Bruce Charlton's Notions

It is very striking to me, how negative are people's ideals now; compared with even fifty or a hundred years ago. 

And I mean negative in practice - not just in theory; because there have been negative religious theories for at least a couple of thousand years - yet in practice Christians had strong positive motivations. 

Negative Theology (Via Negativa) was prominent in Christianity (substantially inherited from pagan Romans and Greeks) in the early centuries AD. I mean the ascetic path of opposition to the world, elimination of temptation, and repudiation of "the flesh", which was taken to the greatest extreme by the hermit Desert Fathers. 

The Neo-Platonic theology (e.g. associated with Dionysius the Aeropagite) was one of explicit negation; that asserted we cannot know God except by knowing what God is Not, are dragged down by our instincts and desires. This in general down-rated or rejected marriage, family, creativity as paths to God; due to their excessive risk of temptation by fleshly pleasures - binding us to mortal life, its pleasures and pains. 

These desires were to be overcome by prolonged disciplines of deprivation and chosen suffering; so that we may learn control of them, and ultimately independence from them. 

Yet, in practice, there was at this time also a very powerful yet implicit positive desire for communion with God, to emulate (their idea of) Jesus Christ, and to dwell spiritually in Heaven even while on earth.

Therefore, the true situation was one in which there was strong positive desires that were unconscious and implicit; which were disciplined and shaped by the explicit rituals and practices of a negative nature. 

Through human history, these unconscious and implicit positive instincts have dwindled, until many modern people are hardly aware of them, deny their validity, and often altogether deny their presence. People (especially in The West) are no longer guided by positive implicit instincts towards God, the spirit, higher consciousness... 

Instead we are guided by external human-originated ideals - especially the dominant ideology of 'secular-leftist-materialism' that underpins all of social and political discourse and institutions in The West. 

If an individual rejects the dominant ideology, he must (as a rule) do so by an explicit and consciously chosen act of will. 

Interestingly, even the ideology of left-materialism itself has been subject to the same trends in consciousness. It has gone from containing a considerable largely-unconscious and implicit positive element; to being almost wholly negative in its ideals, and oppositional in its practices. 

When it began to emerge a couple of hundred years ago, leftism often shared in the (mostly unconscious) positive goals of Christianity; so that there were many "Christian socialists" in the UK (from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, as well as Nonconformist churches), who (albeit misguidedly) saw socialism as a means to the end of a more Christian society. These were a significant cultural phenomenon into the middle 20th century. 

Even among the explicitly materialist-atheist leftists of the late nineteenth century - such as the revolutionary communist William Morris and the gradualist Fabian George Bernard Shaw - there was strong (albeit un-theorized, un-grounded) positive assumption concerning the goals of leftism. 

Such Men would argue that socialism was a necessary/ the best means to achieve the kind of society that was 'common-sensically' (by appeal to universal evaluations) regarded as a good environment for positive virtues. 

For Morris that was a quasi-Medieval agrarian society in which the arts and crafts thrived, and were universal - a world of craftsmen and artists, for whom labour was an altruistic joy. 

For Shaw it was a modern industrial society where all were allocated an equal income that made accessible all the higher things in life (arts, sciences etc). The purpose of universal and equal prosperity was to enable Men to pursue 'mystical' goals; such as attaining higher consciousness - en route to a somewhat Platonic world of pure intelligences whose gratification was contemplation, and untrammeled creativity.

For the likes of Morris, Shaw and other early socialists; the desirability of such a society was self-evident; but it is no longer self-evident in 2022. Indeed, such utopian schemes are all-but off the map, seldom mentioned; and so weakly believed (if at all) that such ideals are unable significantly sustain a life or even (noticeably) to influence behaviour.  

What I mean is that - diminishing, but evident until about the middle-20th century - the underlying, even if unstated, belief even on the Left was that if the obstacles to a better and higher life could be removed by socialism (or feminism, antiracism, an economy of common ownership etc) - then a better and higher life would spontaneously emerge - because that (it was assumed) was what Men wanted.

And it was that better/ higher life that was the ultimate justification of leftism. 

 

Well, that concept has become meaningless, and since the 1960s, as the New Left has focused on negative aims, without any positive sense of where this is going, or what state of society it is trying to achieve, or what people are supposed to do and live-by in a future society. Contra Morris; the arts and crafts, guilds and professions, small villages and farming as a vocation; have all declined catastrophically. And, contra Shaw; Men are more, not less, focused on materialism, consumption and shallow pleasures and dissipating distractions.  

Underlying such changes in both Christianity and Leftism is this waning of the unconscious and implicit, ultimately spiritual and self-justifying, ideal of The Good Life.  

Now we must consciously choose God, Jesus Christ, and to live by the transcendental values of divine creation. These are not longer spontaneously generated from within ourselves. 

On the one hand; we are free-er than Men used to be; because we are no longer subject to uncontrollable drives from unconscious motivations. 

On the other hand; if we do not choose correctly; then we are prone to purposelessness, meaninglessness and therefore despair - in a way that used to be extremely rare, even among the explicit atheists and nihilists of 100-plus years ago. 

What now strikes me about utopian idealists is how pitifully little they want! 

Consider some of the early socialists and communists. Supposing Marx had got absolutely everything he desired - the fully communist atheist society of common ownership, even to the degree that the state withered-away and New Men did all the right things because that is what they desired... What a pathetic life! Merely a brief animal existence of farmyard contentment, followed by a meaningless death and annihilation. 

Or William Morris, with his (to me, far more appealing) vision of a medieval-style, rural and beautiful, utopia of farmers, craftsmen and artists. But again, a world without transcendence, without eternity - hence without purpose, hence without any meaning except the pleasurable distractions of hand-labour, crafts, song and poetry. Then disease, decline and death; and then Nothing - forever. 

Or the modern transhumanists; who seek to abolish disease, ageing, death and suffering. If they somehow got everything what they wanted - what would it amount-to? A world without suffering, a world of continuous (or continuously modulating and varying) pleasure... forever! It takes a peculiar lack of imagination to suppose that even all this impossibly-unlikely transformation would make life worthwhile. 

This-worldly utopians think of themselves, and like to present themselves, as untrammeled by the 'possible' or even the plausible - as sweeping dreamers who dreams will create-themselves, by sheer force of untrammeled desire and will... And yet how pathetically restricted are those dreams!   

But, it might be asked - what about Christians? What about our goal of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - how could this be made... not just bearable, but profoundly and eternally fulfilling? 

I know of nobody who gave this matter deeper and more sustained consideration than William Arkle - most directly in his booklet Equations of Being. In this he allows himself to imagine what would be the necessary characteristics of a genuinely idealistic utopia - actual Heaven. 

What combination of change in ourselves and of an ideal environment, would we personally find fulfilling, motivating and joyous - forever. 

And then; can we conceive of how God - our loving Father and the Creator - might have made such a thing possible: made it happen?

If we can conceive of it; we finally need to ask whether it is true, and accessible to us; and how? 

Suppose that we are personally motivated to perform such a feat of sustained imagination about Heavenly life, what then? 

Well, that may then be a solid basis for Christian life in this very different, and temporary, mortal life and world. 

The contrast with any-and-all worldly and material 'utopias' shall then become very evident; and we may recognize that that kind of idealism is profoundly, tragically, misplaced.

