Hippie Tales - How Age Has A Way Of Straightening Bent Ideals

Anderson Phelps had graduated from Columbia in the halcyon years of student protest.  Mark Rudd had led an insurrection, ousted the president of the university, and set the course for more insistent demands for social justice.  The university remained shuttered for weeks, the New York police had to be called in, and Rudd was carted off in handcuffs as a conquering hero. 

Graduation was uncertain because of the troubles - it took many weeks for the campus to quiet down and for classes to resume, but school administrators were simply glad to be rid of the miscreants who had ruined a perfectly good school year, and graduated everyone in a truncated, dour, and impatient ceremony. 

1968 was not a year for a Columbia student to head to medical school.  It was the revolution which beckoned, one which had political motivation as its origin - equal justice, civil rights, anti-war, and internationalism - but quickly became one of social reconfiguration. Communes, love-the-one-you're-with sexual freedom, unmatched idealism, and a youthful anti-establishmentarianism spread from east to west. The old Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen bourgeois life was dead and buried. 

Andy Phelps had squatted in an East Village basement with five Columbia refugees, a happy cabal of dope, sex, and counterculture with no designs or no intentions.  That was the purpose after all - to deny the ordinary and the bourgeois.  Jobs were for the unreformed, the nine-to-five culture was soul-robbing and deadening, marriage and children were expressions of the vast wasteland not the newly-formed. 

It was a heady time.  The demographics were such that there were more under-25s than at any previous time in American history, and all of them shared the same bubbly optimism.  We can do anything, they claimed, and while some remained fixed on social justice most headed off to the woods for a communal, uncomplicated life. 

Andy went to the north woods of California, a rainy, chilly encampment far from the city, a remote outpost in the redwoods nuzzled by Pacific fog, surviving on oats, groats, and kitchen gardens, doing dishes in small towns to make money for dope and rice, making their own clothes, bringing up children, and living off the land and within the enclosure of nature. 

By the mid-Seventies most of these asylees had returned to the fold, picking up where they left off, getting advanced degrees, applying for jobs on Wall Street, and settling down; but many like Anderson Phelps clung mightily to the ideals of an alternate lifestyle, one uncluttered and uninfected by American capitalism, one of higher values and principles. 

 

He was not alone of course, and while the commune in the forest was abandoned, there were many others in more congenial places - sunnier, warmer places but still far from the contaminating influences of the city.  By his late twenties, the lackadaisical life of the old hippy days - a stoned, drugged, sexually satiated existence without purpose - became untenable.  While he had no intention of 'making something of himself', he needed an occupation, and turned to carpentry.  He would make simple furniture to exacting standards - not to appeal to the market but to satisfy his own needs to take Nature's bounty and turn it into something beautiful in a different way. 

He worked with simple tools and ample patience and satisfied his need for meaningful occupation and legitimate purpose.  He never abandoned his sense of community and counter-culture, but only conformed to a new algorithm within it. 

He kept his hair long, cropped in a pony tail; wore a long, Biblical beard, and dressed in homespun, handmade clothes.  He wrote poetry and inspirational songs of freedom and natural wisdom, lived with a likeminded woman and with her had two children. 

 

To his credit - not many men of advancing middle age were still following the ideals framed in their youth - he remained outside the grid well into his fifties; but then sick with a number of illnesses which were resistant to herbal medicine and spiritual cures, a pesky inhibiting arthritis, and an increasingly restive partner, he moved to town, rented a small apartment-cum-workshop and began to sell his tables, chairs, and cabinets at generous but fair prices. 

No one in an urban environment can possibly avoid the influences of the media and their viral effects; and so it was that Anderson joined a number of activist groups.  Activism had matured significantly since the Sixties and had diversified.  There was not only civil rights and peace to be concerned about, but gender, the climate, political refugees, and the redistribution of wealth. 

The progressive agenda rekindled his socialist passions and he became an ardent promoter of the canon. Although the new intensity and all-encompassing, obligatory fervor was far from the laid-back, let-it-be culture which he had embraced for so long, he endorsed it.  While not the firebrand he was expected to be, he was nonetheless committed and eager. 

There was, however, something unsettling about the progressive movement - a happy camaraderie that overshadowed real political purpose. Protests, unlike those against the war in Vietnam or segregation back in the day, were more like jamborees, funfairs, outings in the sun with frisbee and sack races. Protestors howled and grimaced, but had no agenda.  It was the affair that counted, the friendships, the shared passion - not the political principle. 

