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The Pope Reprimands the Obama Administration
by  Fritz Wagner

Pope Benedict XVI has publicly condemned the attempt of the Obama Administration to impose "radical secularism" on the American people. 

On January 19th, 2012, the Pope addressed a delegation of visiting American Bishops from the Washington D.C. area. The address is couched in tranquil language, but the meaning is plain. We quote the sixth paragraph of the address:

. . . it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres.

 

The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion.

 

Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices.

 

Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.

Pope Benedict is making a thinly veiled reference to the mentality of the Obama Administration which has expressed itself in the attempt to force Catholic employers to offer insurance for abortion and to force Catholic hospitals and doctors to perform abortions.

It appears to us that the Obama administration is staffed at the upper levels by individuals who do not feel safe so long as the majority of the American people allow their consciences to be formed by Christian values.

The Pope ended his address on a hopeful note, suggesting the American clergy and a new generation of laity are in the process of renewing the Church's presence in American culture.        

The entire address, which is not too long, and which many will find worth reading,  may be found HERE.       

Fritz Wagner is Executive Editor at VoegelinView.

 

 

Progressivist Hubris
The Example of Obamacare

  by  Fritz Wagner

Elsewhere at VoegelinView may be found Scott Segrest's essay, "Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism," which deals with the presuppositions and programs of contemporary American progressivism as exemplified in the thought of Richard Rorty.

As pointed out there, coercion is a tool of the progressivist program. If ordinary people don't like what the progressives offer, they will nevertheless have to learn to like it for their own good. An example is the recently passed "Obamacare law" (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, effective from March 23, 2010),  The passage of this law offers a wonderful example of progressivist hubris and illustrates what can happen when progressives take over a political party, as they currently have taken over the Democrat Party.

The Scandal of Divine Presence 

by  Jerry L. Martin

"I Will Be There with You"

One of the most extraordinary moments in the history of revelation is God’s response to Moses’ question:  “They will say to me:  'What is his name?' –what shall I say to them?”  The question is one of credentials.  Moses cannot just do this on his own, in his own name.  “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah, that I should bring the Children of Israel out of Egypt?”  They will want to know for Whom he is speaking.

For God’s response, the most illuminating translation is by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig:  “I will be-there with you and this is the sign for you that I myself have sent you.”  God will be present, and it is precisely God’s presence that certifies his mission.

Beneath the Southern Cross

Why I am not a fan of Charles Darwin

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher, teacher, and journalist, and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin.  We present here a commentary that appeared in Diário do Comércio, São Paulo,  on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth.

The splendid festivities commemorating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth make some essential facts about the life and works of this man of science momentarily invisible.

To begin with, Darwin did not invent the theory of evolution: he found it ready-made under the form of an esoteric doctrine, in the work of his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and as a scientific hypothesis in innumerable mentions scattered in books by Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Goethe, among others.

All he did was to venture a new explanation for that theory–and his explanation was wrong. No one else, among the self-proclaimed Darwin disciples, believes in “natural selection.” The theory in vogue, the so-called neo-Darwinism, proclaims that, instead of a selection mysteriously oriented toward the improvement of the species, all that happened were random changes.

Voegelin Recollected—Recollected

by Jodi Bruhn

Jodi Bruhn interviewed those who studied with Eric Voegelin during his ten years in Munich (1958-1968). Over a ten month period she met the people who recalled what had happened 30 to 40 years earlier. Her work became chapter 3 in Voegelin Recollected–Conversations on a Life , (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2008).

"Kommen Sie doch herein . . ."

It was July of 1999 when I left Munich the first time. One afternoon two weeks before leaving, I stood at the doorstep of a Jungendstil apartment in Schwabing, ringing the doorbell of a man I’d never met. There was no answer. I rang again.

A frail female voice finally responded, “Ja?” I had an appointment with her husband, I explained in a German that was passably fluent by this time. He knew I would be coming; I wished to speak to him about Eric Voegelin.

After a long pause, the buzzer bid me up. I mounted two flights of creaking stairs to be greeted by a shuffling woman in a day coat and house slippers. She admitted me into the adjacent apartment, which she described as the “atelier.”