This is a fascinating interview from 1973 with Jacob ´Ascent of Man´ Bronowski, who was at the time and for many years afterwards a great hero of mine. I watched and rewatched Ascent of Man many times, read and re-read his books many times -- indeed in about 1997 I even contacted his daughter offering to write a proper biography (she rebuffed me and said there was already somebody on the job; although a biography still has not appeared).

Bronowski was a man with great qualities as is, I think, apparent here - also a man of rather significant limitations as is also apparent. But the interview itself is remarkable. This is prime Saturday evening TV with Britain´s best known ´chat show´host ever, and the pace and depth of the discussion is remarkable. Partly this was how things used to be, partly it was due to the way that Bronowski, by strength of character and natural authority, was able to impose his own agenda on mere ´entertainment´.

It can also be seen how the scope of public discourse has been shut-down since - in relation to the discussion of race and intelligence (and bearing in mind, as is obvious enough, that Bronowski was a man of the left - close to being a pacifist and a communist or communist sympathizer like the great scientists JD Bernal and JBS Haldane, both of whom he mentions).

What you get from this is some real Old Left philosophy, based on atheism and an ingrained radicalism such that history is seen as a prolonged conflict between progressive enlightened forces, and theocratic dogma. For instance Bronowski wrote an influential book about the poet William Blake, which paints him in highly political terms and essentially ignores Blake´s blatantly obvious and in-your-face incandescent, visionary, mystical, heretical Christianity´.

For whatever reason, in the discussion of artistic bohemianism and how it contrasts with his image as a scinetist, Bronowski doesn´t mention his time on Mallorca in the 1930s living as a young poet with Robert Graves and Laura Riding, and with a mistress Eirlys Roberts (who later founded The Consumer Association) -- a life of fairly extreme bohemianism by the standards of that time. A touch of the whitewash there, perhaps?

But most telling is the near-final remark on his idea of utopia. Bronowski amplifies his point that he deeply believes that people want to work rather than be idle but are thwarted by the lack of meaningful work - so his utopia is a world where everybody has a satisfying job which he or she is good-at. This absurdity is a view which I shared as a teenager (under the influence of people from Bronowski´s generation) but by the time I was twenty had had thoroughly purged out of me by a crushing avalanche of counter examples from personal experience.

I continued to hold modified versions of this view for quite a while longer but was forced to abandon it when I realized that I was actually talking about myself and a tiny minority of others who are creatively motivated - and in fact hardly anybody is self-motivated, even under ideal conditions. Nearly everybody would prefer not to work. At the very least, most people need a strong social ethos of work to ´want´to do it, nearly everyone does work for rewards or to avoid punishments; and not for intrinsic satisfactions.

But the idea that such would be any kind of utopia is quite extraordinary now! - yet in 1973 was not unusual (as evidenced by the round of applause from the audience) and indeed the ecology (EF Schumacher) and self-sufficiency (John Seymour) movements added a considerable boost to this idea from around the time of this interview and for several years (Andre Gorz was another proponent). I mean the idea that the main political imperative ought to be the provision of Good Work. I think the idea came from the early socialists, reformers, and builders of model communities - perhaps especially William Morris.

I think this view was possible because that generation had been brought-up religiously, so their aethism carried a strong residue of belief in transcendental goods such as beauty, virtue, and honesty - values which Bronowski mentions specifically. And indeed he did indeed adhere to them and defend them strongly; furthermore he developed an integrated philosophy of life based around transcendentals which he expressed powerfully in his books and The Ascent of Man.

The trouble was, the next generation of cradle atheists abandoned all transcendental goods, and became selfish, short-termist and expedient in their actions. They knew about the transcendentals - in theory they approved of them - but lacking any deity could see no reason why they should adhere to them when it was inconvenient or risky. Thus we get the current world of lying careerist bureaucrats and lying public relations pundits which has swallowed-up professional science and the arts (and everything else large scale) until almost nothing remains.

They (we) became unprincipled cowards and slackers - and why not?... When God is dead and was never alive, religion a manipulative lie or a pathetic delusion, and fanatical religiousness (in practice, specifically Christianity) is seen the primary source of all evil through history and continuing (as Bronowski, and his like, taught us most thoroughly).

Anyway - I recommend this interview as containing a great deal of good material, and also revealing the seeds of error and pride which have led to such a pathetic collapse of art, science, politics and all serious human endeavour - in a way which would certainly have appalled Bronowski; although he would most likely have misdiagnosed its cause.

Looking back over the past fifty years I have been reading Tolkien; I can perceive that my attitude to the books (especially The Lord of the Rings) falls into three broad phases. 

Socio-Political

When I began reading, in my middle teens, I regarded LotR as, pretty much, a blueprint for how we ought to live in a socio-political sense. My attitude was that the lesson of the book was that we ought to deindustrialize substantially, and return to an agrarian society, divided into mostly self-sufficient units (i.e. a kind of feudalism), based upon a much simpler level of technology. 

Thus, my interest in Tolkien led to an interest in pre-modern history - Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval. And also an interest in the 'self-sufficiency' and 'intermediate technology' movements, 'ecology', and the politics of William Cobbett, HD Thoreau, William Morris, RH Tawney, the 'distributism' of Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, and EF Schumacher of 'Small is Beautiful' fame.  

In essence; I saw the spirit of Tolkien located in a type of society; and I hoped to live by this spirit via living in what I understood to be a Tolkienian society. I therefore read the books almost as if they were a manual or blueprint for how we ought to live. 

Jungian

In younger adult life, I lost faith in both the power and goodness of politics - and realized that its direction was against the agrarian. I realized that Men were not passive products of social systems - and I developed the broadly-Jungian idea that 'the psyche' was the primary reality. 

I saw the psyche as a third realm in-between the subjectivity of the everyday and mundane mind on the one hand, and the objectivity of the material world (including society and politics) on the other hand. 

My broad conclusion was that the 'lessons' of Tolkien ought to be developed in terms of living in accordance with the collective unconscious - which I saw as an objective realm of archetypal and mythic realities that was shared by all Men. 

In sum; I saw Tolkien as the greatest modern exemplification of this mythic world; and reading him as a way of discovering and strengthening the mythic in my own life; with the goal of living an integrated life - feeling part of society and guided by the wisdom of myth. 

Romantic Christian

In middle age I became a Christian, and then more and more of a 'Romantic' Christian - under the influence of Mormon theology; and writers such as Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield and Arkle. 

Thus, from about 2009, I began increasingly to read and experience Tolkien in a different way. This new era began with my immersion in JRRT's posthumously-published and unfinished novel: The Notion Club Papers. The NCPs contains a good deal of Tolkien autobiography, and was intended as a framework and bridge between the modern world and the world of the 'legendarium' (ie. the Silmarillion annals, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). 

The Notion Club Papers blog then began to record a new practice of reading Tolkien, and some of the other Inklings, as what used to be termed 'devotional literature' - in the same spirit that past generations might have read Milton's Paradise Lost or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 

So, this is where I am now: in my third era of Tolkien. 

There was a fair spell of time when, if anyone had asked - which of course they never did! - I would have called myself an anarchist. This was a consequence of being a 'normal' left wing, socialist, Labour Party supporter in my youth, and having realised that the actuality bore no resemblance to the impulse.

It was also a consequence of my having, in my middle teens, becoming a very keen ecologist - or 'green'-advocate as it later became known: keen on a William Morris-ite medieval society, including traditional, non-mechanised forms of agriculture. This even extended to a preference (or the attempt at such) for low-tech music and simpler musical instruments - a preference for recorders over keyed flutes, for the clavichord over the piano etc.

