Seek Knowledge for the Right Reason

Seek not to grow in knowledge chiefly for the sake of applause, and to enable you to dispute with others; but seek it for the benefit of your souls.

Jonathan Edwards

Learn History

When revisionist history becomes mainstream, then people will accept anything so long as it sounds good. So long as it lets them forget.

Daniel Greenfield, “Memorials of Grief”

Cohabitation Before Marriage is NOT Good

It’s not enough to say that cohabitation is different from marriage. The truth is that it’s the direct opposite of marriage. In marriage, you live as one united through sickness and health until death do you part. In cohabitation, you live as two divided, for an undetermined period of time, for as long as it remains convenient until one or both of you decides otherwise. You may point out that many modern marriages function more like the latter than the former, and I’d agree. That’s the point. Cohabitation doesn’t resemble marriage, but, in our culture, marriage increasingly resembles cohabitation.

Matt Walsh, “5 reasons why living together before marriage will kill your relationship”

DON’T Play Along

Playing along with delusions isn’t a kindness to those suffering from other psychological conditions, and it isn’t a kindness for those with gender dysphoria either.  And if we lend credibility to the notion that adults can choose their sex, parents who refuse to allow a child who, just the week before, self-identified as a butterfly to choose her own gender could then be accused of denying their child health care (because many progressive activists view opposite-sex hormones and plastic surgery as health care now).

Bethany Mandel, How The Transgender Crusade Made Me Rethink My Support For Gay Marriage

The Legacy of “Democracy”

Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

John Adams (1763)

Fighting Fake Evils

All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don’t fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils.  This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left.  … 

[T]o feel good about yourself, you have to fight against something bad. Since the left doesn’t fight real evil (that would take moral courage in addition to moral clarity), it has to fight lesser evils or made-up evils.  For example, the left relentlessly fights racism in America, even though America is the least racist multiracial society in history; it relentlessly fights sexism in America, the country that has afforded unprecedented equality and liberty to women (but it does not fight the terrible sexism that pervades the world’s most women-suppressing societies—those in the Muslim world); and, of course, it fights Nazis and white supremacists—who, though evil, constitute an utterly negligible threat to America today.

It fights religious Americans, specifically religious Christians and especially evangelicals. Now that’s an enemy worth fighting—those mean Christians (and Jews) on the religious right. And it fights conservatives, or at least the conservatives who fight them.

And, of course, it fights global warming. Leftists have convinced themselves that the real fight against evil in the world today is not against Islamism; it’s against carbon emissions.

And now, we can add statues to the list. The left was AWOL against communism, and it’s AWOL against Islamism. But it’s in the vanguard of fighting statues.

Dennis Prager, In a World of Real Evil, the Left Fights Fake Evil

The Failure of “Progressive” Ideology

The progressive of our time…no longer bother to tell us where they believe they are going.  They neither know nor care.  Having sown the wind, they reap the whirlwind and are at its mercy.  The rudder has cracked and the ship knows no direction.  At the moment the only liberty they believe in is the slavery of sexual license and the permission to fashion themselves in the image of any one of a multiplying number of sexual identities, whose very multiplicity and arbitrariness suggest how frail they are and how empty of meaning.  What boon this is supposed to confer on mankind, or what this is supposed to contribute to the common good, progressives do not attempt to say.  They cannot.  In other words, the progressives of our time have no notion of a goal and therefore no notion of progress.  They are not moving at all but sinking, deeper and deeper, into delusions and disappointment, blaming their failures on those who are insufficiently eager to sink along with them.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.185

For Real Education, Dump the Public Schools

The schools could all meet Mr. Wrecking Ball tomorrow, and we would be none the less literate for it.  We might even be wiser, if we read good books.  Homeschoolers, who teach their children at a tiny fraction of the cost of institutional incompetence, have demonstrated that result to anyone with eyes to see.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.145

A Problem of Women in the Labor Force

One of the reasons that the real earnings of working-class men in the United States have been stagnant for forty years is the mass exodus of women from the home and the neighborhood and into the labor force.  That has also had the strange effect of driving up housing costs, and of segregating white-collar professionals from everybody else, as now a doctor will marry a lawyer or a bank executive will marry a professor.  Then the double income goes to support one family with one or two children, rather than each separate income supporting a family with four or five children.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.143

