Wisdom Archive

Descent into Darkness

Posted February 1, 2018 By John C Wright

The next installment of the most important column on the topic you are likely to read this year is up:

Defending the Wood Perilous — Part Two: Descent into Darkness

“In the story, particularly, as in fabulous fictions of the same kind, there are two considerations most useful to notice. The first is that they show that evildoers, even if they seem to escape a thousand times, always get their punishment; the second, that they show many innocents placed in great danger often saved against all hope.”

Part one is here: http://www.superversivesf.com/2018/01/25/defending-wood-perilous-part-one-live-fairytale/

 

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Defending the Wood Perilous

Posted January 26, 2018 By John C Wright

The first part of what promises to be the most insightful essay you are likely to read this year on this topic has been posted. Since I have seen the whole in first draft, I can promise you the whole will prove well worth reading, if you want to know the truth about what is going on in the Fantasy genre and why, and to who’s benefit it is.
http://www.superversivesf.com/2018/01/25/defending-wood-perilous-part-one-live-fairytale/

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Quote of the Day

Posted April 12, 2017 By John C Wright

Brought to my attention by our own Daniel Koolbeck:

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Belle the Inventress

Posted March 17, 2017 By John C Wright

The beautiful and talented Mrs. Wright points out what is wrong with the whole approach of ‘modernizing’ Disney’s Belle in the live action remake of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

http://superversivesf.com/2017/03/14/ruining-beauty/

 

 

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And the Rage Within me Spoke

Posted January 26, 2017 By John C Wright

The Last Crusade, which, as of the time of this writing consists of myself and eight others, has already received criticism for being insufficiently pacifist.

I assume such criticism is not meant to be taken seriously. It came from the Left, of course. Leftists do not remain silent when they have nothing to say. If a Leftist stoops and finds no stone to throw at a nun or a cripple, he will throw a handful of grass.

By no coincidence, I received this letter from a reader named Don Cicchetti , which perhaps can explain whence some of us discover in ourselves a warlike spirit, even if the current phase of the war is spiritual, not physical.

I found it moving, and I trust you will as well.

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Chesterton on Honor

Posted September 14, 2016 By John C Wright

The American Civil War was a real war between two civilizations.

It will affect the whole history of the world. There were great and good men, on both sides, who knew it would affect the whole history of the world. Yet the great majority of Englishmen know nothing about it, or only know the things that are not true. They have a general idea that it was `all about niggers’; and they are taught by their newspapers to admire Abraham Lincoln as ignorantly and idiotically as they once used to abuse him. All this seems to me very strange; not only considering the importance of America, but considering how everybody is now making America so very important. America is allowed to have, if anything, far too much influence on the affairs of the rest of the world…

We know, in our own case, that it is sometimes possible to lose a war after we have won it. The American politicians lost something more valuable than a war; they lost a peace. They lost a possibility of reconciliation that would not only have doubled their strength, but would have given them a far better balance of ideas which would have vastly increased their ultimate influence on the world. Lincoln may have been right in thinking that he was bound to preserve the Union. But it was not the Union that was preserved. A union implies that two different things are united; and it should have been the Northern and Southern cultures that were united. As a fact, it was the Southern culture that was destroyed. And it was the Northern that ultimately imposed not a unity but merely a uniformity. But that was not Lincoln’s fault. He died before it happened; and it happened because he died.

Everybody knows, I imagine, that the first of the men who really destroyed the South was the Southern fanatic, John Wilkes Booth. He murdered the one man in the North who was capable= of comprehending that there was a case for the South. But Northern fanatics finished the work of the Southern fanatic; many of them as mad as he and more wicked than he. Mr. Bowers gives a vivid account of the reign of terror that Stevens and Sumner and the rest let loose on the defeated rebels a pestilence of oppression from which the full promise of America has never recovered. But I have a particular reason at the moment for recommending to my countrymen some study of the book and the topic.

