A classification of the Right by 'Bonald' - plus Mystical Christian Reactionaries

*

Condensed from the Throne and Altar blog - A Taxonomy of the Right written by the pseudonymous Bonald.

http://bonald.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/a-taxonomy-of-the-right:

1. The romantic conservatives. The romantic emphasizes the limits of discursive reason–both its ability to capture the complexities of social reality and, more importantly, its ability to inspire the sentiments and loyalties on which society rests; he promotes tradition, that repository of past ages’ wisdom that speaks to man’s heart.  Members of this tradition include Burke, Coleridge, Kirk, Chateaubriand, Maistre, and Brownson, Russell Kirk, Jim Kalb.
2. The social conservatives.  First great voice was Louis de Bonald. The social conservatives  dedicated themselves to the defense of authoritative institutions, especially the monarchical state, the patriarchal family, and the Catholic Church.  Includes the French counter-revolutionaries– Le Play, Keller, and La Tour du Pin, Taparelli, Leo XIII, Pius XI–in Italy. Much of the substance of today’s conservatism (e.g. opposition to divorce and homosexuality) derives mostly from this tradition. 
3. The distributists/agrarians.  In England and America, social conservatism took a distinct form.  It was at peace with democracy, but remained hostile to industrialization.  Its ideal would be a Jeffersonian republic of small farm holders.  Its two branches were English Catholics (Chesterton, Belloc) and American Southern Protestants (the 12 southerners), Wendall Berry and Allan Carlson.
4. The cultural conservatives.  The focus was that culture was being submerged in materialism, consumerism, massification, and demagogy.  Examples include Eliot, Spengler, Dawson, Guenon, Evola, and Voegelin.  This conservatism was entirely intellectual; it had no political program. 
5. The Right-Hegelians.  Emphasis was on building a social order that would fulfill people’s need for the world to make sense to them and thus remove their alienation from the world.  The Left-Hegelians include Marx, etc). Today, this tradition is carried on by the British conservative Roger Scruton. 
6. The anti-cosmopolitans.  This tradition originates with Herder.  Although he associated with social conservatives, Maurras belonged to this school.  These conservatives emphasize the right and duty of every people to protect its own cultural integrity and to foster intra-group loyalty in its members.  Mark Richardson ably expresses this view on the internet today.
7. The pseudo-conservatives.  This is the group that is fundamentally dedicated to liberalism, but wants to maintain some conservative elements (usually religious piety, parental authority, sexual restraint, or patriotism) as a check on liberalism’s destructive tendencies. e.g. Tocqueville.

***

COMMENT

This is a useful taxonomy, and as I read I naturally tried to discover where I should be classified. But I couldn't find a niche.

So maybe there needs to be at least one further category - how about the following as a first shot at definition?:

Mystical Christian Reactionaries

These ultimately regard politics as properly derived from Christianity; they are, indeed, hostile to the idea of politics. In other words, the world is inevitably fallen and imperfect and will end at some time determined by God; but in the meantime the remediable worldly problems are framed in terms of being ultimately caused by sinful choices and apostasy - always of individuals, but strongly influenced by the nature of society.

Since their politics is seen as second-order, their final political goal has only a loose fit with their basic beliefs - and is inconsistent between advocates; some are aiming at theocracy, others aiming at various divisions of powers - but the goal is one in which Christian practice permeates life.

The main broad causal processes of history are seen in terms of Christian eschatology - i.e. the destiny of mankind as revealed in the scriptures and prophecies, and the working-out of the tendencies of fallen human nature. This is not interpreted in any precise way, but is seen as providing a envelope to expectations.

Humanity is seen as mystically united, so that all personal choices influence the destiny of Man. Since the root of Western social problems lies in apostasy, therefore the mode of action for Mystical Christian Reactionaries is not political but devotional; based on prayer, liturgy, reading, personal discipline and the mystical life. Such 'methods' are seen as the only legitimate force for genuine social improvement. Hence they work through individual personal relations rather than large or formal political groupings.

They tend to be pessimistic in their predictions, but their hope is for widespread conversion and increased holiness in modern society: repentance would be the necessary first step. Lack of repentance and explicit reorientation is seen as vitiating any actual or possible political change.

Rather than hoping for new laws or leaders; Mystical Christian Reactionaries hope for saints and greater sanctity necessary to reverse the apostasy of centuries.

Examples of Mystical Christian Reactionaries include JRR Tolkien, C.S Lewis, Fr Seraphim Rose, John Senior (and Jim Kalb?).

*

Notes added:

An alternative name to 'mystical' would perhaps be 'transcendental' - but that is a word of very limited currency, and might be confused with the likes of Kant, Coleridge and Emerson.

*

For MCRs, all politics is subordinate to Christianity because even at best (and most of it isn't) politics is motivated by Love of Neighbour.

Yet in the absence of the primary Love of God, then Love of Neighbour will (sooner or not-very-much later) be first corrupted, then inverted into Evil.

(Since there are an infinite number of ways that initially-sincere schemes to 'improve the world' or to  'reduce human suffering' may (and will) be corrupted by human error and malice, in the absence of over-arching Love of God and divine guidance.

(The first step in any hopes for improving the world is (for MCRs) always to repent, worship, pray, give thanks, humbly ask for mercy; and this necessity was always clearly perceived in the great Christian civilizations of the past; real improvement is and must be primarily that of the human soul.

('Practical' steps are always hazardous; but invariably counter-productive in the absence of this Godly-orientation.)

*

Another aspect is that MCRs are - in a loose sense - more Platonic than Aristotelian. What I mean is that there is a kind of Platonism about the basic idea that human history as we observe it is the noisy, muddied and superficial appearance of the Unseen Warfare between Good and Evil which is its underlying reality.

For MCRs the underlying reality is thus the balance of domination between purposive Good and purposive Evil both in the heart and in practices.

The history of human and societal decline is ultimately a history of pride, apostasy, self-worship, worship of Evil usurpers.  

(As Solzhenitsyn so memorably encapsulated, the line between Good and Evil runs through every individual human heart; but - as he also showed in his work - some groups of humans, some societies, are better than others.)

*

(Further note on Good and Evil

(wrt the Unseen Warfare behind and beyond the surface world, it is important to recall that Good and Evil are not symmetrical. Good can achieve perfection - albeit not on earth but in God.

(Yet all Good societies (e.g Byzantium) no matter how Good, in this fallen world, will be corrupt; and yet Evil societies (e.g. Lenin and Stalin's USSR) always have some good in them, since Evil can never achieve perfection.

(This is because Evil is subordinate to Good - and not the mirror of Good. Evil is the corruption of Good - the subversion of Love of God by Pride. Therefore, there must always be some Good remaining in order for it to be corrupted by Evil. The completion of Evil would be the end of everything: which cannot be.

(The conclusion is that practical politics requires discernment of Good and Evil societies and persons, to support the Good and oppose the Evil; yet a recognition that both Good and Evil are mixed in this world - albeit for different reasons and with different implications.)

*

Piers Plowman and alms for the poor

*

From Piers Plowman - by William Langland (c 1332-c1400) -  Translated and edited by Donald and Rachel Attwater.

This is considered by Nevill Coghill to be the greatest Christian poem in English (i.e. greater even than Paradise Lost by John Milton).

One of the main themes of Piers Plowman is the necessity for compassion to the poor, and the argument that the virtuous poor have a special salvation (or 'pardon') when they are hard-working, loving and lawful.

But things are very different for the undeserving poor. What follows is one of the sections when the Everyman/ Christ figure Piers deals with the idle and feckless. 

The attitude of this extremely devout medieval Christian towards the undeserving, lawless and parasitic poor seems extremely tough to modern sensibilities - living in a society where most alms are directed at the modern equivalents of such.

But it is modern Christians who are wrong; and the devout and impoverished Langland who represents the properly Christian discrimination with respect to alms-giving.

***

Then sat down some · and sang over the ale
And helped plow his half acre · with `Ho, trollo-lolli!'

`On peril of my soul!' quoth Piers · out of pure anger,
'Unless ye rise swiftly · and speed you to work,
Shall no grain that groweth · gladden you at need,
And though ye die for dole · devil take him who cares.'

The false fellows were afeared · and feigned themselves blind;
Some laid their legs awry · in the way such louts know,
And made their moan to Piers · and prayed of him grace;
`For we have no limbs to labour with · Lord, thanked be thee!
But we pray for you, Piers · and for your plow too,
That God of his grace · your grain multiply
And yield to you for your alms · that ye give us here;
For we can not Swink nor sweat · such sickness us aileth.'