(Unfortunately my manias for electric folk music and grand opera undermined this attempt.)

I would now perceive that I was wanting to arrest society and the arts at a particular, but neither distinct nor stable, point in a process of continual change and development. It was nothing more than a personal, and temporary, prejudice - raised up to some kind of general socio-political principle. And the same could be applied to Morris himself, and to most others who tried to describe a utopian socialistic and/or environmentalist future.

Anyway, I experienced a general collapse of belief in top-down institutions - political parties, trades unions, pressure-groups etc. - as being able to deliver the kind of changes I wanted. And so I began to think of myself as an anarchist. Yet I could not help but still seek for ideological and systematic solutions.


Anarchists are atheists (in practice if not always in theory); therefore their options are limited - somehow improvement must come from what is already there. Somehow a better society must comes from people as they are - therefore, the answer always involves some new way of organising things so that good-decisions, good-results, will emerge from situations that previously led to bad decisions and results.

Secular politics is therefore about how to create processes that will  have the intrinsic property of 'manufacturing' good outcomes. Anarchists analyse society on the basis of power; therefore they try to dispense with powerful people and institutions; therefore they hope to disperse power (without using power) and hope that societies will emerge (since they cannot be imposed) that are 'ruled' by no specific person/ institution but in which each person is autonomous.

In practice, anarchists are compelled to come up with some system by weak the weaker ally to defeat the stronger - and the usual method is some kind of 'grassrotos' or 'direct' democracy - and this is usually formalised into voting. In essence - society is intended to be ruled by mass votes on all significant decisions.

Almost immediately, and sooner rather than later, anarchists recognise that this system (where it can be implemented) does not lead to greater individual freedom; but to an extremely crude form of oppression. I had a few experiences of attending anarchist-type events (and read accounts of others - for example in accounts of the Spanish Civil War), and they were - on the one hand - always shambolic and poor quality; and on the other hand surrounded by a pall of numbingly conformist and self-righteously monolithic moralism.

They were excruciating to me, with a kind of dreadfulness of soul and spirit that I could not deny to myself. 


I think I now realise where anarchism goes wrong - which is its inbuilt anti-Christian ethos, part of which is to regard marriage and the family as institutions. Anarchists are, in practice, much keener to 'smash' marriages and families than they are to attack trades unions and large corporations.

Some anarchists even assert that the individual is an institution! At that point anarchism has reversed, and become nothing-but totalitarian group tyranny.

The causal reason is not far to seek - because anarchists are proponents of the sexual revolution; and each anarchist has a personal stake in this - since they generally are, or aspire to be, beneficiaries of the sexual revolution, in one way or another. As so often with post-sixties Leftism, the politics serves as an abstract smoke-screen for the truth of a sexual motivation.

(Sexuality being  - on average - the second-most powerful human motivation after religion; and when religion is absent, sexuality becomes the most powerful motivator; especially for the most active and aspiring people.)


Yet - properly understood - marriage and the family are precisely Not institutions; they are in fact the only forms of human living that are not-institutional. They are the only forms around-which human society can be, that are not institutions.    


(Not all individual people will get married, not all will want to marry; and perhaps a few will neither  have families nor wish to become adopted into a family - or no family will adopted them. Nonetheless, society will be families linked-by marriages.)

Therefore, by ruling-out marriage and family; anarchists rule out any real possibility of anarchism. Instead they merely replace one set of institutions with another - while simultaneously denying themselves the power actually to implement what they wish-for.


Anyway, I now find myself in the position of actually being - as my ideal - a real, live, political anarchist; precisely because I am now a Romantic Christian believer-in the primacy of marriage and the family.

Furthermore, there is no paradox in my wish for this to become actuality, real-Christian-anarchism is no Quixotic fantasy; since I see all around me that all formal, political, ideological institutions are very obviously in an advanced state of corruption and en route to self-destruction.

While by contrast, marriage and family are spontaneous phenomena because they are in accordance with primary metaphysical reality, as I understand it.


Therefore, if things continue as they are trending, we will reach a post-institutional world; organised around marriage and families. And this will happen like it or not; for worldly good or for ill.

How much of the human world will remain in this post-institutional dispensation is very uncertain; perhaps very little indeed. But that is the world I wish to be a part-of.

Lord of the Rings was the first grown-up book I read, at the age of 13, and it shaped the whole of my adolescent experience of high culture.

The next heavyweight authors I tackled were George Bernard Shaw and Robert Graves - both recommendations of my father. They represented two sides of my character which developed in parallel - rationalism and romanticism; classicism and medievalism.

At this point and for a few years there was an intoxicating sense of culture opening-out; as if it would become a self-sufficient world for me. 

On the rational side I was bowled over by Bronowski's Ascent of Man on TV and went on to read others of his books, I focused on science in school, and I read modern socialist political theory - joining the Labour Party on my 16th birthday. A typical Fabian technocrat.

On the romantic side I read William Morris's political essays and stories, Fritz Schumacher, and was an adherent of the 'ecology' (now Green) movement. I loved Thoreau's Walden and intended to become Self Sufficient following the guidance of John Seymour. A typical utopian transcendentalist.

In music I loved the classical baroque on the one hand (Telemann before Bach - which must be unusual), and opera on the other hand; the classicism of the treble recorder and the visceral appeal of folk rock (especially Steeleye Span) an unaccompanied group singing. I sang in Gilbert and Sullivan, and a Haydn mass - and played Morris Dances, jigs and reels on the most vulgar instrument of all: piano accordion.

A third side of my character was a particular liking for clever and stylish 'aristocratic' lifestyle as epitomized by 18th century classical architecture (eg. nearby Bath and Bristol), the plays of Sheridan and Goldsmith, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (which I acted in), Three Men in a Boat (which I imagined to be aristocratic - although actually it was lower middle class), PG Wodehouse and Tom Stoppard's plays.

These enthusiasms were enabled by the cultural resources of the local library plus inter-library loans, then later Classics for Pleasure records, the Bristol Central Library (including an extensive free record library with classics and folk), the Old Vic Theatre, and the elegant backdrop of Park Street, Cawardines Coffee Houses, and George's bookshop.

Three to four decades on, and most of this has fallen by the wayside except for Tolkien, Gilbert and Sullivan, Jerome K Jerome, and baroque classical music - the rest is mostly a matter for occasional re-visitation in a pleasantly nostalgic spirit (or to understand my previous mind-set) rather than a living, learning, serious engagement.

The authors GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are usually bracketed together - indeed, their friend and sparring partner George Bernard Shaw called them 'the Chesterbelloc' and described an imaginary beast of that name.

(There was, for several years, a kind of road-show travelling around England in which Belloc would Chair no-holds-barred but always good-natured (no-offence-taken) debates between GBS and GKC.)

But while GKC and HB were great friends and allies, and their Roman Catholicism and political views were almost identical, each man has a very different flavour: indeed each could be used to characterize a typical type of modern intellectual Roman Catholic.

To me Chesterton comes across as warm-hearted, sunny, positive - he seems like one of the most likeable men in the history of English literature, and the spirit of his writings breathes generosity. His writing pours-out like a volcano - unpremeditated, unrevised, of amazing evenness and high quality; tackling every subject, yet always the same in essence.

