Red.  Banished from Scandinavia’s El Dorado, that intrepid ginger sought greener pastures in the west.  He found those pastures, then (and briefly) tolerably green, on the far southern tip of a land whose interior was sorely (perhaps symbolically) oppressed by a great mass of frigid whiteness. Continue reading →

“When the word ‘orthodoxy’ is used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago, and the general historical conduct of those who held such a creed.”

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909)

“But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets.”

Acts 24:14.

Readers have from time to time complained that it is false advertising for me to publish my posts at a website that calls itself the Orthosphere.  What these lovers of the tried-and-true hope to find in the gaudy bazaar of the internet I cannot say, but I readily confess that some of my posts may surprise a reader who infers too much from the name Orthosphere.  And some  of my posts will certainly shock a reader who equates the word orthodoxy with one definite system of eternal truth.

As I have written more than once, I was not one of the happy band who founded the Orthosphere fourteen years ago, but I understand that the name was proposed by Bruce Charlton as a means to advertise the fact that the Orthosphere was a group blog (hence “sphere”) that combined writers who were in some sense traditional (hence the “ortho”).  The tradition from which this group wrote was, very broadly. orthodox Christianity, but it was always a latitudinarian orthodoxy and by no means exclusively the orthodoxy of Rome.

“Latitudinarian orthodoxy” may strike you as an oxymoron, but there are equally serious problems with a strict definition of orthodoxy as one particular and eternal truth.  In my first epigraph, Chesterton defines orthodoxy as the creed and conduct of “everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago,” and thereby owns the paradox that the men he calls “orthodox” had become heretics with respect to the authorized truth, the conventional wisdom, the respectable morality of Chesterton’s age..

They had in fact become heretics in opposition to the teaching authorities that by 1900 ruled the public mind.

Continue reading →