 

It might be surprising for those who did not really know Anderson Phelps that he kept his distance from these public fests. To them he was a communalist who valued shared lives more than individual ones, and while today's progressive community might be larger than what he had known in the California redwoods, it was based on the same fundamental principles.  

 But there was the error.  Hippie communalism was all about individualism, doing your own thing, making choices without predetermined value, acting according to individual will and vision.  All within a community to be sure, but a like-minded one, one as committed to individual freedom of expression as he was. 

The enforced community of the progressive movement, its absolute, ex cathedra canon, its fierce censorship, and its complete intolerance for straying from the straight and narrow were distasteful at first and annoyingly ugly to the last. Phelps gradually, politely but decidedly left the movement, returned to his cabinet making, and rejoined his former life. 

Living in a city - over the years New Brighton had grown considerably - he could not avoid what he saw were the excesses of the progressive canon.  It was one thing, familiar to him from his foundational past, to promote gay and transgender rights and the civil rights of the black man; another thing to flaunt their identity. It was a cavalcade, a circus, a side show, a bedeviling caricature of original principle.

It was this preposterousness, this arrogant, self-assuredness, this posturing that turned him more and more away from liberal causes.  While he abjured the excessive, reflexive patriotism of the Right, and its own nostrums of righteousness, the found its core - individualism, enterprise, and lack of sanctimony - heartening and appealing. 

What was his life as a cabinet-maker about if it wasn't about enterprise, individual effort, principle and moral craftmanship? Wasn't his desire for perfection in the name of utility, comfort, and beauty aligned to conservative values of work and its rewards?

He became a burgher but in the best sense of the term - not the burgher of the hated bourgeoisie, but a citizen prospering and enabling others to prosper within a community framework through individual enterprise. 

He still lived a simple life.  The furniture in his house was his and hand-tooled, the appointments were simple but not austere, more Shaker than stripped-bare modern. Yet for all this severity, it was a comfortable home - fireplace, bookshelves, a handy kitchen, and a flower garden.

If ever there was a man true to his principles, it was Anderson Phelps; and while it took him decades to figure out how to play them out with satisfaction and a modicum of peace, he ended up exactly where he wanted to be. 

The Rich Man, The Eye Of The Needle, And The Nobility Of The Poor - Self-Perpetuating Myths

Jack Townsend was a rich man, and his wealth was earned honestly - the American dream of enterprise, hard work, discipline, diligence, and opportunity, 

He was proud of his wealth - or rather the fruits of his labor - and felt no shame or guilt or harbored no second thoughts concerning his good fortune. His wealth was not built on the backs of the poor.  On the contrary it was the facilitator of their economic mobility.

He enjoyed his wealth and had no qualms about having houses in Palm Springs and St. Bart's, an all-expenses-paid lifestyle which was his right to enjoy.  Not the wages of sin but the wages of enterprise. 

 

His wealth, as significant as it was, was simply part of the international market moving according to fixed laws of supply and demand in arcane algorithms which in the era of Artificial Intelligence, was operating more according to their own mysterious mechanisms. 

His money was invested, and from Wall Street banks it circulated around the world - money markets, gold and silver exchanges, commodity futures, buy-outs, creative financial instruments, and the growth of businesses.  He was but one cog in an imponderable mechanism, but the thousands, millions of people like him made it turn. 

Wealth was the product of civilization and its enabler. There would be no Renaissance without the Medicis. 

 

Poverty was on the mind of former President Jimmy Carter when he talked about Jesus and the nobility of the poor, and how it was harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

The poor, Carter said, were anointed, chosen by Christ because of their simplicity, their lack of worldly temptations, and their profound faith in the Lord.  Carter spent his life in the service of the poor, building houses, speaking compassionately and hopefully about a new age of equality, and working the land shoulder to shoulder with tenant farmers.

 Lyndon Johnson saw poverty as an electoral promise – the more the poor made it out of the backwoods, the more votes would be cast in his favor. He was never a rearview president, looking back on the life that had preceded him, but a doer, and he shook down, intimidated, horse traded and wrangled with Congressional leaders to give him what he wanted – millions in cash for Texas. 

Bill Clinton was a good ol’ boy at heart and hated to leave the General Store, fishing for bass on Lake Ochoa, and hunting squirrels and coons in the foothills of the Ozarks.  He loved his people, never lost an opportunity to share tales on the porch of the general store, before and after church, and coming and going from the revival tent. 

All of them missed the point, for of course there was never any inherent nobility of the poor, nor any particular divine light shining on labor.  They were at best perfect examples of Hobbes’ aphorism about life in general – nasty, brutish, and short – consigned by poor breeding, circumstance, and inertia to the lowest rung, wondering what to do next.  In The Land of Opportunity, they missed the bus. 