Public School

Part of our problem is that those twelve years of schooling are in large part an enormous wast of time, because very little of the true, the good, and the beautiful is learned there. School is the asylum where we send children whom we do not know what to do with otherwise.  They learn no grammar there, very little history, no geography, very little of their language’s literary heritage.  They get some math, but in a protracted and mind-dulling way, and some science, but very little of the world that is near their hands and eyes.  Boys especially are bored to tears by it all, and then the remedy comes in the form of drugs, because they cannot pay attention to what is not worth attending to in the first place.  … School as it is now constituted wastes even more than time: it wastes life itself.  It drags out its days and years in weariness, conformity to the political insanity of the day, writing by formula and not by art, and reading mostly junk, the educational equivalent of styrofoam, soft pornography, and mass-produced French fries. 

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.141, 142

Are You A Slave?

The slave is the one who obeys a vicious master, which may all be the man’s own lusts.  The free man obeys God.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.133

What Is Our Life For?

What is our life for?  Why do we work?  If Christians cannot remember the answers, then we are lost indeed.  Work is not something you are supposed to balance against the claims of your family.  Unless you are one of those few whose talents are required in a broad way for the common good of multitudes, if you are not working in the first instance for your family, then something is severely out of order.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.128

Disagreement Isn't Hate

Support for marriage as the union of husband and wife isn’t anti-gay. Believing the truth about marriage—that it unites a man and woman as husband and wife in an act that makes them one flesh—isn’t “anti” anything.

Believing that men and women aren’t interchangeable, and that mothers and fathers aren’t replaceable, that children deserve both a mom and a dad—that’s not hate. It’s truth. And even if you disagree, you should acknowledge that it’s motivated by love, not hate.

Anti-trans bigotry is real—and it’s wrong. And we shouldn’t tolerate it.

But biology isn’t bigotry. The best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality. And it’s entirely reasonable to have concerns about privacy and safety when males who identify as women can go into the ladies’ and girls’ bathroom and locker room.

Likewise, having concerns about giving children puberty blockers, or performing sex reassignment surgery on adults, isn’t anti-trans. It’s a disagreement about medicine.

Ryan T. Anderson, Disagreement Isn’t Hate, Despite What the Left Says

Feminist Spite

We must rid ourselves of the feminist spite that pretends to despise the woman of many talents and many tasks in the home, preferring the specialist who amputates and cauterizes and does one thing well, for herself primarily and sometimes even at the expense of the family.  I said “pretends to despise” advisedly; envies would have been nearer the mark.  Women themselves can testify to this; they know the looks they receive from a certain sort of woman as they mount the steps of the bus with three small children skipping along after.  Imagine the most human place in your experience, the one that is warmest in heart and soul and mind.  It isn’t an office, is it?  We have plenty of second-rate men in our world.  Our whole late capitalist bureaucratic human-resource drudging economy consumes second-rate men as fuel.  We don’t need any more.  We need first-rate women.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.127-128

The Making of a Woman?

First, do not expect gentleness from young women brought up on the female form of pornography, the sleazy and mind-emptying “romance.”  Do not expect it from them if they are taught to swear like sailors, without the know-how and the risk to life and limb and the rough camaraderie that make the sailor’s roughness pardonable.  Do not expect it if they place before their eyes the glossy magazines that slash the soul like steel knives. Do not expect it fi they are trained up in catfights.  …

Second, you might ask exactly how it helps a girl when a parent, usually the father, presses her into competitive sports, when the team or platoon or ship’s crew is not the pattern of female cooperation, when she knows that she will never be able to compete against her male counterparts at the same level, and when the development of her growing body is directed towards child-bearing, not towards loping across the savannah in pursuit of gazelle or hurling a harpoon to spear seals.  … They could be developing all kinds of beautiful and useful skills that would eventually bring sweetness and grace and health to their families and forge real social bonds among neighbors, but they are too busy learning to hit a softball in a field no bigger than the Little League stadium at Williamsport before a few other girls while the boys are off doing something else.  What, ultimately, is the aim?  Yes, there will always be tomboys, and I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball.  I do desire to tell girls that they should not be pushing softball upon them.

Third, how can a girl become a woman like Dickens’s Esther Summerson if she cannot do anything?  Consider what a mass of contradictions we are.  If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop.  If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living—if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town—we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent.  If a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall.  But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents.  Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.126-127