`If it be sooth,' quoth Piers, 'that ye say · I shall soon it espy.
Ye be wasters, I wot well · and Truth wots the sooth!
I am his old hind · and am bidden by him to wam
Those in this world · who have harmed his workmen.
Ye waste what men win · with travail and trouble,
But Truth shall teach you · his plow-team to drive,
Or ye shall eat barley bread · and of the brook drink.
 
But if one be blind, broken-legged · or bolted with irons,
He shall eat wheat bread · and drink with myself,
Till God of his goodness · amendment him send.

(...)

... anchorites and hermits · that eat not but at noon,
And no more ere the morrow · mine alms shall they have,
And my goods shall clothe those · that have cloisters and churches. 

*

But Robert the runabout · shall have naught of mine,
Nor friars; unless they preach well · and have leave of the bishop --
These shall have bread and pottage · and make themselves at ease:

(...)

Then Piers the Plowman · complained to the knight
To keep him, as covenant was · from cursed wretches
And from these wolfish wasters · that do the world harm:
`For they waste and win naught · and meanwhile there'll be
No plenty for the people · while my plow be idle.'

Courteously the knight then · as his nature was,
Warned the waster · and told him to mend:
`Or, by the order I bear · thou shalt suffer the law!'

'I was not wont to work,' quoth Waster · `and now will not begin' --
And made light of the law · and less of the knight,
Set Piers and his plow · at the price of a pea
And menaced Pier's men · if they met again soon.

`Now by peril of my soul · I shall punish you all!'
Piers whooped after Hunger · who heard him at once.
'Avenge me,' quoth he, 'on these wasters · who worry the world!'

Hunger in haste then · seized Waste by the maw
And wrung him so by the belly · that both his eyes watered;
The Breton he buffeted · about the cheeks
That he looked lantern-jawed · all his life after.
He beat them so both · that he near burst their ribs;
Had not Piers with a pease-loaf · prayed Hunger to cease
They had been buried both · believe thou none other!
 
`Suffer them to live,' he said · `let them eat with the hogs
Or else beans and bran · baked up together,
Or else milk and mean ale' · thus prayed Piers for them.

Loungers for fear thereof · fled into barns
And flapped on with flails · from morning till eve,
So that Hunger less hardily · looked upon them,
For a potful of pease · that Piers had made.
 
A heap of hermits · hung on to spades
And cut up their capes · to make themselves coats,
And went out as workmen · with spades and with shovels
To dig and to delve to drive away hunger.

The blind and bedridden · were bettered by thousands;
Those that sat to beg silver · soon were they healed.


http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/langland/

*

Inability to make tough decisions - the monomania of kindness

*

As C.S Lewis often remarked - the one virtue that modern society has above all previous societies is kindness: our most hated vice is cruelty.

Since any virtue pursued in isolation or excess leads to sin, then naturally it is the West's primary and only virtue which is about to destroy the West.

*

Kindness has painted us into a corner from which the only way out is extreme unkindness.

The West could be saved, could save itself - but only by making some extremely tough decisions, by being cruel in the short term in order to promote Good in the long term.

Therefore The West will not save itself, will not even allow itself to be saved.

*

Yet modern kindness is a fake.

Modern kindness is not personal kindness to specific people; the people who feel kind are not paying the price nor are they taking responsibility.

In the past, kindness meant using your own resources to look after some particular person or group.

Now kindness is about 'rights' which means using other people's resources to look after defined categories of persons.

*

And beyond this kindness as a right means coerced confiscation - serfdom.

Needs trumps everything for the monomaniacally kind.

If any needy people present themselves, then the state will take from the serfs and give to the needy; with no limit because the alternative is cruelty.

*

The serfs are forced to support the needy and the state will take the credit for kindness.

The only alternatives to serfdom are either to join the state or become one more of the needy.

Very obviously this will destroy society.

*

Yet of course, the state could stop this at any time - but only by cruelty.

The bottom line is that things are at the point, long past the point, when the tough decision is to stand and watch people die in very large numbers (and in some scenarios to kill people in very large numbers - directly or indirectly - if they will not otherwise desist) in a situation when these deaths could actually be prevented (temporarily, in the short term) by further confiscations from the serfs.

That is what I mean by very tough decisions.

*

And we are in this situation purely because we would not make tough (but much less tough) decisions in the past, on the way to this.

Tough decisions are not at all about the end justifying the means (that is evil): tough decisions are about making the right decisions in the face of temptations from short-termism. 

Tough decisions are about being wise rather than expedient; Good rather than popular.

But tough decisions could not and will not happen because we are ruled by democracy and bureaucracy; and both (being non-personal) are intrinsically incapable of making tough decisions, because intrinsically incapable of truth, wisdom or Goodness.

*

The reality of purposive evil

*

Past societies never had any problem about the existence of purposive evil - intentional evil; this was seen among humans and rooted in the demonic.

But the intellectual elite of Western societies long ago began to discard the concept of demonic evil, and soon after discarded the whole idea of purposive evil, since there was nowhere for evil to be located.

Without the reality of the demonic, to call something evil just becomes a matter of opinion, perhaps a matter of rhetoric.

*

The point is that to discard the concept of purposive evil is not in any sense sense to disprove it.

To find talk of devils and demons to be childish and embarrassing is not in any sense to refute thousands of years of testimony from the greatest of human minds (including the holiest of human minds).

*

And suppose that there really is purposive evil at work in the world, yet we refuse to acknowledge its reality?

(After all, human ingenuity can always find other ways to explain reality, leaving out any particular causal variable.)

Well, the obvious consequence is that evil would then be unstoppable.

Bad things might be observed, we might have theories about why these bad things were happening, and these theories might lead to action intended to be remedial - but the bad things would continue because we were not addressing the real cause.

*

But how would we know that purposive evil was at work? Well, answering that is at least as hard as answering any question about motivations and intentions.

Yet, operating on the assumption that there are no purposive evil intentions is already implicitly to claim that we know that there is no purposive evil.

*

The way to proceed is to acknowledge and accept the vast consensus of human history that there really is such a thing as purposive evil.

We can then try to understand the nature of  purposive evil - about which there is much less consensus, and also discern whether or not purposive evil is operative in any specific situation.

*

Purposive evil can of course be overused as an explanation of human affairs, it can be misunderstood, it can be deceptively manipulated.

But so can evolutionary theory, so can economics - these are presumably real explanations for human affairs, but they are hard to understand, their specific relevance needs to be examined, they are open to misuse.

*

The point is that our society is displaying the most extraordinary and extreme arrogance in not just disregarding but deriding the concept of purposive evil and its roots in an unseen reality of 'the demonic'. This is historically unprecedented. If our society is mistaken about this, then presumably we would expect the consequences to be extremely severe.

*

Who does not perceive the vanity of the world? A Pascal Pensee

*

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself.

So, who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?

But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction.

Them they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

*

Blaise Pascal - Pensees - Number 36 (164). Translated by AJ Krailsheimer, Penguin edition of 1966.

Note: 'Vanity' here (derived from the King James Bible) means something like futile, pointless, meaningless, purposeless, empty.  

***

COMMENT

Pascal, writing in the mid-17th century, already saw that the only way to avoid perceiving the futility of the world is to lose oneself in diversions - in noise, action, daydreams; and that the only people who can really achieve this are 'the young'.

And, presumably, if Pascal were alive today he would see that our modern secular culture is, in this sense, permanently 'young'.

Necessarily 'young' - because in a secular society we must never be allowed to perceive the vanity of the world, since (for a secular world) there is nothing that can be done about it. .

We never grow up.

We are never allowed to grow-up, we never allow ourselves to grow-up: growing-up is indeed punished severely since introspection must be avoided; since introspection leads to wretchedness, boredom to extinction, intolerable depression.

*

Applying modern scholarship to Christian scripture: a fundamental error

*

Who were the authors of the Gospels; and when were they written?

Was St John the Apostle also St John the Evangelist; and was he/ they the same person as St John of the Revelations; and did he also write St John's Epistles (one or both)?

Was Dionysius the Aeropagite a disciple of the Apostle Paul, or someone who lived some hundreds of years later (the Pseudo-Dionysius)?

*

Such questions, but especially the methods used for answering them, have had a deeply corrosive effect on Christianity over the past couple of hundred years.

The methods used have been - in a word - scholarly.

And the scholarship has inbuilt secular assumptions.

