Un-reason

What are the limits of the human sanity? Lately I've been asking myself this question over and over. What tells us apart from the unreasonable man, the madman. What is the grasp every individual actually has on reality?

Human life is full of possibilities. We are faced with a myriad of choices, we are born under the most variated conditions, people under the same conditions do different things with their and it is very hard to tell for sure what is the outcome of a certain character and a certain upbringing. Yet, I believe human nature is a data that cannot be ignored. We are the sons of Adam, daughters of Eve, we are capable of the most wonderful things God enabled us to do so we could give Him glory, we are also capable of following our enemy and committing the most horrible crimes. As we think about these possibilities we are confronted with the hypothesis that whoever is choosing how to act does so because of their reason led them to do so in pursuit of an end.

Even the most despicable monster knows how to operate in the world in order to achieve his ends. Therefore, it is not reason that lacks the criminal at most cases, but moral character. It isn't the capacity to calculate his actions and their operation in reality in view of his ends, but the ultimate ends he seeks with those actions, that determines whether those actions are praiseworthy or reproachable.

However, what happens if one fails to perceive reality as such, what is ones grasp of reality isn't as firm as most people would have it. If we are locked inside ourselves, helpless victims of our disturbed senses, how can we snap out of it. Of course some people are different since childhood and do not recall ever knowing the world in any other way than their own distortion of it. What disturbs me is the thought, frightening indeed, that man may loose his reason. How does one looses one's sense of proportions, his God given capacity to judge in a practical manner the events that surrounds every one of us, the ability to respond to kindness with kindness, rage with rage, and so on. What kind of devilry spawns feelings most disparate out of thin air inside man's hearts, causing violent reactions over trifles?

I have experienced the brief kiss of such madness on my already burdened brow. That is why I ask in desperation how to prevent the disgusting event from ever happening again. I would be most comforting a thought, that of being able to put myself above such dangerous misconceptions of the mind. How is my own consciousness going to tell apart reason from madness? That is worth a lifetime of study and prayer.

Consolation

About five days ago I have finished reading the book of Job. The text on chapter 19: 25-27 is one of the most famous passages of the book. And rightly so, since it has a powerful poetic impact, and a suggestive reference to the last days of this world (although that issue is very controversial, since the original passage proved to be of very difficult interpretation). Whether it was intended or not, the passage makes us think of our end in this world, and about our present life in it.

“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that as the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God, whom I will see for myself, and whom my own eyes will behold, and not another.”

The character’s story is well known to the educated public (maybe not, but I still live – in my mind – on a time in which educated people should at least have some knowledge of the Bible) and Job’s sufferings are indeed many. Out of his despair he says that amazing passage, full of a hopeless hope, trust beyond desperation.

It is clear to me that the present times are times of despair. The western world has long left the principles that made it great. It is now drenched in godlessness. More surprising, the godless people find that insulting the belief and the believers of the one true God is a fairly amusing pastime. Others make their entire careers based on the propagation of the non belief, which is a belief itself, but pregnant of folly, because it is a belief in nothing. Indeed the materialists, the fundamentalist atheists, the hedonists that see nothing beyond themselves are all of them mad, but claim to speak in the name of reason. Odd, but not surprising. This is a time of crisis, after all.

When faced with this situation, one can do like the person in the Psalm 11:3 and ask: “When the foundations are destroyed, what can the godly accomplish?” We lack foundation, as a civilization, yes, that’s evident, but only because we refuse to see it. In such times it is absolutely important that we put our faith in God, and say that even dead, even destroyed; we will see God stand upon the Earth to judge. We will see His glory nonetheless.

However, that is a constant yet distant hope. We must live and die for it, but sometimes we cannot be like Job and take comfort in it. Our suffering is indeed great if we truly care about those who are yet left to be saved; those who would see us vanished only because we tell them they’re sinners, just like us. They have even tried to destroy sin in order to sin without guilt.

They haven’t succeeded. We bear witness to their deeds as we know others will bear to ours. We hold on to the truth and stand by it, in spite of the rejection we feel, the sense we no longer belong in this world. All of this is a great cause for anguish. Once again one is led to the word of God, for Christ says: “In the world you have trouble and suffering, but take courage – I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33)

Therefore we must walk humble, ashamed of our sin and our condition (not better than anyone else’s), and proud of our savior, the one who conquered the world, who defeated death, who lives in glory and is coming for us. If we cannot believe that much, we are no Christians.

A bit about conservatism and democracy

It has been my pleasure, now that I have come to the United States of America (more specifically the city that gave origin to the longest running soap opera in history) to gain some small familiarity with the work of a very important intellectual, in the good sense of the word, which has been of capital importance to the conservative thought and also to conservative politics over the last decades. Of course I'm talking about Russell Kirk.

