Suffering in the world

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Since we are creatures of this world, we are motivated by a desire to attain pleasure and to relieve suffering; yet since we are transcendentally-orientated creatures this desire cannot be primary.

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So long as we perceive suffering in the world - even if that suffering is just insufficient pleasure or mere boredom - then we will be motivated to end it.

Indeed, we are motivated to end suffering everywhere and for everyone for all time - simply as a matter of security.

(Because so long as suffering happens, it could happen to us - and if there is no more suffering, then we need not fear it.)

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But suppose that there was no such motivation to end suffering - either because all suffering has been ended, or because all suffering as been ended so far as we know.

What then?

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Do we imagine that when all suffering has been ended then we can shift our aspiration to higher things?

Do we really think that is what would happen?

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Is this, in fact, what we observe?

Are the societies that suffer least, those which aspire highest?

Are those individuals who are most free from suffering, also those individuals who have their sights set on the highest ideals?

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 Do we, in a word, conceive high ideals as luxury goods?

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(And what is our society's idea of higher things, anyway? Well, obviously we don't mean religious ideals, because as a society we don't believe in God, nor even the immortal soul. And spirituality without religion is just psychotherapy - so just another way of seeking pleasure; not higher at all. Like the lifestyle arts - restaurants, clothes, holidays... merely fashions, therefore the opposite of 'high'. Ummm - The Arts?  Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt - that kind of thing... oh, I forgot, we are beyond all that now; shock, disgust, subversion - that's what we like, isn't it. Not exactly 'high'. Philosophy and Science?... well, this is just getting embarrassing, we've just got rid of these and replaced geniuses with committees of sensible bureaucrats. How about having unrestrained and passionate political discussions in bars and cafes, is that it? Exploring new forms of sexuality and morality - are these the higher things? Somehow it doesn't seem right... Simmering self-loathing and slow cultural suicide? -Now you're talking! Those are the sort of high ideals that we love.)

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Or could it be that high ideals are, in some way or another, a product of suffering - or, if not exactly suffering, of a state of discontent?

Um - yes, that is right.

Isn't it?

It is our suffering that prompts us to look beyond the mundane.

(Prompts us - but does not force us.)

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Is suffering then good?

Obviously not.

As worldly creatures we are, and must be, motivated to escape suffering in some sense.

But suffering is - if not good - surely necessary in this world.

And - surely - a primary devotion to the elimination of suffering (i.e. the new religion, the new 'Christianity' indeed) is therefore not merely utopian or futile - but is actually evil.

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Repeat: although suffering is obviously not good; a primary devotion to the elimination of suffering is actually evil.

Because suffering is a prompt to look higher, to look beyond.

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I am saying that it is - not that it ought to be: suffering just is that which prompts us to transcendence; suffering that ultimately derives from the perceived insufficiency of the world.

We just are creatures who perceive the world as insufficient.

And the only way we can get rid of this perception is to kill it.

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We cannot make the world sufficient, we can only kill the perception that the world is insufficient.

But we can do that: for most of the people, for most of the time.

And that is, of course, precisely what we are doing.

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Indeed, although we are, and must be, and should not try not to be, creatures of this world; a primary devotion directed at anything of this world (including the elimination of suffering) is evil.

Our primary devotion must be The Good - the transcendental Good, a something not of this world.

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Or else we (and everyone else) might as well be dead, or never live in the first place, as the surest means of avoiding suffering...

... just as we 'put down' a suffering animal; whom we suppose not to have a soul, and whose role is to serve humans and/ or be happy - and if the animal can no longer serve humans nor be happy and is suffering, then it might as well be dead

- so we kill it.

And anything else we suppose not to have a soul - from humane motives - to eliminate suffering.

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Here is the hard bit.

The real sin here is not in the killing, whatever its scale, but in the reason for killing.

A soul-less society of soul-less individuals (that's how we perceive ourselves), killing soul-less entities as and when... necessary; because it is rational to kill soul-less entities when they suffer, or will suffer, or may cause suffering...

Note the paradox.

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From Father Smith's sermon - The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy

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I observed some of you. But do you know what you are doing? I observe a benevolent feeling here. There is also a tenderness. At the bedside of some children this morning I observed you shed tears.

"Do you know where tenderness leads? Tenderness leads to the gas chambers.”

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“These are strange times. There are now two kinds of people. This has never happened before. One are decent, tenderhearted, unbelieving, philanthropic people. The other are some preachers who tell the truth about the Lord but are themselves often rascals if not thieves.

"What a generation! Believing thieves and decent unbelievers! The Great Depriver’s finest hour! Not a guilty face here! Everyone here is creaming in his drawers from tenderness! But beware, tender hearts!

"Don’t you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers.”

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"Never in the history of the world have there been so many civilized tenderhearted souls as have lived in this century.

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been killed.

" More people have been killed in this [twentieth] century by tenderhearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together."


The Thanatos Syndrome, by Walker Percy, 1987

***

When 'it' happens, it won't be reported in the mass media

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Things begin in one specific place at one specific time - and spread-out from there - things don't happen simultaneously in many places all at once.

(If they seem to, then this is because all these things have a common cause: a cause in one particular place and time).

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When 'it' happens, whatever 'it' is - when things turn, or we cross a threshold - it won't be reported in the mass media.

Indeed (if the past is any guide to the future) we probably won't even know about it, until much later (if at all).

And we may not 'know'.

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(The birth of Jesus was not exactly front page news across the Roman Empire).

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Indeed, 'it' may already have happened - whatever it is.

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But the first to know will probably be those who are least orientated to the mass media, or official communications.

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Imagine a world...

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Without suffering and with nothing but pleasure; when each person was (somehow) independent and able to extinguish immediately all incipient bad feelings and replace them with happy feelings.

A world where we personally would be distracted from pain and gratified to the limit of our comprehension 24/7 - either in reality or in virtual reality - it does not matter since we would not know the difference.

A world where we would be so gratified that we would cease to worry about, cease even to know, what other human beings might be doing - or even whether there were any other human beings, really.

We would each be truly independent and autonomous - freed from care.

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Whether we lived forever in this state of euphoria, or whether we lived a few moments and died and were utterly extinguished, would not make any difference at all - since there would be no dread of extinction - it would not interfere with our state of gratification.

Indeed, it would not matter whether we were born or came into existence, really.

We could be asleep all the time, or we might never have lived in the first place.

Because if we were not born we would not know what we had missed.

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There would be no motivation to change, there would be no motivation.

As long as there is something - even if just boredom - then there is motivation to escape it. So there would be no boredom. There would be no discontent.

We would not want anything - any glimmer of discontent would be eased and displaced.

No yearning. All yearning soothed-away, tranquillized.

We would not want to escape, there would be nothing we could imagine that we could escape to: in fact, we could not even formulate the idea of escape.

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Does this prospect strike you as paradise on earth, or are you made uneasy - perhaps even repelled?

Is this heaven or hell?

(Some would say that this is literally hell - if you want it, you will get it.)

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The only reason for being uneasy or repelled by this vision (as surely you, like me, must be?) is if you believe in the soul - and believe in transcendent reality - a reality which is the true human destiny.

If you are uneasy or appalled by this imagination then you are rejecting humanism (atheism, agnosticism) you are rejecting the ideals of secular politics (whether left or right) - you have a yearning for transcendence - for something not of this world.

Is this yearning a delusion, or is it significant?

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Smoking and creative accomplishment

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Smoking cigarettes very probably causes lung cancer (although I am not so sure about arterial and heart disease - the effect size is so small that it could easily be due to incomplete control of confounders), shortens life expectancy, and I personally find it aesthetically unpleasant - and I have never smoked regularly.

