Jacob Cooper’s Loyalism, or: Search your feelings, you know it to be true!

In our family, the Doane side genealogy (my mother’s side) is incredibly well-documented, but the Cooper side, really not so much. Much of the Cooper side story has been based on my own research, in large part by using the Fowler family’s documentation on Ancestry.com - from this, as far as I could ascertain, the Coopers were Quakers who came over to Pennsylvania in the wake of the Williamite Revolution and the Lockean Act of ‘Toleration’ (which notably and explicitly barred Quakers and Catholics from holding high office). However, I could not be certain of these results, in part because so much of the documentation was lost, of our family’s history before my grandfather Franklin’s enlistment in the medical corps of the navy during WWII. There was Oscar Reid, my great-grandfather, a family tradition of connexion to the Watson family through his mother, and then... well, nothing. So I recently took a Y-DNA test from Family Tree DNA, to determine which Cooper lineage I belonged to.

Well, the results have been quite interesting to say the least. My closest relative on FTDNA (genetic distance of 0 at a 37 Y-DNA marker resolution; essentially, solid proof of a common paternal-line ancestor within the past ) is a fellow from Texas who traces his ancestry back to Sarah Ann Phillips and John Calhoun Cooper of Union, South Carolina, the son and heir of Stacey Cooper, who in turn was a younger son of William Cooper and Elizabeth (or Lydia) Ann Clark of Bucks County, PA. The Jacob Cooper the Fowlers list as my direct paternal-line ancestor was also their son, and brother to Stacey Cooper. Interestingly enough, even though Stacey is listed as a veteran of the War of American Independence on the Whig side, Jacob made the ‘Enemies List’ of Whig militia Col. Thomas Brandon, making his estate legally forfeit by the South Carolina rebel government.

The family history in these records is fascinating; I am tempted to visit Union, Spartanburgh and Travelers Rest next time I’m back in the United States to see where and how the folks lived. The reconstruction of the genealogy of my father’s family has taken quite a bit of poking, especially since going back to Joseph Cooper (Jacob’s son) they were, as landless sharecroppers, little better-off than slaves themselves and essentially on the losing end of Dixie’s slave-based economic system (which, sadly and shamefully, my great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Delan Cooper fought to keep intact). One of the first things to be lost in the crushing grip of intergenerational poverty is the family history. There is little use for it when one’s family is but a season away from starvation.

They say one’s social views and views on morality are rooted somewhat in heredity; I’m still somewhat sceptical of that claim. However, it has been a pleasant surprise to discover that communitarian conservatism (that of the Loyalist streak) runs strong in my family, both on my father’s side in South Carolina and on my mother’s in Pennsylvania. Searching my feelings, I know it to be true. (It’s good to have the genetic proof all the same.)

However, my light-sabre forms still need some brushing up.

Neoliberalism and family values

What a load of crock.

So... let me get this straight. Nordic-style welfare states are bad because - in encouraging pro-family policies like paid parental leave, subsidised education, living wages and day-care, and generally making sure that families in general and mothers in particular don't lead miserable lives shuffling sixty hours plus a week between two below-subsistence jobs - they make single people feel comparatively bad about themselves?

The article itself is risible enough, using decade-old statistics to prove an utterly frivolous point in the style of a right-wing libertarian ‘gotcha’-style hack piece on the Nordic social-market model of the sort which are so popular on Reason and at the Cato Institute. But, for the record, it does illustrate clearly one highly intriguing thing: neoliberal capitalism is no friend to family values. That its defenders are actively seeking to use utilitarian logic to level life satisfaction between families and non-married childless people like this, is telling to say the least.

And I'm really not trying to be down on single people here; I've been one myself for most of my adult life. If one has not been called to holy monasticism or to the blessed life of celibacy, it really sucks. It might not suck as much in the US as I am sure it would in the Nordic countries, but I get the feeling that would have more to do with the climate. But REALLY, Alicia PQ Wittmeyer? Child support policies are bad because parents ought to be made as miserable as singles?

Well, one thing’s for sure: the next time a right-winger says that anti-capitalism is a politics of envy against the successful, all one really needs to do in response is direct them to this article. Because if Ms Wittmeyer is any indication, libertarians and neoliberals seem to do the politics of envy every bit as well as, if not better than, we anti-capitalists do.