*

This means that Christianity is now seen by many to hinge on scholars, and the processes of scholarship, and the funding and fashions of scholarship, and the limitations and specialisms of scholarship...

And, since the process of scholarship is open-ended, and scholarly conclusions are continually being revised - this means that Christianity itself is seen to be undecided, evolving, and at any moment subject to radical revisions due to some unforseen 'discovery'.

And scholarship is secular.

Consequently, Christianity has declined from The Truth, to research findings.

*

So, we find that major points of modern Christian controversy are being argued on the basis of things like history, translation and archaeology; that is, apparently the modern situation is taht Christian understanding of 'right and wrong' - how Christians are supposed to live - is being (presumably because we believe it ought to be) decided on the basis of very precise scholarly nuances in the interpretation of inferred meanings of certain ancient texts seen in their social context.

All of this has the assumption that we simply discard (and explain away - as a consequence of their social situation) the tradition of Christians for the past two millennia. Because their views are automatically invalidated since they lacked modern scholarly knowledge and methods...

(When St Paul said X, was that really said by St Paul, and if so was this perhaps a scribal error, or a mistranslation, or a later editorial addition, or does the phrase - properly understood - have a double meaning, and anyway what did he mean in the specific context of his time ???... )

*

Or else we could acknowledge that this whole approach to the scholarly validation of scripture is crazy and misguided.

It is not that scholarship has gone 'too far' but that the whole enterprise was an error: root and branch.

And the whole apparatus of scholarship applied to scripture needs to be discarded.

(Harsh, I realize - but necessary...)

*

Ask yourself: Is the meaning of Christianity - the meaning, purpose and nature of human existence - to be put into the hands of scholars whose expertise is secular in essence and assumptions?

Whose whole method is based on subtracting the possibility of divine revelation and divine intervention in human affairs?

Whose whole method is non-Christian?

*

Surely the meaning of Christianity ought to be determined now in the way it has been determined until recently in the 2000 year history; by the discernment of those who are holiest, those who have the greatest understanding and experience of God; and not those who have the greatest mastery of paleography and ancient languages?

*

It all depends on whether you acknowledge the principle of divine inspiration, and the authority of those Saints and advanced religious who transmitted revelation through the centuries.

If you do not acknowledge the authority of this mystical 'tradition', then you are left entirely in the hands of the modern secular scholars - whose methods make no judgment of, hence exclude the possibility and possibilities of, divine revelation.

(And even if they did not exclude divine revelation, since modern scholars are very seldom (or never) themselves advanced in holiness, they certainly would not be able to make the necessary discernments concerning the validity of revelation.)

*

So, given that modern-era scholarship is radically incomplete in terms of its evidentiary base and given that it is performed by people inadequately qualified in terms of their sanctity - then it really has nothing whatsoever to say about the authorship of scriptures and holy books.

All that modern-era religious scholarship is doing is playing a subversive game; making the deadly assumption that divine inspiration doesn't exist, is not real, cannot be real; and then treating scripture just like any non-inspired historical text, and seeing what happens...

Then forgetting (deliberately forgetting) that their initial assumption invalidates any and all conclusions...

*

By contrast, if we go by the idea of the question of divine inspiration being evaluated by those who are themselves divinely-inspired (who are themselves advanced in holiness; and therefore in a position to 'detect', to understand and to evaluate divinely inspired texts) - then there is seldom any problem.

The creation of the canon of Christian scripture, was decided by this means: inspired men evaluating inspired texts.

The decision was that all the divinely-inspired content of the St John's of the New Testament (Gospel, Epistles, Revelation) derive from the authorship of the same man - insofar as that is how they were evaluated by many generations of Holy Fathers whose sanctity far outstrips that of any person alive today.

And the substantive authorship of the texts traditionally attributed to  Dionysius the Aeropagite indeed lies with a disciple of St Paul - and not some figure centuries hence.

*

And when there is disagreement among the Holy Fathers and Saints, then it needs to be settled by comparisons of their authority and sanctity, and their views of other Holy Fathers and Saints - and not by modern-era scholarship of whatever type.

*

Once the authorship is established in this fashion, then there is scope for what are really trivial and optional conjectures about how texts may have been transmitted by various combinations of oral tradition, formal teaching, discipleship, copying and translation of written texts, editing and compilation of such texts etc.

All of this (it must be presumed) under some form of divine inspiration such that the revelatory essence is preserved for those competent to understand it.

It ought not to be a big issue, it is not a genuine challenge for faith, because in our era there are few - perhaps none - alive who are competent to make scriptural discernments.

*

In sum, Western culture has made the logical error of allowing its Christian faith to be eroded by scholarly methods which treat scripture just like other texts.

But, if you believe that scripture is just like other texts, then you do not believe in scripture: indeed you do not believe in even the possibility of scripture.

*

So, it is not so much the conclusions of biblical scholarship which are erosive, but its assumptions and its methods.

To accept as relevant to faith the scholarly method of treating scripture 'just like other texts' is, in and of itself, to accept the assumption that scripture is just like other texts - to accept that scripture is of merely human authorship - to accept that scripture is not divinely inspired in any meaningful sense.

To base faith on scholarship is to accept that Christianity should hand-itself-over to secular institutions.

*

We modern men are spiritual pygmies in a low and corrupt era, therefore we can have nothing new and true to say about such matters as scriptural authorship. The proper attitude is to learn and accept the tradition of discernment from those far better than ourselves.

*

The modern, progressive creed - Weston from Out of the Silent Planet

*

From Out of the Silent Planet, a science fiction novel by C.S. Lewis, 1938.

Scene:

Oyarsa is the ruling 'planetary intelligence' (or 'angel') of Malacandra (i.e. Mars).

Ransom was brought to Mars by Weston to be a sacrifice to the inhabitants.

Ransom escapes from Weston and befriends the inhabitants of Malacandra; but Weston (and his side-kick Devine) have shot and killed several of the Martians.

In this scene Weston has been brought in front of the Oyarsa to explain his motivations and conduct.

Ransom mostly translates Weston for the Oyarsa; but later in the passage Weston speaks directly to the Oyarsa using a basic 'pidgin' form of the Malacandran language.

'Hnau' means a sentient being, a 'person'. Hrossa and Pfifltriggi are types of sentient Martian (i.e. types of hnau).

Maleldil is God; the lord of the silent world is Lucifer/ the devil (said here to be the fallen planetary intelligence ruling the Earth - Earth being the Silent Planet of the novel's title).

***

'Speak to Ransom and he shall turn it into our speech,' said Oyarsa.

Weston accepted the arrangement at once. He believed that the hour of his death was come and he was determined to utter the thing - almost the only thing outside his own science which he had to say. He cleared his throat, almost he struck a gesture, and began:

'To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race. Your tribal life with its stone-age weapons and beehive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization - with our science, medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which is rapidly annihilating space and time. Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. Life -'

'Half a moment,' said Ransom in English. 'That's about as much as I can manage at one go.'

*

Then, turning to Oyarsa, he began translating as well as he could. The process was difficult and the result - which he felt to be rather unsatisfactory - was something like this:

'Among us, Oyarsa, there is a kind of hnau who will take other hnaus' food and - and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an ordinary one of that kind. He says what he does now will make very different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born. He says that, among you, hnau of one kindred all live together and the hrossa have spears like those we used a very long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats small and light and like our old ones, and you have one ruler. He says it is different with us. He says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it. He says we have many bent people and we kill them or shut them in huts and that we have people for settling quarrels between the bent hnau about their huts and mates and things. He says we have many ways for the hnau of one land to kill those of another and some are trained to do it. He says we build very big and strong huts of stones and other things - like the pfifltriggi. And he says we exchange many things among ourselves and can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way. Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people.'

*

As soon as Ransom had finished, Weston continued.

'Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilization.'

'He says,' began Ransom, 'that living creatures are stronger than the question whether an act is bent or good - no, that cannot be right - he says it is better to be alive and bent than to be dead - no - he says, he says - I cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language. But he goes on to say that the only good thing is that there should be very many creatures alive. He says there were many other animals before the first men and the later ones were better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals were not born because of what is said to the young about bent and good action by their elders. And he says these animals did not feel any pity.'

*

'She,' began Weston.

'I'm sorry,' interrupted Ransom, 'but I've forgotten who She is.'

'Life, of course,' snapped Weston. 'She has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and today in her highest form civilized man - and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever beyond the reach of death.'

