The Nightingale

 

I have been teaching Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” and as usual, the interpretations of the fable in the common texts, are preposterous. They want to claim the story is meant to show that natural beauty is superior to artificial beauty.

Right. Compare the natural with the artificial nightingale as objects. The nightingale is axiomatically drab, unremarkable in appearance, indeed invisible in the night. Andersen stresses this. “’I never imagined it would be a little, plain, simple thing like that.’” By contrast, the mechanical bird is beautiful: ”’This is very beautiful,’ exclaimed all who saw it.” “It was so much prettier to look at.” 

If Andersen meant to contrast artificial beauty with natural beauty, and find the artificial wanting, he has done a very poor job of it. One would think the opposite.

Nor is the song of the natural bird more beautiful than that of the artifice. Anderson stresses this more than once: less varied, but not less beautiful. It “was as successful as the real bird.” The music master, the resident expert, declared it more beautiful.

In the story, the only problem is that the mechanical bird over time stopped singing.

But that is not a valid contrast with a natural bird. A natural bird would actually die well before the mechanical bird wore out.

Read the story again, understanding that the “natural” nightingale is the Holy Spirit. Everything falls into place. The contrast is not between man and nature, but man and God.

Of course, the school commentaries cannot say this; they must suppress all reference to Christian belief. They must ignore his sins gathering around the Emperor’s bed, or the figure of Death leaving for a churchyard, or the bird’s talk of holiness.

It is the key to all Western literature, to all Western culture, and to life itself, and it is being suppressed in our schools.

Speak of the Devil

 

Guess who's coming to dinner?

Last evening, I attended a Christian discussion group. Nominally, it was a group for those thinking about becoming Christian; but in reality, all but one were practicing Catholics.

The topic for the day, based on a video we had all just watched, was “how to resist evil.”

Striking to me, nobody seemed to have much concept of evil. They seemingly had not thought about it, and did not want to think about it. How is this healthy Christianity?

Challenged at one point with the question “what is evil?” there was general silence. Eventually one participant looked up the dictionary definition on her smart phone. 

When someone brought up demonic possession, the facilitator visibly balked. I pressed in with Biblical references; otherwise I think he was about to scoff at the idea. As if demons were anything more than an antiquated superstition!

This is the “happy happy joy joy” motivational speaker Christianity. It is lame, and goes in circles, because it lacks one leg. You cannot believe in God, and not the Devil. Otherwise you are lying to yourself.

Refusing to see evil does not make it go away. It ensures that evil thrives. 

“All that is needed for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”

“The Devil’s greatest trick is convincing people that he does not exist.” The Devil loves the darkness.

Deny his existence, and you not only stop resisting evil around you, and in you. You begin to believe in all kinds of scapegoating and mad conspiracy theories involving the “other.”

Why the Jews?

He said it.

It seems clear that the right has won the bitterly fought war for the culture, at least in the US, which probably means everywhere in time. There are and still will be struggles, assaults, riots, government overreaches, and assassinations, but the outcome is no longer in doubt. 

But now the right in turn seem to be increasingly delusional. I think of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, as examples.

This may be an overreaction to the atmosphere of thought policing, of cancel culture and deplatforming, being lifted. We saw something like this in the Sixties, when the McCarthy era ended, and the various media morality codes were lifted. In fitful exuberance, almost any idea was vented, and considered. Anything seemed acceptable. Why don’t we do it in the road? Why not put a hole in your head, to open your third eye? Why not drop out and live on a commune in Goa?

Ben Shapiro is currently being pilloried for saying something perfectly reasonable: that, if young Americans are lacking opportunities where they live, they should move. Others on the right are outraged. As Americans, we have the right to whatever we want, wherever we are. What sinister force seeks to steal this from us?

Shapiro is obviously right. Moving for better opportunity is the essence of the American story. It is a nation built by immigrants, and by settlers forever moving west. America is, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, with reference to its literature, the frontier. 

But like the Hippie Sixties, the resurgent right will suddenly not accept the bounds of reason or common sense: “we want the world, and we want it now.”

And part of why there is such blowback to Shapiro is that he is Jewish. For the question hangs suspended: if, the left defeated, we still do not have everything we want, what sinister force seeks to withhold this from us? 

This, sadly, naturally segues into antisemitism. If I deserve whatever I want, and some Jew seems to have more than I do, then they must be the guys. They must be keeping it from me.

The more so since the Jews always represent the Law: the idea of living with restrictions on one’s behaviour. 

To resurrect a famous phrase from the Sixties, we have met the enemy, and they is us.

 

A Sensible Immigration Policy

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island

Many problems are solved if we accept one basic truth: culture is not race; race is not cultu. Culture is not genetic. To suppose cultural behaviour is hard-wired is the essence of racism. Yet that seems to be the common notionu on the left.

Second premise: cultures can be judged, and determined to be better or worse. “Cultural relativism,” popular on the left, the idea that cultures are free to determine truth itself, is the core idea of fascism, if not Nazism,

A culture is a set of tools for living. Like any set of tools, one culture can be better than another—or better at one thing, and worse at another.

A better life, in material and in spiritual terms, shows a better culture. And of course, we should all want a better culture, for a better life.

The cultures we currently call “indigenous” or “aboriginal” are essentially failed cultures. They provide at best a meagre material existence. They have produced little in terms of artifacts or technology or social cohesion or art. While they might retain elements out of sentimentality, given the choice, no moderns purportedly of these cultures actually prefer to live in their traditional way.