The supposed dangers of passive smoking are almost entirely invented (dishonestly and/ or incompetently) - other-peoples' smoke is very unpleasant, but the only real health danger of other-peoples' smoke is the acute one of people who have for example asthma which is triggered by smoke.

But maybe smoking - specifically nicotine - has psychological benefits for some people - maybe it boosts creative accomplishment?

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Take a look at this video about the design team who built the Mosquito - probably the best aircraft of the 1939-45 World War

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/educational/watch/v1406840b8zsDG5Y

In every shot there is one or more of these conservatively-dressed design-genius chaps smoking-away like mad, on pipes and cigarettes.

Many of the most creative intellectuals were not just smokers, but heavy smokers - CS Lewis and the Inklings spring to mind, Crick and Watson's RNA Tie Club, Einstein and his pipe, and of course Gandalf and Saruman.

If we were to compare a collection of creative intellectuals 70 years ago and now the main difference would probably be that around 1941 they would have been surrounded by a dense cloud of tobacco smoke.

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Smoking (especially cigarettes, because they deliver nicotine so rapidly) is of course addictive; but was smoking among intellectuals entirely a matter of addiction?

Unlikely, because nicotine is an indirect psychostimulant which probably has significant effects on boosting drive and energy and perhaps clarity of thinking - via both direct cholinergic (nicotinic) and indirect dopaminergic routes.

There is strong evidence that nictotine both prevents and treats Parkinson's disease, and perhaps also Alzheimer's disease.

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2008/11/sub-types-of-depression-and-self.html

Indeed, the mind sharpening effect of nicotine is very obvious, and is similar to but different from that of caffeine.

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Could it be that the decline of smoking among creative intellectuals may have contributed to the decline of genius?

Could it be that we have sacrificed a human accomplishment for a longer life span?

Maybe.

If so, it is probably now possible to get the benefits of smoking - i.e. the nicotine - without the carcinogenic harm - i.e. the smoke.

***


NOTE: Thanks to WmJas, who has found some data on smoking and creative writers posted at:

http://wmjas.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/smoking-and-creativity-a-few-data-points/

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How can individuals make a difference?

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The fact that all large modern institutions are thoroughly corrupted by political correctness and secularism (including all major churches) implies that pursuit of The Good is now restricted only to individuals (or small - probably informal - groups) - which in turn leads to a consideration of how individuals can - potentially - 'make a difference'.

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1. There is a 'fake' way in which individuals can be argued to make a difference, and that when an individual is arbitrarily taken-up by a large and powerful interest group and used as a propaganda weapon.

This applies especially to designated victims (real, or contrived - it does not matter much) - of whom Rosa Parks is perhaps the best known example in the USA; although there have been many others throughout the West.

Clearly an individual becoming a tool of establishment power is not really what is meant by an individual 'making a difference'.

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2. Individuals who truly make a difference do so by their example, which changes the lives of many other individuals.

Examples might include the Holy hermits of 'the desert' such as St Anthony of Egypt, St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne or St Seraphim of Sarov - people who sought and attained ascetic isolation for many years during which they developed their spirituality to an extremely high level, before returning to the world to teach and inspire.

While of course these figures can be (and are) later used for propaganda purposes (with all the selection and distortion this entails) - they are primarily examples, and individuals who were originally sought-out (rather than promoted) by people recognizing their special intrinsic qualities and responding to word-of-mouth outside of 'official channels'.

Other examples can be found in less perfectly-achieved  forms, and also among types of non-religious 'creative genius' - albeit many/ most creative geniuses in the arts and sciences were bad examples in many/ most ways other-than their specific creative gifts.

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So, yes indeed, individuals can 'make a difference' - and the real examples of individuals making a difference are usually quite easy to distinguish from the fake - at least in the early stages of their making a difference.

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Of course, there are also individuals who make a difference-for-the-worse - and there are plenty of these, and some have made a truly enormous difference for the worse: quantitatively far-outstripping and of the measurable effects of Saints, and operating with extraordinary rapidity.

But while building is slow and incremental, destruction is swift and facile - evil geniuses are pushing at an open door.

One sure way to discern the difference between real/ good and fake/ evil individuals-of-influence, is that the real and good individuals who make a difference only do so after many years of disciplined struggle. This is necessary - albeit not sufficient.

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As a rule; any individual who makes a large and rapid difference without prior years of struggle is either a fake tool-of-propaganda or else 'demonically-inspired'.


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The 're-entry problem' for artists and scientists - Walker Percy

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From Walker Percy: Lost in the Cosmos, 1983.

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"In the age of science, scientists are the princes of the age. Artists are not. So that even though both scientists and artists achieve transcendence over the ordinary world in their science and art, only the scientists is sustained in his transcendence by the exaltation of the triumphant spirit of science and by the community of scientists.

"It is perhaps no accident that at the high tide of physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great revolutionary physicists — Faraday, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein – were also men of remarkable integrity and exultant wholeness of character, of generosity and benignity. Compare the lives and characters of the comparably great in literature at the same time: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway.

"With the disappearance of the old cosmological myths and the decline of Judeo-Christianity and the rise of the autonomous self, one the study of secondary causes, the other the ornamental handmaiden of rites and religion, were seized upon and elevated to royal highroads of transcendence in their own right. Such transcendence was available not only to the scientists and artists themselves but a community of fellow scientists and students, and to the readers and listeners and viewers to whom the ‘statements’ of art, music, and literature were addressed.

"But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by the problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What do you do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table.

"The only exception to this psychic law of gravity seems to be not merely the great physicists at the high tide of modern physics but any scientists absorbed in his science when the exaltation of science sustains one in a more or less permanent orbit of transcendence – or perhaps the rare Schubert who even during meals wrote lieder on the tablecloth …

"But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by writers and artists. They, especially the later, seem subject more than most people to estrangement from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solitariness, depression, violence, and suicide."

***

Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos is a very deft and thought-provoking piece of philosophy in the jokey guise of a self-help book. I bought it after reading a recommendation from the superb Roman Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft.

The above passage made a big impression on me, because throughout most of my adult life the 're-entry problem' was perhaps my greatest concern.

Like Einstein, 'I went into science to escape the intolerable dreariness of everyday life' - and the same applied to English literature.

And indeed I went into science and literature just early enough to catch the tail-end of their transcendence (at the same time as Walker Percy was writing this book) - an era now utterly gone.

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In science, what I craved was precisely that complete world of transcendence achieved by the physicists at the 'high tide' of their subject, or by biologists a little later - I hoped that I could live 'in' science pretty much all the time (at least as a seamless, continuous background to life).

I achieved this state only briefly, from late 1994 up to around 2000, when I pretty much lived and breathed evolutionary theory - but only by cutting myself off from the mainstream; and at the cost of developing a carapace of indestructible pride which would - I felt sure - be validated and rewarded (some time soon, and in unforeseen ways) by worldly status, success and security.

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I had earlier achieved a similar but briefer state when I was studying English literature (and philosophy, informally) full time 1987-8 - in other words I lived 'in' literature as scholar, critic, essayist and (sort-of) poet (cringe...).

For a while, sleeping and waking life seemed to be conducted within this transcendental bubble of literature.

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But such states can only be sustained against the ennui of habituation by increasing doses of pride and neophilia - both of which are ultimately destructive of transcendence.