Belloc, on the other hand, has a hardness and a darkness about him. His writing (although also extremely abundant) often gives the impression of being worked-over and contrived. His best work is probably the light verse, especially the Cautionary Tales for Children, which are unsurpassed in their surreal fluidity, the brilliant humour and perfect technique... simply brilliant - but which are deliberately 'nasty'. Belloc's essays and best books like The Path to Rome and The Four Men are very fine - but strike me as unspontaneous, and hard edged - like a wood-cut, or perhaps a steel engraving.

Put simply, Chesterton represents a Merry England style of Roman Catholicism which brings to mind an idealized version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - or William Morris's News from Nowhere plus vulgarity and religion. For Chesterton, God is primarily about Love and Beauty.

That is, Chesterton dreamt of a colourful, semi-chaotic, lusty and noisy life of vivid and flawed characters engaged in all manner of activities - a society of people who often get carried away into extremes by their love of each other, and of beauty, science, medicine, learning and other positive things. But also a society in which there will be phases of reflection, repentance and renewal and unification of the apparent-chaos. However, Chesterton loves 'life' so much that he would not want unity at the cost of vigour, or love.

This Chestertonian vision is, indeed - for me, by far the most appealing vision of what Roman Catholicism could perhaps be.

And it is the basic vision to which adhere all whom I judge the best Roman Catholics that I 'know' (mostly as penfriends, authors, bloggers).

But the Bellocian type of Roman Catholic is also common among intellectuals, maybe commoner. It is a Roman Catholicism which is strong, hard, strict - and not so much warm as either hot or cold: it is the Roman Catholicism of Southern Europe of the past few centuries - harsh sun and black shadows; periods of routine and inertia interrupted by extreme violence.

Bellocism is, for me, that Catholicism of a man who is not naturally 'a good man', and who was not really motivated by love. Belloc held-onto to Roman Catholicism with a grip of iron and was valiant in the defence of Christendom; but I don't think he was motivated by love - rather (usually) by anger, irritability, and a strong streak of harsh authoritarianism enjoyed for its own sake.

The Belloc type of Roman Catholic is also common online - they get the greatest satisfaction, seem to take, indeed, a bitter delight, in excoriating other ('heretical') Christian denominations. These Bellocians seem attracted to Roman Catholicism primarily by its clarity: the authority structure, the uniquely comprehensive and logical theology, the apparent ability to provide a clear answer to any question.

Their general stance of Bellocians is what I term 'legalistic': their ideal is that God is primarily about power and truth in unity. The church understand this, and tells us exactly what it is essential to do (and not to do) in any circumstance, and therefore obedience is by far the most important Christian virtue. Their primary role in the Christian life is allying themselves with legitimate authority and against disobedience.

Now, of course, this characterization of legalism as 'Bellocian' is an unfair exaggeration; and Belloc the man in his later life practised a simple, humble faith which struck all who saw it as sincere. He also joined in with the Chestertonian hurly-burly lifestyle with vigour - albeit, there always sounds like an element of aggression in Belloc's 'noisyiness' - an element of attention-seeking and self-assertion which was absent from Chesterton (who, by contrast, seems innocent, schoolboyish, even when describing drunken revellings and hi-jinks).

But in his prime as a public figure, Belloc did indeed create the general impression I describe - and the, harsh, hard-eyed, cold-hearted legalistic style and emphasis is one which is all too common among those who describe themselves as traditionalist Roman Catholics.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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


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

*

Another word for PC would be the New Left.

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

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

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

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

erived from spontaneous human .

*

*

I used to be a keen socialist, from age about 13-18 - and as a teen I read fairly widely in the British tradition: William Morris (very much liked him), The Fabians (GB Shaw, Wells etc), Tawney (Christian socialism) and modern people like Schumacher, Anthony Crosland, modern Fabian Essays, the New Statesman every week...

(I was never a Marxist, however.)

*

Socialism is of course egalitarian, that is it is focused on equality - and most of the early socialists wanted equality of opportunity - an essentially equal chance for everybody, but naturally leading to unequal economic outcomes.

(The recognized the obvious truth that strictly equal opportunites lead to unequal outcomes.)

They focused on levelling-up of economic conditions, and on education: compulsory education for all, more schools and colleges, more scholarships for the poor, better schools all round etc.

George Bernard Shaw regarded this as insufficient, and argued for economic equality - specifically equal salaries for all - he regarded this as sufficient to address the problems of inequality - but of course he allowed for many other differences.

Essentially Shaw wanted to settle the economic problem (and socialism was based on an economic analysis) - and allow people to get-on with more important matters.

*

But none of these early socialists argued that people were equal.

None argued that that individuals and groups were the same.

They did not argue same-ness because it obviously was not true - to argue to would have been simply insane, nobody would have taken them seriously at all.

And because people were not the same, therefore their outcomes in a system of equality would naturally be different. Therefore if (like GB Shaw) you wanted equal outcomes you had to impose them coercively - precisely because people were not the same, and if you did not coercively-impose equal outcomes you would not get them.

They realized that as soon as you stopped actively-imposing equal outcomes, then outcomes would again become unequal.

*

Yet nowadays same-ness of all people and groups is precisely the default of Leftism - and the assertion that because all people and groups are the same, then and difference in outcomes must have been coercively imposed.

Now, this modern doctrine of the same-ness of people and groups is not just a stupid and indefensible error - because it is not the kind of thing that somebody can be wrong about, it is not the kind of thing that could possibly be the result of a mistake.

None of the early socialists believed it, perhaps nobody believed it until the mid-twentieth century - and it was not believed then as the result of any kind of discovery!

*

So, the modern near-universal belief in the same-ness of people is not, therefore, any kind of stupidity, nor is it due to any kind of un-informedness.

And, although this belief is obviously insane - it is not plausible to imagine that belief in the same-ness of people was caused by actual clinical mental illness affecting the intellectual elite en masse...

No, no - what a belief in the same-ness of people is, is evil; pure evil.

(Evil is the destruction of Good - and Good is truth, beauty and virtue - in unity.)

*

Belief in the same-ness of people is an ideology which allows un-bounded destruction of human society - at every level - and without limit or restraint - and continuing until there is nothing left that can continue the process of destruction.

This is not the kind of thing that happens by accident, or as a consequence of well-meaning people blundering in their analysis and actions - it is done by people in service to pure evil.

The people themselves may or may not be evil or nasty people - just as Maoist Commisars, Gulag guards and Gestapo may or may not have been evil or nasty people.

But those who believe in the same-enss of humans serve evil - they are on the side of evil - and this is a straightforward objective fact: anyone who believes-in, argues for, or enforces policy based-on the same-ness of people and groups is serving evil.

*

*

At some point the problem stopped being poverty and became luxury.

*

At some point the mass of people stopped being over-worked and became idle; at some point they stopped starving and being thin or began overeating and becoming obese; at some point they stopped having too few amusements and began spending most of their time on amusements; at some point poverty stopped being austere and became self-indulgent (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, pornography, life as psychodrama); at some point people stopped having nothing to do and found that they could not escape the relentless distractions...

At some point ugliness became a vast and tidal force, fashion became an imperative, the mass media came to define reality - we saw our own lives and the world through ideological lenses.

- But when?

*

In the USA it was earlier than in the UK; but in England it was about the mid 1960s.

But I recall in the early 1970s when I realized that the Old Left world view I had imbibed from William Morris, Bernard Shaw and the early socialists had gone.

I always supposed that when people had enough, they would be satisfied with enough, and not want more and ever more, and would move onto higher things.

