You Can Only Tell What You Know

 

"...not that I mean to depreciate [the poets]; but everyone can see that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language.”—Plato, Timaeus (Jowett)

It is a common Twitter trope these days to portray our American elites (political or artistic) as a deliberate set of societal saboteurs, scheming in air-conditioned offices about how to take down the whites and the Christians, the "grillers" and the "normies." They lure us with innocent-sounding phrases like justice and neighbor or a wonderful Episode 1 of a streaming series. The mass of middle America joins in, some with caution, more with enthusiasm. And then--bam--in swoops the Wokeness, the lawfare, the main-character-who-surprise-is-actually-gay-but-still-somehow-just-as-awesome. The trap closes, we conservatives lose another political battle or beloved IP, and the process starts all over again.

Commonplaces--Nov/Dec 2023

 

“This is what defines the peculiarity of Augustine’s pilgrim city in this world: its members…refer these concerns to the enjoyment of eternal peace. Thus when a Christian, from such an eschatological perspective, affirms some secular value, some human enterprise or achievement, his affirmation will not be an simple self-identification. His peculiar posture to the world precludes identifying himself with its values without some reservation. The fullest endorsement of a secular value is tinged with criticism. What others may affirm simply as good the Christian has to subject to a more exacting standard. His good must survive the more deeply penetrating questioning from an eschatological perspective.”—R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine

“It is necessary in this age for the citizens of the kingdom of heaven, surrounded as they are by the lost and the impious, to be vested by temptations, so that they can be trained and tested like gold in a furnace. We ought not therefore to wish to live only with the holy and the just before the time is right; so that we might deserve to be granted it at the proper time.”—Augustine, Augustine’s Political Writings Letter 189

From Plato's Republic (Jowett translation)

“Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter. For a fit of laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a violent reaction.”—III.388

“Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.”—III.389

“Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved. What evils? Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.”—IV.422