The re-entry problem always gets you.  Percy lists (and explains) the attempted solutions:

(1) reentry uneventful and intact, [not to feel any contrast between the transcendent and the everyday]

(2) reentry accomplished through anesthesia, [chemical assault on the conscious brain - by drugs or alcohol]

(3) reentry accomplished by travel (geographical), [keep moving - keep exposing oneself to the shock of the new]

(4) reentry accomplished by travel (sexual), [drown oneself in sexual pursuit and gratification]

(5) reentry by return, [give up transcendence and return to roots]

(6) reentry by disguise, [keep up an act of worldly satisfaction until it becomes habitual]

(7) reentry by Eastern window, [dissolve the self in Zen indifference]

(8) reentry refused, exitus into deep space (suicide),

(9) reentry deferred, [solitude, utterly cut-off from the mundane]

(10) reentry by sponsorship, [sponsorship from God, transparency before God: the religious solution - a seamless integration of work and spirituality]

(11) reentry by assault. [political confrontation with the mundane - the life of an uncompromizing and persecuted dissident]

But of course none of them really work except (10) because the problem is insoluble in this world - and the sponsorship by God is extraordinarily difficult for the isolated, nihilistic modern intellectual.

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This-worldly transcendence of the kind I sought in science and literature (and which Einstein achieved, pretty much) was only available to an elite few, and as a temporary phase in the breakdown of Western society - a breakdown from transcendence as other worldly to the current situation where all forms of transcendence as seen as delusional - and the only 'solution' to the reentry problem is regard it as an artifact of an obsolete world view.

Modern scientists and literary scholars have no re-entry problem, because they are only and wholly engaged in the 'intolerable dreariness of everyday life' - from which they distract themselves whenever possible.

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Or, more accurately, modern scientists and literary scholars have nothing but a reentry problem, since they do know what it is to transcend the everyday and mundane.

(And if they do know from experience, then they regard that experience as a delusion to be explained-away; not as a really real state.) 

And the failed solutions of the re-entry problem are, merely, the standard strategies of modern life.

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The City of God: The Church, or Constantinople?

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In the lives of most Christians past and present, The Church is grossly deficient, and we must make do with the best that can be managed: which may not be very much.

Some denominations are much better than others at insisting-upon - sometimes eliciting - specific approved behaviours from adherents.

This might happen for many reasons: one common way of getting adherents to behave well is by being selective (excluding non-virtuous people, or only attracting the well-behaved to join), another is by having strict and explicit laws backed up by punishments (sometimes draconian) for transgression. Strictly, therefore, the behavior of adherents may have nothing to do with the specifically religious aspects.

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However, the ideal of The Church varies between denominations, and I think these ideals can be compared and evaluated.

It is instructive to imagine how the world would ideally be organized (ideally according to specific aspiration) if a denomination or religion had its way.


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In the Catholic Christian denominations, the ideal is sometimes termed The City of God -  a situation actualized in Heaven - but seen only incompletely and in corrupted form here on earth.

There are two main concepts of the City of God - Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.

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The RC concept of the City of God comes from Augustine of Hippo (St Augustine to the RC Church), and it refers to the ideal Church.

It is the Church - ruled by the Pope (Vicar of Christ) - which is seen as the earthly representation of the Heavenly order.

The secular world of 'politics', ruled by the monarch or by some other form of government such as democracy - is excluded from the City of God.

The Western Catholic tradition is therefore dualistic: Church and State, spiritual and secular - Pope and Monarch

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The Orthodox concept of the City of God comes from Eusebius (early church historian and biographer of Constantine), and refers to the city of Constantinople.

It is the City - ruled by the Emperor (Christ's Vicegerent on earth) - which is seen as the earthly representative of the Heavenly order.

The Eastern Catholic tradition is therefore monistic: a single hierarchy with the divinely ordained monarch at its head and incorporating the Church and State, spiritual and secular interwoven within it.

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I regard the Orthodox ideal vision as superior, since it includes the whole of human society in microcosm; whereas the Roman Catholic City of God explicitly excludes the secular world, and introduces a division into all human affairs.

This dualism, I believe, is the ultimate case of the thin-ness, the two-dimensionality which I feel in relation to the Roman Catholic church - even in my most idealistic imaginations of how it might be. I feel this even in its most passionate and eloquent advocates (even in such 'rounded' and earthy advocates as Chesterton and Belloc; even in such earthy places as Spain and Italy).

There is, for me, a dry-ness about the RC priesthood which I cannot prevent myself from noticing - this even comes through in the Gregorian chanting. It may be, often is, sublime - but always, for me, incomplete - even in its aspiration it excludes so much of human society.

Of course the dualism brings advantages: in practice the Western Church is less corruptible by politics, because more independent of it.

Furthermore, the Western Catholic tradition has a higher level of achievement (and a higher level of potential achievement) in the relatively-autonomous intellectual sphere of universities, systematic theology, philosophy and leading on to science.

Nonetheless, this achievement comes at the price of a fundamental societal disunity which - once introduced, has tended to increase and evolve until we get the micro-specialization of modernity and - indeed - the secularization of society, including the Church itself.

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By contrast, when I read accounts of Byzantium I feel a straining towards an idea of organic completeness - or rather of Heavenly completeness.

I feel that the City of Constantinople in its ideality (an ideal which was indeed passionately and devoutly believed by its inhabitants for hundreds of years) was indeed a representation (incomplete and corrupt, inevitably) of Heaven on earth in a way that is beyond the scope of the Western Church - because not (in a sense) desired by the Western Church.

I even feel that this difference can be felt between otherwise very similar countries such as Western Spain and Eastern Greece - this is a question of impressions, not facts. For me the Greek Church feels a part of the social whole in a way that the Roman Catholic Church does not, and probably could not be, in Spain.

I feel it also in the contrast between Orthodox chanting and Gregorian chanting - the (various types of ) Orthodox chant have a much greater appeal to me, a more complete and rounded spirituality which does not separate the spiritual and secular. A glimpse of Heaven as a City, not as a Church... 

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(All this is a nebulous impression which I could not back-up with data, nor would I want to - nonetheless I think it is true. At any rate, it is something I cannot help but perceive.)

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If intellectuals are to blame - what should intellectuals do?

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If, as I have said, intellectuals are to blame for the current malaise

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/03/jim-kalb-mini-discussion-about.html

...then what should intellectuals do about it all?

What, in particular, am I - an intellectual - doing writing this blog to be read by other intellectuals?

What, then, do expect myself and others actually to do!

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1. To understand. Which entails being honest - the iron law of truth-speaking and truth-seeking. If you can't then shut-up and say nothing; never defend or rationalize dishonesty. Equally - discern beauty and virtue as best you can and seek them - don't excuse ugliness or moral inversion.

2. To refrain, if possible - by-hook-or-by-crook - from making things worse.

3. Not to attack or undermine nascent possibilities of improvement arising from non-intellectuals (on what are likely to be speciously pseudo-intellectual grounds or from intellectual special-interests or - especially - from intellectual snobbery).

4. To seek to become devoutly Christian, as best you can (as best I can). If nothing else, to pray.

5. That's about it...

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Jim Kalb mini-discussion about tradition

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@  http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/node/2900

James Kalb is perhaps the most insightful of current writers on political correctness, Liberalism, multiculturalism, non-discrimination etc. And I would regard myself as working towards the same general goals as him.

But of course I would not bother blogging on these topics if I believed that JK was completely right!

The link refers to a mini-debate we had at his blog over the last couple of days.

*


JK: "The problem is multifaceted and multilevel and the response must be so as well."

BC: "My feeling is that if the response 'must be' multifaceted and multilevel, then there will be no response - or, at least, the response will be ineffective.

"And this is indeed the probable future.

"If there is to be an effective (or even partially-effective) response it must be simple and immediately comprehensible.

"Simple responses are indeed simplistic, but that is the nature of politics, in my opinion.

"Complexity in policy is - de facto - either a distraction or merely self-contradictory, rather than truly complex."

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Jim advocates a complex, hence intellectually-driven, approach to the situation.

My own view is that intellectual approaches have failed, indeed intellectual approaches are now the main problem and are a red herring. 

Intellectuals have proved themselves unworthy, have engaged in treason (of the clerks).

Intellectual approaches have created political correctness and relentlessly expanding bureaucracy: have destroyed art, music, literature, science, the military, and are currently destroying the world economy.

Yet by and large, in the vast majority, intellectuals are perfectly happy with their approaches and merely suggest that they need more money, more autonomy, and a little more time.

On the contrary, I believe that is anything is to be salvaged it will come from a non-intellectual approach: from holiness rather than reason (insofar as these can be contrasted) - or, as a stop-gap, temporary fix, from common sense.

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Alienation, not-thinking and animism

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The characteristically modern malaise is alienation - detachment from the world, lack of a sense of involvement with life, a sense of unreality.

This has replaced the conviction of sin which dominated though most of recorded human history, and still dominates most of the world.

Modernity has escaped from guilt into meaninglessness.

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To escape from alienation is difficult, since it is not a misunderstanding of the modern world, but on the contrary a realization of the actuality of the modern perspective, following it through to its correct implications.

So alienation is commonest among the most thoughtful, most reflective people - not so much among the ignorant or instinctive.

Alienation is therefore an aspect or attribute of the nihilism of modernity.

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In a society which regards the soul as a fiction, which regards the individual as radically isolated (and where solipsism seems as irrefutable reality to many - that humans have nothing to do with each other except at a crudely material level of satisfying or frustrating desires) - the compelling urge to escape from alienation seems to dominate everywhere and in everything.

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There is only one way to escape from alienation while continuing to embrace modernity (atheism, soul denial, humanism, materialism etc) - and that is not to think about it.

The first is to learn not to think about it, to be unreflective, to become immersed in busyness at work or in the home, in the media - news, sport, soaps, fashion - in the minutiae of life, absorbed in hopes and plans for the future, absorbed in powerful emotions such as hatred or lust, absorbed perhaps in arts or crafts or science or maybe even creativity of some kind.

Or when immersion is impossible; to use analgesia, pain killing maneuvers - principally serial distraction, to hyperstimulate oneself and to become (deliberately) addicted to this hyper stimulation - to make oneself (deliberately) a hyper-stimulation junkie - such that life is a matter of seeking and finding, and planning to seek and find, situations where the pressure of stimulus is such as to displace alienation. These situations may themselves be unpleasant - like arguments, abuse, violence, self-harm, nasty drugs that make you feel bad - but they prevent the boredom which leads to alienation.
 
Another method is to obliterate the type of thinking which leads to alienation - to become and remain intoxicated, in one form or another.

Another is to train oneself in unemotionality; to be (or aim to be) cool, cold, indifferent - psychopathic. Such that intellectual or analytic perceptions do not trigger emotional responses. To look upon the world with a hard eye - invulnerable.

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Another is to 'regress' - to adopt (in actuality, or much more often in imagination) the unalienated state of childhood or some imagined simpler society - a world of animism.

This is how the world was for almost everyone before they were spoiled by nihilism - a world when we had an immortal soul, and so did our toys and trees, a world of bogeymen and ghosts, a world where our parents knew what we were doing and thinking even from afar - a world of proximate terrors (often) yet ultimate coherence. A world focused around ourselves yet not solipsistic because it seemed that everybody knew who we were and everything was somehow related to us and we were part of some kind of plan (a world, that is, of paranoia - it its technical sense).

An animistic world in which we were engaged - where there was real joy and real misery, and always meaning and purpose.

Yet to embrace animism is to reject modernity.

If animism is real then we have left modernity; if animism is imaginative we have encapsulated imagination from socio-political life and made it irrelevant to life - at best a recreation or escape (and that indeed may be valuable - even vital).

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So - alienation is an inevitable and rational consequence of modernity and its soul-denial, its nihilism.

And - given the assumptions of secular humanism - there are no escapes from alienation except these two: not-thinking about it, or 'regressive' animism.

*

Freedom-from, freedom-to - fashion as god, fashion-makers as primary

*

In modern public life there is a weird dance between regarding individual peoples desires as overriding every other consideration yet being infinitely plastic and changeable.


So that sometimes it is argued that if people want to do X then society ought 1. to allow X and 2. to make X possible

- yet it is also argued that if people stop wanting X and want Y, and then later Z

- they should 1. be allowed to change their mind and 2. society should facilitate whatever it is they have changed their mind to wanting.


(Except of course when people want something which society currently regards as wicked - something that is supposed to be a result of the disapproved forms of prejudice rather than the approved forms.)


*

Like sexual behaviour. At the same time society is supposed to form itself around individual people's expressed sexual preferences, yet these preferences are (for each individual) open-ended and labile.


At the same time sexual preferences are regarded as if they were permanent and constitutive of a persons identity - such that it is immoral to ask them to change their sexual preferences, because this is tantamount to attempting to destroy their individual essence, to destroy their identity.


Yet at the same time, sexual preferences are regarded as evolving, labile, open-ended - it is seen as an individual's right to change sexual preferences, to seek new sexual preferences. As if sexual preferences were utterly trivial, superficial, like this-year's fashion.

*


So sexual preferences, and other motivations, are treated like a fashion that carries moral authority, while it lasts.

Who is in charge of this process?


Why - the people who set the fashions! (whether they be sexual, political, moral, scientific, legal - whatever.)


In sum - this is a freedom for propagandists to have their propaganda treated as a mandatory yet open-ended fiction.


*

This is a consequence of trying to make a negative ideal (freedom-from) into a positive idea (freedom to).

But of having a metaphysical perspective which denies any essence - which regards humans as soul-less puppets that are actually moved by social manipulators, and puppets that ought to be moved by social manipulators.

*

Modernity has no answer to the question of what people want and what they ought to have.

Sometimes modernity (e.g. economics) acts as if people want what they choose.

Sometimes modernity acts as if what people say they want, or 'say' in the want in the context of a range of forced choices - as in a questionnaire - which is then subject to averaging...

Yet at the same time people are allowed, entitled, to change what they say - indeed people must change what they say in line with evolving socio-political imperatives.

*

So fashion is god.

What people choose and what people say are manipulable. If these are supposed to form the motivational basis of society then who is in charge?

The propagandists and those who define the choices.

Those who make the fashions have ultimate moral authority.

*

So a perspective which purports to place in the individual (his 'rights', motivations and desires) at the centre of politics - but which in theory and in practice strips the individual of essence (because the modern human has no soul, officially - and is a merely socio-biological collection of attributes)...

actually makes the individual irrelevant, a pawn for propagandists.

*


Note - having written the thing, I recognise that these arguments are plagiarised from C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition3.htm

*

First cousin marriage: good, bad or indifferent?

*

I was recently re-reading my favourite Charles Williams novel The Place of the Lion and noticed for the first time that the lovers (Anthony and Damaris) are first cousins.

In the novel, the fact that they are cousins is treated as a 'good thing' - it seems to imply that there is a kind of familial love between them, as well as an erotic love.

In Tolkien's world, Hobbits often marry their cousins - and this also seems to be regarded as 'a good thing' on the whole.