This room was unlike most I’d seen at such meetings, with heavy green velvet curtains drawn, strewn with curios: a marble bust in one corner, a stuffed duck on the mantelpiece, an immense glass coffee table cluttered with mannequin body-parts, an Oriental lounge, a large, well-stocked bar, some Persian vases, assorted photographic paraphernalia.

The room was filled with what Germans would call Ramtsch, but it was quality Ramtsch. This junk had the aura of a déclassé aristocrat.

from the Crow's Nest

THE OTHER 

Islam and September 11th, 2001

Originally published in October of 2001

Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream. —Richard Hooker

After the murderous events of September 11th, 2001, there was an immediate reaction in which people wanted to retaliate against Muslim Arab nations, since, after all, this was an attack worse than Pearl Harbor and therefore we needed to declare war and punish the enemy. "Arab" is used advisedly because there was no thought of attacking, for instance, Indonesia or Turkey, non-Arab Muslim nations.

But the reaction in favor of massive retaliation was only momentary and was replaced almost immediately by a determination to capture or kill the conspirators and their protectors. Such a restrained reaction is, as far as memory serves, the first time when a massive murderous act is not responded to with a reprisal on a similar scale. This restraint may exist in part from the memory of murderous bombing of civilians by the US and British air forces in World War II, by the knowledge that for the last fifteen years or so, cruel events often end up on video tape, and lastly, one would hope, that the President of the United States, in fact, lives the Christian life that he openly espouses.

So who are these people who committed suicide and mass murder? Do they represent a radical fringe of Islam? Why did they do it? Is there a solution? I am not an Arabist or scholar of Islam but I needed to come to some conclusions on this like everyone else in order to cope with the disaster and draw closer to God because of it.

Beneath the Southern Cross

Mr. Rorty and his Fellow Animals

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. He presently lives in the United States where he writes and teaches. His commentaries fill several volumes. The following is taken from O Imbecil Coletivo (The Collective Imbecile), and was translated into English by Pedro Sette Câmara. His latest book is Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca, a study of Machiavelli.

"Error speaks with a double voice, one proclaiming the false and the other denying it; it is a dispute of yes and no, called contradiction . . . Error is condemned, not by the mouth of the judge, but ex ore suo."

 —Benedetto Croce       

 

"Philosophy originated from the attempt to escape to a world in which nothing changed. Plato, who founded this field of culture we today call 'philosophy', believed the difference between past and future to be minimal." Thus begins the full-page article Mr. Richard Rorty published in Folha de São Paulo on March 3, 1994.¹

Well, when I started working in journalism, more than thirty years ago, such a paragraph would be mercilessly cut off at the copydesk. They also would not miss the opportunity to send the author a note such as follows: "But how, smarty boy, could Plato so anxiously desire to escape to a world of changeless stability, since in this world itself he did not see any big difference between past and future?"

Today, flagrant nonsense like this is printed as a deep manifestation of philosophical thought, and nobody from the copydesk is there to say that that is not acceptable even as would-be journalism..

from the Crow's Nest

 Money, Books, and Amazon

by Fritz Wagner

For some months now, we have been linking a few of our book ads to amazon.com. We recently learned that Amazon would pay VoegelinView a referral fee for sales made as a result of visits from VoegelinView. 

The University of Missouri Press, which publishes most of the books we advertise, does not object to something that is likely to result in increased sales of their books. We also think that readers who shop online would likely rather deal with Amazon than with individual publishers. Our Board of Advisors has offered encouragement.

Since VoegelinView operates at an annual deficit, any income is welcome.

We have made arrangements with Amazon and are now designated a "sales associate." We are converting our "click-thru" ads to take the reader directly to the page at amazon.com where the book is sold.

One other benefit: the referral fee is paid even if the reader buys something other than a book. If you decided to buy a flat screen PC monitor or a home theatre TV from Amazon, we would get the fee, providing you got to amazon.com from VoegelinView and made the purchase during the same visit. 