The profane and their handlers

The Holy Feast of the Theophany was just celebrated this past weekend. We remembered on this day the visitation of the Magi to the infant Christ, and the baptism of the adult Christ in the Jordan, and the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon him from the heavens. (The dove, naturally, being a symbol of God’s peace toward man.) In the Orthodox Church – and in the other churches observing the Julian Calendar – it is a day which should be observed as holy.

However, on the 19th of January in Kyyiv, when the President of Ukraine was praying at church, a group of rioters on the Maidan were busying themselves in a profane anti-baptism of fire, using brickbats and firecrackers, throwing smoke pellets, rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police, burning busses and generally behaving like thugs – embodying the exact opposite of the symbol of Christ’s baptism. Hopefully, most Ukrainians will see the sacrilege for what it is. The literal fascists in the Svoboda Party hate the Orthodox Church with a passion, whether because it happens to be affiliated with Russia or because it stands firmly against their hateful ideology and always has.

What we in the West have to remember is that equally to blame for the rioters’ desecrations are those who bankroll them and give them moral support. That includes the members of the EU government who were all too willing to cut Ukraine adrift financially after the association agreement was signed, but who now are all too willing to split the country down the middle to get their way. And that includes Americans who are willing to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of structural adjustment just to see Russia on its knees the way it was under Yeltsin.

巧言令色，鮮矣仁！

In all of the Analects, the one group of people Confucius singled out for particular critique are those who appear to be gentlemen, who keep all of the fine points of etiquette, but who do not follow the Way in their conduct and in the proper spirit of the rites. At times, the tone of biting sarcasm comes even through the Legge translation (not used here). ‘Fine words and an insinuating appearance,’ the Master said, ‘rarely accompany kindness [1].’ Also: ‘The Yi and the Di [barbarian tribes of the east and north] have their worthy men, whereas the states of our Xia [China] are without them [2].’ Also: ‘The men of former times, in matters of rites and music, were rubes; the men of these latter times, in matters of rites and music, are gentlemen. If I had to use them, I’d follow those of former times [3].’

Confucius had a high respect for poor and low-born and seemingly-foolish men who knew the virtues and who knew the Way, but he decried and excoriated the obsequious and the presumptuous both, who were also often cruel. Confucius in this way prefigured the approach, as the other virtuous pagans and as John the Baptist did, of Our Lord, who dined with tax collectors and prostitutes and sinners, and reserved his condemnation for the legalists and false gentlemen of his day who kept the laws and even the unwritten customs exactly (but who looked down on and refused to help those who didn’t). The greatest enemies of the traditionalist are not the radicals; they are the hypocrite and the fop. The radicals always come afterwards, and they are almost always right about the hypocrites and the fops, which is how they tend to gain their sympathy when they attack traditionalists.

I have written on this blog already about the dangers of white émigrés. I now wish to address the dangers of false gentlemen, hypocrites and fops originating closer to home – the people who tend to bemoan the fall of the Confederate States as the fall of a gentlemanly culture in the United States. The most recent example I had the misfortune of stumbling upon was an article by one Stephen Klugewicz arguing that the surrender of General Lee to General Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse was a ‘watershed moment in history’ in which the Old World with its manners and nobility surrendered to the New (without either). Firstly, the entire article reeks of the sort of Stalinistic cult of personality which the Lost Causers tend to indulge in regarding their generals (and project onto the North’s attitudes toward Lincoln), with no word too fine and no appearance too insinuating to be wasted upon the god-king Lee.

Secondly, I am led to wonder in precisely which ‘company’ Lee felt it necessary to appear the gentleman. Klugewicz states that manners in their highest form – chivalry, in other words – entails the defence of the weak, to the protection of women and children, to the clothing of the poor. I agree with this in full. But Lee displayed none of the above manners to those weaker than him. As his own correspondence and newspapers of the time indicate, his slaves detested him and tried on many occasions to escape from him. He separated children from their parents – made orphans, that is, rather than ministered to them. Indeed, on one occasion he instructed his men to beat at least one of his slaves cruelly and to flay the skin from his back, and then to pour brine into his wounds. His own overseer refused to whip Mary Norris, a fifteen-year-old girl, but Lee paid the county constable to do the filthy deed, as he heaped abuse upon Mary all the while. I would very dearly hope that this is not precisely what Klugewicz has in mind when he quotes Burke about ‘[making] power gentle’ and ‘beautify[ing] and soften[ing] private society’. But – and I say this as one sympathetic in the deepest degree to both the true ideals of Christian humility and chivalry as lived out in both public and private life – if Klugewicz is holding up Lee as an example of either, can it be any wonder that radicals are so numerous who are led to mock both as rank hypocrisy?