Yet this matter of cousin marriage (or sex) is in fact highly controversial around the world: ranging from societies where cousins (even double cousins - on both the mother's and father's side) are more-or-less forced to marry, through a mildly pro-cousin marriage atttude such as that exemplified by Charles Williams and Tolkien, though indifference to cousinness as an irrelevance to marriage, to first cousin marriage being actually illegal (in many US states).

This is a quite remarkable - but almost un-remarked - range of opinion.

Anthropologists have shown that some societies more or less depend on cousin marriage for their cohesion (a cohesion based on genetic relatedness - the cohesion of 'clans'); while for other societies - especially more modern societies - the cohesion of families is a direct threat to the cohesion of the larger state.

Of course there are concerns (or pseudo-concerns) about 'in-breeding' being a bad thing; on the other hand there is some evidence that a degree of inbreeding is beneficial to biological fitness.

I simply flag this up as a fascinating but almost-ignored divergent aspect of social morality: is the ideal spouse a cousin, or anything-but-a-cousin?

*

Does anybody, nowadays, have an integrated personality?

*

When comparing successful writers from two generations ago - the likes of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis - with a near-equivalent from now - JK Rowling - I am struck by the fact that Rowling's personality is highly fragmented and grossly inconsistent by comparison with her predecessors.

So that Rowling's world view in the context of the Harry Potter books is grossly at-odds with her personality as expressed in interviews etc; while Tolkien and Lewis are 'all-of-a-piece' - all their works in different genres, their letters and interviews and biography, very obviously amount to a self-consistent and integrated world view.

What I find interesting is that Rowling's world view in the Harry Potter books is both self-consistent and also broadly consistent with Tolkien's and Lewis's world views (although relatively simplified) - and it is the 'public persona, the non-literary world view which is so sharply at odds.

*

Indeed it is very characteristic of modernity that people have fragmented, unintegrated world views.

The world view in their work is inconsistent with their world view as private individuals; their political views are inconsistent and changeable, their motivations do not match their explicit aspirations, and so on.

This is unsurprising in that modern life is (or was) composed of specialist social systems, each with different rules and languages - and these tended to evolve away from each other. So that science focused almost exclusively on Truth - which became operationalized in terms of replicable facts and approved methods; art became focused on aesthetic factors - which became operationalized in terms of theory; the media became focused on attention grabbing - and so on.

And of course Tolkien and Lewis both regarded themselves as 'dinosaurs' - out of step with the fragmented and specialized world of modernity which surrounded them, throwbacks to a much earlier (pre-Renaissance) style of thinking and being.

And they were pretty much the last representatives of that style - except for some few people operating in enclosed and detached religious groups (I am thinking of Fr Seraphim Rose), who do not impinge on mainstream culture.

*

On the other hand, political correctness represents a kind of re-integration of world views: so that all the social systems are currently being re-integrated in terms first of being made consistent with political correctness, then being motivated by political correctness.

So, for instance, arts and sciences are no longer either aesthetically-motivated/ truth-motivated but these are now subordinated to the motivations of political correctness.

One might expect that this would lead to a re-emergence of the integrated personality - except that political correctness is itself grossly incoherent, continually changing, and indeed oppositional and reactive rather than propositional and substantive.

*

Where good work is still being done, as with the Harry Potter novels, then this is always non-politically correct insofar as it is good.

Yet, at a personal level, the penalties for being non-PC get greater and greater - so we still see (as with JK Rowling) gross fragmentation of personality; such that the ability to hold-by and be-adept-in multiple incompatible ways of thinking and world views is now adaptive, sophisticated - almost 'common sensical'.

So that if JKR expressed views views that were consistent with the world view of HP, she would be a social pariah - a hate figure - and the novels would be suppressed by one means or another. So the best that she can do (whether intentionally or by instinct) is to smuggle the world view out in the form of a novel (as, indeed, a kid's novel), hidden by a veneer of PC - and to ensure that never at any time does she follow through the logic of the novels into her public persona.

*

Of course there is a price to pay.

JKR comes across as immature, vapid and evasive in her interviews and essays, compared with the tremendous adult solidity and gravitas of Tolkien and Lewis.

But she is in good company. Everybody in public life comes across as immature, vapid and evasive: because that is precisely what they are.

Worryingly, almost everybody in private life now comes across as immature, vapid and evasive - because it has become habitual (it has had-to become habitual, since the cost of failing to be dis-integrated is so high).

The triumph of political correctness is that we always feel asif Big Brother is watching us. A social grouping of unselfconscious truth seekers and truth tellers such as The Inklings would be almost impossible nowadays.

*

(I should point out that Tolkien and Lewis are vastly more intelligent and knowledgeable than Rowling, or indeed than anyone else in modern public life - and Tolkien more intelligent than Lewis, Lewis more knowledgeable than Tolkien - but this is not mainly a matter of intelligence and knowledge. It is primarily a matter of partly-trained and partly-habitual honesty; and underneath that a grounding in reality. Reality regarded as real.)

*

The consequence of all this is that moderns are incapable people. At most they can operate with technical adeptness within small, grossly-incomplete and hermetically-sealed specialist worlds - they are dogmatic technicians.

But most moderns are even worse than that because they lack technical expertise of any kind - this being continually stopped short or diverted by the over-riding application of political correctness - so that even very simple causal chains of a purely technical nature become disrupted whenever they get anywhere near human applicability (or else their human applicability is denied, and the activity thereby neutered).

And this is why modern humans cannot solve any problems anymore.

All they can do, all we can do, is reframe things so that they are no longer perceived as a problem: we simply redefine threats as - what is the jargon? - opportunities.

Transcendental inversion, again 

*

And such is the fragmentation of thought and the dis-integration of world views that the gross insanity of the process is concealed.

Fragmentation leads to more fragmentation, until...

Everything falls apart.

*

Christianity and Political Correctness - what I think and what I don't

*

Christianity cannot be used - and the attempt should not be made - as a means to the end of good secular government.

(For instance, Christianity should not be used as a means of making people behave well.)

The word 'good' in good government, indeed, has a quite different meaning from a Christian and a secular perspective: in that salvation is the aim of Christian government while happiness/ minimization of suffering is the aim of secular government.

*

However.

Atheism is inadequate as a basis for good government - such that all secular government is unstable and self-destroying except in the short term.

(i.e. atheist government can last only a few generations, and then only by virtue of inertia from a previous stable polity.)

*

Furthermore, most (almost all) Christianity nowadays is thoroughly corrupted by worldly secular thinking - in the West this means that almost all the leadership of Christian churches are primarily politically correct (leftist, progressive) and only secondarily Christian, hence in practice work against Christianity, in one way or another.

*

So, there is need for discernment.

To find the small amount of real Christianity among a vast mass of corruption and error and lies.

And to prepare, if possible, for worse to come (prepare spiritually, I mean).

*

It is very likely that Christians (real Christians) are not going to be on the winning side in this world.

At least, things have been getting worse from a Christian perspective for such a long time, and are now very bad indeed; and much wiser heads than mine have perceived that this is unlikely to be reversed (except perhaps temporarily and in a localized way) - and indeed things are likely to get very much worse.

*

SO (what I think is that) Christianity is probably 'not a good bet', not an expedient choice, if someone is looking for power, status, influence, worldly happiness or indeed freedom from suffering.

But only a valid choice for people looking for reality (i.e. The Good: approximately for Truth, Beauty and Virtue): looking - that is - to save their souls and (perhaps) those of (some) others -

...but not a good bet for those looking to save a 'civilization', or a nation, or an ethnicity or any large grouping. Since all such are now so thoroughly corrupted by worldliness that they do not want to save their souls (not, indeed, believing that they have any souls to be saved).

