Bruce Charlton's Notions

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It seems that political correctness represents a 'turn' in Leftism.

Leftism can be seen, for most of its history, as a reaction against Christianity; a denial of the reality of God and a compensatory deification of the human.

But PC has turned against the human, and is now a deification of the system.

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Now the cutting edge of the Left is not about gratifying individual preferences, nor about self-development: these must be subordinated to abstract systems for allocating 'goods' to ensure 'fair' outcomes.

In this sense, administrative systems of group preferences ('affirmative action') are the epitome of modern PC Leftism; monitoring and regulatory guidelines becoming ever more numerous, interactive; concerning smaller units; and penetrating ever-deeper into the capillary level of human life, the interstices of human interaction.

The modern Leftist hero is no longer a spontaneous, self-validating spirit of godlike autonomy but an expert and obedient functionary who has internalized all the rules such as to satisfy all the quotas simultaneously.  

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What counts as 'fair' is necessarily very uncertain, given that humans don't really matter anymore; but if the PC Left is unsure about what counts as fair, it is very sure about how fairness should be achieved: fairness is an outcome of abstract process (laws, rules, regulations) that over-ride individual choice.

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The Left is no longer about a society based on equally free humans all of whose needs are satisfied - since the PC turn the Left is now about humans being an unfortunate (but perhaps temporary) impediment to the smooth running of impartial administrative systems (which systems currently involve humans, but perhaps temporarily).

It is no longer the job of The System to fit around human desire, as for the sixties radicals; but the job of humans to fit into and support The System.

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Something analogous is, of course, also axiomatic in the Gaia worshipping Green Left. The system is Gaia, and humans function mainly to damage this system. What is required from humans is at least support of the Gaian system - but ideally mass suicide.

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Th strange thing is that this U-turn is hardly noticed on the Left, even among those (such as the Baby Boomer generation) whose own lives have described the trajectory from valorizing individual freedom, impulse and happiness down to the anti-human abstract impersonality of PC.

In the space of forty years the Leftist Utopia has gone from being a hippy commune of free love, dreamy drugs and idleness; to a politically correct society in which every thought, word and deed are monitored and regulated by bureaucracies that are assumed (on the Left) to be intrinsically benign.

The difference is not subtle: you'd have thought they might have noticed...

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Glenn Gould seemed to phrase trills more than any other pianist I have encountered.

In the finale Gigue movement of Bach's French Suite number 4 in E-flat Major he uses slow trills.

(This is one of the most joyous pieces of music I have ever heard - especially the repeat of the first section):

7:09 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2OGhZ8fbAs

(BTW: it sounds even better on vinyl - as per usual.)

In the Prelude in G minor from Book 1 of Well Tempered Clavier Gould uses an accelerating trill in the high part (rather faint in this recording - it sounds like only one stereo channel) at the opening and repeated variously in other voices; which accelerates in a stepwise fashion and at one point is syncopated, in triplets - I have always loved the way he played it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qefBKP6M6CQ

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From some recent comments on this blog, it seems as if there may be misunderstandings about my attitudes to various Christian denominations, and my supposed hostility towards some. This posting is to clarify matters.

(Note: I will be even-more-than-usually selective in what comments I publish on this topic; and I do not wish to engage in public confession, soul searching or autobiography - either my own or that of others.)

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1. My ideal is Byzantine, an Eastern Orthodox divinely-sanctioned monarchy; life permeated by ritual, liturgy and prayer; a society replete with ascetic religious (monks and nuns), elders, advanced sanctity, even living Saints.

This is the ideal, but this doesn't exist anywhere in the world, and has not done so for many centuries; and nothing of this kind has existed in England since late Anglo Saxon times (arguably).

We are now so very, very far away from this situation that it is off the map; except that the ideal can function negatively to clarify what is wrong, what not to believe (e.g. democracy, this-worldliness etc).

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This is my ideal not because I would personally be happiest in such a society, nor because I personally am anywhere near it; nor because I think it is going to happen in England or the West either in my life or at any conceivable time in the future.

Trained-up as a hedonic individualist I would very likely find living in a really Christian society exceedingly uncomfortable, intrusive and dull. But the fact of my own corruption by modernity is surely no argument against recognizing the superiority of a spirituality which I myself could/ would not attain?

