This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Against Hankins: You Can't Use Moral Relativism to Claim a Warrior Is "Great" in Any Sense Connoting AdmirabilityI woke up in a bad mood this morning. Thus I want to circle around again—like a dog to its vomit—and set out two things that really piss me off about James Hankins’s excerpt from his The Golden...
I woke up in a bad mood this morning. Thus I want to circle around again—like a dog to its vomit—and set out the two things that really piss me off about James Hankins’s excerpt from his The Golden Thread that he chose to publish in First Things: one that is full-blown fascist, and the other that is profoundly anti-Christian:
The full-blown fascist—not neofascist, merely—is this:
World War II was a just war fought by the allies in ways that were—sometimes—unjust. It is simply a lie to claim that “our grandfathers saw no crime in the fire-bombing of German cities from the air” or that “our grandfathers saw no crime in the… nuclear incineration of two Japanese cities filled with innocent civilians”. There were great efforts made to grapple with the moral dilemmas of how to fight World War II to minimize the total amount of atrocity. And there was great concern over what we were doing, inside and outside the military. We did not ignore then, and we do not forget now. More important, the only purpose of “forgetting” in Hankins’s passage here is to slide into full-blown moral relativism: because the West did not always live up to its high ideals about how to fight a just war justly, we have no standing to judge Aleksander for fighting unjust wars systematically unjustly—and that it is an “odious modern habit of mind” if we attempt to do so. Hankins has now wedged himself into the fully fascist position that large-scale war-crimes are just hunky-dory. And that really does piss me off. The profoundly anti-Christian one is this:
Let’s set out the argument:
Yes, Hankins claims that divine favor rested upon Alexander. Yes, Hankins claims that the favor of God Almighty, the Α & Ω, The One Who Is, rested upon him. For “[when] human beings… exceptionally, achieve greatness… this can only come through divine help”. And “the ancients saw [this but]… we fail to see, or… prefer not to see” it. Now people are situational. I am sure James Hankins is a good guy in the Senior Common Room. I would love to learn from him about Francesco Petrarcha, Leonardo Bruni, and Marcello Ficino. But this public presentation of himself that he has taken on—no thanks. Yuck! References:
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…##against hankins |
| ||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment