The vulgar herd

 One ass pisses, the rest piss for company.

-- Roger L'Estrange

Does a spring pour forth from the same opening fresh water and brackish?

 Why the **** does everyone swear all the ******* time?

 

The mind which wrote this essay is a busy ditch, for which unsurprisingly the old concept of the vulgar is unimagined country. Accordingly, when it tires of being crass it is capable only of infelicity:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A nodding beam or pig of lead,

May hurt the very ablest head.

 

-- Alexander Pope

The golden mean of equanimity

He laughs at all the vulgar cares and fears,

At their vain triumphs, and their vainer tears;

An equal temper in his mind he found,

When fortune flatter'd him, and when she frown'd.

-- John Dryden

Oswald Spengler: The opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar

Pride and quietly borne poverty, silent fulfilment of duty, renunciation for the sake of a task or conviction, greatness in enduring one's fate, loyalty, honour, responsibility, achievement: All this is a constant reproach to the "humiliated and insulted".

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), p. 94.

Mark the ruins

 

 

 

 

Now wasting years my former strength confound,

And added woes have bow'd me to the ground:

Yet by the stubble you may guess the grain,

And mark the ruins of no vulgar man.

-- William Broome (1689-1745), translator of parts of Homer's Odyssey for Alexander Pope

On the origin of "The West"

"What is Europe?" is an interesting question.

Old it certainly is, and we conservatives tend to think of Europe as the center of everything as a consequence of a long historical development, especially in the wake of the rise of America as the western outpost of "The West" to become the leader of the free world. But from the beginning, obviously, it was not so, but how?

The Greek mythology put the navel of the world, the center, at Delphi, to which east and west came to consult the famous oracle. From this mythology Europe specifically was first associated with the west conceptually from the simple geographic situation of the oracle's position beneath Parnassus to its west, as first expressed in the "Homeric" Hymn to Pythian Apollo, perhaps dating to as early as the 6th century BC:

"Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said:

'In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.'”

And so we "of the west", of Europe, are so because the Greeks originally said so.

The Romans were the first westerners to acknowledge their debt to Greece, and they demonstrated it in so many ways, but chiefly through imitation of Greece's literature and art, the surest form of flattery. Through conquest of Europe they spread that sense of debt to Greece to all the peoples of the continent, and beyond.

That is why we still feel the pull of Europe, despite all the forces arrayed against us seeking to break its spell over us. But the center is really Greece. If we want to be stronger as the people of The West, we ought to take a cue from those old Romans and commit ourselves anew to imitating the best ourselves, just as the great men of the Renaissance did. And one can do it in English, too, simply by immersing oneself in the authors which formed the basis of Johnson's Dictionary, for example. It's what I do everyday, just to anchor myself to the best of the past in order to make the best a part of my too often sorry, vulgar present.

A social Darwinist dangles a preposition in defense of materialism against feminism, with a dash of Freudianism thrown in

Some choice! Would you like the bullet in your head, madam, or in your heart?

Here:

[M]ediocrities never lack admirers among the Second Sex, who, having very little judgment, are naturally taken with the vulgar world’s appearances. Women are by nature very willing and eager status whores, although certainly this ugly truth is not something that any man wants to believe, least of all the conservative Christian, who is happy to make “a victim” out of a shameless whore-on-the-payroll like Holly Madison. In women the ordinary man is looking for a mother figure whom, however, he shall also sleep with. From a moral point of view, man has throughout his savage history been an essentially evil being. Shaped in response, woman finds that the proverbial “nice guy” is the last thing she craves. In the face of evil, woman thinks, “He is worthy.” “Nice guy,” in her subtle vocabulary, is code for wealth, and, God willing, a way to philistinism.

When there is no God to inform reality, your only choice is servitude to the distortions of full-throated ideologies.

Reza Aslan doth protest too much: Even saying he responded "in a derogatory fashion" vainly tries to put a shine on the vulgar turds he tweets

Here . . . but also here where you'll find he has quite the habit of unleashing a veritable shitstorm of vulgarity.

Well, he did convert back to Islam from Christianity.

He did steal the idea of his so-called PhD thesis from S.G.F. Brandon.

And he did eat human brains.

Reza Aslan. Profane. Aggressive. Confrontational. Disingenuous. Kleptomaniacal. Mendacious. MUSLIM.

For CNN, he's perfect.

Catholic George Weigel says Charlie Hebdo is as corrosive of decency as the jihadists are destructive of order

The Holy Trinity by Charlie Hebdo's Luz

Quoted here:

Issue after issue, Charlie Hebdo mocks, not vice and folly (which are fair game), but many people’s most deeply held and cherished beliefs, including their religious convictions. I won’t describe its cover cartoon lampooning the doctrine of the Trinity after the Catholic bishops of France had opposed so-called “gay marriage;” if that cover was not pornographic, than the word “pornographic” has no meaning.

In the world of Charlie Hebdo, sadly, all religious convictions (indeed all serious convictions about moral truth) are, by definition, fanaticism—and thus susceptible to the mockery of the “enlightened.” But that crude caricature of religious belief and moral conviction is false; it’s adolescent, if not downright childish; it inevitably lends itself to the kind of vulgarity that intends to wound, not amuse; and over the long haul, it’s as corrosive of the foundations of a decent society as the demented rage of the jihadists who murdered members of Charlie Hebdo’s staff.

Spengler on 'Womanish Love of One's Neighbour'

From The Hour of Decision, 1933:

"There is one other thing that belongs of necessity to a ripe Culture. That is property, the thought of which causes delirious outbursts of envy and hatred from the vulgar-minded. Property, that is, in the original sense: old and permanent possession, inherited from forefathers or acquired over long years by the heavy and devoted work of the owner and cherished and increased for his sons and grandsons. Wealth is not the mere background of superiority, but, above all, the result and expression of it, a function not only of the way in which it has been acquired, but also of the ability needed to shape and use it as a true cultural element. Let it for once be said outright, though it is a slap in the face for the vulgarity of the age: property is not a vice, but a gift, and a gift such as few possess. For it, too, is the product of long training through generations of distinction; occasionally it is acquired in families that have worked their way upward - by self-education on a groundwork of sound and strong race-character, but practically never by original talent alone, without some precondition of educated environment and past example. It is not a question of how much one has, but of what one has and the way in which one has it. Mere quantity as an end in itself is vulgar.

"One can have, and will to have, property as a means to power - this is a subordinating of economic successes to political aims, and it affirms the ancient experience that money belongs with leadership in war and State. This was Caesar's conception when he conquered and plundered Gaul, and that of Cecil Rhodes when he got the mines of South Africa into his hands in order there to found an empire after his own heart. No poor nation can have great political successes, and so long as it regards poverty as virtue, and riches as sin, it does not deserve any. This was the fundamental though only half-conscious meaning of the old Germanic expeditions by sea and land, for with the booty acquired, ships were built and followers enlisted. This type of will-to-power is hallmarked by a royal generosity. It is the opposite of greed and miserliness and equally remote from parvenu prodigality and womanish love of one's neighbour.

"But this is beside the point. I am speaking of property-owning in so far as it implies the tradition of a Culture. It signifies inward superiority, it marks a distinction from whole classes of people. Not much is needed: a small well-preserved homestead, a worthy craft reputably practised, a tiny garden bearing evidence of cultivation by loving hands, a miner's spotless home, a few books or reproductions of classical art. The point is that these objects should be transformed into a personal world, should bear the stamp of the owner's personality. True possessions are soul, and only through that soul Culture. To estimate them by their money value is, however you look at it, either an incomprehension or a desecration. To divide them after the owner's death is a sort of murder."