Dr. Kirk's "Conservative Mind" is the book in question, and I'm constantly surprised to see that the intellectual history of conservatism is filled with greatness, much more than I could have ever imagined, given my Brazilian education in the humanities (mostly a mix of godlessness and leftist propaganda). Not only that was surprising, but also the fact that many conservatives, as shown by Dr. Kirk, defended that democracy was not the only and best form of government thinkable, but also showed that in some ways democracy is a shortcut to tyranny.

The main idea is that the unchecked democracy is a sure road to a chaos of legislation regarding the most trivial matters, the necessity to consult the public opinion and to enforce it against good sense, all of those leading to disorder in society. The people (the sovereign people, if you wish) ends up looking for the first man or group clever enough to promise some sense of direction in exchange for obedience in every way.

This kind of anti-democratic thinking was something to be loathed when I was in college. Both law and philosophy professors (I'm a Law graduate who also studied philosophy whenever a chance appeared) abhorred the idea that anything else was possible, and rapidly reminded us of the three hundred or something terrorists arrested and killed during the military dictatorship in Brazil (of course I'm pretty sure that the terrorists that escaped to Cuba got to kill their share of people too, since that regime killed more than one hundred thousand people). That was so automatic that I never saw anything remotely different from democracy as less than murder.

One begins to wonder about such things when one gets in contact with the philosophers and try to make out their reasons for one or the other position (democratic or anti-democratic, that is) and the results of their work. Plato is one of the best examples of how one begins to question the validity of democracy. He was born during a time of social instability and soon he witnessed a political crisis in Athens, precisely the home and cradle of democracy. He saw as the democratic ideal had a propensity to the fostering of tyranny. His political ideas were the result of his disappointment with the rule of the majority and his perception that the people should be ruled by the best, not by the mob.

That kind of elitist thinking is rather odd to the modern ear, because of the argument for equality, which is so unquestionable nowadays. However, our experience shows that equality is a fallacy, or better, it only applies in the context of the Christian equality before god: "I am a debtor[the apostle Paul owes the gospel, that is] both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish." (Rom. 1:14). An equality in every other respect seem more like a plan of the devil to pervert the equality willed by God. It is obvious that the idea that all can be equal in most respects, when there are so many differences as there are people, is madness.

When Plato rejects equality, he suggests that some people are fit for the government, other for the arts, other for commerce, and so on. One should know oneself before believing to be able to impart some of his or her wisdom to society on every possible matter proposed. This kind of order in society requires that people be honest with themselves and with others, in a way that is very hard to believe today. The modern man honestly believe (because of the equality lie) that he is entitled to every benefit and every exercise of power possible in a given society, and gets rather frustrated when reality tells him otherwise.

The conservative knows that life is not about having rights without obligations, that privilege comes with responsibility, that men are not equal and thy should not wish to be, for that would be tyrannical. It's realistic, it's human, it fits. It's not that democracy and conservatism are incompatible. As long as democracy can be checked by prejudice and the accumulated wisdom of experience, as well as a distaste for sudden changes, the two of them can live side by side. But only because the conservative will be alert to any kind of derailment of democratic power, any exercise of that power that tries to enforce itself too rapidly or to deeply into the body politic.

I mourn for Brazil as i think of such things, because most people are being fooled by demagogic democratic rhetoric, mainly because, it is flattering for the people to hear that it has power, even when it is only the power to install chaos.

Image:"Democracy .. a challenge." Illinois WPA Art Project. Work Projects Administration Poster Collection (Library of Congress).

Ana Vidovic

This, my friends, is Ana Vidovic. Some of you may have heard of her, some of you may not, but it is very likely we'll hear a lot about her in the years to come.

Why?, you may ask. Mostly because she is not only obviously beautiful, but also one of the most gifted guitar players I've had the pleasure to listen to. She has received a great number of awards at a surprisingly young age, she was invited to study guitar in the USA with the celebrated Manuel Barrueco (even because,by that time, she was already well known in Europe), her technique is quite impressive and she looks great on video, what more can I say?

At her website: - www.anavidovic.com - you can check her presentation at the Kennedy Center. She starts playing Bach, very competently, I should say. It's a very good recital for anyone interested in getting acquainted with the lady's guitar.

It is very refreshing to see someone like her on the scene. Not that I don't love to see Julian Bram's bald head going up and down as he leans over the lute, but there is something exciting about this young performer who can deliver great serious classical music in a sexy red dress (once again, look for her Kennedy Center performance). She doesn't seem vulgar, but elegant, even though I can't help thinking she could be one of those bond girls from eastern Europe. A actually hope someone decides to invite her to be a bond girl... Now, enough with the jokes. I mean only to compliment Miss Vidovic. She is an accomplished artist at a very young age, already recording and touring a lot; it is a pleasure to be able to use this space to recommend her art to all guitar lovers that happen to come by my blog. That would be all for now.