So our authors benefit, our publishers benefit, and you help VoegelinView at the same time. It sounds almost too good to be true. It probably is too good to be true. But we will give it a try and see what happens. And please buy your next major appliance at amazon.com after using us as a portal to get there!    

—May 25, 2011

Glenn Hughes

Hail and Farewell

Thomas D'Evelyn

Glenn Hughes has served as poetry editor here at VoegelinView since its inception more than two years ago. This Good Friday is the last day on which we publish his weekly offerings. Best known as a philosopher and author of books on Eric Voegelin, Glenn, known to his friends as "Chip," once confided that poetry was at least as important to him as is philosophy. Two volumes of his own poetry have been published and are available from Pecan Grove Press. A few his poems have appeared here.

Looking back now on the more than ninety poems he has offered our readership, we see he has done something really splendid for us. We, who thought we had enjoyed a broad liberal education and were therefore acquainted with the best poetry written in English, were shocked to find, week by week, that many of the wonderful poems Chip was bringing to us were not so well known and not too commonly found in anthologies. We shall always be greatful to Chip for giving us this treasure which will always be ours. Thank you, Chip Hughes!

Chip will continue at VoegelinView in his capacity as a member of our Board of Advisors and we expect to continue to publish both his beautifully crafted poetry and his philosophical prose from time to time.  

As successor to Chip Hughes, we welcome Thomas (Tom) D'Evelyn, an independent Voegelin scholar, founder of the Writing Institute of Portsmouth, and devotee of modern and Haiku poetry. Tom brings us his first offering next Friday–the Friday of Easter Week.  He has promised to accompany the poems from time to time with his own criticism and sometimes ideas drawn from the thought of Eric Voegelin.

We welcome Tom and look forward to accompanying him on a rewarding journey!       

—April 21, 2011             

from the Crow's Nest

A Visit with Lissy Voegelin

by Fritz Wagner

We have just completed a series of reminiscences about Eric Voegelin's years at Notre Dame, collected and edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn in their recent Voegelin Recollected. We have also run a few of our own memories we thought might be of interest. This is the last of them–a sort of story within a story.

In October of 1992, I decided to visit my son who was then living in Oakland, California. Oakland is across the bay from San Francisco and I had never before visited this beautiful area of the United States. I thought it would be a nice opportunity to meet Paul Caringella, Eric Voegelin's personal assistant for many years, so I called him from my home in Ohio and arranged to meet him at Stanford University in Palo Alto, a city just south of San Francisco.

With my son beside me, I finally got to meet Paul at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus. He took us to the cemetery where Eric Voegelin had been buried in January of 1985. It was on a hill top with a lovely vista. One could see many miles across valleys to the distant hills. It was the kind of beauty for which California is famous. A single small wind-twisted tree broke the horizon. Nothing else impaired the view: no monuments, only simple flat headstones. Paul pointed out the headstone for the man lying next to Voegelin. It said simply, "Wiseman."

Later my son and I and a friend of my son from Baden, Germany, a young electrical engineer named Ulrich, went with Paul to visit Lissy Voegelin at the Voegelin home in Palo Alto. We came by appointment and Lissy awaited us sitting up in bed in the master bedroom. She looked elegant and regal in a blue robe, with her freshly permed thick white hair.

Lissy said she never spoke German anymore (I believe she said that she and Eric made it a rule to talk together only in English.) But in the case of Ulrich, when he stepped forward to be introduced, she took his hand and said a few things to him "auf Deutsch."

Paul told Lissy that I had some memories of Eric at Notre Dame back about 1960 and Paul thought Lissy would enjoy them; enthusiastically she encouraged me to share my memories.

Order and History in Bavaria

by William Petropulos

Let me give you a brief summary of some of what I heard at the conference on “Eric Voegelin: Ordnung und Geschichte” at the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, January 29, 2011.

The speakers were Hans Maier, one-time professor at the Institute Voegelin founded, later Minister of Culture in Bavaria, and Professor emeritus of the University (his last post having to do with Christian Philosophy); Peter J.Opitz, whose work you are familiar with; and Michael Henkel, Private Dozent for Political Science at the University of Leipzig, a younger scholar who has written about Staatslehre.

