One of my favorite Substack writers,
wrote a column recently that concluded (paraphrasing), “we need to spend more time thinking and writing about positive things.” Well, I thought to myself; that is what I am doing here! Or, at least, am setting out to do here.It got me thinking, though: I have read a remarkable series of articles recently on Substack that absolutely got me thinking about that which is “true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy.”
by Johann Kurtz is, unsurprisingly, a blog that gets me thinking that way. Recently he wrote an amazing column about raising noble children, Raising Children Worthy of Empires. He wrote about how actual aristocratic families raise their children to be noble. The first thing that really struck me in it was the necessity of not simply challenging the children: but of their doing actual, dangerous activities.A second striking component was inculcating a sense of service for all of the families counting on their wise management. Think, for example, of a family manufacturing enterprise, that has been built up to have 40 employees. If the founder retires and passes it on to his son who is a drunk and gambler, 40 families could lose employment if he wrecks the company.
As a parent of teens, I found the whole essay to be enlightening, challenging, yet attainable. It resonated strongly with me, with echoes nonetheless within my middle-class American upbringing (thanks, Mom & Dad! and in abstentia, Gram & Gramp! and Grandma and Grandpa!).
And tying back in the Librarian’s essay, Gotterdoomerung, so what do we do when things are hard? When powerful forces are working against Good? When it is hard to see the Good prevail? Do we just stew in our doomedness?
A third critical component in raising noble children (per Kruptos’ essay) is to prepare kids for hardship, for difficulty, for challenges. Their goal is not a life of ease, but to perpetuate what they have. They stand on the shoulders of great men and women who brought them to where they are; there is a responsibility to care for and to perpetuate it.
Walking in an estate, it is easy to recognize a Persian rug as an heirloom. Here in the West, for the average family, electricity is an heirloom. The railroads are heirlooms. Even our school systems and governments are heirlooms.
I work in clean energy because I want our great grandchildren to still have the energy that makes our lives so “powerful.”
My mother works with a public school that has a significant enrollment of disadvantaged families, helping the kindergarteners to learn to read. For her, reading and thinking unlock the world.
What are the heirlooms that you want to pass on?
It seems undeniable we are standing at the end of our civilization, facing down a new 'dark age'. The barbarians are not in the gates, or even in the city, but are legislating the sack from within the doomed city's own capital, are issuing orders for rape and pillage from the judicial bench.
We then are like the monks who preserved the fragments of the Greco-Roman world that we have today. And the great question before us is, what should we protect and what should we let the Leftists burn? What is it important that our children have?
I am honestly struggling to think of anything that I have that they won't be better without. In our world I have to explain that witches are real and that hurting children is their primary purpose. I have to solemnly, and repeatedly, explain that boys are boys and girls are girls and that anything that tries to confuse the two is an enemy. I never saw myself doing those things. Never imagined that they would need to be done. And there are so many deadly enemies that it just never occurs to me to prepare them to meet. Jeff, what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy in our society to pass on? I am drawing a blank. Anything that I kept I would feel as if I had kept something devoted to destruction, something under the ban of God. Is it better to abhor the whole thing, to despise even the garment defiled by this wickedness?
Jeff- Some great thoughts here. Especially this: "My mother works with a public school that has a significant enrollment of disadvantaged families, helping the kindergarteners to learn to read. For her, reading and thinking unlock the world." Your mother is onto something. For me, it's reading, thinking, and unthinking. Hope you're well this week, Jeff. Cheers, -Thalia