Kate Rusby, "The Village Green Preservation Society". A song by The Kinks, originally, as a partly -- but only partly -- ironic expression of the role of rock bands like The Kinks in preserving an identifiable English culture against the incursions of an ugly and generic modernity.
* Dustin Peone, Godfrey's Role in Vico's Scienza nuova (PDF)
* Philip Ball, We are not machines, at "Aeon"
* Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette, Blameworthines Implies 'Ought Not' (PDF)
* David Bannon, The Consolation of Silence, at "Front Porch Republic"
* Mahmoud Jollah, Metaphysics and Convention in Dimensional Analysis, 1914-1917 (PDF)
* Allison Parshall, Why Almost Everyone Gets the Monty Hall Probability Puzzle Wrong, at "Scientific American
* Jonas Raab, Aristotle, Term Logic, and QUARC (PDF)
* Rob Alspaugh, Cur Deus Homo II.18b-20, at "Teaching Boys Badly"
* Michael Walschots, Moral Necessity, Possibility, and Impossibility from Leibniz to Kant (PDF)
* Scott Locklin, Prediction markets are vile midwittery, at "Locklin on Science"
* William M. Briggs remembers philosopher and physicist Wolfgang Smith, who recently died.
As today is the feast of St. Sharbel on the General Calendar (the Maronites usually recognize today as a feast of St. Sharbel on their calendars, but actually celebrate his feast on the last Sunday of July), here is a re-post of a post from 2019.
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Today is the feast of St. Sharbel Makhlouf, or Charbel, monk, priest, and hermit of Lebanon. He joined the Lebanese Maronite Order in 1851, and was granted permission to enter the eremitic life in 1875, in which he stayed until his death on Christmas Eve in 1898. The Maronite Catholic Church began as an ascetic movement, St. Maroun himself having been an open-air hermit, so hermits are very important to it as part of carrying forward its heritage. A few months after his death, there were reports of a bright light shining over his grave, and people have ever since traveled to his grave at Annaya for healing.
And if a man could ask for a potato in the form of a poem, the poem would not be merely a more romantic but a much more realistic rendering of a potato. For a potato is a poem; it is even an ascending scale of poems; beginning at the root, in subterranean grotesques in the Gothic manner, with humps like the deformities of a goblin and eyes like a beast of Revelation, and rising up through the green shades of the earth to a crown that has the shape of stars and the hue of Heaven.
G. K. Chesterton, "The Slavery of Free Verse", Fancies Versus Fads.
I'm currently going through a rather brutal period of grading, so things will likely be light here and perhaps also next week.
Song
by Alice MeynellAs the inhastening tide doth roll,
Dear and desired, along the whole
Wide shining strand, and floods the caves,
Your love comes filling with happy waves
The open sea-shore of my soul.But inland from the seaward spaces,
None knows, not even you, the places
Brimmed, at your coming, out of sight, --
The little solitudes of delight
This tide constrains in dim embraces.You see the happy shore, wave-rimmed,
But know not of the quiet dimmed
Rivers your coming floods and fills,
The little pools ’mid happier hills,
My silent rivulets, over-brimmed.What, I have secrets from you? Yes.
But, visiting Sea, your love doth press
And reach in further than you know,
And fills all these; and when you go,
There’s loneliness in loneliness.
Huw Price has an interesting, if quixotic, article at "Pearls and Irritations", Conscription and the Monarchy -- the infant in the room. In it he argues that the children of royalty aren't allowed normal choices in life and that they should have the right to them. He has made this argument before, and for some very difficult to discern reason he always seems to take it as an especially clinching argument against the Australian monarchy.
It's very difficult to pin down what exactly the right is that Price thinks princes and princesses are denied. "Normal choices in life" is not something children generally have; at least, the actual choices children have are extremely limited. For instance, Australian children are in some sense denied normal choices in life; if 'normal choices' are just choices that can usually be made, it's a statistical normality, and being born in Australia prevents you from making all sorts of choices that are normal around the world. The population of Australia is dwarfed by populations that have very different customs with regard to children and therefore very different choices. I can hardly imagine that Price thinks we should abolish citizenship as well as principality and republics as well as monarchies. It's obviously some particular kinds of 'normal choices' that Price has in mind; but he never really tells us what they are, nor why these rather than other kinds of choices are the ones about which we should be concerned. And when he's ever actually pressed on it, what he actually talks about is not the child's choices but the parents' choices, as he does in this very argument when countering the objection that the children of the wealthy are often in analogous situations.