America is based on many fictions and this, the nobility of poverty is one of them.  Work is simply a necessity, unequally apportioned, differentially paid.  There is no nobility in factory work, farm labor, office work, or public service.  Facts of life have no inherent value.  Economic variables even less. 

Today the question is moot.  Manual labor is reduced to a few essential industries not yet subject to robotics or Artificial Intelligence, and soon the knowledge economy will become universal.  The idea of the nobility of work or the nobility of poverty is not only a Victorian fiction but totally irrelevant. 

Catholic priests take vows of poverty, and within that narrow framework, individual priests find their calling.  Father Aloysius Brophy of the Church of the Holy Family, found the parable of the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle particularly insightful; and as he looked out over his well-heeled congregation, he spun his own parables about the dangers of wealth.  

He stopped short of indicting the rich - that they ipso facto would be denied the Kingdom of Heaven because of their wealth - but issued fair warning.  The path to riches is the road to sin. 

Despite current interpretations of Matthew (Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God) to equate wealth with sinful ignorance and a rejection of Christ's admonition to love the poor, Jesus meant only that a focus on wealth accumulation distracts from spiritual matters.  In fact his admonition was a derivation of ancient Hindu texts, the Upanishads which warn that the material world is nothing but Maya, illusion, a chimera of false promise. 

Townsend had left the church many years ago, not so much for the personalized, subjective blandishments of Father Murphy and his misinterpretations of the Bible but for its false idolatry. The Church, for all the heady intellectualism of Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas had fallen on hard moral times, grasping at divine straws while ignoring the undeniability of Darwin, Einstein, and Planck. 

The world was deterministic - random selection, indefinable quanta - and fixed mathematical absolutes.  The church had nothing to say either about the ineluctability of an aggressive, territorial, self-defensive human nature or a quantum physics which led its uncertainty principle to be applied to social dynamics. 

Today's progressivism stuck in Townsend's craw, for it was more idolatrous than the Vatican's facile, temporal interpretation of the foundational precepts of the Early Church. Progressives denied the ineradicable elements of human nature, insisted on social progress when none could be seen over millennia of successive generations, and proposed unfounded, idealist solutions to imagined problems. 

The nobility of the poor, an idea which Townsend thought was long dead and buried, emerged as a progressive precept.  There was not only something wrong with the accumulation of wealth per se, but it harmed the poor, a noble class, a worthy, equal piece of the social fabric. 

Nobility itself does have value as a moral feature of life - men and women of class, breeding, a sense of pride in themselves and a consideration for others were indeed noble - but when attached to a temporal equation like poverty, it loses potency and agency

And so it was that Jack Townsend went about his business, of clear mind and untroubled conscience, a man determined by factors beyond his control, with no destiny other than following those rules, not subject to any higher order of morality but respectful of the randomness of his success. 

Pope Leo And The Hypocrisy Of Vatican Censure - Trump, Iran, And The Crusades

 'God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war'

In this disingenuous statement, Pope Leo has conveniently ignored Catholic history. The Crusades were not just armies of the West marching to Jerusalem to rid the Holy City of its Muslim infidel; but a militant statement of the power, glory, and rightful place of Christianity in the world.  They were different from the marauding armies of Genghis Khan who rode out of the steppes with a hundred thousand horsemen, laid waste to and then conquered the world from Europe to Asia.  

They were the instruments of God’s will, and as such they would be unstoppable.  Over a period of two hundred years, three Crusades marched out of Europe to the East, each to be the final one, the scattering of Islam and the establishment of the one true church.  While the Crusades ultimately failed in their military objective (the last Christian outpost in Palestine fell in 1291), they accomplished much, much more.

Of course the Crusades were of more than religious purpose.  The popes were as territorial and power-driven as any secular leader, and the agenda of the Crusades was as least as much geopolitical as spiritual.  Nevertheless, the Middle Ages was a profoundly religious period, as close to the imperial church and Constantine as England is to the Norman Conquest, far enough removed to engineer a new, historical Church, but close enough not to have lost missionary zeal.  

The Crusades were at once cultural expressions, political and military expeditions, and the consolidation of papal power. Yet they consolidated the collective identity of the Latin Church under papal leadership; and constituted a replenishable source  for accounts of heroism, chivalry, and piety that galvanized medieval romance, philosophy, and literature.  Most wars are fought by conscripts, and the Crusades were certainly no different, but in an age of militant Christianity and unquestioned belief they were just as certainly led by true believers.