I assumed that people would be satiated with food, toys, fashion, holidays, news, sports, pop music, gossip about remote or imagined stuff - yet these are ever more dominant.

I hoped that people would flip from consuming and amusing, to conserving, creating, appreciating'; would recognize the dead end of materialism and would spontaneously become more spiritual.

Ha!

*

There has indeed been recognition of this within mainstream culture, since the Beats of the 1950s, then the Hippies of the 1960s, then the beginnings of the Small is Beautiful/ ecology/ Green movement in the 1970s...

But this movement has been incorporated into consumption on the one hand (consuming ever more Green products and ideas) and New Leftism on the other hand (the soul destroying corruptions of political correctness - and the intrinsic dishonesty of that world view).

Thus this impulse has been ineffectual because - even when utterly sincere - it has joined with Leftism and been assimilated to modernity.

*

Leftism is nihilism; and destroys whatever it incorporates; and by now the Left is so large and inclusive and its propaganda so relentless and universal that people have lost the ability to comprehend any alternative. Thus they are trapped.

*

Yet, this movement of thought which we see so perverted and made counter-productive and corrupted to evil in the modern 'Green' movement, is based-on a good impulse and recognition and aspiration - to live in a world where Nature is regarded with reverence and Natural Things are treasured: a world where water, trees and landscapes are loved.

Leftism intrinsically and necessarily perverts and inverts all this - if not immediately then sooner or later (usually sooner).

*

The craving for Nature is a reactionary impulse that can only be defended and lived by in a reactionary context and will be perverted by and form or taint of Leftism, progressivism, modernism; a yearning for The Natural is a world view which is rooted in respect-for-tradition, the ancient, the existing; instead of belief in progress, the new, the future...

If all the goodness and wholesomeness of the world is not to be destroyed incrementally, then there must be a world view which regards the spontaneous and universal and old by assumption (an assumption which can be overturned in specific instances, but is nonetheless the assumption), superior to the contrived, local and recent.

That is the only foundation upon which we may build. Anything built upon Leftism will collapse due to lack of foundations, if not swiftly demolished and replaced by something 'better'.

*

*

I read the Hobbit when I was, I think, 13 years old; and it was a few months before I moved on to read LotR.

The delay was because I liked the Hobbit so much that I wanted more of the same, especially, more of Bilbo - and I didn't like the idea that he would only be a character at the beginning.

Anyway, when I eventually read LotR I was completely smitten. For the rest of my school days I would re-read and re-read and also looked at everything else by or about Tolkien available to me at the time.

*

As I recall, I did not re-read Tolkien so much in my twenties and early thirties - and the return was triggered by Tom Shippey's Road to Middle Earth.

This era of neglect now seems to me a dark time in my life.

My young adult neglect of Tolkien seems like evidence of corruption and decline (certainly not of maturity!).

*

Anyway, reading LotR aged 13 opened-up many worlds for me.

Firstly, the world of grown-up literature - the first authors I read were Bernard Shaw, and Robert Graves - specifically the I Claudius and Claudius the God books; because Tolkien also made me want to read more history.

I also read history proper, and especially the history of Anglo Saxon times, and of farming and country life.

Then I became generally interested in the whole business of rural England - for instance the oral history of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe, the work of George Ewart Evans, and the memoirs of Evesham Vale farmer Fred Archer (I didn't realize Tolkien's brother Hilary was at that time still a fruit grower in Evesham).

*

Considerations of life in The Shire meant that I became interested in Self Sufficiency (John Seymour), the Small is Beautiful movement with Fritz Schumacher and the budding 'Ecology' (now 'Green') movement - also William Morris's stories of a medieval socialist utopia (Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere); and Thoreau's Walden.

*

Tolkien's 'medievalism' and use of song led to an interest in Folk Music - which included not just watching and listening, but also participation and a little bit of arranging of unaccompanied song and dance; and then classical music, beginning with Bach and Telemann (because of their use of the recorder! which I regarded for some reason as a Tolkien instrument).

*

All these strands came together in an interest in myth, legend and fairy story.

And I read other 'fantasy' writers - some written before and some after Tolkien - but only found something of what I sought in Alan Garner and Lloyd Alexander.

*

Also, I learned a little of Tolkien's professional work, and this (plus good fortune of having a well trained English teacher) led to me reading Chaucer, Gawain and the Green Knight and some other Middle English poetry. This was, in fact, my first interest in poetry - I went from medieval poems to the more modern.

*

There was probably even more in the way of influence. And of course there were other preceding and subsequent interests, not related to Tolkien and often hostile in spirit to the above - for example a love of the 18th century era of England in its architecture and lifestyle, and of PG Wodehouse; and of science.

*

But suffice to say that reading Tolkien age thirteen was the door to self-conscious adulthood for me; and I could not have wished for a better door.

My main regret is that Tolkien did not influence me even more, and throughout my whole life; because, of course, I tried to ignore completely Tolkien's Christianity until I was moving into late middle age - not very many years ago - when at last I recognized that this was the deepest element of all in Tolkien's great works.

So, just about the one area of life in which I did not allow Tolkien to influence me at all was religion; specifically my own complete lack of religion.

*

 

Romanticism is the future, even after more than 200 years of its incompleteness, its failure; because Romanticism is the only movement of honest men's minds that is a third path: not the past of institutionally-based religious traditionalism; not the present of secular Leftist materialist individuality; but a future of individually-based religiousness.


Romanticism is based on the texture of life itself, and the discernment of the heart. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic, office life and of the shallow, atomised, emotional manipulations of modern mass media and leisure; it also rejects the ideals of obedience, submission and group-conformity that traditionalism put at the centre of its moral systems.

Romanticism takes its measure from the texture of life and finds what it seeks in the best moments of actual life, and in a more sustained fashion in the romantic arts.

For example in what-it-is that makes the world of Lord of the Rings so deeply appealing to some modern minds, or (to go back to its beginning) the worlds of Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Novalis... It is that quality of enchantment, of being-enchanted - but being-enchanted not deceptively, not as a false day-dream; but the kind of enchantment that is a disenchantment, a clarification and revealing of beauty, truth and reality.

(A matter almost of dramatising life, and knowing it is dramatised, and living-in this drama.)


Romanticism is what makes us look around with such profound dissatisfaction at culture; at mass culture, official culture, high culture, at the culture of existing churches and their services; at the people who speak out in the public realms and what they say and - even more - how they say it. They are all talking heads or dancing puppets, they are all disengaged and lost, they are never serious about the realities of mortal life!

What we need, and need is the word for it; is the element represented by elves in Lord of the Rings - indeed we need that and more. But we do need a sense of life as continuing creation, meaning and purpose and of us each as engaged in this living, conscious activity. We need to be within this aliveness and consciousness - and at the same time to know that we are within it - so we may rest and work in this state without evasion or blindness: the maximum of consciousness.

Enchantment, magic - these are terms we use. Children - young children - experience life this way; but they are inside the stream of life, and hardly conscious of themselves; whereas we are all overwhelming conscious of our-selves except when we (our selves) deliberately self-obliterate with the mass media, with drugs, with numbing frenzy or despair.


Only God can produce and sustain the enchantment we seek - there is no secular magic: it cannot even be simulated.