'He says,' resumed Ransom, 'that these animals learned to do many difficult things, except those who could not; and those ones died and the other animals did not pity them. And he says the best animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these and he says that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased. He says that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in Malacandra, then they might be able to go on living here after something had gone wrong with our world. And then if something went wrong with Malacandra they might go and kill all the hnau in another world. And then another - and so they would never die out.

*

'It is in her right,' said Weston, 'the right, or, if you will, the might of Life herself, that I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag of man on the soil of Malacandra: to march on, step by step, superseding, where necessary, the lower forms of life that we find, claiming planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity - whatever strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed - dwell in the universe wherever the universe is habitable.'

'He says,' translated Ransom, 'that because of this it would not be a bent action - or else, he says, it would be a possible action - for him to kill you all and bring us here. He says he would feel no pity. He is saying again that perhaps they would be able to keep moving from one world to another and wherever they came they would kill everyone. I think he is now talking about worlds that go round other suns. He wants the creatures born from us to be in as many places as they can. He says he does not know what kind of creatures they will be.'

*

'I may fall,' said Weston. 'But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond.'

'He is saying,' Ransom translated, 'that he will not stop trying to do all this unless you kill him. And he says that though he doesn't know what will happen to the creatures sprung from us, he wants it to happen very much.'

*

Weston, who had now finished his statement, looked round instinctively for a chair to sink into. On Earth he usually sank into a chair as the applause began. Finding none he was not the kind of man to sit on the ground like Devine - he folded his arms and stared with a certain dignity about him.

'It is well that I have heard you,' said Oyarsa. 'For though your mind is feebler, your will is less bent than l thought. It is not for yourself that you would do all this.'

'No,' said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. 'Me die. Man live.'

'Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you before they lived on other worlds.'

'Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange Big!'

'Then it is not the shape of body that you love?'

'No. Me no care how they shaped.'

'One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot be, or you would love hnau wherever you met it.'

'No care for hnau. Care for man.'

'But if it is neither man's mind, which is as the mind of all other hnau - is not Maleldil maker of them all? - nor his body, which will change - if you care for neither of these, what do you mean by man?'

*

This had to be translated to Weston. When he understood, he replied: 'Me care for man - care for our race - what man begets-' He had to ask Ransom the words for race and beget.

'Strange!' said Oyarsa. 'You do not love any one of your race - you would have let me kill Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, that what you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left.'

'Tell him,' said Weston when he had been made to understand this, 'that I don't pretend to be a metaphysician. I have not come here to chop logic. If he cannot understand - as apparently you can't either - anything so fundamental as a man's loyalty to humanity, I can't make him understand it.'

*

But Ransom was unable to translate this and the voice of Oyarsa continued:

'I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey it, though if we ask you why it is a law you can give no other reason for it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to disobey. Do you know why he has done this?'

'Me think no such person - me wise, new man - no believe all that old talk.'

'I will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one.

***


COMMENT

Weston's views are pretty much identical with my own from the late 1990s into the mid 2000s.

The humour and wisdom of the passage comes from the contrast between Weston's idealistic abstractions and Ransom's translations into plain, honest language (the language of Malacandra is intrinsically plain and honest, since it is an unfallen world).

*

The Oyarsa's message:

There are natural moral laws that all people are born with - and one of these is the love of humankind. Lucifer (who rules the earth) has taught you to break all the moral laws except this one.

But love of humankind is not one of the greatest moral laws - rather it ought to be subordinate to other laws which you break.

Furthermore, Lucifer has exaggerated the application of this law to the point where it becomes folly and has set up this folly as your ruling principle. And now you can do nothing but obey it, without constraint and regardless of the consequences.

But you cannot give any reason why you should obey this moral law, and disobey all the other (and greater) moral laws.

Lucifer left you this single natural moral law, the love of humankind, for this reason: a warped man who is actively and zealously pursuing a single moral law is capable of far more evil than a man with no morality at all.


*

Would I have seen through mine/ Weston's views if I had read OTP at that time, and seen what they translated into 'in plain language'?

Sadly, I doubt it...

*

My three favourite movie scenes: fighting, courage, acceptance of mortality...

*

From the end of Blade Runner, 1982:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU

*

From the end of The Last of the Mohicans, 1992

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tiKM4fxY1U

*

The charge of the Rohirrim from The Return of the King, 2003:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAG5vBKmvcA

**


The best popular art of our time is pagan.

***


Theme, acting, script and editing would all have counted for nought without the music:

BR - Vangelis; LotM - Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; RotK - Howard Shore.

*

The absence of evil from modern discourse

*

Isn't it remarkable that evil strikes us as ridiculous? That the concept of 'evil' seems dumb or insane or manipulative - that to believe in the reality of 'evil' is itself seen as the product of a deranged mind?

*

One of the ways that evil is disposed of is that it is regarded as a kind of conspiracy theory, and we all know that conspiracies don't exist...

The two options presented by mainstream discourse are 'cock-up or conspiracy' - accidental and blameless error versus self-aware, purposive, explicit alliances to pursue what are acknowledged to be deliberately harmful plans.

 Actually, these two options do not exhaust potential descriptions of reality...

*

Evil is absent from modern discourse, because the modern concept of evil is a straw man - and also because in a nihilist world there is no such thing as evil.

Similarly to conspiracy, for something or some-one to count as evil they are supposed to be self-aware concerning their own evil nature, and to pursue evil wholly and relentlessly in all things.

If it can be shown that evil people or groups are well-motivated, or sometimes do good things, then that evidence is assumed to have disproved or explained-away the evil.

*

How did we reach such a state of absurdity? Especially after living-through the twentieth century, with evil operative on an unmatched scale?

Answer: Because we live in a society where the Left has won. And the Left has a problem with evil, a deep and insoluble problem.

The Left cannot conceptualize evil (because it has no coherent concept of The Good). Even in its own terms of materialistic, this-worldly hedonism - in terms of a society optimizing comfort and pleasure and minimizing suffering, the Left cannot deal with evil - at root, because so much misery on such a vast scale has been deliberately produced by Leftist schemes and regimes

For the Left to have a concept of evil would be to convict themselves.

Leftist evil (and evil by Leftist standards of moral evaluation - truly vast quantities of human misery) - evil which is so very extreme and so very obvious - simply cannot be acknowledged nor responded-to.

*

You would have thought that so many and such extreme examples of the consequences of Leftism would have destroyed the Left - but no; the Left is stronger than ever.

The conclusion is that no evil which could ever happen could ever destroy Leftism.

*

And since we all live in a Leftist society so pervasive that we are all tainted by Leftism to a greater or lesser degree - we can only glimpse the truth at moments before relapsing into delusional dreams.

We all have a problem with evil, a blind-spot about evil.

And the simpler and clearer and more obvious the evil, the less clearly we can understand or see it, the more necessary it is that we do not see it.

*

Modern Left corrupts and subverts - prefers not to destroy - GFC comment

*
FROM THE COMMENTS BY 'GFC':

I believe the Left to be the child of Satan, and in this we see that the rotten apple doesn't fall far from the diabolic tree: the devil cannot create of his own accord but can only twist what has already been created into corrupted forms. Always the devil tries to ape the creation of God.

The modern Western Left works its part in this by undermining and eating away at legitimate authority, but once that work is complete, attempts to set itself up in the only way it can: as a funhouse mirror image of what it worked so hard to destroy.

This is why the Left today doesn't try to destroy institutions like the Church outright but rather corrupt and subvert them. They don't wish to do away with authority per se, only usurp those rightfully in authority and rule in their place.

***

My response:

Indeed!

As in many other respects, the modern Left (political correctness) more resembles the late, cynical and corrupt Soviet Union (Brezhnev era) than it does early and idealistic post-revolutionary Communism.

*

The Old Left tried to destroy whole institutions such as the cultured aristocracy, scholarly private schools and universities, independent scholarship, the serious Christian Churches.

Early Soviet Communists did this to the Orthodox Church+ (which still had immense status and power even in 1917) initially mostly by violence: imprisoning, torturing and killing vast numbers of bishops, monks and priests, and devouts adherents - by invasions, confiscating resources, wholesale demolition etc. (See also Solzhenitsyn's massive documentation.)

*

The New Left attacks on institutions are legal, regulatory and legislative; harassment is by official investigation and taxation, key individuals are publicly vilified by spreading lies and libels, the mass media is used for mockery and humiliation, employment is undermined, official scapegoat status is conferred, police protections are removed - and so on.

Unless, of course, these institutions tacitly acquiesce in their own re-making and re-direction - in which case they are showered with money, privileges, honours, and official admiration.