Every age has its special strength, and generally one in which some particular nation is specially strong. Every age has also its special weakness and deficiency, and a need which only another type could supply. This is rather specially the Age of America; but inevitably, and unfortunately, rather the America of the Northern merchants and industrialists. It is also the age of many genuine forms of philanthropy and humanitarian effort, such as modern America has very generously supported. But there is a virtue lacking in the age, for want of which it will certainly suffer and possibly fail. It might be expressed in many ways; but as short a way of stating it as any I know is to say that, at this moment, America and the whole world is crying out for the spirit of the Old South.

In other words, what is most lacking in modern psychology is the sentiment of Honour; the sentiment to which personal independence is vital and to which wealth is entirely incommensurate. I know very well that Honour had all sorts of fantasies and follies in the days of its excess. But that does not affect the danger of its deficiency, or rather its disappearance. The world will need, and need desperately, the particular spirit of the landowner who will not sell his land, of the shopkeeper who will not sell his shop, of the private man who will not be bullied or bribed into being part of a public combination; of what our fathers meant by the free man. And we need the Southern gentleman more than the English or French or Spanish gentleman. For the aristocrat of Old Dixie, with all his faults and inconsistencies, did understand what the gentle man of Old Europe generally did not. He did understand the Republican ideal, the notion of the Citizen as it was understood among the noblest of the pagans. That combination of ideal democracy with real chivalry was a particular blend for which the world was immeasurably the better; and for the loss of which it is immeasurably the worse. It may never be recovered; but it will certainly be missed.

G.K. Chesterton On America, from COME TO THINK OF IT.

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Superversive: Puppy Pictures, Please

Posted September 13, 2016 By John C Wright

The beautiful and talented Mrs. Wright has written a column attempting to explain the obvious to the oblivious:

The Bifrost Between Calico and Gingham

I have been asked what the Puppies—Sad and Rabid alike—are objecting to? If they are not racist or homophobes—ie, if it is not the author’s identity that they object to—why do they think that so many of the stories that have been winning the Hugo and the Nebula are receiving their awards for the wrong reasons?

I think I can explain. I will use, for my example, the short story that won the Hugo in 2016: “Cat Pictures Please.”

I must admit I had trouble seeing why “Cat Pictures Please” was the best story of the year. I’d read stories last year that I thought were significantly better. It was cute, but I had trouble seeing how it measured up to “Scanners Live In Vain” or “Flowers For Algernon” or “Nine billion names of God.”

But I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt here. It is possible that many of these voting are young enough that they haven’t read the stories that made this one seem derivative to me. If so, this story would seem much more impressive.

And tastes differ.

That’s okay.

My gentle wife is considerably more generous in her judgment than am I.

I believe the gap between the puppy kickers and the sad puppies was trenched deliberately. It is not because they misunderstand us that they hate us; they hate us because we love science fiction for its own sake, as an imaginative exercise opening realms of wonder. They see science fiction as they see all things, as tools useful for social engineering and thought policing. We seek to free the mind, they seek to chain the mind.

I would prefer that I am wrong on these points and Mrs. Wright be right. I wish this were merely a matter of misunderstanding, or differing tastes.

Nonetheless, the attempt to cross the gap between the puppy kickers and the sad puppies is laudable. Blessed are the peacemakers.

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Arhyelon: The Prude and the Trollop

Posted September 5, 2016 By John C Wright

From the pen of my lovely and talented wife.

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/09/05/the-prude-and-the-trollop/

Occasionally, I come upon a review (there has been more than one) of The
Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin
where the reader threw the book across the room and stopped reading at the scene in chapter Four where crazy orphan boy Siegfried Smith encounters a young woman deliberately wearing too-tight clothing to flaunt her curves and uses the word (brace yourselves, my dear readers) trollop.

These reviewers universally agree: clearly the author (not the character, mind you) must be a disapproving prude out to slut-shame all well-endowed girls.

Read the whole thing. We live in a society where the sterile old maiden aunts react with fainting spells and clutch their pearls, but not at the first hint of anyone behaving improperly or lewdly, but at the first hint of anyone behaving properly or chastely. They expect you be be ashamed for not being shameless.

The world is moonbat lunatic crazypants insane.

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Young Mrs. Wright and her Legalistic Atheist Friend

Posted August 17, 2016 By John C Wright

A controversial post this week from the lovely and talented Mrs Wright. She asks when is it right and proper to murder grandma?