Mr. Maier, who had once had his conflicts with Voegelin, had been asked to go over the history of Voegelin’s time in Munich. Voegelin, according to Mr. Maier, did not think enough about preparing the secondary teachers, and other “multipliers,” but was too focused on educating a scholarly elite.

In general, he thought Voegelin was unsuited for the everyday workings of political science: teaching people about voting laws, institutions, and the rest, and was almost exclusively concerned with the deeper issues upon which society is of, course, based but which political science cannot deal with exclusively. In other words, Voegelin was right, but he was also wrong.

Mr. Opitz had been asked to give an overview of Voegelin’s scholarly development. He demonstrated how Voegelin had deepened his original insights, which were made pretty early in his career, concerning the cognitive and existential basis of science. He emphasized Voegelin’s search for the Ground, the symbols of that experience, and the centrality such experience plays in the order of the soul and society. He also pointed out that Voegelin’s work was an attempt to respond to the “modern crisis” of the loss of spiritual orientation.

from the Crow's Nest

Watching TV, "The Mugging," and Racism

by Fritz Wagner

We are presently running a series of reminiscences about Eric Voegelin's years at Notre Dame, collected and edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn in their recent Voegelin Recollected. We have a few of our own memories we thought might be of interest.The following three that took place in the Law School auditorium mentioned in part 1 of "Voegelin at Notre Dame."

Watching TV

You understand it was 1960 and I was a nineteen year old undergraduate. To give you the setting: Our class was held in the auditorium of the Law School building.  Standard American-Oxford-Gothic law school architecture. The classroom ran the width of the building and there were windows on both sides. In the front was a stage surmounted by a proscenium arch and steps lead from the audience level upto the stage. On the stage was a desk, a lectern on the left side and a blackboard. There were 80 or 100 Voegelin students in a room that might have held 400 or so law students. We sat in comfortable theater seats, unlike the portable student desks found in most classrooms. If memory serves, Dr. Voegelin was always turned out in a well-tailored three piece suit.

I recall one Monday morning. The class bell rang but Voegelin was not poised at the lecturn as was his custom.

Alvino-Mario Fantini

February 2011    

In Banes, a hole-in-the-wall along Köllnerhofgasse and only a block from my flat, I see people meeting for drinks every evening.  Some of them  appear to be rather disgruntled government servants and others have a manic-depressive aura about them.  It is there that I can almost feel the darkness of spirit of which the early 20th century Austrian writers wrote. It is not merely something seasonal that comes with the early dusk that in winter descends on the city; it is something that wells up from an ever present source.

There are of course many Austrian writers waiting to be read. I’ve in fact had an opportunity to pick and choose among them, in no particular order, and I agree with those who say there seems to be a pervasive gloominess and, some would say, morbidity,  in their manner of writing, a gloominess that in fact preceded the crumbling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

from the Crow's Nest

"We have met the enemy, and he is us!"

by Fritz Wagner

We are presently running a series of reminiscences about Eric Voegelin's years at Notre Dame, collected and edited by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn in their recent Voegelin Recollected. We have a few of our own memories that seem to fit in with the published recollections, so we thought we would offer them here for whatever interest they might have.  Here is the first, relating to the same South Dining Hall mentioned often in part 1 of "Voegelin at Notre Dame."

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND THEY ARE OURS. —Oliver Hazard Perry, letter to General Harrison after the victory over the British fleet at Lake Erie, 1813.

Many years ago, when I was a very sophisticated, but shy, nineteen year old, I wandered into the public cafeteria at the Notre Dame South Dining Hall. I recall it was about 10:00 o'clock in the morning and I had stayed up late–probably in a residence hall bull session–and had slept through breakfast, so I came over to the cafeteria to get some coffee and a roll.

The cafeteria was a rackety place, with terra cotta floors and brick walls and vaulted plaster ceilings frescoed with pioneer priests greeting Indians. The tables and chairs were heavy oak. It was the kind of place where, if the kitchen helper dropped a tray of silver, the noise would hurt your ears.

