Aesthetic Violence: “The Left seeks to demonstrate that it can hurt you; this is what encourages lockstep compliance. If this claim is not contested, then the extant Leftist narrative prevails.Β This was the situation in 2020 when COVID locked much of the country in their homes and riots broke out in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Encouraged and supported by the media, millions of dollars of goods were looted, dozens of people were killed, and entire districts of major cities burned. This was a peak of political violence in recent American history, and it shocked most people into a sort of stupor. There is little doubt that this violence was centrally funded and organized: pallets of bricks showed up at protest sites, demonstrators were shipped in via buses, and uniforms and tactics were kept consistent across cities. The 2020 riots were essentially a coordinated PR rollout; a conflagration of aestheticized violence.”
Die Before You Die: “Towards the end of his life, the Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas had a vision while serving the Mass. What Aquinas saw in his vision we cannot say, because he died without telling anyone what had happened to him. All we know is that he immediately gave up everything he was doing. After a lifetimeβs theological inquiry, and a lifetimeβs writing, he put down his pen and never picked it up again. He was in the middle of his great work, theΒ Summa Theologiae, but he left it unfinished and just walked away. I can write no more, he said.Β I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”
Life as Aesthetics? “You might say that warfare is not art, but I believe any craft raised to a sufficient height of mastery and genius is a type of art, philosophically in that it helps to justify life. In fact it can under the right circumstancesΒ enhanceΒ life, and raise it up further towards the heavens. Hence Burckhardtβs provocative description: The State as a work of art. Is your life a work of art?”
Prisoners of Themselves: “If these people ever cherished the idea of being free to think their own thoughts and live their own lives, itβs getting late in the game. They will end up prisoners of themselves.”
The Red Hand Files: “…you are oscillating between terror and euphoria…because what you and your wife are about to embark on is perhaps the most substantive course of action two people can take β to bring a baby, that fragile interwork of spirit and atoms, that squalling metaphor of conjugal love, that emissary of hope and potential, that boy of joy, into what is, by any measure, a deeply troubled world…what a defiant and outrageous act of positive intentionality it was, of courage and faith in the human adventure itself, of resistance against cynicism, of pure, undiluted trust in things…”