The New Left, as you shrewdly point-out - aim to preserve the hollowed-out shell of these institutions - and to fill these shells with inverted content (e.g. the aristocracy replaced by titled subvertionists, educational institutions by social engineering certificate-allocators, independent scholarship by state-funded 'research' bureaucracies++, Christian churches by this-worldly hedonism-sanctifiers and propagandists for 'the welfare state' etc.).

*

Again, the late Soviet Union were pioneers in New Left tactics with respect to the Orthodox Church.

After an decade or so spent in an orgy of blood lust, the State instead corrupted and subverted the Orthodox Church into a branch of the state bureaucracy by hollowing it out and inserting Communist personnel, functions and ideals; atheist KGB officials were put into in Bishop's jobs, Churches were used to spread Communist propaganda and engage in spying and surveillance.

A shell of surface continuity was maintained - while the official 'Orthodox Church' was enlisted to promote national cohesion and nationalistic zeal.

*

The West is nowadays full of 'official' Orthodox Churches.

Indeed, there is very little else...

***

Notes:

+ http://russiascatacombsaints.blogspot.com/

++ It is insufficiently acknowledged that the Royal Society of London - once the premier scholarly institution in the world, descended from the actual originators of modern science - is now merely a branch of the UK public administration; receiving the great bulk of their annual funding from the state in return for providing useful pseudo-scientific validation of government policies:- such as their support for the new quasi-religious moral dogma of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming' due to carbon dioxide pollution.

*

What is Charity/ Agape/ Christian Love of fellow men?

*

From Donald Attwater's 1930 Introduction to his modern English translation of Piers Plowman - Everyman's Library edition, 1957 [re-punctuated, somewhat].

*

'Chastity without Charity shall be chained in Hell', Langland says, and has done. Charity, that is, not a vague benevolence, an 'universal embrace', nor even just refraining from adverse speech and being kind (especially to those one likes); but the habit or virtue which enables men to love God above all things for his Own sake, and for His sake to love all their fellow men; the agape of St Paul.

*

Comment:

Reading this passage induced a flash of what feels like insight.

Charity is:

1. The habit or virtue which enables men to Love God above all things for his Own sake.

2. And for His sake to Love all fellow men above themselves.

In other words, a Christian must first Love God above all other and then (and only then) can he, should he, Love his fellow men as they ought to be Loved.

*

The second cannot come until after the first.

Attempts to Love (in a Christian sense) one's fellow men must fail; unless and until there is Love of God.

To Love your fellow men, to Love your neighbors above yourself - these are concepts, instructions that must inevitably be misunderstood in absence of the Love of God, which must come first.

*

All this is perfectly plainly set out in the liturgy and throughout scripture, but that doesn't stop it being misunderstood; that doesn't prevent the point being missed - by me, by many others.

*

Those who have not achieved Christian Love of God (those who are not actually loving God) - such cannot understand, do not know the meaning of, Christian Love of their fellow men.

Therefore, in the absence of Charity, 'well-meaning' attempts to apply, to live in accordance with, Christian Love of fellow men must be futile, feeble, clumsy, prone to error and wrong emphasis; such attempts are prone to fall into harming people and unwitting devotion to the service of evil.

*

Indeed, this is precisely what we see in mainstream secular society and in worldly forms of Christianity: misguided attempts to 'love' one's fellow men, to love neighbors above self - without already-existing Love of God.

(Indeed with an active denial of God and hatred of Christianity).

*

To try and love fellow men above oneself without first loving God above all, leads by steps to the insanity of political correctness: to self-hatred and a materialist parody of Charity.

*

With PC, instead of Charity we get an impersonal, mathematical confiscation and allocation of worldly goods, coercive bureaucratic procedure displacing human morality, elimination of Love and its replacement with Altruism.

But Christian Love of fellow men can only be attained via the Love of God. 

*

Ideology versus expertise - Political correctness coming the full circle

*

There is a sense in which political correctness in The West is (merely) the return of a normal situation for historical human society: a situation in which all social functions are subject to 'ideology' (which was previously religion).

It is modern societies that are unusual in favouring expertise above ideology.

*

So, where it can be seen that over the past several decades there has been a progressive 'politicization' of the educational system, public administration, health services and so on - this is a case of 'normal service will shortly be resumed'.

The normal thing for most differentiated societies in the world and throughout history is to be ideological, not expert.

*

The move back towards a society unified by ideology  can be seen in terms of universal political influence expressed via laws and administrative regulations which mean that a university or school or business must be PC first, and fit educational objectives into that framework. Senior staff are screened for political correctness, and non-PC behaviour is grounds for employment sanctions including dismissal.

Ideology is mandatory, effectiveness is an optional extra. And this is the normal human situation (except, perhaps, in times of emergency such as war or famine).

*

Specified religious beliefs and behaviours were mandatory  among the ruling elite until relatively recently.

Such that the philosopher David Hume (the 'best'-ever British philosopher) was passed over for a Professorship at Edinburgh in favour of a nonentity, essentially for religious reasons.

Of course the same was seen in the Soviet Empire - all leadership positions went to loyal Party Members with competence as a secondary consideration.

This is normal usual natural - and applies to most societies: Ideology trumps expertise.

*

The past couple of hundred years in the West, with its ideas of the rule of 'the expert', is exceptional.

The idea that leaders should primarily be competent is unusual.

Modernity was that era when expertise trumped ideology; when science pursued scientific goals related to truth and was (at least in theory) ruled by the best scientists, the economy pursued profit, productivity and other economic imperative - and was ruled by those best at attaining these goals - and so on.

But with the advent of political correctness, Western society began to move back to its pre-modern default.

Since PC, The West is no longer even trying  to have its societal functions run by specialized experts.

The ideology of PC trumps expertise.

*

So, wind-ahead to when PC has displaced expertise with ideology; and in so doing has destroyed modernity.

This means that, under PC, the economy and technological capability of the West would subside to the level of pre-modern agrarian societies - so that The West would be equal in power to the societies that surround it...

(This is not my inference, but is an explicit ultimate goal among many elite Leftist intellectuals including the most powerful person on the planet.)

*

Okay - so then how does a society dominated by Leftist PC ideology line-up against the more traditional ideologies - religious and ethnic?

A nation dominated by a PC-elite versus a nation dominated by a religious elite?

A nation dominated by a PC-elite versus a nation dominated by nationalistic ideals?

To frame the question is to answer it.

*

This is the blind spot of Leftism, and always has been. If the Left gets the kind of society that they want, it will be destroyed by traditional societies?

This is why the Left is dishonest - structurally dishonest.

In practice Leftism is a fake - maybe it pursues modernity under disguise of Leftism (early Soviet Union, early Communist China); maybe the Left destroys modernity but disguises this with propaganda and spin (the current situation in the West); maybe it explicitly destroys modernity but pretends that this is sustainable (Green politics).

But an honest Leftism would need to be driven by some kind of spirituality - since it would have to acknowledge that in destroying modernity it would destroy itself - and would do so anyway because it was the right thing to do: perhaps because it regarded itself as evil and deserving of destruction, or perhaps in pursuit of some higher goal.

The nearest approach to this would be something like an absolute and unconditional pacifism which explicitly acknowledged that the pacifism it advocates will inevitably lead to defeat.

*

I have never seen anything explicitly of this kind - I mean advocacy of deliberate, ethical suicide - honestly and explicitly stated on the Left - but it is possible that the strength of political correctness may derive from an implicit desire of martyrdom which will some time soon become explicit.

That would be the ultimate triumph of ideology over expertise.

*

Conclusion: Modernity is finished, normal service has been resumed with ideology as primary.

Assumption: We will get ideology (whether we like it or not).

Question: Which ideology would you prefer?

*

Sin and Law

*

I believe Law has become so dominant a model for conceptualizing morality, that now our culture cannot escape its domination.

In particular, immoral behaviour, sin, is nowadays defined in terms of 'breaking a Law'.

Hence virtue is conceptualized in terms of following Laws, the possible nature of these Laws; and moral debate degenerates into speculating about the possible consequences of applying specific Laws.

*

So - somebody does something immoral, or habitually behaves in an immoral way - a way that 'strikes people' as immoral.

The first thing that people ask is whether the behavior breaks 'the Law' (as it exists).

When a behavior does not break the Law, then the feeling is that the behavior is probably virtuous!

*

But even if the immoral behaviour does break the Law, then we have all been trained to ask whether breaking the Law necessarily and always in every circumstance means that the behavior is immoral; and of course the answer is no.