But on this morning at this time of day the cafeteria was almost empty. As I walked along looking for a seat, I saw Professor Voegelin sitting at one of the few occupied tables reading a newspaper.  It was a table that sat four and he sat on the inside away from the aisle. He could have been upstairs in the private faculty dining room if he had wished, but he was down here in this huge room.

A Voegelin Literary Criticism

by David Palmieri

Voegelinian literary criticism is still taking its first steps.

Voegelin himself was a master critic of the philosophical text and — he wrote in a letter to Robert Heilman — an amateur critic of the poem, play and novel. Voegelin practiced literary criticism most assiduously in his discussion of Homer and the Athenian tragedians in The World of the Polis and in his analysis of the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw in a 1971 issue of The Southern Review.

As early as 1967, an article by Anselm Atkins in Drama Survey, “Voegelin and the Decline of Tragedy,” worked to insert the philosopher into literary criticism. Since then, Voegelinian literary criticism has moved ahead fitfully with the most concerted efforts being made by Glenn Hughes in his work on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson, and by Charles Embry in The Philosopher and the Storyteller (2008), the first monograph to use Voegelin’s later philosophical vocabulary as critical tools in an analysis of novels from England, Germany and the United States.

from the Crow's Nest

Sands of Iwo Jima

What every President needs to know

by Fritz Wagner

I was talking to the plumber, 'Oleg' by name, and when I hung up I looked at the caller ID on the phone and saw that he had a very Ukrainian last name. He had sounded thoroughly American but his name reminded me of the Ukrainian clients I had when I was practicing law in Baraboo, a resort community in southern Wisconsin not too far from metropolitan Chicago and its immense émigré population from central and eastern Europe.

These Ukrainians were first generation Americans, hard working, intelligent and successful. They were buying vacation homes in the area. But they had in common something I could not understand at the time. They were intensely secretive about their personal lives and business transactions, apparently because of “the government.” All loyalty was to the family and the Ukrainian Catholic Church. All distrust and suspicion was directed at government, its tax collectors, inspectors, etc. I understood they came from Communist societies but I couldn’t understand why their suspicions carried over to the United States. After all, they were free men once again.

A Step Closer to Sainthood for

a Modern Intellectual

by  David Walsh      

The beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman by Benedict XVI on his recent visit to England might seem to be a locally Catholic affair. Newman had founded his own Congregation of the Oratory in Birmingham and it was there he lived the last part of his life. His own community and region could be expected to take pride in the advance of one of their own along the path of canonization as a saint. A first class miracle accomplished through his intercession was required to authenticate the papal judgment. That had occurred in the person of Jack Sullivan who had been cured of a spinal disorder. 

But there was something more unusual about the event than even that impressive claim suggests. It was that the Church had found a candidate for canonization who fits the mold of a modern intellectual.

THE CAINE MUTINY COURT MARTIAL
or, Is it Worthwhile to Psychoanalyze Politicians?

by Fritz Wagner

There was a time, not too long ago, when amateur psychoanalysis was in the toolbox of students, intellectuals, and even the smart set. It was marvelous! If you knew just a few facts about a person you could plug the facts into the Freudian system and imaginatively destroy him. And without Freud's ghost hovering, it is unlikely either Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), or the later movie of the same name (1954) would have taken the form they did.

 

Today the grandchildren of that generation are not much interested in psychoanalysis. Voegelinian analysis of pneumopathology certainly provides a superior tool for Voegelin readers. For a wider public a strong argument can be made that a psychology based on doing good and avoiding evil is more useful to the individual than trying to recover forgotten childhood experiences in order to explain unhappiness. The facultative psychology of the Scholastics, most notably in the work of St. Thomas, may be the best path to emotional well-being.