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/08/16/when-can-we-murder-grandma/.

She was Miss Lamplighter at the time when the events described took place. I wonder who the friend was with whom she was secretly in love.

Many years ago, I was driving down the highway, from North Carolina to Maryland, in the company of a friend, with whom I was secretly in love, and we were discussing abortion.

I had told him my stance. I was very pro-abortion. (I realize that, since then, someone came up with cute little terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice”, but this was before that. We still called it pro-abortion and anti-abortion.)

My reasons were as follows:

I believed that all life was sacred, that to kill would be to break a commandment. I believed that this was in direct disobedience to the will of God. So, I personally would never have an abortion.

BUT, I felt I had made this decision on religious grounds. Thus, abortion should be legal so that everyone could make their own decision based on their own religion.

I felt very strongly about this. So strongly that I had voted a pro-abortion ticket one year.

I felt this was about defending religious freedom.

But, as I chatted about the issue with my friend, he brought up the word murder.

“Abortion’s not murder!” I scoffed.

But I was a bit unnerved. Never had I before heard abortion referred to as murder.

“Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being,” quipped my legal-minded friend, who was an atheist just out of law school. He then listed the times when it is lawful to kill a human being: self-defense, defense of others.

Laws in favor of abortion, he pointed out, did not make it lawful to murder a human being. They merely defined an unborn child as “not yet a human being” and, thus, not covered by these laws.

Read the whole thing, and discover whether or not the dashing yet dark-hearted logical and legalistic atheist, using only human reason, without any resort to revelation or divine authority, can convince our innocent but sweet and young Christian idealist something about the inner nature of the moral code God Himself wrote with His finger on our hearts.

You may discover why the enemy hates logical and lawful thinking as much as he hate Christian love. Both point to the divine.

 

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On the Feast of the Assumption

Posted August 15, 2016 By John C Wright

Send by a friend:

There was a beautiful reading in the Office of Readings today. I thought I should share it, especially with John Wright.

St. John of Damascus was a Syrian monk and priest, from the same stock from which the Maronites descended. He lived in the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem in the seventh century.

From a homily by Saint John Damascene, priest
(Homily 9 on the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 3, 7-8, 10: PG 96. 727, 734-735)

You have borne for us the clothing of immortality Read the remainder of this entry »

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Five Points to Ravenclaw

Posted August 3, 2016 By John C Wright

The beautiful and talented Mrs. Wright pens her musings on Harry Potter, and spoiler-free thoughts on the recent release of JK Rowling’s latest.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , by the bye, is not a book, nor did Rowling write it: it is the script of a play based on a treatment she wrote. Some emptor who were insufficiently caveat , if I may coin the expression, apparently bought it, poor fools, without knowing that crucial tidbit of information about what they were buying.

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/08/01/a-little-touch-of-harry-in-the-night/

 

Saturday night, standing between the trolley witch’s cart and the wand maker, surrounded on all sides by charm and wonder that was the world of Harry Potter, I couldn’t help recall how I had come to be there.

The first time I ever heard of Harry Potter was nearly two decades ago. John had been reading an article that mentioned complaints about some “overly-masculine” book from England, where children characters still punched each other.

Some months later, I walked into Barnes and Nobles, and they had a display showing a rather charming book cover. The title of the book had the boy’s name in it. It reminded me of Encyclopedia Brown, Tom Swift, and other books John had loved as a boy. I called him over and showed it to him. His face lit up. “That’s the book I told you about!”

The title was: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Doesn’t the cover even look like one of those old boys adventure books?

The title made me smile, because it reminded me of the Philosopher’s Stone (Little did I guess that it actually was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, only they’d dumbed it down for Americans.)

“Let’s get it.”

We read it to each other on our Christmas trip to John’s mom’s. We LOVED it.

It was entirely enthralling. It had the cheer and the wonder of a fairy tale, but the concreteness of the modern—or at least semi-modern day. There was a lonely orphan boy and a talking snake. A friendly giant who told the lonely boy that he was a wizard. (Even today, that scene brings tears to my eyes, every time I reread it.) There was a magical boarding school with moving staircases, cruel professors–though no more cruel that the real professors at the boarding school C. S. Lewis attended, and a Forbidden Forest.