Some circumstance can always be imagined (even if they actually never existed) where breaking any particular Law is justified - Laws are, after all, merely abstract, selective and summary.

So, any Law always has exceptions and flaws; yet Law is regarded as the only valid conceptualization of morality.  

*

This is crucial - we are trained to believe that morality is Laws (including law-like rules and regulations); only Laws can be moral - that morality can properly be conceptualized only in abstract and formal terms.

*

So we are confronted by the inadequacy of any existing specific Laws, but the conviction that behaviour ought to be regulated by Laws - based on the conviction that morality is a matter of Laws.

Therefore we need constantly to change the Law: to increase the number of Laws (to fill in the gaps and close the loopholes) and to increase the generality of Laws (to cover all possible contingencies).

Now we have truly vast numbers of specific Laws, such that nobody knows them all and nobody understands their interaction; and anyways these Laws continually change, such that nobody can keep-up; and we have Laws of such generality that everyone is in breach of them at all times for instance politically correct laws based on subjective tendencies - such as those relating to discrimination or Hate Crimes.

*

This situation is subversive of morality itself - indeed not just subversive but actively destructive.

Because when the definition of sin depends on breaking a specific Law; and when such Laws are abundant, incompatible and continually in flux - then it is rational to abolish any inconvenient sin by changing the Law.

New sins are thus continually being created (by the expansion of Law/s) while traditional sins are abolished by change of Laws.

Both trends lead to temporary and contingent laws without any underlying moral rationale; which means that any specific sins are considered as contingent as the Laws which define them.

*

So now we have a self-refuting paradox: We believe that sin ought properly to be defined in terms of Laws, yet we also believe that Laws are arbitrary and we know that Laws are always changing.

The name for this situation of incoherence is nihilism - the denial of reality, the denial that reality is real.

Nihilism is not the dominant mode of modern social discourse merely because lots of people happen to have chosen it; rather it is that social conditions, including the legal system, actually imposes nihilism on our culture.

Imposing nihilism actively destroys human meaning and purpose, and creates a state of alienation; and that it what Law is doing to us.

*

The error is fundamental, the situation vastly entrenched; the only answer is radical.

Start again.
*

Chronological snobbery - Lewis and Barfield

*

From Surprised by Joy - by C.S. Lewis - with reference to his friendship with Owen Barfield (my punctuation and emphasis):

*

"[Barfield's] counter attacks destroyed forever [an element] in my own thought.

"In the first place he made short work of what I have called my 'chronological snobbery', the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.

"You must find out why it went out of date.

"Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do?

"If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that their own age is also 'a period', and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.

"They are likely to lie in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels necessary to defend them."

***

Comment:

Why did something go out of date: was it ever refuted? Or to people disbelieve it merely because it is old-fashioned.

Some of the greatest intellectual shocks of the life have been recognizing that old ideas were never refuted but merely died away, to be replaced by something with novelty value but little or nothing else to recommend them - merely because of fashion, because that is the nature and definition of fashion.

*

I came across numerous examples in science (IQ research) medical history - especially psychiatry (the electroencephalogram); and the biggest example in philosophy - where the vast and coherent synthesis of Aquinas was progressively dismantled and discarded for ever smaller, more partial and less coherent systems.

*

Of course the process is most obvious in the arts over the past century, where the decline in quality is impossible to hide.

And then of course there are morals...

*

Why is Christianity incomprehensible to the modern mind?

*

What I find striking about the modern mind (and I speak from fairly recent experience) is how it finds meaningless the major concepts, the vocabulary, the discourse of all previous human generations.

Not wrong, but meaningless - incomprehensible. 

*

It is not that people explicitly deny the existence of the soul, or a super-natural world, or continued existence after death, or objective morality ('Natural Law'), or angels, or miracles, or prophecy, or sin, or God...

It is that these things are vague, feeble, incomprehensible - they lack subjective reality.

Moderns just cannot make sense of the major concerns of previous human generations.

Such matters don't feel important - not important enough to worry about.

*

But why do modern people think so differently from those in the past? - how do they think so differently that past categories just dissolve away without argument.

What is it that devalues, renders nonsensical, those things which used to be considered the most important things?

What traps them - traps us - inside the bubble of our own bland detachment?

*

I think that the root of this is the functional specialization of discourse which characterizes the modern world.

We start out as children thinking the same way as the mass of humanity. But to become a competent adult in the modern world is to have been trained in compartmentalization of discourse.

And a side effect of specialized discourse is that general discourse become impossible.

*

The nature of religious, Christian, metaphysical discourse cannot be captured by specialized discourse, therefore cannot be captured by modernity; therefore is either excluded or trivialized by modernity - therefore this whole domain of life has simply dissolved away.

It is not that modernity (or 'science') has discovered that there is no soul, or God, or that reality is a matter of subjective opinion, or else a social construct - rather it is that the discourse of modernity cannot make any sense of such concepts as such - but can only evaluate them sequentially, a bit at a time, using narrow and inappropriate criteria - and inevitably reject them as meaningless, unnecessary...

*

The process ought to be obvious. How could science disprove religion, for example, when the very first assumption of science is to exclude religious causes explanations and use only material causes and explanations? Surely that is easy to see?

But no. People learn to do science, learn think scientifically (disciplining the spontaneous human tendency to make religious explanations for phenomena), and at some point science-thinking becomes a habit - and people 'discover' that they no longer 'need' religious causes and explanations.

All that has happened is that they have developed a habit of thinking (including the habit of excluding religious explanations); and the habit has become so ingrained and socially-supported, that they have forgotten that it is just a habit - itself having no justification other than the pragmatic.

*

In sum, the problem of modernity is not only that it destroys our ability to understand religion and the supernatural; but that it destroys our ability to understand anything at all - or, that 'understanding' is now framed in such a narrowly specialized sense that it becomes a matter of indifference.

Because, although we habitually regard scientific truth as being the only kind of truth which is really solid, in practice almost nobody cares about scientific truth - certainly scientists do not care about scientific truth, since they do not try to discover truth nor do they speak truthfully.

So we are in the bizarre situation that our paradigm hegemonic mode of thinking, i.e. science, has become so narrow and partial that we no longer care about scientific truth; yet the habitual exclusions which led to science have prevented us from conceptualizing what has happened.  

*

Modernity merely evaluates one thing in terms of another, and perpetually displaces the question.

The process is eventually circular - except that people get bored and their attention wanders before the circle is completed.

In modernity, nothing is valuable in itself, but only in promoting 'something else' - that 'something else' not being valuable in itself, but only in terms of another 'something else'.

Which is to say, everything depends on everything else.

Which is to say everything is incomprehensible - including Christianity.

Which is to say that nothing feels like it matters.

*

Who are the virtuous poor? Northumbrian shepherds?

*

Reading the medieval poem Piers Plowman by William Langland brings me up against the Christian conviction that it is easier for The Virtuous Poor to achieve salvation than the Rich.

Langland - at various times and with varying conviction - asserts that the simple, hard-working Christian plowman (i.e peasant) has a special 'pardon' from God which enables him to be saved; while the hazards of luxury corrupt many more powerful, wealthier and prestigious individual.

*

But who are the modern virtuous poor?

The first thing to be said is that there probably are not many of them - certainly no a large class of people analogous to the medieval peasants.

And the people who spring to mind as the modern poor are more akin to the assorted pleasure-seekers, loudmouths, brawlers, drunkards and fornicators depicted by Langland as the dregs of the Middle Ages.

The mainstream modern 'poor' are perhaps akin to the idle vagrants who Langland argued should be forced to work by the lash of starvation!

(And yet there are those who regard Christianity as soft!)

*

One group of people who strike me as akin to the virtuous poor are the Northumbrian shepherds who I used to see at country shows, involved in the competitions for best sheep.

My observations were superficial, but they were a quietly impressive bunch.

In the first place they were indeed quiet - men of few words, minimal movements, modest demeanor.

(When a shepherd won first prize for his sheep, this would be acknowledged by - at most - a barely-perceptible nod. Yet they might have put in many dozens of hours of work in preparing and displaying that sheep.)

And when a shepherd did speak it was brief and to the point; their rural dialects (from both sides of the border of England and Scotland) were intrinsically musical, their words lyrical: they were naturally poetic both in terms of what they said and how they said it.

*

Well, all this may be wishful thinking.

