I WON'T CALL DAVID BENTLEY HART a "great" scholar and writer because I think that word in that context has been used so promiscuously that it is meaningless. I'll use the less institutional but more personal word wonderful because he provokes wonder and thinking and testing and exploration instead of the inferior form of belief based on authority. I get nervous when I see a documentary about a living person, especially one who has had very serious health problems the past year as DBH has because, being Irish Catholic, it seems to be tempting fate. I'm hoping that this isn't a summation of his life's work but an interim report.
I'd recommend listening to the whole video because it is so full of that kind of wonder provoking context and, since it's his broad and rigorous and still flexible mind, over a huge range of topics. He gives the most intelligent and interesting advocacy for baseball over goalpost sports I've encountered as well as a brilliant defense of his book which has had a huge influence on me, That All Shall Be Saved. I'd concluded years ago that the reactionary Catholic Thomist Ed Feser was nuts but I hadn't been aware of how pathological his attraction to violence was from my voluntarily limited exposure to him.
The reason I decided to post this video and recommendation was something he said at about 1:02:09 in the context of his relationship with those who attacked that book and the idea of Christian universalism in general but which I think is entirely relevant to our current and disastrous politics.
But the people who who have the the brains to see the problem with what they're saying but have somehow made themselves not see it out of just party loyalty, they're the people that frighten me most because something tells me that in every every despotic regime in history. Those are the people who actually ran things the ones who not the, you know, not the lunatics not the wounded but the ones who had the intellectual resources to know better but who had argued themselves out of the out of it.
Anyone who wants an explanation of the rational margin of the Republican-fascist caucuses in the House and Senate during Trump II and especially the Republican-fascist majority of the Supreme Court will probably find that is about as good a one as you can get. What makes a Chuck Grassley abandon the anti-Soviet line of the Republicanism he has lived in his entire life to hand over the control of the United States to the KGB thug Putin through a morally degenerate and monumentally stupid man? What makes a physician like Bill Cassidy cave into Trump putting the degenerate anti-vaxx-anti-medicine huckster Little Bobby Kennedy in charge of American health?* It is the fact that for Republican-fascists their Party Loyalty is as extreme and distorting and perverting as the doctrinaire Thomists Hart addressed right before he made that remark attribute what a normal, non-pathological person would recognize as diseased and perverted human thinking to God.
Though it is one of the best and most interesting such videos I've seen in a long time I will make one criticism of it. The choice to have banal background music during the entire thing at times was so distracting from what was being said that I kept thinking it would have been an entirely better movie if they hadn't had much if any music in it at all. I hope they will release a version of it where that junk is removed.
* I won't put Susan Collins in that category because there literally is nothing more to her than her partisanship and her career, once in a while voting the right way because she can dupe those who reject Republican-fascism but who are convinced by the Republican owned media in Maine that "she's different." She has no core values apart from that. She is entirely cold-blooded.
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