*

Severus Snape 4 Lily Potter/ Evans

*

One of the many extraordinary things about the Harry Potter series is the way in which the celibate and unrequited love of Severus Snape for Harry's mother Lily all-but usurps the main plot - and forms (for a sizable minority of fans) the centre of the whole series.

In other words, for some fans, Snape - rather than Harry - is the most interesting and sympathetic character.  

This was clearly unplanned by JK Rowling - who has stated that she regards Snape as a nasty character redeemed only by his love (for Lily) and the courage which this inspires - but otherwise very deeply flawed - almost to the point of sadism.

It is a remarkable thing in a modern context that Snape should take on this role; especially as he is portrayed in the books (big nose, greasy hair, awkward loner).

*

Of course, the casting of Alan Rickman in the movies may have something to do with this, since Rickman's screen persona is intrinsically attractive to women of all ages, regardless of his role.


*

That aside; I see this phenomenon of Snape-mania as yet further evidence of the benign subterranean influence of the Harry Potter series - that Rowling has made the permanently unrequited love of an unattractive social reject (albeit one of great magical powers) for a 'popular' beauty into a morally-admirable thing for tens of millions of readers.

*

This fact is only understandable in terms of the other-worldly backstory of Harry Potter - the immortality of the soul, and life beyond death.

Snape is indeed brave in life - but from a this-worldly perspective his unyielding love for Lily can only be seen as a pitiful delusion. The fantasy life of a 'sad' man.

Yet that is not how Harry Potter readers experience it: they see Snape's love as being - not requited - but validated (or redeemed) beyond the grave.

This in the context of the biggest publishing success of the past generation!

*

I say it again: remarkable...

* 

Today's Tolkien action at the Notion Club Papers blog

*

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/02/legolas-gimli-and-key-passage-of-lord.html

*

A definition of political correctness

*

In a nutshell I regard political correctness as mainstream leftist politics post-1965.

This marked the tipping point between the left seeking equality of opportunity (meritocracy) and switching to equality of outcomes (egalitarianism),

there was a switch from the left being based on economic policy (especially the belief that the planned command economy was actually more efficient than the market) and a move towards cultural engineering via propaganda and 'consciousness-raising',

the beginning of the left's systematic dishonesty - especially suppression and demonizing of IQ research (IQ had been a leftist baby when the left was were concerned with equality of opportunity and meritocracy),

it when the left began their obsession with the Nazis and eugenics (having pretty much ignored the matter for two decades from 1945),

the beginning of a shift away from being a party representing (and funded by) the proletarian working class/ unions to a rainbow coalition of 'victims' of 'prejudice'; and so on...

*

Of course PC was continuous with socialism (or liberalism as you call it in the US), and socialism grew from atheist radicalism, that from deism and non-conformist Protestantism/ Puritanism, that from Scholastic Roman Catholicism, and that branched off from the undivided Christian 'Orthodox' Church around AD 1000 -

- so the roots of PC are very deep, being indeed the roots of modernity

(which explains why the modernizing opposition ideologies - such as libertarianism, or moderate Conservatism, or indeed any secular political alliance - cannot stop PC, and why PC will be replaced by a pre-modern, anti-modern ideology) -

...but, despite these roots, it was about 1965 when socialism clearly became fundamentally built on lies (and not merely superficially and tactically dishonest), became cut-off from the real world, and from negative feedback, became focused on process rather than outcomes:


and when transcendental inversion and the subversion of Truth, Beauty and Virtue became not just a plaything of the elite but a mass policy.

*

Another word for PC would be the New Left.

But political correctness is what the general commonsense public call moral inversion - the subversion of spontaneous human morality and its replacement with the opposite.

And this is distinctive to post-1965 leftism, which is why I use the readily-understandable term PC and try to enlarge its meaning, rather than using a more generic name such as socialism or liberalism - which includes types of 'Old' leftism from the era when socialism was merely a (mistaken) set of organizational means to the achievement of the True, the Beautiful and the Virtuous - as conceptualized by commonsense, by natural law, often by nonconformist Christianity.

The difference between - say - William Morris's utopian socialism of News from Nowhere (roughly, an idealized and secular Medieval communal society of craftsmen and free peasants), and the modern Western inverted world of bureaucratic political correctness motivated by the subversion of all forms of traditional Good, is about as extreme as can be imagined - despite their shared deep roots and tendencies.

Hence the need for a more specific term than socialism/ liberalism.

erived from spontaneous human .

*

The Good and the trancendental goods: Truth, Beauty, Virtue

*

The Good is the highest aim in a human life. (e.g. in Plato). It does not necessarily refer to God or to the Gods, but to what humans ought to do.

The Ancient Greeks recognized that The Good was transcendental, had to be transcendental - had to be something outside and beyond humans to which each could aspire (and which they might fail to attain).

*

The Good is highest, but it is hard to understand, hard to think about - and most people usually focus on three component transcendental goods of Truth, Beauty and Virtue (moral good).

However, there is a problem in splitting up the Good - which is that people begin to evaluate the world using separate modalities of thought.

Truth becomes the province of - firstly - philosophy, then later science.

Beauty becomes the province of Art.

*

And Virtue? Virtue becomes religion - the whole thing! - or later Virtue may become a secular ideology.

And indeed morality can become the whole of religion - such that people cannot see that religion has anything to do with either Truth or Beauty.

Morality becomes the whole thing.

In which circumstance religion (or secular ideology) becomes legalistic, inevitably.

Virtue is a matter of following a set of rules, of Laws. Virtue is reduced merely to obedience. 

*

The pursuit of Virtue, detached from its unity with Truth and Beauty in the Good - is a major pathology of Western thought

Some Christian denominations - most of them indeed, are wholly concerned with Virtue, and regard Truth and - especially - Beauty as of grossly subordinate importance.

The actual circumstances of this kind of religious life and practice may be devoid of Beauty or hostile to Beauty. Indeed, Beauty may be regarded as a snare, rather than a component of The Good.

And the same applies to mainstream secular ideologies - such as Communism, or modern liberal political correctness. They are wholly Virtue orientated, and being untruthful in pursuit of Virtue is not only tolerated but approved.

*

Creating ugliness in pursuit of Virtue is likewise approved (building hideously soul-destroying, but functional, housing for the poor; or brutal cityscapes and offices for bureaucrats - to be concerned by Beauty in such circumstances is regarded as unserious Dandyism).

To be indifferent to precise facts or to lie, and to destroy beautiful things and to create ugly environments in pussuit of Virtuous goals is indeed regarded as evidence of moral seriousness.

For such people, the truly Virtuous ought to be indifferent to such matters - their minds are wholly moral.

*

But lined up against this partial pursuit of Virtue are similarly absurd, wicked and evil partial exaltations of Truth and Beauty.

The partial pursuit of Truth leads to scientism; to the common and indeed dominating conviction that science, mathematics and the like are the only valid forms of knowledge; and that the true and dedicated scientist should pursue Truth indifferent to Virtue and Beauty - that the single-minded pursuit of Truth (usually in the form of 'facts' and technology) is indeed intrinsically virtuous, and intrinsically beautiful - so there is not need for the serious scientist (or philosopher) to worry about these matters.

*

And there is an equivalent situation in The Arts.

Beauty becomes the province of Art, and the understanding and promotion of art becomes a matter of aesthetics - distinct from evaluations of Virtue and Truth - leading to the ideal of Art for Arts sake.