But recall that the best British folk poetry is to be found in the ballads from this region, and that the very first named English poet was a northern shepherd: Caedmon, as told by The Venerable Bede:

*

[Caedmon] was established in worldly life until the time when he was of advanced age, and he had never learned any songs. And consequently, often at a drinking gathering, when there was deemed to be occasion of joy, that they all must in turn sing with a harp, when he saw the harp nearing him, he then arose for shame from that feast and went home to his house.

Then he did this on a certain occasion, that he left the banquet-hall and he was going out to the animal stables, which herd had been assigned to him that night. When he there at a suitable time set his limbs at rest and fell asleep, then some man stood by him in his dream and hailed and greeted him and addressed him by his name: 'Caedmon, sing me something.'

Then he answered and said: 'I do not know how to sing and for that reason I went out from this feast and went hither, because I did not know how to sing at all.'

Again he said, he who was speaking with him: 'Nevertheless, you must sing.'

Then he said: 'What must I sing?'

Said he: 'Sing to me of the first Creation.'

When he received this answer, then he began immediately to sing in praise of God the Creator verses and words which he had never heard, whose order is this:

*

Nu we sculon herigean heofonrices weard
(Now we must praise the Protector of the heavenly kingdom)

meotodes meahte ond his modgeþanc
(the might of the Measurer and His mind's purpose)

weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs
(the work of the Father of Glory, as He for each of the wonders)

ece drihten, or onstealde
(the eternal Lord, established a beginning)

He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
(He shaped first for the sons of the Earth)

heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend
(heaven as a roof, the Holy Maker)

þa middangeard moncynnes weard
(then the Middle-World, mankind's Guardian)

ece drihten, æfter teode
(the eternal Lord, made afterwards)

firum foldan, frea ælmihtig
(solid ground for men, the almighty Lord)


Note: þ is called 'thorn' and ð is called 'eth' - and they are used for the various sounds made by modern 'th'.

*

Then he arose from that sleep, and all of those (songs) which he sang while sleeping he had fast in his memory, and he soon added in the same manner to those words many words of songs worthy of God.

Then in the morning he came to the town-reeve, who was his alderman. He said to him which gift did he bring, and he directly lead him to the abbess and made it known and declared to her.

Then she ordered all of the most learnèd men and scholars to assemble, and to those who were present commanded him to tell of that dream and sing that song, so that it might be determined by the judgement of all of them: what it was and whence it had come.

Then it was seen by all even as it was, that to him from God himself a heavenly gift had been given.


http://www.heorot.dk/bede-caedmon.html

*

Revolution - or permanent anarchy? GK Chesterton on the Suffragette strategy

*

"The objection to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the contrary, it is that they are not militant enough.

"A revolution is a military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace.

*

"Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something else; which is altogether another pair of shoes.

"They do not create revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality.

"Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. (...) You can only knock off the King's head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever.

(...)

"It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test.

"War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably--numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead.

"But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever.

*

"The working objection to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or not; but this is surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the destruction of actual democracy.

"What should the mass of women decide if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people practically say that females may vote about everything except about Female Suffrage."

*

The Unmilitary Suffragette, from What's Wrong with the World by GK Chesterton, 1910

***


Comment:

A tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever - this is a striking recognition, a century ago,  of the methods of the Left which have led to political correctness: rule by the tiny minority.
 
Obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever - well, yes indeed.

You can knock off the King's hat any number of times - how can such behaviour be stopped (especially when it is tacitly approved by the King's rivals)?

Modern society seems unable to deal with this kind of stubborn, unrelenting disorder by any means other than yielding.

Presumably, the only effective methods would be judged too harsh to be acceptable in modern society: hence tiny minorities of really persistent troublemakers get their way, sooner or later.
 
*

The four levels of allegory applied to Frost, Harry Potter, Toy Story 3

*

From Nevill Coghill and C.S. Lewis I learn of four levels of allegory as described in medieval times; which I understand as follows (and this is my made-up shorthand terminology). 

1. Primary. The literal level of what is described.

2. Referent. That secondary literal meaning which is encoded in the first level.

3. Moral. Any underlying moral point or message.

4. Ultimate. The ultimate level of understanding the human condition - usually spiritual or religious, but perhaps some other non-religious ultimate.

*

(In what follows, I am blurring the difference between allegory and symbolism, in order to emphasize the layering. Often the allegorical interpretation is optional, subordinate or may be denied by the author. Strictly, though, the allegorical layers ought to be deliberately and consciously encoded in the text - as William Langland did with Piers Plowman.)

*

So that Animal Farm by George Orwell has the primary literal level of being a story about animal and farmers, a referent literal level of being about the Russian Revolution, and a moral level of being about the tendency for revolutionary ideals to be corrupted. It does not have a substantive Ultimate level (at least, it does not for me).

*

Another, fuller, example might be Robert Frost's poem Nothing Gold Can Stay:


Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

*

1. A poem about leaves.
2. Referring to Life in General ('dawn goes down to day')
3. Moral. A poem about the evanescence of beauty ('hardest hue to hold') it should be cherished while it lasts.
4. Ultimate. That this is the Christian human condition ('Eden sank to grief')

*

The fourth 'ultimate' level of religious meaning may be implicit: a matter of 'pointing offstage', as throughout The Lord of the Rings.

Or it may be depicted partially but inexplicitly - as in the Harry Potter series with its ghosts, talk of souls, the 'Veil' (dividing death from life) in the Ministry of Magic, and the King's Cross limbo' chapter of the last book.

Or there may be an explicit description and explanation of the Ultimate level, as with the last of the Narnia Chronicles.

*

The Death Eaters in Harry Potter are an obvious three level allegory of Nazis - with Muggle hating representing anti-Semitism in a literal fashion, and the third layer of an egalitarian morality of tolerance also  very obvious.

What makes the Potter series so much richer than this is that the fourth and ultimate moral layer is Christian, supernaturalist, traditional; with multiple allegorical pointings to the Christian story, with its sacrificial theme, death and rebith etc, and moral principles (esepcially the centrality of Love in the sense of 'Charity' or Agape).

So that Death Eaters are ultimately evil not because they inflict pain on others (Harry does that), or because they are snobs; but because/ insofar as they reject Love and worship Voldemort, who is a false god.

*

And what of Political Correctness?

Clearly much PC art can be interpreted as having the first three levels of allegory - but not many PC works go so far as to provide an Ultimate level of allegory.

The ultimate level for political correctness, as I have argued in this blog passim - is a this-worldly perspective of human life as regulated by abstract rules that are 'inverted' - i.e. non-spontaneous, non-natural, and with a utilitarian justification (i.e. optimizing happiness for the greatest number - but especially minimizing suffering).

PC allegory might also has characteristic themes such as diversity/ multi-culturalism, egalitarianism, peace and so on.

*

The best example that comes to mind of a PC work of art which depicts the Ultimate level of allegory - the 'sprituality' of PC - is the recent movie Toy Story 3 which I reviewed last year:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/07/toy-story-3-superb-depiction-of-best-of.html

*

Of course Toy Story 3 has the first three levels of allegory since it is

1. Literally about toys,

2. Referring to humans - each toy being a recognizable human type,

3. Has a moral message/s concerning the importance of friendship, courage and loyalty (i.e. the pagan virtues of Natural Law) - and also PC themes of egalitarianism (all toys equally deserve equal gratification, hierarchical command is characteristic of evil), diversity (inclusive of all types of toy), anti-cruelty (evil toys are cruel, good toys are non-violent) etc.

*

But in addition the resolution of Toy Story 3 strikes me as a depiction of a kind of paradise of political correctness.

The toys voluntarily choose to accept an egalitarian, multi-cultural and diverse life (inclusive of all the different toys of different types) - by sharing equally both pleasures and duties, and accepting that it is all going to end in destruction; yet accepting destruction as the essence of life: sweetened by friendship.

The ideal life as a kindly mutual huddling against the indifference of the universe.

I see the denouement of Toy Story 3 as being an acceptance of the ultimate PC reality of life as governed by abstract rules - rules whose face value is utilitarian - but in a world where utilitarianism (a life of gratification equally and for all) lacks further validation.

It also has the ides that 'meaning' comes wholly from relationships, despite that relationships are inevitably short-lived.

It is a tragic ultimate view of life, a fusion of pagan and PC, beautifully done. But having seen this ultimate and participated imaginatively in it, the deep current of hopelessness in modern life is entirely understandable.  

*

Alienation, purposelessness, meaninglessness and Christian conversion

*

Although the only reason for becoming a Christian is that it is the truth, that it is reality; nonetheless, since we humans are weak and corrupt there also needs to be at least some short-term reward for conversion.

