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Dear Friends,
As we leave for a few days in Sonoma -- where we'll celebrate the second birthday of grandson Keelan Bailie and granddaughter Eva Marie Orsi -- I'm sending along another potpourri of things recently posted on our Facebook page.
The first is an excerpt from an online article by the British philosopher Roger Scruton:
"We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness."
George Santayana, who tended to be even more wistful than even Scruton about the exigencies of age, is the source of the famous observation: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." On that theme, the following seems highly pertinent to our situation today:
"For Hegel," writes Robert Nisbet, 'freedom is not individual rights against the state but, rather, the conscious, accepting participation in the state. Rousseau would have understood. Hegel clothes the absolute state, just as Rousseau had, in the garments of freedom; but there cannot be the slightest doubt of Hegel's dedicated belief in the absolutism, the sanctity, even the divinity of the national state's power.... It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence that Hegel's transmutation of freedom from a state that has individual autonomy and rights as its essence to one in which the true measure becomes not autonomy or independence for the individual but his willing participation in a centralized, absolute structure of power. ... We cannot overlook the ascendant and powerful place that Hegel gives to the state in distinct contrast with church, family, community, and all other component groups of civil society....
"It was the conservatives from Edmund Burke on ... who were the first to reinstate family, local community, church, social class, guild, and other forms of intermediate association to a position of theoretical importance ..."
The day after I posted this, I saw an editorial that strikingly echoed the contrast Nisbet brought out between the Hegelian apotheosis of the state with the Burkean celebration of what Catholic social teaching calls subsidiarity. It is in the context of these subsidiary associations and institutions that our relationships flourish and our humanity is given its healthiest expression. Without this "middle ground," the individual is helpless before the state, which easily and eagerly fills the vacuum. (As anyone with eyes to see can now see.)
Below is what Yuval Levin wrote on that subject in an August 6th National Review article. Everything is about politics in the months before an presidential election, but what Levin says is ultimately not about politics, and it's not about economics. It's about the conditions conducive to the flourishing of the human spirit and the achievement of a measure of genuine human happiness.
"The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between - and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.
"But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground - the family, civil society, and the private economy - to thrive in relative freedom. "
Finally, this, from an August 12th Facebook posting:
A few Sunday thoughts . . .
As summer winds down our nation will soon be plunged into an intense political debate about the future of this country. The stakes couldn't be higher, nor the alternatives starker. I personally feel a great sense of urgency about these things, worried as I am about the drift toward both moral and material bankruptcy.
BUT ... this is a fallen world, and it will remain
so after November 6th. Even when the choices are as consequential as they are this election year, there will remain the deeper question about the meaning and purpose of human existence. So, in anticipation of the political debates that soon fill the air, today I pause to take in a larger panorama.
Why are we here? What are humans for? A Christian answer might look something like this:
We are here to ready ourselves for our ineluctable entry into the infinite Trinitarian drama of selfless love, which is our destiny. To aid in that preparation, we have been placed in the midst of a family and society not of our own making, and in an utterly fascinating and materially demanding world, which provides the beauty and blessings, the hardships and responsibilities, by which the latent and sin-crippled capacity for self-donating love might be sufficiently awakened and refined so that we will experience our posthumous encounter with the Trinitarian mystery, not as a hellish annihilation of our habitual self-fixations, but rather as the fulfillment of a deeper longing which, in this life, we habitually refract into a kaleidoscope of personal aspirations and worldly desires. Those of us who - through no merit of our own - have come to recognize Christ as the model and mediator of our Trinitarian tutorial risk squandering that incomparable blessing to the extent that we fail to avail others of it.
It is too much to expect that we will take part in the approaching political debates in constant cognizance of this deeper reality, but, God willing, we can hope to regularly be reminded of it.
. . . . .
Thank you as always for your interest in our work and especially for your prayers and support. Randy and I are both sincerely grateful to you for making it possible for us to do the work we do. With gratitude and affection, 
Gil Bailie  
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