...Think of the most wonderful of godless utopias: William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890) - a great creative genius pulls-out the stops to depict the best world he can imagine, and it is utterly dead! So much more the ideal societies of now - those vile politically-correct utopias of micro-managed abstract symbolism, made by what people 'ought' to enjoy but actually can't; and yet enjoyment is their only bottom-line. Utopias of guilt and despair made worse by faked morality and manufactured appreciation - like the depicted worlds of propaganda and public relations emanating from committees of the managerial drones and psychopaths who run modern institutions, here and now...

Enchantment comes only from a group that is made of individuals affectively-affiliated - that is from families and marriages, and from real friendships (which are precious but exceedingly rare, especially nowadays; modern friendships are nearly-all mutual emotional exploitation and tactical alliances). All this needs a totally different conception than exists of what life is about, and how life needs to be arranged: around-what life needs to be arranged.

At present we can barely even speak about this - especially not in the public arena. And of course nobody can be persuaded - the need to be persuaded and resistance to persuasion are the depth of the problem and why it has resisted solution for 200-plus years...

No that is wrong, it is not 'the problem' but we ourselves who have been and are resisting solution for 200-plus years; trapped by our fear of awareness, our desire for pleasure, our lust for power; trapped by the forces of darkness which offer short term gratifications of many kinds, and promise protection from horror and despair, and the misery of those we most resent. We are being willingly led by the nose into our doom - and that is why we are damned: I mean the willingness, expressed by the stubborn, deep-rooted resistance to embarking on the proper life we used-to know we ought-to be doing.

If we are experts in anything, it is in self-blinding; failing to see the obvious - stridently-denying the almost-overwhelming in our-selves; which is the radical, profound, incurable unsatisfactoriness of present and past living - and the different and only-yet-imagined nature of that which we are destined to strive-for.


As a concrete example - that vital subject of the relations between men and women. 

How can anybody (I mean from our hearts, here and now) be happy with how this matter has been approached; how it has been enforced at any point in history up to the present, and with the public ideas proposed for the future?

The current state of sexual politics is evil; but the past state was also wrong, distorted, crudely-simplistic... And the problem was the nature of past past societies in which the individual was forced to conform to group ideals - it was the group which was dominant; and since each human is unique, every possible, every imaginable group ideal represents a harsh distortion and a mental tyranny.

The only future our hearts endorse is one in which men and women are complementary individuals; that is both known to be different and complementary (the two complements making one) and individuals (each different from every other in the past, present and the future).

(If our deepest understanding of the relationship between a man and a woman can be captured in a rule, law, bureacratic regulation; then we know for sure it is wrong. I mean we - each of us - know for sure. In our hearts we know it. And don't tell me that we 'have to' have this, that or some-other principle - I am not interested in expediency, indeed expediency is precisely what is paralysing our thought. We must first think - indeed imagine, fully - with absolute clarity, about what should-be; expediency is entirely a different matter.)

This is a situation that cannot be captured, and ought not be controlled, by any form of groupish social organisation, any law or generalisation. It requires an entirely different basic understanding, a different logic.

And that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism. The necessary logic was defined, albeit abstractly and in a way that is very difficult to understand, by Coleridge; in the concept of polarity or polar logic. But the answer was given, and we can make it clearer and simpler now that the pioneering and heavy-lifting has been done by a genius.


Let that be a guide... Until we have each reached a position from-which we can explain how the relations of men and women can be conceptualised such as to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts - until such a time, we shall remain lost and despairing, and doomed to self-damnation.

*

In what follows I am talking about the process by which a false belief is created and sustained at a group level, and not about individual people.

Obviously, it would be plain silly (as well as wrong) to assert that PC is a mass primary delusion which happened to arise simultaneously among many individual people.

What I am talking about is the mechanism of PC delusion formation PC at the group level.

Individuals participate in the PC group delusion (indeed they are now forced to participate); but that is not its origin, nor is it individuals who sustain the process of thinking imposed by PC.


*

While some roots of PC are innate, and some trends of modernization can be traced back a long way (at least 1000 years, with acceleration from about 300 years ago) - nonetheless PC crystallized and grew to become large and powerful from the late 1960s.

People tend to forget how rationalist was mainstream Old Left political thinking up to the mid 1960s - it was essentially a highly intellectual, Marxist-based thing.

In the UK the dominant Leftism was from the Fabian society: an upper middle class led, meritocratic, non-revolutionary gradualism, based on the assumed superiority of the planned economy, the assumed superiority of bureaucracy over markets, and therefore nationalisation of all significant parts of the economy. 

This was highly meritocratic, based on equality of opportunity (enforced by the state), and egalitarian in terms of economic distribution - the state would substantially equalize incomes.

There was a belief that economic hardship damaged life chances, and that there was therefore more talent among the poorer classes than was being allowed to emerge.

But for Fabians there was no question about the fact that people were themselves unequal in character and ability. Socialism was not about denying the obvious facts - it was about rewarding people more or less the same, and giving them the same life chances, regardless of their character and ability.

So Old Left socialism was limited in scope mainly to economics (at least in its aspired scope - in practice it became corrupted into totalitarianism) - and it was not necessarily, nor even usually, atheist - there were many Christian socialists.

The Fabians were not trying to build heaven on earth, merely trying to alleviate some of the more extreme suffering on earth.

*

So mainstream Fabian socialism was very different indeed from political correctness - although, as a matter of observation, many Fabian socialists became PC, went along with it, as it emerged.

*

The other strand of socialism came from idealist roots, in people such as William Morris, but further back the romantics.

However, it did not come from specific people, it was not primarily rational - it was an irruption of animism, of id, of the craving for connection with the world - it sought a society in which alienation would be abolished, a society of positive bliss where people could live naturally, at their fullest human potential.

It hated industrialisation, hated bureaucracy, hated rationality - it sought a situation where for everyone impulse and instinct could flow swiftly and unimpeded into action.

It was about remaking society as paradise upon earth; and when existing humans impeded this, it was about re-making humankind.

It was this strand of unreasonable, irrational, Utopian leftism which irrupted in the 1960s among the intellectual elite and which threatened to sweep away the Old Left.

*

But the Old Left was already in deep trouble, although few had yet realized it.

The moral force of the Old Left came from the idea that lower class people of brains and ability were being kept down, while upper class people - many or most of whom who lacked brains and ability - were ruling the country.

Simply from the perspective of efficiency this was undesirable.

However, by the mid-twentieth century (with improvements in psychometric testing) it gradually became clear that modern societies already had equality of opportunity, the meritocracy was already in place - or at least as equal as could reasonably be aspired to, in an imperfect world.

So Old Left socialism - if it was honest - had lost it main moral driving force.

*

At around the same time, or a bit later, the Old Left also lost its economic legitimacy; as it became ever-clearer that economic planning, the replacement of markets with bureaucracy, was less- rather than more- efficient.

*

So the Old Left were, as a movement, en route to electoral destruction - caught between the hammer of the idealistic Utopian New Left and the Right. The Old Left had no idealism, and they had no rationale - and they were rapidly losing their electoral base.

The New Left electoral base was not rooted in the working class/ proletariat - but in gathering all kinds of groups (a 'rainbow coalition')  who felt (or could be made to feel) oppressed - and added these to the traditional proletarian (Trade Union) left, with its upper class Marxist leadership.


This involved systemic dishonesty - and it was from the mid-1960s that the Left became based upon dishonesty (not just accidentally dishonest, or corrupted into dishonesty - but dishonest at its deepest root.)

*

Political correctness emerged as a modus operandi between the Old Left and the New Left.