What more could the child-like heart of a fantasy fan desire?

Read the whole thing. The column, and, if you like, the script of the play.

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Lamplighter’s Ideal Election

Posted August 1, 2016 By John C Wright

My lovely and talented wife has a new column over at Arhyelon:

www.ljagilamplighter.com/2016/08/01/the-ideal-election/

This is the most interesting and unnerving election that has happened in my lifetime. Unnerving for several reasons.

When I was young, my parents were very thoughtful and idealistic people. They instilled in me a wish to see our country have a president who was as great as some of the most noble men of the past. So each election, I have searched the candidates for someone who truly believed and lived the ideas for which he stands.

Sadly, such candidates never appeared.

Until this year.

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Quote of the Day

Posted July 5, 2016 By John C Wright

From the pen of Michael Crichton:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

“In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you

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A Decline in Courage

Posted May 13, 2016 By John C Wright

This is the text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn speech delivered to delivered 8 June 1978, Harvard University.

I present it without comment: the thing speaks for itself. But I will direct your attention to one line, which is of particular weight and terror to me:

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary.

I will also utter a note not about the speech but its audience. I observe the sad irony that, before his speech, the Powers That Be among our progressive elite master class hailed and praised Solzhenitsyn as a second Tolstoy, and, after, forbore to mention him at all. No opium-addled oriental potentate lolling on his divan surrounded by eunuchs and courtiers was ever so fickle or addicted to flattery as our modern Powers That Be, whose insolent rule over us lacks the least shred of honest authority.

A World Split Apart

I am sincerely happy to be here on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and most prestigious university. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is “VERITAS.” Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on it’s pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my today’s speech too, but I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary, but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said.

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of entirely destroying the other. However, understanding of the split often is limited to this political conception: that danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is a much more profound and a more alienating one, that the rifts are more than one can see at first glance. This deep manifold split bears the danger of manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom — in this case, our Earth — divided against itself cannot stand.

There is the concept of Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Any ancient and deeply rooted, autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this category China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as compact units.

For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. It may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become a distant part of the West. I am no judge here. But as to Israel, for instance, it seems to me that it’s been the part from the western world, in that its state system is fundamentally linked to religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small, new European world was easily seizing colonies everywhere, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but also usually despising any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. On the face of it, it was an overwhelming success. There were no geographic frontiers to it. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden in the 20th century came the discovery of its fragility and friability.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious — and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of subservience, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill.

But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction.

However, it is a conception which develops out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world’s rifts, I would have concentrated on the East’s calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
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Comment Overheard on Another Blog: Civilization

Posted April 24, 2016 By John C Wright

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/04/fighting-fire-with-fire.html?showComment=1461555667194#c2058459623491693344

 krymneth                                  

April 24, 2016 8:01 PM

People mistake the result of civilization for the contract of civilization.

The contract of civilization is that you will defend it. Said defense involves being obligated to attack those who break the contract of civilization, with whatever it takes to preserve it.

The result of consistently applying this principle is that eventually you don’t have to anymore, and you get peace. (At least locally.) But this is not because you pre-commit to peace at all costs; it is because you pre-commit to defending the peace, and by doing so, often don’t have to.

The SJWs are barbarians. They lack the civilized virtues, they lack respect for their civilization, they have opted out of the contract of civilization, they hate civilization.

Those who refuse to honor their contract to defend are perhaps not barbarians… but neither are they civilized. They are some third category that our language lacks a word for since we haven’t had this kind of wealth in the past before to get this far along the post-civilization track. (“Cuckservative” is a flavor of this, perhaps, but not the totality of the concept.)

It is not a higher morality to insist on not using effective defense against the barbarians. It is a lower morality. I could make a case for it being a lower morality than even the barbarians have, though that is debateable. But that is the moral debate that it raises, not “which is a higher morality, those who effectively defend civilization or those who consider only their own moral character?” but “which is preferable, the barbarian or the one who does nothing to stop the barbarian?”

Braying about one’s refusal to honor their civilizational obligations is not a point of pride; it is a badge of shame.

My comment: brilliant. Bravo.

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