There needs to be some therapeutic aspect to conversion.

And that which requires therapy is modern secular life; which (whether pleasurable or miserable on average) is perceived as ultimately alienated, purposeless, meaningless.

*

Alienation, detachment, alone-ness, lack of any connection or relation to the world - is pervasive in modernity.

Alienation can be solved with animism, with paganism; it can be solved in fantasy and sometimes in art; it can be solved in human love (of spouse, of family).

And alienation can also be solved by Christianity which affirms a continuous personal relationship with God (specifically Jesus Christ) so that we are never truly alone.

Also, for a Christian there is the continual reality of Unseen Warfare, of the struggle for salvation affected by angels and demons (which are Christian interpretations of the conscious natural entities of animism or the gods and goddesses of paganism).

Since the Christian is never alone, and always the object of attention; alienation is a temporary illusion - not a permanent reality.

Furthermore, for a Christian the unity of Man is not a mere aspiration, but a fact. We are - whether we like it or not - all in it together; and what we think and do affects not just ourselves but everybody.

No Man is an island: not even in his 'private' thoughts; humans are necessarily social even in solitude. Hence the divisions between practical and personal, work and prayer, contemplation and labour are abolished. A desert-dwelling hermit may exemplify the fullest membership of humankind.

*

Purposelessness is a feature of modernity where life is specialized, each specialism exists only to serve other specialisms, yet each specialism is narrow, literal and un-engaging.

Everything feels trivial because it is going nowhere for no reason.

Some moderns 'lose themselves' in work or human relationships, others in whatever happens to provide temporary distraction or relief from consciousness (e.g. intoxication, busyness, serial pleasure-seeking). But these are merely means to an end which is left blank by modernity.

For the Christian, however, there is an underpinning purpose to life: which is salvation. All our choices lead either toward, or away from, salvation.

Properly understood, there is also the possibility of increasing holiness - which is termed theosis - i.e progress in this life towards God-like-ness. The success of theosis is Sainthood - a Saint being understood as one who lives partly in Heaven while still on earth.

So, for a Christian, nothing is trivial: everything is goal-directed.

*

Meaninglessness is the sense that nothing matters in an indifferent universe. The secular materialist looks up at the stars and feels infinitely insignificant.

By contrast, Christianity states that on the contrary everything is significant.

It offers a cosmology, a description of reality, which encompasses this life, the reality of the soul and its survival of death, the nature of the next world into which the soul survives, the existence of beings intermediate between Man and God - namely angels and demons.

When a Christian looks up at the stars he become partially aware of (is glimpsing) spiritual reality: a universe of life, meaning, struggle - the field of transcendent truth, beauty and virtue - and a reality in which his own soul is a focus of vital importance.

*

So that although Christianity is not about 'being happy' (rather it is a struggle until death, an unseen warfare); and although Christianity is not about re-making the world in accordance with our subjective desires (not about lets-pretend or wishful-thinking  - but rather about fitting oneself to reality); nonetheless adopting the Christian perspective does offer some immediate and profound psychological rewards.

For a Christian things matter: choices matter, what we do has meaning and purpose; and the universe is in personal relation to the perceiving soul.

What happens in life is never lost in time and space - but (for better or worse) is a permanent reality of the soul.

*

Wholeness, weight and significance are restored to life; there is no longer reason to live wholly for distractions.

So although wholeness, weight and significance bring a new set of problems for the convert - Christian conversion is not entirely a matter of struggle, trial and tribulation; it does have immediate rewards.

Conversion to Christianity means reality is real and has our human experience at the centre of things; there is no longer need to live by strategic evasion of consciousness and systematic suppression of thinking.

*

Medieval cosmology - looking up at the stars...

*

From Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages, by C.S. Lewis (in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1966).

*

Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that pre-Copernican astronomy is true.

(...)

You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier.

And secondly, because the Earth is an absolute centre, and Earthwards from any part of this universe is downwards, you will find that you are looking at the planet and stars not merely in terms of 'distance' but of that very special kind of distance we call 'height'. They are not only a long way from Earth, but a long way above it.

(...)

Now these two factors taken together - enormous but finite size, and distances which, however vast, remain unambiguously vertical, and indeed vertiginous - at once present you with something which differs from the Newtonian picture rather as a great building differs from a great jungle.

You can lose yourself in infinity; there is indeed nothing much else you can do with it. It arouses questions, it prompts to a certain kind of wonder and reverie, usually a sombre kind (...) But it answers no questions; necessarily shapeless and trackless, patient of no absolute order or direction, it leads, after a little, to boredom or despair or (often) to the haunting conviction that it must be an illusion.

(...)

But the effect of the old model becomes even more interesting when we consider order.

It is not merely very large, it is a whole of finely graded parts. Everything descends from the circumference with a steady diminution in size, speed, power and dignity. (...)

All above the Empyrean [Firmament] is in a special, immaterial sense 'Heaven', full of the divine substance.

From the Empyrean down to the Moon is the realm of aether - that strange half-matter in which so many different ages have believed (...) - changeless, necessary, not subject to Fortune.

From the Moon down to the Earth is the realm of air (...) which is also the realm of luck, change, birth, death and contingence.

(...)

It is a structure, a finished work, a unity articulated through a great and harmonious plurality. It evokes not mere wonder but admiration. It provides food for thought and satisfaction for our aesthetic nature.

(...)

After the dimensions and the order we must consider the dynamics. (...)

The infinite, according to Aristotle, is not actual. No infinite object exists; no infinite processes occur. Hence we cannot explain the movement of one body by another and so on forever. (...)

All the movements of the universe must therefore, in the last resort, result from a compulsive force exercised by something immovable.(...)

He called this Unmoved Mover either 'God' or 'Mind'. It moves the Primum Mobile [or outermost sphere of the universe] by love. (...)

Accordingly we find (not now by analogy but in strictest fact) that in every sphere there is a rational creature called an Intelligence which is compelled to move, and therefore to keep his sphere moving, by his incessant desire for God. (...)

*

A modern might ask why a love for God should lead to a perpetual rotation. I think, because this love or appetite for God is a desire to participate as much as possible in his nature; i.e. to imitate it. And the nearest approach to His eternal immobility, the second best, is eternal regular movement in the most perfect figure, which, for any Greek, is the circle.

(...)

[A man of the middle ages] did not think that the spaces he looked up at were silent, or dark or empty. Far from being silent, they were perpetually filled with sweet, immeasurable sound. The vast hollow spheres, turning each at its proper interval inside its superior, gave out a blended harmony.

(...)

Nor were these high regions dark. The darkness in which the stars (for us) is set is merely the darkness of the long, conical shadow cast by the earth when the sun is below our feet. They knew (...) that the apex of this dark cone must fall well above the moon.

Beyond that apex the higher heavens are bathed in perpetual sunshine.

(...)

And these spaces, bright and resonant, were also inhabited. We have already peopled them with the Intelligences who either animate or guide the spheres.

Distinct from these, but of course equally immortal and superhuman, are the angels. Their natural habitat is between the Empyrean and the Moon and their number is probably enormous. (...)

[Humans] touch only the lowest fringe of angelic life. (...) They are ordered in nine classes which are arranged in three groups of three classes each. (...)

The lowest hierarchy deals with human affairs; Principalities with the destiny of nations, Archangels and Angels, in varying ways, with those of individuals.

(...)

[God governs the world through the angels; the whole angelic population, without prejudice to its complex internal triads, is the medium between God as agent and Nature (or man) as patient.]

(...)

But I must crowd the sky a little more. (...) Besides the Intelligences and the angelic hierarchies are the planets themselves. Each of them is doing things to us as every moment.

(...)

Go back for a moment to the experience I mentioned at the beginning; that of looking up at the stars (...).

The full contrast between the medieval experience and ours is only now apparent.

For whatever else we feel, we certainly feel that we are looking out; out of somewhere warm and lighted into cold, indifferent desolation, out of a house onto the dark waste of the sea.

But the medieval man felt he was looking in.

Here is the outside. The Moon's orbit is the city wall. Night opens the gates for a moment and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps which are going on inside; staring as animals stare at the fires of the encampment they cannot enter, as rustics stare at a city, as surburbia stares at Mayfair.

(...)

These spheres are moved by love, by intellectual desire, never sated because they can never completely assimilate themselves to their object, and never frustrated because they continually do so to the fullest extent which their nature admits or requires.

Their existence is thus one of delight.

The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one.

They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect object.

***