Given the evidence of his comportment to those weaker than him, Lee was a much better example of ‘brute force’ and ‘cold reason’ at work, than any man living in the North at that time. Yes, indeed, we can carefully examine Lee’s public façade, the one which he showed to Grant – but it was ill-done to present Grant as a boor or a calculating man of no manners, when the supreme gallantry he and his government displayed to the defeated Confederates is a matter of public record. To be sure, it is character, which is what we truly ought to be concerned about when we speak of ‘manners’, is determined by how he treats those nearest to him. ‘See what a man does,’ says Confucius. ‘Look at his motives. Examine the things he finds peace in. How can a man hide his character? How can a man hide his character [4]?’

Our Lord put it more pithily: ‘By their fruits you shall know them.’

‘Perhaps in America the precipitous decline of manners began somewhat later, in a humble home in south-central Virginia, when the Last Cavalier of the Old World laid down his sword in defeat, giving way to the New World Order of centralized government, crony capitalism, and the narcissistic New Man,’ Klugewicz fawns – a man who waxes lyrical over the fine-tuned rites and music of the latter-day ‘gentleman’, and ignores the fact that men of true substance and loyalty had been driven out in a former age, to Canada and to less hospitable shores, or stayed and lost everything they had to the fervour of revolution. A revolution which the even modern-day defenders of the Lost Cause lay claim to. The fact of the matter is simply that the South up until the end of the Civil War was already a crony-capitalist entity. It was a colony made up of industrialised factory-farms, engaging in monocultures of cotton and sugar, and it was cotton which made it an integral part of the globalist capitalist empire which Britain had become in the meanwhile.

I am not someone who has any relish in what the United States became in the aftermath of the Civil War. I am no apologist for the Gilded Age or the robber barons or the railway magnates. But nor am I one who will bow before graven images or be made to flatter false gentlemen like Lee, for want of anyone better.

[1] 子曰：「巧言令色，鮮矣仁！」 (Analects 1:3)
[2] 子曰：「夷狄之有君，不如諸夏之亡也。」 (Analects 3:5)
[3] 子曰：「先進於禮樂，野人也；後進於禮樂，君子也。如用之，則吾從先進。」 (Analects 11:1)
[4] 子曰：「視其所以，觀其所由，察其所安。人焉廋哉？人焉廋哉？」 (Analects 2:10)

The radical personalism of Dr King

Dr King at the Transport Workers Union conference, 1961

Personalism is a highly misunderstood school of philosophy and ethics, and many of its leading thinkers and proponents have been likewise misunderstood. At base, I fear that when most Americans hear or read the word ‘personalism’, they are immediately tempted to think of a bourgeois liberalism, a German-accented idealism or a libertarian political philosophy which sees individuals as atomised constellations of abstract rights. But this reading of personalism would certainly be a novelty: alien to the Thomistic Jacques Maritain, hideous to the Péguy-influenced Mounier, and downright anathema to the radically anti-materialist and anti-bourgeois Orthodox lay-theologian Nikolai Berdyaev!

More insightful commentators might make the deeper and generally more correct connexion between personalism and existentialism, but it would be laughable to suggest that the person as she exists is of any great interest to Nietzsche (concerned as he was for going ‘beyond’ good and evil, and ‘over’ mere personhood, whatever each was supposed to mean) - and the monstrosity of Nietzsche’s brute-force individualism would certainly put most personalists off him, since personalists are concerned with the person as she exists, in all of her messy and inconvenient social embeddedness. There is much more for the followers of Michael Sandel to make of the personalists than there is for the followers of John Rawls, let alone for the Nietzscheans.