Although a rainbow coalition of the disaffected made electoral sense as a way for the Left to survive, there seemed to be no way that anything could possibly hold together groups whose interests were - in the end - mutually exclusive and even in the short-term were in conflict.



To survive, as it has, the Left evolved that group cognitive process which we call PC, which alternates between Old Left bureaucracy and New Left/ romantic Utopianism.

*

The psychological basis of the PC Left is simply, merely, being anti-Right - merely the idea that the Right is evil.

At an individual level this ascribed evil on the Right could be of many, contradictory origins - its fundamental basis might be economic oppression, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, hereditary aristocracy, free market libertarianism, some personal slight, nationalism, the soul-less  materialism of the Right, the Christianity of the Right : the specific grudge does not matter, so long as the Right-haters continue to work together, vote together.

*


Nobody invented political correctness, but over a relatively short period its amazing explanatory power dawned on more and more people on the Left.

In order to mobilize passion, PC can talk like a 1960s hippie revolutionary; in order to get power and stay in power PC can act like a 19th century Prussian bureaucracy. It simply flips back and forth in response to threats from the Right.

PC will use whatever works to defeat the Right, here and now, in this particular situation, regardless of the implications - because none of the implications will be followed through but merely swept aside in the next fight.

PC is a bundle of tactics. But PC tactics do not ever add-up to a strategy.

*

PC is hard to defeat, and impossible to defeat rationally, because it is not aiming anywhere in particular in any sustained way - it is aiming to defeat the right and to keep-together its coalition in this fight.


Sometimes PC is anti-racism, sometimes anti-sexism; sometimes pro-worker, sometimes pro-shirker; sometimes it is nationalist, sometimes it is internationalist; sometimes pro-economic growth, sometimes engaged in wrecking the economy; sometimes it aims to cover society in a blanket of bureaucracy, sometimes it wants a society of utterly free and spontaneous individuals - and so on.

Each of these happens for a segment of time, then is followed (but not consecutively) by something else happening; and the earlier is pushed aside.

PC is like the evening news, and then and then and then - something shocking, then something inspiring, then some politics, then a bad person, then a funny item, then a bit of gossip - it never adds-up, it cannot be added up, nobody tries to add it up; it is just a means of attracting and holding attention.

PC is functionally just a means of attracting and holding-together a short-term effective anti-Right alliance.  


These irreconcilable demands are not to be balanced, nor to be compromised, but instead a mode of disrupted social cognition is to be imposed in which apparently all of this is possible, or rather not-impossible.

*

Delusions are, at root, not about belief, but about a mode of thought, a style of cognition - they are rooted in thought disorder where consecutiveness is disrupted.

Political correctness is an insane mode of discourse. It cannot be argued-away because its mode of thinking is not rational.

If you argue rationally against PC you will be met by gut feelings, if you argue emotionally this will be discarded and forgotten, and you will be met by rationalist bureaucratic speak.

If you argue from the needs of proletarian workers, you will be met by the needs of immigrants and the underclass; but if you reverse the basis of the argument then PC will reverse its focus of concern.

PC knows that the Right is evil and that anything they do to defeat it here and now is justifiable.

*

That's it. PC is a delusional system which arose, evolved in order to preserve the power of the political Left; it must be intrinsically (not accidentally, not remediably) delusional (irrational, fragmented) in order to hold-together the disparate and conflicted members of the Old/ New Leftist rainbow coalition in their opposition to the Right; and the dishonesty of PC is an intrinsic (although unintended, because unperceived) by-product of this cognitive  irrationality.

*

*

Many, most, people do not notice that Leftism is primarily and intrinsically anti-Christian - and one reason they don't notice is that in the early decades of English Leftism, and even extending into a few people still alive today, there were real Christians who were Leftists - Christian Socialists.

In the Nineteenth century into the twentieth there was FD Maurice, HH Kelly, Charles Gore (great and Holy Anglicans), there was the Anglo-Catholic movement - and there was an economist called RH Tawney who led to a school of 'ethical socialism' which included some people I know as friends, including the late Norman Dennis.

Does Christian Socialism refute the idea that the Left is intrinsically anti-Christian?

*

No it doesn't.

English Socialism is based upon an error, indeed multiple errors - the primary error being that the industrial revolution - while creating a minority of extremely wealthy individuals, led to an economic decline for the working class.

In other words, the error was that the industrial revolution led to increased economic inequality, and that therefore the solution was greater equality.

In reality, the opposite was the case. The industrial revolution involved population growth and productivity growth - so per capita wealth increased, and the greatest share went to the poor.

For perhaps the first time in human history, from the time of the industrial revolution, the poor had more surviving children than the rich.

*

English socialism was an error simply because the new urban poverty was concentrated and public in its squalor hence impossible to overlook, while the much more severe rural poverty was dispersed, private, invisible.

Upper class people of a type disposed towards socialism simply did not notice poverty when it was most severe - when the children of peasants (no matter how many were born) pretty much all died of starvation or disease, and only those born to wealthier parents had a realistic chance of surviving to adulthood.

*

So English socialism had a twin basis in economic error, and a misplaced rural nostalgia.

The economics was a plain error, since if it is economics that you are worried about, it is capitalism which has improved the condition of the poor - not socialism.

The rural nostalgia (most notably of William Morris) was misplaced in so far as its focus was economic - urban conditions were indeed hellish, but they were considerably more prosperous overall.

If economics is to be the focus, the bottom line was that the urban poor had more to eat. The benefits of rural living are not economic.

*

Of course, even though Leftism in its English socialist form was based on error - many of its motivations were good.

But the stubborn refusal to admit the foundational economic error, decade after decade, utterly corrupted socialism.

The focus on alleviating poverty shifted as the poverty was progressively abolished by the continued operations of the industrial revolution - instead of the ancient definition of poverty as (primarily) starvation and lack of clothes and shelter; poverty was redefined as relative, as a matter of inequality - and inequality, difference, was newly defined as intrinsically unjust.

*

The least-wealthy were the new poor - among a population living among universal luxury, those with fewest, or lowest status, luxuries became 'the poor'.

Yet socialism contrived to retain, by educational propaganda and the mass media, the same angry zeal and impatience concerning relative poverty as has driven it when the concern was with death by starvation.

Instewad of being angry about actual poverty; Leftists were now angry, very angry, about injustice - which could be detected wherever needed; defined and re-defined at convenience.

*

In the early 20th century, Socialism became an economic theory (the 'command economy' in communism, or the 'planned economy' in Britain), in rivalry to 'capitalism', for improving economic growth and for a 'fairer' distribution (failing to recognise that the distribution of economic benefits of the industrial revolution was from its very origin already strongly egalitarian).

*

What has all this to do with Christianity?

What indeed.

*

Certainly socialism does not come from Christianity - since there were some 1800 years of Christianity before socialism. 

Certainly socialism was not a legitimate Christian response to the new spiritual problems of the industrial revolution - since socialism is an economic theory, and the industrial revolution improved the economic conditions of the poor. The idea that socialism would help was based on a mistake.

Christianity does not legitimately come from socialism, not even in the new and specific conditions since the industrial revolution - since an economic focus for life is an intrinsically anti-Christian stance.

*

The vast majority of devout Christians have not of course been Leftists (were indeed opposed to Leftist ideas); and the vast majority of committed Leftists have not of course been Christian (were indeed opposed to Christian ideals).

So the Christian Socialists are a tiny minority, where these two separate systems overlap...

Are they correct or deluded?