The War of the Eight Saints (1375–1378)  arose between Pope Gregory XI and the Italian city-state of Florence, which opposed papal expansion in central Italy. The war was marked by Florence inciting revolts in the Papal States and the Pope retaliating with military action. The war ended with a compromise peace in 1378, contributing to the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome.

The Holy Roman Empire - Papacy Wars primarily occurring from the 11th to the 13th centuries stemmed from power struggles between the German emperors and the papacy, particularly over the issue of lay investiture. Key events included the Investiture Controversy, where popes sought to establish ecclesiastical independence from imperial authority. Significant battles and political maneuvers characterized this period, culminating in the Concordat of Worms in 1122, which sought to delineate the roles of church and state.

 

This historical ignorance is just the most obvious reason to wonder whether the new Pope has come loose from his moorings. His deliberate omission of the intricate philosophical debates concerning the nature of just wars is nothing more than political grandstanding, a thinly-veiled criticism of the American war in Iran. 

Philosophers and theologians have always been concerned about the concept and nature of a just war.  Most believed that there was such a thing, and tried to fit conflict within larger religious and ethical constructs. In Ancient Rome, war was always potentially nefas ("wrong, forbidden") and risked religious pollution and divine disfavor.  

A just war (bellum iustum) thus required a ritualized declaration by the fetial priests More broadly, conventions of war and treaty-making were part of the ius gentium, the "law of nations", the customary moral obligations regarded as innate and universal to human beings. 

Augustine, perhaps Christianity’s most influential theologian was one of the first to assert that a Christian could be a soldier and serve God and country honorably. He claimed that, while individuals should not resort immediately to violence, God has given the sword to government for good reason (based upon Romans 13:4).

 

In Contra Faustum Manichaeum book 22 sections 69-76, Augustine argues that Christians as part of government should not be ashamed to protect peace and punish wickedness.



Nine hundred years later, another influential theologian, Thomas Aquinas set forth the conditions under which just wars should be fought:

• First, just war must be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state. (Proper Authority is first: represents the common good: which is peace for the sake of man's true end—God.)
• Second, war must occur for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain (for example, "in the nation's interest" is not just) or as an exercise of power. (Just Cause: for the sake of restoring some good that has been denied. i.e., lost territory, lost goods, punishment for an evil perpetrated by a government, army, or even the civilian populace.)
• Third, peace must be a central motive even in the midst of violence. (Right Intention: an authority must fight for the just reasons it has expressly claimed for declaring war in the first place. Soldiers must also fight for this intention.) 

New York Times journalist Jeff McMahan has written about the origins of the just war theory and how it is being challenged by the changing nature of war.  The principles of right wars and right conduct were developed and applied when wars took place between nation-states; but now that armed conflicts rarely pit countries against each other and more often set factions in opposition within a country or a region, these principles may no longer be applicable or appropriate. 

Enshrined in the principles of the Geneva Convention, such wars must adhere to the following principles:

In most presentations of the theory of the just war there are six principles of jus ad bellum [undertaking just wars], each with its own label: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, necessity or last resort, proportionality and reasonable hope of success.  

Jus in bello [conduct in just wars]comprises three principles: discrimination, necessity or minimal force, and, again, proportionality. These principles articulate in a compressed form an understanding of the morality of war that is, in its fundamental structure, much the same as it was 300 years ago.

The moral argument comes when superpowers have to decide whether to intervene or not.  Surely there was a moral case for a just war for the United States to intervene in the Rwandan genocide and wage war against the Hutus; or to send in expeditionary forces into Sudan to stop the killings in Darfur; or to have intervened far earlier in the war in Bosnia.  

Many argue that in failing to fight that just war, America and its allies were immoral.  Justness or rightness have to be defined within the context of sins of omission as well as sins of commission.

What exactly is the Pope’s ‘wage war'?  America's decision to defend itself after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and to fight Nazi aggression in Europe was a decision to wage war and few historians or philosophers have criticized Roosevelt and Truman for their decisive actions.  Israel has fought not only for its political independence but for the survival of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. 

Leo's simplistic take on conflict is directed at Donald Trump for attacking Iran. Yet from a moral perspective, the pre-emptive military removal of an existential threat - a regime determined to develop nuclear weapons to destroy Israel and threaten the United States - is justified within any of the legal, moral, or philosophical codes of behavior set down in early Christian history.   

The more the Pope wanders in the weeds of geopolitics, the more of an out-of-touch caricature of faux holiness he becomes.