Sadly, there is a tendency in the Boston school of Borden Parker Bowne to over-read personalism through a German-idealist lens, but the most famous personalists to come out of the American sphere are Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. - the last of whom was a Boston personalist, the student of Edgar Brightman (himself a student of Bowne). And Dr King was not averse to expressing his personalism in radical, concrete and highly un-German ways. This was a man who could write, on the one hand:

I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. Behind the harsh appearances of the world there is a benign power. To say God is personal is not to make him an object among other objects or attribute to him the finiteness and limitations of human personality; it is to take what is finest and noblest in our consciousness and affirm its perfect existence in him. It is certainly true that human personality is limited, but personality as such involves no necessary limitations. It simply means self-consciousness and self-direction. So in the truest sense of the word, God is a living God.

And on the other, fusing these personalist ideas with those in the African-American spiritual tradition very closely mirroring Ruskin’s Unto This Last:

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Or, with equal compatibility, with such pro-labour ideas as this:

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.

Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted.

Or, of course, with outrage against the Vietnam War, as here:

This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

Or (perhaps most controversially nowadays) with a strong and almost Patristic emphasis on the traditional family, encapsulated pithily here:

The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.

Part of the reason that Dr King’s legacy evokes so much confusion in modern American political life is that he didn’t really see eye-to-eye with either organised (white) political party of his time. He would likely do so even less now, when his legacy faces co-opting both by economistic right-liberals, by retrograde old Trot militarists and by the pro-abort lobby, an ‘unseemly squabble’ over his corpse, as David Lindsay would no doubt term it. Neither major party embraces a personalist political philosophy (though arguably only the Democrats would grudgingly make a place for it), nor does either major party respect a politics at human scale.

But one can see that Dr King’s read of the personalist tradition led him to embrace a form of politics which was anti-capitalist, anti-materialist and anti-imperialist, but which was at the same time pro-union and pro-family. Dr King respected the whole person and only the person as ikon of the Almighty. Very clearly he was not an individualist, for he understood and insisted on the value of the family in upbuilding the person and of the government in protecting her and of the community (including labour unions) in joining with her to fight for justice. But also, equally clearly, he saw the danger of reducing the individual to something whose worth is to be reckoned in terms of or even comparable with the things she consumes.

I have long held that the best way to remember Dr King is to let him speak in his own words and his own voice; I still hold to that. And I hope that I have done so in a fitting way here.

Pointless video post – ‘Redemption’ by Queensrÿche (with Todd La Torre) and ‘Anyone Can Be a Hero’ by Crystal Ball

After one of the messier, more dramatic and litigious of band break-ups in 2012 (enough Blabbermouth fodder to make Tarja’s departure from Nightwish look like a downright friendly tiff by comparison), two different Queensrÿches showed up to produce two duelling album releases. It’s brutally clear who won that shootout, and it wasn’t the quicker draw. The Queensrÿche featuring three-fifths of the old crew plus Parker Lundgren and Todd La Torre cleaned house with a short and punchy release featuring some solidly retro power-metal offerings like ‘Redemption’ above. The catchy, wailing chorus line comes straight off their early work, too, as though Todd is channelling the Tate of 30 years ago. The lyrics are also quite noteworthy; Geoff Tate’s having left the band on the worst of possible terms hasn’t made the ‘Rÿche any less pissed-off at big media and big business, it seems. Definitely some shades of Operation: Mindcrime here, and not just in the twin-guitar riff attacks. Reminds me why I fell in love with the ‘Rÿche in the first place. Search and you’ll find the answer, indeed!

Speaking of catchy, Swiss eurockers Crystal Ball have serendipitously surfaced on my sonar, so to speak. This is some truly fine power-tinged hard rock, and hell if their new guy Steve Mageney doesn’t sound like the love child of Andi Deris and Thomas Laasch (just enough grit to keep things interesting) rocking out to an accompaniment who all clearly listened to ‘The Final Countdown’ one or fifty too many times. I say this with the greatest affection, by the way. ‘Anyone Can Be a Hero’ is brilliant in its elegant simplicity, an upbeat ‘80’s-style stand-up-and-be-counted arena-rock anthem that simply doesn’t get old. Dawnbreaker, from whence this song comes, is a bit more diverse in its sound, and crosses over into power metal and even straight-up ACCEPT-style ADH at several points, but they’re at their best when they stick to their hair-metal guns, cheese and all, as here. And no, I won’t be getting that haircut; thanks for asking.

Swing and a hit

From Adam4d.com.

Way too close for comfort, particularly mine. But that is how humour is s’posta work, isn’t it?