They are deluded, Christian Socialism is not a novel and coherent synthesis - but is merely (at best) two separate systems in the same mind: unintegrated, unintegrable.

Most often, Christian Socialism is a consequence of error, or a consequence of dishonesty.

*

But humans are error prone creatures - our information is incomplete and biased, and our reasoning is defective, and we are easily influenced.

Yet error - honest error - typically becomes obvious within a few decades.

"By their fruits shall ye know them" - and the fruits of Leftism are rapidly and reliably anti-Christian, as can be seen within one or at most two generations.

That Christian Socialism was a heresy was apparent within a few decades, the intrinsically anti-Christian nature of Leftism obvious in all Leftist controlled states within a few decades (sometimes even faster).

*

Therefore, the only Christian Socialism which is good, is that which is based upon an honest economic mistake due to ignorance - but the error of Leftist economics soon became dishonest, and in order to preserve Leftism the error had to be preserved - which led to systematic lying, and then (and now) to systematic and coercive imposition of lies.

So Leftism is now objectively evil - indeed by far the major source of societal evil in the world (by societal evil I mean added to the irreducible minimum from original sin).

Indeed it now looks as if Leftism was the greatest triumph of evil in the history of the world.

So Christian Socialism is (and always was) an oxymoron, self-contradictory, self-refuting - intrinsically destructive to the Christian element of the compound name.

*

*

A long time ago, mainstream Leftism used to be utopian - and to re-explore that era I began looking through my old copy of News from Nowhere, by William Morris - which always struck me (as a youth) as the most desirable socialist utopia I encountered.

I did not get very far reading it - because, although it is beautifully written, after about six pages I was overwhelmed with 'yes, I get the idea' and couldn't be bothered to read more and more examples of it.

*

The idea is that a socialist society would be like an ideal holiday, in a beautiful and unpolluted country, full of wonderful arts and crafts, and people who are warm, friendly and hardworking from the sheer joyous expression of their nature.

It is a world in which, so far as the externals of life go, there is nothing wrong.

*

But it is no better than an idealized holiday.

And I find it impossible, by any degree of extrapolation or amplification, to make an idealized holiday into an eternal Heaven. It is simply inadequate to my-self, and especially to my best-self.

To be contented for eternity with an ideal holiday I would have to be much less an entity than I perceive myself to be (at my best) - I would have to excise my deepest yearnings.

*

To a person who is crushed by poverty, pain, sordidness and tyrannical authority - an ideal holiday sounds like more than enough - to escape seems sufficient.

But to anyone who is not currently so crushed, and who has actually experienced something approximating to the perfect holiday, it is clear that no matter how vividly painted - such a world is not utopia.

*

It is also based upon either an error or a self-deception regarding human nature, and the possibility of Men being always as Men are at their very best; which means blaming all the significant evils of men upon social circumstances.

(Instead of Man being born free yet everywhere in chains; it is a case of believing that men Men are born good, but are everywhere being made to do evil by 'society'.)

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But I find that the example of family life is qualitatively different from that of holiday. Family life at its best is something that I can easily imagine may be imaginatively extrapolated into such a type of ideal, that it would indeed be eternal fulfilment.

This is perhaps because family relationships have (at their peak) a divine quality, which reveals a level of response in ourselves and possibility in the nature of things - specifically an extension of family relations to include the divine -  that makes Heaven imaginable merely by quantitative extension.

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In sum, an ideal holiday seems stubbornly to remain at the level of pleasure - and no matter how much pleasure may be amplified and sustained, pleasure does not suffice.

But an ideal family is a different matter, being of the realm of love - which in actual practice, as well as imaginable aspiration, satisfies us more deeply and fully than any conceivable pleasure.

Ideal family love satisfies, yet not only as a perfect blissful moment (although there are those); but also and mostly as a thing incorporating motivation and purpose, a thing changing and growing, and a thing we do not merely observe but are on-the-inside-of, completely involved-with.

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This was probably my favourite painting age about 18-20 years - exceptionally evocative of that sense of aching yearning, Sehnsucht, that CS Lewis termed Joy. After living from brief glimpses of the picture held in memory, I eventually found an affordable reproduction to put on my wall - it was actually some luxury wrapping-paper, purchased at Durham Cathedral!

At that time, and originally deriving from my immersion in Tolkien; I had an imaginative desire of 'Medieval' things - either original e.g. Gothic Cathedrals, Chaucer and his contemporaries) or in Revival (e.g. William Morris, Pre-Raphaelites, Carmina Burana by Carl Orff).

Although strictly this painting is a bit late for the Middle Ages, it has that God's-eye not-perspective which aims to depict the distance with the same detail as the foreground; and it was the distant, right side of this canvas that I found so very attractive.

I also liked the winter scene; since I associated it with being warm indoors beside a blazing fire; perhaps in the philosopher's tower of a castle (an image of Merlin from TH White's The Sword in the Stone). And the birds.

It strikes me now that the people are all anonymous, absorbed into the public roles: no 'characters' - and this doesn't appeal to me anymore. My tastes and hopes have changed. Then, I yearned for an earlier time of order, structure, guilds; and yearned to be the kind of person who could indeed live that way...

But that was a lack of self-knowledge, a fancy merely - because I am not of that kind. And have, indeed, spent most of my post-adolescent life resisting anything of the kind. I became a doctor - one of the last of the guilds, and now gone - but while I wanted to be a part of the profession, I was always on the outside and a mixture of unable and unwilling to join-in. The same problems applied to academic - earlier and more strongly.

And either way, there is now no real 'in' to join' - just the lies of public relations and the reality of bureaucracy. So it turned-out for the best, after all!

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Reader's Question: "I've often wondered about the phenomenon of late-60s British folk rock. That is, in the context of the hedonistic excess of the era, were those songs of traditional England a reactionary thread or was this a process of co-option of older motifs into a nihlistic era? The morality expressed in many of those songs was very pre-sexual revolution but the scene was very similar to typical rocker decadence. Thoughts?"

My Answer: I'm never altogether sure what is meant by folk rock - but I will assume you mean the movement of whom Ashleigh Hutchings was instigator - the main thread being Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and their spin-offs - or what people sometimes call 'electric folk'. 

If so, I think you have encapsulated the reality - and the point that artists and performers lives, and the context of performance, are often at odds (the social environment of The Globe, for instance, often very much at odds with the sublime sentiments of Shakespeare - as was, no doubt, Shakespeare's own life) . 

As 'art' the folk rock movement was largely a relatively healthy neo-paganism backlash, clustering with the interest in Tolkien, DH Laurence, Thomas Hardy, Blake - love of the countryside and old architecture, the revival of Morris dancing, Mummers Plays. 

Politically, the folk rock movement was solidly Old Left, and included a lot of overt pro-union/ anti-boss material - but there was a strain of William Morrisite socialist utopianism. 

Religiously, there was no Christianity beyond the general affection of old churches and old ways; and sexually I would say that the morality was traditional - either a Rabelasian celebration of lust (e.g songs with jokey euphemisms like 'cuckoo's nest) or else celebrating love and marriage and fertility.  

So, as always a mixed picture - and a temporary phase. The movement was certainly not nihilistic; but lacked the courage and strength of a full religious faith... but then so did almost all the movements of that era. 

I still regard the best of it - eg much of mid seventies Steeleye Span, or the Compleat Dancing Master and Morris On albums - as among the best 'popular' music I have ever heard.

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