That the serious artist and arts critic is indifferent to Truth and Virtue - or rather that artistic values themselves transcend such concerns- and that Art - Beauty - is (by this account) intrinsically true and intrinsically virtuous; so that any trammelling or constraint on 'artistic expression' is intrinsically a violation of truth and virtue as well.

*

So we reach, have long-since reached, a situation when the transcendental Goods have been split up and regarded as separate, regarded as amenable to separate pursuit; are indeed contrasted with each other and pitted against each other by what are de facto interest groups such as priests, scientists and artists: each claiming the high ground, each trying to subordinate the others.

*

Yet The Good is in reality a unity: that which is Good is intrinsically and inevitably virtuous, true and beautiful.

Truth, Beauty and Virtue cannot really be separated.

The Good is not attained by being virtuous and then bolting-on truth and adding a layer of beauty; nor is it attained by a narrowly fanatical pursuit of precision and reliability then surrounding it with a halo of words that claim its ultimate virtuousness and an assertion of its special kind of beauty; nor by a belief that an effective novel, poem, painting, song - created to fulfil the criteria of these aesthetic forms is intrinsically also a agent of  the highest truth and tending to a special kind of human virtue...

The situation is that the True, Beautiful and Moral are by-products of the Good - and when they are not by-products they are not good; that the specific pursuit of Truth, Beauty and Virtue asif they were distinct goals may very easily become subversive of the Good, may indeed become its opposite, have indeed already and long since become the opposite of Good. *

While this may be very obvious for the narrow pursuit of Beauty (as Art) or Truth (as philosophy and science) it is equally so of the narrow pursuit of Virtue.

*

I am stating here that the narrow pursuit of Virtue in detachment from Truth and Beauty is anti-Good  (or rapidly becomes so).

The idea of a religion focused on, based around, Virtue; and subordinating of Truth and Beauty, is a Bad thing, not a Good thing.

Virtue is not higher than Truth and Beauty.

To act as if Virtue is higher than Truth and Beauty is very swiftly to embrace the Bad - not merely the narrowly wicked (anti-virtuous) idea of Bad, but to destroy the whole capacity for Good.

The mode of thought which sees Virtue as requiring trade-offs with Truth and Beauty is at fault.

The aspiration of religion must not be Virtue, but must be The Good.

And the Good can be conceptualized as closeness to God, communion with God, as God-like-ness.

*

I have found that this is the essence and focus of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church tradition, but I have not found this insight elsewhere except as a minority view - it is found elsewhere, but in a rather tenuous, personal, and peripheral expression of spirituality - and not as the core.

Hence most Christian denominations cannot keep a hold of The Good: find it too imprecise, too slippery, to hard to grasp and hold.

Most revert to a focus, a prioritizing of Virtue: and to make this more precise they render Virtue explicit in Law.

Others (much more rarely) become almost wholly aesthetic - and merge into the Arts.

Others become too philosophical, and too systematically philosophical.

*

And The Good cannot be attained by first splitting into the T, the B and the V - and then afterwards trying to bolt them together again!

The act of breaking-up the Good irreversibly destroys that which is necessary to unify the Good. The operation of splitting is imperfect, much is destryed in doing it, somethings are left out, the analytic knife inflicts collateral damage.

The 'operation' of analyzing Good into TBV is like dissecting an animal to understand it; then trying to fit it together again and bring it back to life!

Unity of The Good is above all of these dangerous specifics.

*

Only by a focus upon The Good, as characteristic of God; and by conceptualizing Christianity as the desire to move-towards God (that is - towards the unified transcendent Good) and commune-with, partake-of God; can the partiality and distortions of the specific TBV specific Goods be avoided, and the real unified reality be (at least potentially) approached.

*

The Psychology of Political Correctness

*

['The Book' so far...]

*

Political correctness, or PC, is now pervasive and dominant in the West.

PC is not a joke, it is extremely powerful and extremely widespread – indeed hardly anybody among the intellectual elite, the ruling class, is immune – most are deeply complicit, even those who laugh at what they regard as the absurdities and excesses of PC.

(In ten years time these same individuals will be zealously defending these absurdities and regarding the excesses as middle of the road mainstream).

*

We need to take PC very seriously indeed; before it is too late.

(It may already be too late to save society, but it is not too late to save our souls, and those of others – which is more important.)

The purpose of this book is to help recognize and understand the phenomenon of political correctness as a wholesale human disaster. Indeed, once grasped for what it is, it is difficult to exaggerate the harm done by PC and the harm it will do if not destroyed.

*

Because political correctness is not merely weak in defence of The Good (roughly speaking of Truth, Beauty and Virtue); it is actively subversive of The Good.

PC not only damages societal functionality, it turns functionality against itself - to create paralysis.

It can be convincingly and correctly argued that political correctness will destroy all Western Nations and Western Civilization - I regard that as obvious and uncontroversial – but even if it did not, and whatever happens to the socio-political scene, PC is the greatest of disasters for the human soul.

It is indeed the most pervasive mental pathology to have gripped humanity; its sufferers are trapped in a fly bottle of their own devising, and cannot find a way out.

*

Political correctness has emerged over historical time, indeed over at least the past millennium, and has grown exponentially – but, like all exponential processes (the growth of cancer, the growth of populations) the early stages were all but invisible – and it is only in the past 50-60 years that the full blown phenomenon of PC has become so big and so strong that it cannot be ignored; indeed it can barely be resisted, so pervasive and powerful it now is among the leadership of all major Western institutions (including all the mainstream churches).

*

The pathology of PC has many names: nihilism is perhaps the best.

Nihilism being the denial of the reality of reality; otherwise known as relativism.

So for the nihilist there is no reality, but only an infinite number of possible situations, none intrinsically realer than the others, none being correct.

*

Nihilism is contrasted with the traditional human viewpoint that there is a reality, a transcendental reality – which is really real, although human knowledge of this reality is imperfect.

Transcendental reality is also called The Good – it is a unified single thing, but is often split into three sub-domains: Truth, Beauty, and Virtue.

Nihilism (including PC) denies the reality of The Good, and denies the reality of The True, The Beautiful and The (morally) Virtuous.

*

Nihilism is a consequence of atheism, of the denial of a transcendental God (or possibly Gods in the plural) that underwrites reality, which is reality.

Political correctness is the fully-developed following-through of nihilism to its narrowly-rational (but un-reasonable) consequences.

Political correctness is therefore a disease of the mind, a pathology of thought that renders its compliant sufferers incapable of salvation.

*

That is the problem of PC – that it is a soul-denying, hence soul-destroying, ideology.

And once a person has accepted and internalized the assumptions of PC, he cannot get out of it: he is trapped in the fly bottle, merely buzzing round in circles.

And the bottle glass is opaque – he cannot even see outside it.

*

The pathology of PC is made possible by and supports the replacement of reason by rationality, and the fragmentation of rationality into many small and detached segments.

PC rationality will therefore get you only a step or two, before some different and incommensurable mode of reasoning will kick-in.

So there is no reasoning in political correctness, only the application of arbitrary algorithms and procedures and fail safes (in particular the ad hominem attack default, which is underpinned by nothing more than a conditioned revulsion to the non-PC).

*

So, a mere thirty or so years since PC became identifiable, and just a couple of decades since it became powerful enough to be troublesome, the entire intellectual elite has been absorbed into it. Clearly, they were pre-adapted, and PC is merely an outcome of long-standing trends.

*

Quite suddenly, we notice that the Western elites are detached from the mass of humanity throughout history and throughout most of the current world.

