Have you ever made a mistake and then repeated the same mistake years later? Well, the British government has. In 1776, they underestimated the determination of the American people to be independent of Britain. Then, approximately 250 years later, they underestimated the determination of their own people to be independent of Continental Europe (the EU).

I hope our British cousins will celebrate America’s Independence with us on July 4th. I know I will celebrate the UK’s independence with them on January 31.

Happy 4th everyone!

In his seminal work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (c. 1920) both predicts and explains the global conflict in which we are now embroiled. He divides world history into a number of distinct “ cultures/civilizations”. That’s not unique to Spengler. What is unique is the classification scheme he uses. For example, he speaks of a Magian culture and a Faustian culture.

The existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, defined “art” as anything that shows us something new about the world, ourselves, or our place in that world. Most of us think we gain new insights through expository prose (like mine). What a paltry palette that gives us! Sure, expository prose can teach us much…but not that much. The medium of expository language is extraordinarily limited.

The Germans, wow! Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger – each one turned philosophy and/or intellectual history on its head. (How many heads are there – apparently a lot more than we once thought.) Spengler, for instance, offers a totally novel interpretation of Western culture and world history. There are some weak points but overall it is both eye-popping and prophetic.

In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms.

The Gospel of Matthew (18:3) quotes Jesus as saying, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Why not? What is it that little children have that we don’t? Turns out, little children have an ability that almost all of us have lost: the ability to hold several different, and superficially inconsistent, models of reality at the same time.

Death. It is the mother of all our fears. Fear reflects our vulnerability and, ultimately, our mortality. Pain, however horrible, is ultimately bearable; death is not! And yet, no one has ever experienced death and no one ever will (the definition of death is “the absence of all experience”). What we think we know about death comes entirely from external observations of other organisms (including loved ones).

As a teenager, I became aware of a book by Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West, written c. 1920. Like any intellectually inclined adolescent of the ‘60s, I was drawn to the title. But throughout high school and college I was warned off of Spengler by teachers, mentors, etc.: “He’s a racist, he’s a Nazi, etc.” All false claims. In fact, his books were banned by the Nazis.

We have been trained to think of mythology as fictional, even foolish. And yet all Truth (whatever that is, Pontius Pilate) occurs within the framework of some mythology. Myth is the ultimate and only TOE (Theory of Everything). Science and math, for example, however important, are limited by the discoveries of Heisenberg and Gödel. Religion requires faith and so must be limited by the skepticism that unavoidably lies beneath that faith.

“Nothing is noble which it is noble to despise. Wealth, honors…absolute power…these no sensible man would count as blessings since…it is nobler to despise (them) than to admire (them).” (Longinus, 3rd century A.D.)

For better or worse, we don’t talk a lot about ‘nobility’ today, but the virtue of nobility is one of those virtues that is strongly correlated with the concept of the Good. If you can imagine yourself condemning a particular ‘accident’ (above) as ignoble, then you are not yet dealing with true nobility.

Like the Good…or Being itself…true nobility is among those qualities that have no antonym.

For the first time since the 1980’s, we seem to be dealing with monthly, year over year, inflation rates north of 5%. More alarmingly, the cognoscenti are busily assuring us that this uptick is “only temporary”, the result of supply chain disruptions that will ‘soon’ be fixed.

Caveat: historically (1930 Germany, 1975 US), nothing triggers hyper-inflation so certainly as denial of the simple inflation that folks are experiencing everyday at the gas pump or in the supermarket. Just ask Paul von Hindenburg…or Gerald Ford.

Happily, it has been 40 years since hyper-inflation dominated the US economy; less happily, once hyper-inflation gets into the system it is extremely difficult to get out. It took the Reagan Revolution to make it happen here.

“I’m now seeing ‘Leo’ as an extension of Francis’ pontificate, made more concretely relevant and imbued with new vigor.”