Byzantium is my ideal because I believe it is the 'best' Christian society, founded on the Truest principles, and closest to optimal for the pursuit of salvation and especially the highest levels of sanctity.

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2. In practice, here and now, currently, I am an Anglican: i.e. a member of the Church of England; orthodox (not liberal), exceedingly irregular and inadequate in attendance and involvement, but of no very unusual kind to the external eye.

I mostly worship-in and support two Anglican churches: one is Protestant - evangelical, family- and mission-orientated; the other (where I celebrate the Eucharist/ Holy Communion) is Anglo-Catholic and uses the Book of Common Prayer.

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I hope and (probably) intend sometime to become a Roman Catholic in the newly established Ordinariate (http://www.ordinariate.org.uk/) especially if the traditional liturgy was used; but at present there are no local parishes.

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In general, I approve (in principle) all examples of Mere Christianity (as defined by CS Lewis in his book of that name) - which means 'core' Christianity.

But I regard most actual Christian denominations as being partial and prone to wrong emphasis.

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I also try to regard The Church as a mystical institution, and not as an organization or a collection of organizations.

Hence, in my view, many or most actual Christian Churches may - as organizations and in practice - do more harm than good to many or most people; for example by false emphasis, worldliness, legalistic modes of thinking, 'pseudo-Christianizing' of what are fashionable, liberal secular concerns and values etc.

The greatest evil is selected and twisted from the Good.

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I do not hold up my current practice as any kind of recommendation to others, nor do I defend it; since it is negative, feeble, lazy and compromised. Neither is this a false humility but simple fact. I simply mention this matter of Christian denominations in order to to demonstrate that - as well as my veneration for Eastern Orthodoxy as potentially being the highest Way and Truth - I very obviously have no hostility toward Protestants or Western (including Roman) Catholic denominations or individuals; since these are either churches where I currently worship, or where I hope to worship.

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From commenter Rottweiler at the blog Throne and Altar:

http://bonald.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/mystical-christian-reactionaries-another-type-of-conservative/#comment-2932

I think the point of winning the war of ideas against progressives, a struggle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, is nothing more grandiose than turning the state into Purgatory so no more revolutionary leaders can turn it into a genocidal Hell. 

An Emperor’s job was not to solve all his subjects’ problems, but to restrain the Antichrist by simply occupying the throne. 

Then each subject could exercise his free will to strive for Heaven, or not.

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Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him.

The two principles of truth - reason and senses - are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception.

The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and, just as they trick the soul, they are tricked by it in return: it takes its revenge. The senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

They both compete in lies and deception.


Blaise Pascal - Pensees - Number 45. Translated by AJ Krailsheimer, Penguin edition of 1966.



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COMMENT

Since, as Pascal shows, we have no reason to believe either reason or the evidence of the senses (experience), whence comes truth?

Only by grace - in other words from God.

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Truth is either inbuilt by God (in the form of inborn reason) and/ or truth is received by revelation from God during the human lifespan derived from the evidence of our senses - by experience, as an increase in genuine knowledge.

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Reject God and you reject both reason and the evidence of the senses as sources of genuine knowledge.

(Neither chance nor evolution could arrange matters such that reason and/or the senses provided genuine knowledge; why should they?)

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The choice is God or nihilism (denial of truth, of reality): there is no other option.

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One of my favourite pieces of music is the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, by Michael Tippett (1953) - indeed it is probably the single piece of 20th century classical music which most moves me.

(Indeed I was moved to within an inch of my life! when I saw it done at Tippett's 75th Birthday concert in 1980, by the English Chamber Orchestra, with the composer present.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNqTeQa7MDQ

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And one of my favourite books is Akenfield - an oral historical study of an East Anglian village by Ronald Blythe (1969)

http://www.akenfield.com/

I read this intensively 1973-4 - on the recommendation of an inspirational history teacher named John Reeve (who later became a well known educator and author at the British Museum, London).

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The music and the book come together in one of my favourite movies - Akenfield directed by Peter Hall (1974) - and in particular a sequence depicting the courtship and love of the historical protagonist (Tom) and his wife.