Holly Cole and Gray Skyes

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

-T.S. Eliot



It’s pretty lonesome to be the guy who walks around carrying the weight of the world on his pockets. You’ve got to have really big pockets too. This wandering around, not knowing what to do, and not knowing what’s going the outcome of the struggle between the forces of your laziness and your will to do something meaningful is a very hard activity and, at the same time, no activity at all.

To make it all the more depressing, the sky is as gray as my disposition. I face the everyday task of being nice, smile and nod to everybody as a way of expiating my petty little sins. It’s not so unpleasant as it is dull. When you take upon yourself the task of being nice as a discipline, everything becomes rather gray. But I suppose the whole nice business has become part of my nature anyway.

There is one good thing about today, though. Holly Cole. I’m listening to her Temptation album. I have many albums to feel depressed listening to, but this goes to my top ten list. No, I will not list the others, I’ll mention them if I ever catch myself listening to them in a sad mood, but not before that. Her low key, soft and whispery voice caught my ear as soon as I heard the first notes of Bob Telson’s Calling You, and then I was lost. She really knows how to create a blue atmosphere without screaming her pain like a cat being choked to death. That has become a rather hard to find, much appreciated quality.

Of course I don’t expect many strangers reading this weblog, even though it’s published, but I feel it’s useful to clear out to those of you who are not familiar to the Portuguese language (a very beautiful language indeed, if I may say) that I am an inhabitant of the inexplicable Terra Brasilis, which makes me no more of a potential idiot than anyone else, but certainly makes me a subject to a higher level of pretentious ignorance than people in America or the Old World are obligated to encounter. That happens because here we have a strong intellectual vice of copying the most recent nonsense that turns out to be fashionable in the supra mentioned locations (culturally speaking, of course) without much critical evaluation, as long as it helps any leftist political project. But even so, that is not what makes me depressed. It’s the bloody gray sky (Brazil is not sunny all the time, hard as it may be for some to believe) and this is one of those dreadful days with nothing to do and everything to be sorry for.

So, of course, as any guy with half a brain immersed in this “amazing” cultural environment (I’ve actually read, for example, a college professor write an article on a major newspaper defending the acquisition of transcendent knowledge of the self and the reality of the universe trough the use of mind blowing natural drug from a plant from Amazon region, like we were back in the sixties and everybody was living a life of liberation, drugs and promiscuous sex, and calling it just an alternative lifestyle) I think very highly of my own intelligence, but that doesn’t necessarily makes me right. I only do it because it’s comforting when I find that I can’t talk to most people. The best way a narcissistic like me can have a brake from all the stuff he has to put up to is to feel bad about it and write all down on paper, or on the computer (how little romantic). So, now to the point: I used to express all my malcontent in Portuguese, on another blog, but that got me tired, and I started writing about more important reflections – mostly philosophy – and lost my space to be miserable. What brings me to Prudence Regained, which was created so I could practice my English writing skills, not very good, I fear, and now assigned to bear my complaints as well.

But Holly Cole was the topic in question. Many people must have made better compliments to her talent and her ability to choose a very unexpected and yet captivating repertoire. But the sun is shining again, so this will be it, for the time being.


 

Prudence Regained

Who erewhile the happy Garden sung,
By one man's disobedience lost, now sing
Recovered Paradise to all mankind,
By one man's firm obedience fully tried
Through all temptation, and the Tempter foiled
In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed,
And Eden raised in the waste Wilderness.
Thou Spirit, who led'st this glorious Eremite
Into the desert, his victorious field
Against the spiritual foe, and brought'st him thence
By proof the undoubted Son of God, inspire,
As thou art wont, my prompted song, else mute,
And bear through highth or depth of Nature's bounds,
With prosperous wing full summed, to tell of deeds
Above heroic, though in secret done,
And unrecorded left through many an age:
Worthy to have not remained so long unsung.

Milton - Paradise Regained

Prudence once had its wings spread over us, covering our eyes from the sheer madness that surrounds us, and giving all man who could listen a true sense of order. It has been a long time since we lost that sense. The world is upside down, and not in a good way. Prudence is lost, and it is our hope that we may join forces with all those people out there who are making a true effort to regain it. I would not have paradise on Earth, it is a blasphemy to believe such thing might come from human hands, but I can hope for some relief from the firm grasp of the heathen authorities who try to push away the Kingdom of Heaven and to smother the faith of the believers. If we are to stand against such evil, we must find once more the ability to reason and discover the truth beyond all deception. Prudence is the virtue that allows a man to weigh and tell apart the sound truth and the modern discourse of desperation. And so we go in search of Prudence. May God be with us.