Lord Acton
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men"
***
Human physicality -- a "subset" of The Incarnation -- is a weighty thing and comes with a mighty bias.
But were we not, in large part, products of our circumstances, what would we be.
Or more precisely, how can we be grounded if we don't grow out of some particular ground?
It is also true that we have enough leeway to overrule our conditioning.
For example, I am conditioned to see widespread possession of firearms as the surest sign of cultural barbarism and often a prelude to cultural collapse.
Yet I do not oppose the 2nd Amendment (which, I must add, vouchsafes the right to bear arms but only from the prior predicate of a "well-regulated militia.")
Similarly, I think abortion is a hideous act of violence, but -- with reluctance -- I "sign off" on Roe v. Wade because until a fetus is self-sustaining, I must accept the defensible argument that it is an appendage of its mother and therefore subject to her "rule." (It is also true that, unless we advocate absolute proscription of abortion -- a position I do not subscribe -- logic requires "the line" be drawn somewhere and who am I to say that MY line is The One True and Inviolable Line?).
I would also prefer there be no standing armies, but because I am not an absolute pacifist, I cannot categorically oppose their existence.
And so it goes...
If I were to absolutize my idealism, I would absolutely oppose much of the legislation which my intellectually-informed conscience obliges me to tolerate.
This overall situation is similar to what my Dad used too say: "In order to guarantee the cornerstone of freedom, we must make sure that lots of guilty people walk."
Again, Merton:
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Thomas Merton http://paxonbothhouses.
I suspect that the final benefit of Democracy may be that Truth is better served by polar interplay than lopsided political victories.
Historically, lopsided victories tend to be fascist.
And for good reason.
Fasicism represents total imposition of one dominant political will.
Although this imposition may be happy at the outset, monopolarity is intrinsically unhinged from the nature of Reality and must therefore implode (often explosively) under its own dead weight.
In 1870, along with his mentor Döllinger, Acton opposed the moves to promulgate the doctrine of papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council going to Rome in order to lobby against it, ultimately unsuccessfully. Unlike Döllinger Acton did not become an Old Catholic, and kept on attending Mass regularly and receiving the last rites on his deathbed.[9] The Catholic Church did not try to force his hand. It was in this context that, in a letter he wrote to scholar and ecclesiastic Mandell Creighton, dated April 1887, Acton made his most famous pronouncement:
But if we might discuss this point until we found that we nearly agreed, and if we do agree thoroughly about the impropriety of Carlylese denunciations and Pharisaism in history, I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III. ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greatest names coupled with the greatest crimes; you would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science.[4]
Pax on both houses
Alan
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:
Alan,
Ruth Ginsburg's personal trainer
We need to know the personal stories of the justices on the Supreme Court in order to understand the motivation for their decisions. For instance, a justice who likes dogs will make decisions that are good for dogs and their owners. Likewise, a justice who hires a personal trainer, like in this story, will be favorably disposed to any litigant in the profession.
This is what we mean when we say "the personal is political." And that's the current standard. It was once expected that judges make decisions with a degree of detachment and objectivity, but now we understand that individuals cannot transcend their circumstances.....
So the Washington Post runs these stories about the private lives of Supreme Court justices -- so we can know how they might be ruling.
Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about the marital and family status of each justice -- so we might know how they might lean on the same-sex marriage question.
The worst part is that it pertains to you and me as well. You are a prisoner in your own body. Your body is old, white, and male and you cannot think otherwise. Your body is who you are. Your bias is undeniable and cannot be overcome. I don't need to read your words -- I just need to take a good look at you, and then I can tell where you're coming from.
--
Fred Owens
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