Likewise, he likes to use the word 'conscription', but never does anything to contrast it with other things that have been called the conscription of children, like mandatory schooling, which is almost always justified as making them suited to a what is in fact a public office, even if not always called such because of its fundamental nature, namely, that of citizen. In fact, that's where conscription, at least in modern societies, is found: in countries that have the draft, or like the United States leave open the option of the draft, actual conscription is based on the duties of citizenship. And this is part of the problem; he seems so taken with the argument that he never clarifies what we are to make of the fact that we are all born under duties and obligations that are taken to override our choices.
What I really find puzzling, though, is that he never discusses the actual reason for the situation he bemoans, in which princes and princesses have limited options. Why do they have limited options? Because the role of the Royal Family has been sharply curtailed so as to be nothing but a tool of the Crown. Being nothing but instruments of the Crown, princes and princesses are obviously going to be required always to do things in light of the interests of the Crown. There are lots of monarchies in which kingship is just a title with some responsibilities, in the way that being a landed baron is, but the British form of monarchy partly develops as a way to limit both the power of the king and even more sharply the power (and thus choices) of anyone around the king. Both the United Kingdom and Australia are sometimes called 'crowned republics'; this cannot be taken seriously (at all of the United Kingdom, which is not in any way republican at all, and for most things of Australia, which does have republican features but interwoven with clearly non-republican features), but the grain of truth in it is that much of how the monarchy currently works in Commonwealth countries has arisen not from the nature of monarchy itself but from continual attempts to force the monarchy not to act quite like a monarchy but like a state-dignity-machine.
He ends:
Many of us hope that we’ll have another chance to make Australia a republic—within our lifetimes, if we’re lucky. In pressing for that change, let’s remember that it is not just about our right to govern ourselves. It’s also about the rights of a few British children, presently conscripted to do the job.Australians usually have their referenda on monarchy or republic when the reigning monarch dies, so I almost read this as Price wishing for King Charles to hurry up and die; but then I remembered that the Australians postponed the referendum after the death of Queen Elizabeth, so perhaps that is the one that he means. Or perhaps he thinks it might happen by some other means. But in any case, what I actually find interesting is the phrase "make Australia a republic", which sums up entirely why republicans in Commonwealth countries are usually loons. You can't just up and make something a republic. That's not how republics work at all; a lot of things have to come together for them. The transition from monarchy to republic is a particularly harsh transition, because the habits of governance and self-governance have to change rather extensively in order to make it; no nation has ever made the transition without several severe stumbles, and remarkably few have even succeeded at all. Most attempts to "make monarchy X a republic" end up actually making a third-world dictatorship in which the tyrant calls himself "President" and the people are less free than they would be under a king. The consistent evidence of history is that monarchies are just easier to build and maintain than republics, so the move from the former to the latter switches a lot of things from 'easy' to 'hard', and every people who have ever made the change have struggled with some of the new hard-mode features. Actually rising to the challenge requires a complete change in politics, because in a republic everything that is a matter of national identity is a matter of politics. People abroad are often astonished at the insanities of American politics, but I tell you, my friends, this is how politics in an actual republic works; the formats and institutions may change, but there is a particular kind of mixture of patriotism and paranoia and chaos that is needed to make a republic work, and by the nature of a republic it infects everything.
Of all the Commonwealth monarchies (and indeed, I would argue all the Commonwealth nations, monarchy or not), Australia is the one best positioned to make the transition to a republic. A major part of that is that its hybridized form of government means that its habits of governance and self-governance are already adapted to at least some republic-like institutions. Since lack of this adaptation is one of the big stumbling-blocks, as far as history seems to tell us, that headstart counts for a lot. But 'republic' is not just a decal you slap on the chassis; it's an entire way of doing things. Even if Australians were to vote to become a republic, and start calling themselves a republic, Australia will not be a republic in our lifetime, but only some weird hybrid thing sliding erratically in a vaguely republican-ish direction. Republicans in Commonwealth countries are usually loons because they have somehow picked up the idea that you can just wave a magic wand of voting and transform, but republics are an immense amount of work.
Jane Austen died in Winchester on July 18, 1817; she was 41 years old. From one of the three prayers she wrote for family devotions:
Father of Heaven! whose goodness has brought us in safety to the close of this day, dispose our hearts in fervent prayer. Another day is now gone, and added to those, for which we were before accountable. Teach us almighty father, to consider this solemn truth, as we should do, that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past.
Give us grace to endeavour after a truly Christian spirit to seek to attain that temper of forbearance and patience of which our blessed saviour has set us the highest example; and which, while it prepares us for the spiritual happiness of the life to come, will secure to us the best enjoyment of what this world can give. Incline us oh God! to think humbly of ourselves, to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct, to consider our fellow-creatures with kindness, and to judge of all they say and do with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves....