The Long View

Today in Roman History

Perhaps it's official now: the airship has become the cultural sign for parallel universes and alternative history. I was struck by this in this week's premier of the FOX science-fiction drama Fringe. The device is very handy; you can switch a scene from AH Washington DC to our Washington DC in an instant just by deleting the zeppelin flying past the Capitol dome.

I use the term "zeppelin" generically: the airships that serve as cinematic signs do often try to incorporate features of the sleek vessels currently under development, but rarely the more exotic ones. Signs must be familiar enough to signify, I suppose.

Again, so far these things are largely imaginary, which may be all to the good. The periods of history when airships are conspicuous tend to be very odd.

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The nations were under judgment again at First Things this week. Can Christians be patriots, we are asked in a series of postings, and how can the advantage of a single nation be preferred to the universal good of mankind, eh? Not that the nations came off badly in these essays: R.R. Reno offers a reasonably sunny, Thomistic view of patriotism, which of course was also Fr. Neuhaus's position.

There is a point that I may have mentioned previously, but which seems to me to be routinely missed in this kind of discussion: in a democracy, the ordinary person is not simply a subject, or for that matter a contractual client of Leviathan. When we consider what we are obligated to render to Caesar and what to God, we must consider that we are Caesar. Governments have a duty to promote the public good, and citizens have a fiduciary duty to support that project, in rather the way that the board members of a corporation have a duty to foster the success of the policies they have agreed on.

The eclipse of this principle from politics is the signature defect of the babyboomer era of libertarian diversity.

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The principal defect of the First Things site, incidentally, is that the audio on one of the ads embedded in the top-page is set to "play," so that when the page loads a voice says: "Congratulations: You've Won!"

No, you haven't. Take it down.

Now.

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Just to show how little I know, let me confess that I had expected Benedict XVI's recent visit to Britain to be the Battle of Seattle in full canonicals. Instead, at least as far as I could tell from the time-delayed side of the Atlantic, the events went off without a hitch, and even the protests were reasonably good natured. For a wonder, Benedict actually managed to say complete paragraphs of his ideas, rather than just soundbites, where a mass audience could hear them.

As several observers have noted, Benedict was politely insistent on his role as the minister of the Petrine Ministry, which in Catholic theology is the interpretation to refer to the papacy of the Biblical texts saying that Peter is the rock on which the universal Church is built. You must imagine my surprise, therefore, when Benedict arrived at Lambeth Palace, where he was greeted by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. They repaired to a large and ancient library, where they exchanged words of greeting. As the pope sat a little behind him on a small dais, the Archbishop ended by expressing the hope for unity among the denominations in a Church "founded on the apostles and prophets" with "Our Lord Jesus Christ as its cornerstone." Then he turned around and asked, "So how do you like those apples, Fritz?"

A zeppelin could be seen through one of the library windows as this exchange occurred, but most of it happened in our timeline, too.

Regarding the religious reason for the papal visit, the beatification of John Cardinal Newman, I must observe that my first contact with his ideas was entirely negative. I went to a Jesuit high school, where one form of punishment for disciplinary infractions consisted of the student copying out by hand passages of Newman's writings. In later years, I found Newman worth reading, but some time was necessary for that first association to wear off.

We had corporal punishment too, you know. Probably it did less damage.

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I have mentioned before in this space that I have a long review up of C.G. Jung's Red Book. I bring it up again just to note that the book impelled me to reread Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Jung himself acknowledged was a model for The Red Book, at least in some respects.

I have read quite a bit of both Nietzsche and Jung, but only now does the penny drop. Quite a lot of The Red Book develops ideas found in Zarathustra: the ego as the self's sockpuppet, the growth of nonconscious evil as conscious good becomes more refined, and of course Nietzsche's age of the Overman seems to rhyme with Jung's impending Aeon of the Individuated. And then here is this bit from the section "On the Way of the Creator" in Zarathustra:

Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself. And your way leads past yourself and your seven devils. You will be a heretic to yourself and a witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and a villain. You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!

(Translation by Walter Kaufmann]

That sounds more than a little like a course of psychoanalysis conceived as a series of confrontations with the archetypes. Instead of writing books, maybe Nietzsche should have just charged people by the hour to hear him talk about his ideas. That was often the practice in the ancient world, where we often know the ideas of philosophers only from their students' notes.

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Speaking of the ancient world, President Obama is looking hourly more like Gaius Gracchus, though we may of course preen ourselves on the fact that our modernity is less brutal than its Hellenistic counterpart, and that this business is now handled through election and civil law suits rather than mob violence and proscriptions. The reforms of the Gracchi may have been self-interested and even vindictive, but nothing but irony flowed from the successful conservative reaction. It will not be different this time.