(They have been increasingly detached for a thousand years - but the numbers were initially very small. Only when the detachment became official policy was it so obvious that anyone can see - if they use their eyes, which of course most do not, and most of these now cannot.)

They are detached because PC is a reaction-against, a reversal of, an inversion of all spontaneous, traditional (and also specifically Christian) human thought processes.

*

Political Correctness is subversive of The Good.

It is not ignorant of The Good – it knows what The Good is, PC indeed must know The Good, in order to subvert it.

This is why PC is the preserve of intellectuals – because those too ignorant to know The Good cannot subvert it; they may of course go against The Good – they may be wicked, create ugliness and tell lies – but only for their own selfish and short term purposes, only from ignorance or impulsivity.

The point of PC is that it systematically subverts Virtue, Beauty and Truth and pursues wickedness, ugliness and lies – not by accident, not merely by ignorance nor by selfish short-termism – but as a matter of the highest principle.

*

In morality, PC pursues the-opposite-of-Virtue. It learns about spontaneous human morality – Natural Law – and it does... something else. It subverts the natural and spontaneous. It reacts-against it. In practice it does the opposite, or what it conceives to be the opposite.

Where humans are motivated by love or duty, PC demand they be motivated by adherence to formal principles and procedures. Where humans spontaneously nurture and protect the family, PC attacks the family relentlessly and promotes any and all forms of social organization except the family. Because humans, like all animals, are heterosexual, PC promotes all other forms of sexuality. Because some humans are brave and heroic and those who are not tend to admire these traits in others; PC promotes cowardice and expediency.

*

Because humans naturally love Beauty, and value those who create Beauty; PC subverts Beauty. Politically correct art is anti-Beauty – it regards The Beautiful as Kitsch at best and tyrannically fascist at worst; it is about creating expectations then thwarting them, it is about replacing harmony with dissonance, edification with shock, delight with horror, pleasing sounds with noise, elevating subjects with disgusting subjects, aesthetic elevation with visceral degradation.

*

And PC reacts against The Truth. Truth is to be subordinated to the goal of subversion. Unwanted Truths are Hate Facts. Universally known Truths are replaced with narrow scraps of bureaucratically defined principles; spontaneous and obvious knowledge is contested, undermined, broken-up and contradicted one fragment at a time and replaced with Professional Consensus (Peer Review).

*

What does PC put in the place of The Good, and its component transcendentals of Virtue, Beauty and Truth?

Nothing definite – because for PC there is no reality.

Instead there are an infinite number of relative ‘realities’.

PC subverts The Good, but offers no substitute for The Good - except The Better.

*

PC does not know what it aims-for; it knows only that it must destroy The Good, that it may be replaced by something Better - only it has no criteria for evaluating what is better.

Since evaluations are themselves relative, The Better is not really better than the Good, but it might be!

The evaluations are themselves part of the project of subversion and experiment - PC subverts the Good and seeks the Better; subverts past current evaluations in pursuit of Better evaluations, and the Better will itself emerge as a consequence of the evolving process.

If PC has any faith, which is doubtful, it is that this evolutionary process of subversion and experiment is intrinsically virtuous.  

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Why then does PC subverts the Good?

Because current and past realities have flaws (when compared with an ideal) and since there are an infinite number of alternative realities there must be many realities among them which are better than the current or past reality.

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The job of PC is them to destroy current reality, detach itself from all past realities, and seek among the infinity of alternative for something better (which must be there, by sheer mathematical probability, somewhere).

PC will search through, sort-through, experiment-with these alternative realities to find something better – maybe something perfect?

And anyone who is against this search and experiment, is simply an apologist for the evils of the present and the past.

Political correctness is hostile to The Good in pursuit of The Better.

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PC subverts current and past ideas of Virtue, Truth and Beauty in pursuit of greater Virtues, Truths and Beauties which currently cannot be imagined.

The PC promotion of Vice, Lies and Ugliness are therefore merely experiments in pursuit of The Better.

And the process is unconstrained by reality, because there is no real reality, (the reality of the real being illusory, delusional) there is only an infinitude of ‘realities’, some of which must (surely?) be better than this reality, the reality from which we suffer now, or the past realities from which humanity has suffered during history.

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The pessimistic passivity of the right - paralysis by procedure

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It is often remarked that the political right are remarkably accepting of trends which they regard as deadly, and prone as individuals to lapse into a state of pessimistic and passive paralysis.

Of course, there is a sense in which this is a 'realistic' response to current and predicted events; yet despair is a sin.

There is a sense in which the right is prone to lapse into a state in which they see events not only running against them, but where they perceive that nothing constructive could - even in principle - be done to stop and reverse these trends.

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I suspect that this is because the right has - over centuries - internalized the (intrinsically leftist) assumption that politics ought to be a matter of procedures: of laws, regulations, practices, systems. 

The idea of legitimate politics then becomes equated with the business of setting-up these procedures.

Wisdom in politics then becomes a matter of foresight into how these procedures will work out.

The notion, on the modern mainstream right, is that only when new procedures have a high probability of benefit with a low predicted incidence of serious harm, is it reasonable to intervene.

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And - contemplating the morass of modern society - thoughtful rightists can see no way through the mass of interlinking leftist procedures.

They cannot - in all honesty - even imagine as a thought experiment, a set of alternative procedures (of laws, regulations, systems) which would reliably (and without too many breakages) lead to the outcomes they desire.

And so they despair, and so they give-up.

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But to concede that good government is a matter of good procedures is to concede the debate before it has begun.

The old ideal of good government was government by a wise man: a King Arthur, or a King Alfred the Great.

Of course there will always be need for some procedure - Alfred was a pioneer of English law - but equally all procedures rely on human wisdom.

The difference is in which direction the ideal lies, and in which direction the system is pushing: is it, as with modernity, pushing in the direction of making a human-proof system; or one in which human wisdom has the best chance of operating.

Are systems and procedures the ultimate authority - or is the wisdom of a wise man the authority?

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The right needs to accept that no systems are human-proof, nor would it be a good thing if they were.

The right needs to stop looking for solutions in terms of an alternative set of procedures,  laws and systems.

The right needs to think in terms of aiming at outcomes; and of government as a matter of having the best people in authority, not in terms of having such a perfect constituion that people are irrelevant.

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The leftist ideal is a government so systemically-perfect that all personnel are interchangeable, indeed perhaps humans could be replaced by chimpanzees (or computers).

That cannot be the ideal of the right.

The right - and this applies to both the religious and the secular right - needs to think in terms of a government which aims to does the right things.

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Doing the right things is therefore a matter of

1. Wanting to do the right things, and

2. Being competent to do the right things.

But the second depends on the first:

among governors, among those in authority: 

motivation is more important than competence. 

Indeed, competence without proper motivation is the most dangerous situation of all.)

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On the right there must be a focus on what needs doing, and on government by those who recognize these needs, then - preferably - by those who are best able to achieve these needs.

Procedures, laws and systems must take a second place.

Human beings should count for most.

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That much is shared between the secular right and the religious right: but the 'ideology' of what is right, what is needed, is of course very different indeed.

However, until there is a recognition that rightist politics is mostly about the outcomes aimed-at - the right will continue to be paralyzed.

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Here it comes:

There does not need to be a plan in order for the right to start work, in order for the right to govern.

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The right must not - ever - place its trust in systems. 

There does not need to be a set of new laws and regulations by which the right hopes to achieve a given outcome - but there does need to be a will that certain outcomes be achieved.

And that will will have at least a chance of finding a way.  

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