My previously names favourite movie scenes (from Blade Runner, Last of the Mohicans and Return of the King) were all heroic: but this one is extraordinarily tender.

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Buy the DVD, watch the movie. You won't regret it. You will always remember it. 

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I have never presented a written-out and formal taxonomy of the Right so far - but reflecting on Bonald's more complex taxonomy which I posted two days ago makes me realise I implicitly use a simpler (and more simplistic) threefold taxonomy as follows:

1. 'Mainstream' (or pseudo) Right (which is actually part of the Left)

2. 'Fascist'/ commonsense Right - which is the secular anti-Left, a reaction against the Left

3. the Religious Right - which is pre-Left: it is what the Left was/ is reacting against.

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So the chronological order, and causal sequence, is as follows:

First there was the Religious Right, and nothing else

Secondly there was the Left which was a reaction against the Religious Right, therefore Leftism = the anti-Religious Right (and includes the pseudo-Right, such as mainstream Conservatives and Republicans, and libertarianism).

NB: The Left is intrinsically and necessarily anti-Religious, although secularization of the Left was gradual, and remains incomplete except among the elite politically correct intellectuals. Insofar as a person or institution is Leftist, by that much they are anti-Religious (which is compatible with a relatively high level of religiousness, nonetheless; especially in a society where the average level of religiousness is low).

Thirdly there was Fascism which is Secular Commonsense anti-Leftism, therefore Fascism = the Non-Religious anti-Left.

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And that's it!

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From Chance or the Dance? A critique of modern secularism by Thomas Howard, 1969.

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There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark.

They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.

Men believed in things like the Last Judgment and fiery torment. They believed that demented people had devils in them, and that disease was a plague from heaven. They believed that they had souls, and that what they did in this life had some bearing on the way in which they would finally experience reality. They believed in portents and charms and talismans. And they believed that God was in heaven and Beelzebub in hell and that the Holy Ghost had impregnated the Virgin Mary and that the earth and sky were full of angelic and demonic conflict.

Altogether, life was very weighty, and there was no telling what might lie behind things. The ages were, as I say, dark.


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Then the light came. It was the light that has lighted us men into a new age.

Charms, angels, devils, plagues, and parthenogenesis have fled from the glare into the crannies of memory. In their place have come coal mining and E = mc2 and plastic and group dynamics and napalm and urban renewal and rapid transit.

Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal. They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the knowledge that the thing that was making them, scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer.

Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things.

The age was called enlightened.

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The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

That is, to the darkened mind it did not mean nothing that the sun went down and night came and the moon and stars appeared and then dawn and the sun and morning again and another day, which would itself wax and then wane into twilight and dusk and night. It did not mean nothing to them that the time of work was under the aegis of the bright sun and that it was the sun that poured life into the seeds that they were planting and that brought out the sweat on their foreheads, and that the time of rest was under the scepter of the silver moon.

This was the diurnal exhibition of what was True—that there are a panoply and a rhythm and a cycle, a waxing and a waning, a rising and a setting and then a rising again. And to them it was not for nothing that the king wore a crown of gold and that the lord mayor wore medallions. This was the political exhibition of what was, in fact, True—that there are royalty and authority and hierarchy at the heart of things and that it is possible to see this in lions and eagles and queen bees as well as in the court of the king.

To them it was not for nothing that a man went in to a woman in private and uncovered her and knew ecstasy in the experience of her being. This was simply a case in point of what was True anyway—that there is a mystery of being not to be thrown open to all, and that the right knowledge of another being is ecstatic, and that what appears under these carnal forms is, in fact, the image of what is actually True.

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The former mind, in a word, read vast significance into everything. Nature and politics and animals and sex—these were all exhibitions in their own way of sex-these were all exhibitions in their own way of the way things are.

This mind fancied that everything meant everything, and that it all rushed up finally to heaven. We have an idea of royalty, this mind said, which we observe in our politics and which we attribute to lions and eagles, and we have this idea because there is a great King at the top of things, and he has set things thus so that our fancies will be drawn toward his royal Person, and we will recognize the hard realities of which the stuff of our world has been a poor shadow when we stumble into his royal court.