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Fritz Wagner) Commentary Sat, 29 May 2010 01:24:57 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/letter-from-vienna-may-2010.html http://www.voegelinview.com/letter-from-vienna-may-2010.html

 

 

by Alvino-Mario Fantini

 

 

Recently I began to read about the life and work of German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand who, to escape the Nazis, moved to the Austrian capital — until the German Anschluss (annexation) forced him to leave for the U.S.¹ As a conference in Rome at the end of May will consider, von Hildebrand had a lot to say about love; but he also wrote a lot on the subject of beauty — in music, the visual arts and in the natural world.  

 

Yet beauty, like love, is frankly not a subject many of us are used to talking about with any kind of philosophical rigor.

 

In the past, my own attempts at representing my experiences with beautiful things to others have left something to be desired. I’ve generally described Vienna in strictly physical terms and have tended to limit my comments to rudimentary descriptions of its grand sights and charming sounds.

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Wed, 12 May 2010 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/letter-from-vienna-april-2010.html http://www.voegelinview.com/letter-from-vienna-april-2010.html

 

by Alvino-Mario Fantini

 

I sometimes think  I can catch a glimpse of the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as I walk through the streets of Vienna late at night. Walking past the windows of a gasthaus (a tavern with bar or restaurant) or heuriger (a wine tavern), I like to imagine the old Austrians sitting inside are characters in a Viennese novel. Their faces flushed, they almost look as crippled by their frailties as do some of the characters in the Austrian literature of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

 

This seems to be especially so with many of the later turn-of-the-century stories and novellas, which seem to revel in the gloom and melancholy of their protagonists. In the stories of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), for example, lonely sympathetic characters often end up struggling with moral dilemmas or carry the pain of unrequited love. Zweig tells of the desperation in the lives of his characters and, in many cases, his characters end up as suicides.

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/gosplan-healthcare.html http://www.voegelinview.com/gosplan-healthcare.html from the Crow's Nest

 

Gosplan Healthcare?

by Fritz Wagner

 

 

This week the machinery of the US Congress will grind furiously and may extrude a healthcare sausage that is nothing less than a Soviet style economic and social disaster. With the very best of intentions it cannot work because central planning cannot work. It runs contrary to the ineluctable tendencies of human nature. The impossiblility of successful centrally managed healthcare was brought home to me when considering Thomas Sowell's recent The Intellectuals and Society (See Book Reviews). At the same time, a not at all recent book, dating from the last years of the cold war, considers the then-Soviet design and construction of nuclear submarines ( (I am an inveterate reader of books naval and if you are old enough, you can remember it was a very scary time!).

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/taking-a-chance-on-love.html http://www.voegelinview.com/taking-a-chance-on-love.html from the Crow's Nest

 Taking a Chance on Love

by Fritz Wagner

 

In the Church calender, this past Monday was celebrated as the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. In his homily at that Mass, the celebrant mentioned the late philosopher Martin Buber as representing the viewpoint that "the problem with Christianity is St. Paul."  It got us thinking. And, not surprisingly, our thoughts turned to Eric Voegelin and specifically the shock that many Christians experienced after reading Voegelin's appraisal of St. Paul. This happened with the publication of Volume IV of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, in 1974. ]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:55:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/it-s-not-the-money-dummy.html http://www.voegelinview.com/it-s-not-the-money-dummy.html from the Crow's Nest

 

It's not the Money, Dummy! 

by Fritz Wagner

 

No. It's a second reality. Something terrible has happened and the US Government and the establishment media are pretending it hasn't happened. A lot of rice bowls are about to be broken, it is true, but more importantly, there is an immanent threat to the immanentists. They are in danger of being thrown into nothingness. The Emperor has no clothes and people might start to snicker and laugh.

 

Of course I am talking about global warming. Or rather man-made global warming. Apparently a whistle-blower put up on the internet hundreds of email messages from research scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a public university in Great Britain whose stored records had become subject to the recent British Freedom of Information Act. The institute’s director had apparently requested the systematic deletion of compromising emails.

