The natives apparently believe Denmark is a great place to live. They’re probably still relieved they weren’t taken over by Norway.

By way of contrast to my Abolition post below, note the links, one to a poem, in this post by Frank Wilson.

From C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, which I found in full on the Columbia University’s Augustine Club website:

Propaganda is their abomination: not because their own philosophy gives a ground for condemning it (or anything else) but because they are better than their principles. They probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next lecture) that valour and good faith and justice could be sufficiently commended to the pupil on what they would call ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ or ‘modern’ grounds, if it should ever become necessary. In the meantime, they leave the matter alone and get on with the business of debunking. But this course, though less inhuman, is not less disastrous than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’.20 The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

In the thread for yesterday’s award post, Susan points out Betsy’s Page, which leads me to Betsy’s latest post about a hero at Virginia Tech, Professor Liviu Librescu. “My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Librescu’s son, Joe Librescu, told the AP today by phone from Tel Aviv. “Students started opening windows and jumping out.”

From our Omnibus desk–it has come to our attention that some BwB readers have been encouraged, inspired, and provoked to deeper or more diverse thought. We don’t quite know how this could happen, and to the extent that anyone anywhere might be offended by this alleged provocation, we sincerely apologize. Specifically, to Sherry and Kathryn, the bloggers of BwB apologize for spurring your thoughts.

By way of penance, we have been asked to link to other blogs which have provoked our thoughts over the past few months. This would be an reasonable act, however, we don’t think. At all. The thought fairy shuns us (she has even stuffed thistles in my ears when I have considered thinking). We avoid even shallow thought whenever possible, which in our experience has been about 98% of our blogging lives. So we ask for mercy. In asking for mercy, we beg you, the unfortunate readers of this blog, to recommend blogs which have inspired you to further mental activity. Perhaps, the JunkYardBlog or the Blue Crab Blvd, The Thinklings or World Mag Blog. Don’t be shy. Tell us which blogs have provoked you.