Astrology talks a lot and says nothing

 

 Trifling futility appears in their signs of the zodiack, and their mutual relations and aspects.

 

-- Richard Bentley

But it never occurs to Theodore Dalrymple that you have to become hollow before you can be stuffed

 

 

 

 From Theodore Dalrymple, here:

From thinking about the number of taxidermists a society needs, it was a short step to wondering about the nature of human need itself. It may be that I dearly want a stuffed owl or fox in a glass case, as so many Victorians appear to have wanted (for hardly any bric-a-brac shop is complete without a moth-eaten owl in a glass case), but could I be said really to need one? ...

 

But then again, I don’t need the vast majority of what I want, and therefore all the activity of the people required to supply me with it (and all that billions of people want but don’t need) is unnecessary. In other words, the vast majority of human effort is futile, and Ecclesiastes got it right: All is indeed vanity. Nothing is more vital to the continuation of our system, therefore, than the willing acceptance of triviality and futility. They are what make the world go round. There is no getting off the treadmill, and taxidermy is a metaphor for our existence. To put it in contemporary British vernacular, mankind is stuffed.


T. S. Eliot (The Hollow Men, 1925):

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Trump "supporter" Peter Thiel has it exactly backwards: Our economic decline is a symptom of our cultural decline

Peter Thiel tonight at the Republican National Convention, already being quoted here at the libertarian-friendly Real Clear Politics:

Fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.

Back in 2010 Phyliss Schlafly clearly expressed in the wake of the battle against Obamacare how it is precisely cultural degradation leading to the decay of the family which results in the enormous costs destroying the American economy. The truth is that limited government cannot exist without social conservatism. People who won't limit themselves cannot produce it, just as gay people cannot produce the next generation.

While Thiel's sincerity is questioned on psychological grounds, real conservatives recognize that the project of making America great again is futile apart from moral renewal.

Perfect freedom eludes us

From Carol Zaleski on Samuel Johnson, here, who with fine turns of phrase has captured the humanity and wisdom of the man who navigated the divide between pre-modern and modern man more heroically than any English writer before or since:

'No writer has more convincingly described the failure to “scheme life,” the near futility of hygienic self-improvement. Not piety alone, but piety weathered by illness, disfigurement, financial worries, marital difficulties, overwork, and hereditary melancholy (to the point that he feared madness), as well as his bungled attempts at self-discipline, made Johnson skeptical of the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy. He was a kind and courageous man (notwithstanding his well-known combativeness in debate), full of charity, whose setbacks inoculated him against spiritual pride.'

You can't take the Jew out of the apostle to the Gentiles: "Don't walk like Gentiles walk"

Don't walk like an Egyptian

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.

-- Ephesians 4:17