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:25:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/the-apple-store.html http://www.voegelinview.com/the-apple-store.html from the Crow's Nest

 

A Visit to the Apple Store

by Fritz Wagner

 

I went into the Apple Store last Friday. My PC harddrive had gone silent, although it was still new and the warranty was fresh.  My wife had a new Hewlet Packard laptop with Vista installed (and Windows 7 promised) but her frustration level continued to rise so she had stopped trying to take charge of it.  My son has been a Mac user for 25 years and insisted the time had come for me to try it.  So I drove to the posh* shopping center and walked into the store with no words in the windows, only white silouhettes of apples with a bite missing. 

 

 

Inside, the place was a zoo.  A deliberately spartan room filled with long counters topped with computers.  The large staff wore color coded T-shirts: orange for concierge (the department store floorwalkers of the pre World War II years?), baby blue for "specialists," and  navy blue for "geniuses" (a "genius" is a technician).  I went up to a baby blue specialist and asked her if she could help me. She said she couldn't because she was working the cash register. I asked if she could take my money. She said yes. Then I said I wanted such and such with a warranty and word processing program here is my credit card.  I was out of there in ten minutes.  I was very glad to be out of there in ten minutes!

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:40:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/a-little-humble-pie.html http://www.voegelinview.com/a-little-humble-pie.html from the Crow's Nest

 

A little humble pie

by Fritz Wagner

 

How to lie with statistics is the name of a book that came out about fifty years ago.  We were undergraduates and we read it avidly.  For me it was the first crack in the façade of the modern effort to give meaning to society through numerical representation, but mostly we read it because it was fun to see how manipulators operate.

 

There are a couple of statistics about VoegelinView that I have become aware of and thought should be passed along. 

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:07:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/toronto-iii-a-lttle-anamnesis.html http://www.voegelinview.com/toronto-iii-a-lttle-anamnesis.html from the Crow's Nest

Reflections on Toronto-Part III
by Fritz Wagner

A little Anamnesis and Marshall McLuhan;
Risotto and the Innkeepers Act;
Manifest Destiny

 

Voegelin in Toronto. The DVD, that is. Panel 12, held late on Saturday just before the business meeting, was devoted to a discussion of the 1978 conference that has been preserved as a video showing the brilliance of Voegelin, Gadamer, Lonergan, Bloom, Poole and Lawrence in disussion with one another.  The conference might have been forgotten had not panel chairman Zdravko Planinc, then a student at York University, transcribed Voegelin’s lecture and comments which were subsequently published on the Web by Maben Poirier in the erstwhile Voegelin—Research News, which in turn led to the obtaining of the conference tapes and eventual issuing of the DVD. The pamphlet prepared to go with the DVD gives the conference history and Voegelin’s own comments afterwards. It can be seen here. 

______________________________

 

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Fritz Wagner) Commentary Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/toronto-ii-boredom-in-toronto.html http://www.voegelinview.com/toronto-ii-boredom-in-toronto.html from the Crow's Nest

Reflections on Toronto-Part II

Slouching toward Toronto to be Bored?

by Fritz Wagner

 

I was surprised to learn in Toronto that some Voegelin scholars expressed their sense that Voegelin studies has “had its day” and that it is time to move forward to a present time in which we must deal with problems Voegelin never faced. In fact, after one such post-panel comment from a member of the audience, we heard from somewhere a quiet but clear “Hear! Hear!”

 

Are these people onto something? Is there an elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring? Perhaps in some ways, yes.

 

That favorite term for the devout and mechanical follower, a term popularized by Voegelin, “epigone,” comes to mind. For how many years can you type the word “metaxy” without numbing yourself into indifference?  And, as was made evident in Toronto, there is a rather widespread uncertainty about the continued usefulness of the term “gnosticism,” the signature concept used in Voegelin’s break-through to public awareness in his 1952 The New Science of Politics. Furthermore, Mathias Riedl pointed out in his presentation that new historical evidence has undone the image of Joachim of Fiora, upon which Voegelin relied, in mapping out his ideas of modern gnosticism.

 

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Barry Cooper) Commentary Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/toronto-i-political-correctness.html http://www.voegelinview.com/toronto-i-political-correctness.html from the Crow's Nest

Reflections on Toronto-Part I

Political Correctness, Parliament and Princeton

by Fritz Wagner

 

 

 

The Eric Voegelin Society annual meeting in Toronto featured no fewer than thirteen panels, some of which this observer found noteworthy. First to be mentioned is the panel on “Political Correctness,” more formally styled “Conscience, Expression & Liberty: Pitfalls of Political Correctness.” A great deal was said about the Canadian Human Rights Commissions, a subject which has already been considered at VoegelinView in a John von Heyking book review and in an analysis of the Kafkaesque enforcement machinery constructed alongside and parallel to normal law. 

 

More interesting to this observer would have been a discussion by the panel of the psycho-social environment (to paraphrase Juergen Gebhardt) which made such a law possible.  Sitting near Barry Cooper at dinner later that evening I wondered out loud if the political enforcement of superficial unity of public manners was accepted by Canadians because of an unintended consequence of  Parliament’s expansive (keep up with the U.S.) immigration policy that results in a thinning out of the social substance?  After all, it is rather difficult to become a Canadian by mere conscious effort if one comes from somewhere else.  Being Canadian involves a complex and rather subtle set of attitudes not evoked by uttering the names of great mythical figures and events, so ably described by Juergen Gebhardt in Americanism:  The Genesis of a Civil Theology (excerpted here at Vv).   It at least suggests a fruitful area of inquiry by one of the several Voegelinians who might look into this sort of thing.  But perhaps not Canadians.  Juergen G. has shown how important distance can be when examining a culture. Perhaps it should be examined by someone who doesn’t have to live with the hard stares of his neighbors!

]]> bcooper@ucalgary.ca (Fritz Wagner) Commentary Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.voegelinview.com/a-poet-remembered.html http://www.voegelinview.com/a-poet-remembered.html from the Crow's Nest

A Poet Remembered

Ernest Sandeen (1908-1997)

by Fritz Wagner

 

Poetry editor Glenn Hughes is the master of his realm, so when I came across a poem I admired I sent it to him in hopes he might want to add it to the cue so it would eventually appear here at VoegelinView.   Glenn approved and you will find it today (August 14, 2009)  featured on the poetry page.  It is called "Parked Car," was written by Ernest Sandeen and was first anthologized in a slender volume of his poems titled Children and Older Strangers. 

 

Ernest Emmanuel Sandeen wrote a half dozen or so volumes of poetry in his long life.  He earned his first fame with this very poem, "Parked Car," which was published in The New Yorker in 1938.  I looked it up and realized that although he was rather young, his work was appearing alongside such luminaries as S.J. Perlman, Ogden Nash, and Wolcott Gibbs—that was in the late '30's when the life of the arts was the best life and much of it flowed through that essential magazine.

 

At Notre Dame In 1960 I took a course in Chaucer from Professor Sandeen but was then unaware he was a poet (like most poets he had to earn a living doing something else).  Subsequent courses included Old and Middle English literature and modern British poetry.  Eventually he offered me a job correcting exams, etc., and not too long ago I found my copy of Children and Older Strangers and on the titlepage there is this inked inscription:

 

                                     February 19, 1962

 For Fritz Wagner

     In gratitude for our happy associations

     and with warmest regards,

                              Ernest Sandeen

 

I suppose I was not very appreciative at the time.  Perhaps I thought some professors' openness and generosity meant I belonged in their company.  I knew "Ernie" (Only the faculty called him that!) when he was in his early fifties. He was a rugged looking man with a bulldog square face and a brush top haircut that belied his gentleness.

 

Twenty five years later I made an oil painting called "The Parked Car." There was no conscious connection because I had forgotten his poem by then.

 

The poem is certainly superb; the last four lines are a perfect combination of original imagery, profundity and economy.  The poem more or less summarizes much of my own youth in a way that nothing else approaches.  Let us just say that if I wouldn't talk about my teen years I could at least point to this poem.

 

Today there is a biennial Ernest Sandeen Prize for Poetry, awarded to a poet who has also published at least one previous volume of poems.  In fact a search for his name on the Web mostly produces pictures and biographies and collections from the winners of the prize named for him.