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So this mind handled all the data of experience as though they were images—cases in point, that is, of each other and of the way things are. So that when they came across the idea, say, of the incarnation of the god, it made perfect sense to them, since it was in the nature of things to appear in images—royalty in lions and kings, strength in bulls and heroes, industriousness in ants and beavers, delicacy in butterflies and fawns, terror in oceans and thunder, glory in roses and sunsets—so of course the god might appear in flesh and blood, how else?

And when they heard about a thing like resurrection, they could believe it, since they thought they could see the same thing (life issuing from death) in other realms—seedtime and harvest, and morning and evening, and renunciation and reward—and so what else did it all mean but that it is the way things are that life triumphs over death?

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This mind saw things as images because it saw correspondences running in all directions among things.

That is, the world was not a random tumble of things all appearing separately, jostling one another and struggling helter-skelter for a place in the sun. On the contrary, one thing signaled another. One thing was a case in point of another.

A goshawk tearing a field mouse seemed a case in point of what is also visible in the fierce duke who plunders the neighboring duchy. A lamb was an instance of timidity, mildness, harmlessness. The earth receiving life from the sun and bringing forth grass and trees and nourishing everything from itself was like all the other mothers we can observe—doves and ewes and our own mothers.

The inclination to trace correspondences among things transfigured those things—goshawks, lambs, the earth, kings—into images of one another, so that on all levels it was felt that this suggested that.

It is a way of looking at things that goes farther than saying that this is like that: it says that both this and that are instances of the way things are. The sun pours energy into the earth and the man pours energy into the woman because that is how fruit begins—by the union of the one thing and the other; by the union of what appears under stellar categories as sun and earth, and under human categories as man and woman.

That is, in both instances, there is enacted under the appropriate species what lies at the root of things.

From Chance or the Dance? A critique of modern secularism by Thomas Howard, 1969


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COMMENT

The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

This aphorism, and the passage as a whole, highlights that we are dealing with a metaphysical change: a change in the basic assumptions by which experience is organized; a change in what constitutes knowledge and not a change due to knowledge.

This change seems to have been led from 'the top': from the intellectual class. It is the intellectuals who first and most whole-heartedly embraced the idea that nothing means anything.

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But why did intellectuals rebel against the inbuilt, inborn, natural, spontaneous, universal and necessary human assumption that everything means everything?

In principle this might be due to a push or a pull. Intellectuals might either be repelled by 'everything means everything', or they might be attracted by 'nothing means anything'.

My feeling is that it was the attraction of 'nothing means anything', the attraction of using this as a weapon against... against whoever or whatever stood in the path of the gratification of intellectuals.

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That seems to me to be the big story of general intellectual history during the past millennium: an unrelenting series of writings, paintings, theatre, movies - all by intellectuals using the 'nothing means anything' argument against persons and institutions who oppose them.

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Intellectuals use this wholly general argument against specific persons and institutions without realizing (or caring?) that in doing so they are destroying all possibility of meaning, purpose and connection in life.

It is the endemic un-willingness to apply their knock-down metaphysical 'argument' to their own ideas which indicates that general intellectual activity has been and remains fundamentally unserious.

It is the endemic inability to recognize that their short-term knock-down metaphysical 'argument' over the longer term destroys not just their enemies, but also themselves (destroys in fact - the world and reason for existing) which indicates that general intellectual activity has been and remains fundamentally incompetent.   

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Although there are a few exceptions, intellectual activity has been, for hundreds of years, at root un-serious and incompetent; or if you prefer spiteful and reckless...

The mass of intellectual activity is not a noble thing, as often asserted and assumed; it is in contrast a prideful thing - and this applies as much or more to the geniuses as to the intellectual footsoldiers .

Therefore, to assert the intrinsic worth of intellectual activity per se is merely to make a blanket excuse for pride; to assert the intrinsic value of power - to excuse generation upon generation of ingrained impulsive malice.

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And that is the 'reason' for the metaphysical shift from everything means everything to nothing means anything.


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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.

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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?).

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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.

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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.)

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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.)

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(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.)

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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.

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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. 

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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/

*

*

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.

*

*

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.

*

*

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.

*

*

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.

*

*

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...

*

*

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.

*

*

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.

*

*
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.

*

*

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

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'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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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!

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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.  

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Start again.
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