An immigrant nation, like Canada, the US, Australia, or Singapore, has the golden opportunity to select immigrants for the quality of their culture, in order to add it to their own. 

This is the secret of the relative success of these immigrant nations: cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is how cultures advance.

However, such nations should select immigrants on the basis of the potential added value of their original culture. What skills can they bring, and what can they teach us?

Most obviously, we want all the Jews we can get. Twenty-five percent of all Nobel Prize holders are Jewish, despite their being only 0.2% of the world’s population. Even a small proportion of Jews vastly enriched any culture. Better yet, they are often persecuted, and so might want to emigrate. Any sane nation ought to open their doors wide, and actively oppose antisemitism.

Any European culture is, in world terms, a good bargain. Europe brought us science, human rights, democracy, and most of the best of the arts. Barely a century ago, Europe ruled the world. The downside is that we already have the best of Europe, and Europe is doing so well that fewer might want to emigrate. Luckily for us, the Jews in Europe are now feeling increasingly insecure. And we have a golden opportunity to take in more Ukrainians.

We should also look to the European diaspora. Many South Africans of European ancestry might currently want to emigrate. 

Along with a rich cultural heritage, Japan in the last century or two has shown itself to be highly capable. And we do not have many Japanese Canadians or Americans, comparatively speaking. They should be welcomed in.

We do not want to import the Communist ideology, but immigration from the Chinese diaspora sounds promising: from Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau. Chinese or Confucian culture led the world several centuries ago, and seems recently to have regained its footing.

Muslim lands, leaving aside the occasional accident of oil, have been lacking in cultural accomplishments over the past few centuries. This is especially striking since they are the inheritors of some of the most productive cultures of the ancient world: Egypt, Lebanon, Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor. This suggests there is something in Islam that actively inhibits cultural development, and we should not want to import it.

And the problem is not hard to identify: Islam is a holistic ideology, setting down rules with divine sanction for all aspects of society and life. This stifles innovation. Yes, it had a golden era. The Muslim world did well for several centuries after the great Muslim conquests. But this can be explained by their first conquests being these rich ancient cultures. They fuelled continuing creativity for a time, until Islam gradually converted the populace and shut innovation down. To get a sense of what Islamic culture is in the absence of this influence, visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the U.A.E. There is much there that is shiny and new, from oil money. But look past that, look for older traditions. A Muslim life is limited and tribal.

However, this still presents an opportunity. We should welcome members of non-Muslim minorities from Muslim lands: the Maronites, the Yazidis, the Zoroastrians, the Copts, the Indonesian Christians. These groups are likely to have much to contribute in a new milieu, just as they were able to fuel the Muslim Golden Age. And this would be, for us in Canada, largely a new contribution to our culture.

India has also, despite an ancient and rich culture, been in a stall for centuries. I suspect the caste system has curbed development, and is not something we should want to import. Granted that caste has been legally abolished in modern India; nevertheless, it is embedded in the culture, and has religious sanction. There are, again religious minorities that have proven themselves productive within this milieu: the Parsees, Jains, and the Christians of South India all outperform the Indian national averages in education and in income, rather like the Jews.

The worst possible sources for immigrants would be areas that are still highly tribal in nature, and at war among themselves: places like Somalia, Yemen, and most of sub-saharan Africa. This is asking for trouble, probably importing trouble.

It is all simple once we ditch the false lens of race.

Sea Power, Land Power and the Fall of Empires

 

The British First and Second Empires combined.

I heard recently an interesting analysis of why the sun did set on the British Empire. It all came down to the First World War. Britain’s great strength was always been being an island. This meant it need not fear a land war. It did not need to support a standing army, or to rebuild from the devastation of wars. It could pour its resources into having a strong navy, focus on industry, and choose its fights.

It then made the fatal mistake in the First World War of deciding to fight a huge land war—throwing away its natural advantage. While it won, it broke the bank. It lost leadership at that point to the USA.

What might have happened had Britain restricted its land participation in the First World War? At worst, it would merely have lost its leadership to Germany instead of to the USA. 

But quite possibly, its naval blockade could still have been decisive against Germany. 

I think it likely Germany’s Schlieffen Plan would still not have worked. During those first few weeks, the British presence in France was nominal in any case. From that point on, with trench warfare favouring the defense, it was hard for either side to advance. It was stalemate on the ground while the British blockade slowly strangled of German production. The eventual entry of the US was caused by events at sea, and so should have happened anyway, giving France that final punch against an exhausted Germany.

Meanwhile, Britain might have had more resources available to intervene in the Russian Revolution and keep Russia in the war—or at least, following the war, ensure that the Whites won. That could have made quite a difference in subsequent history.

During World War II, the UK was compelled by circumstances to follow a more logical policy—France fell swiftly.  But they might have been in much better shape had they not sent a large land force to France, which then had to be evacuated without its equipment at Dunkirk. The Channel remained Britain’s protection, and they were able to rebuild. Had Russia not been attacked, Britain would have slowly starved Hitler out anyway—that’s why he had to attack. The British Navy cut him off from oil.

Again Britain won—but at such a cost that they could not sustain any longer the cost of their great navy, and so their empire.

Imperial Japan made the same mistake. They had the same advantage as the UK, of being an island. Their natural course was to be a sea power. Instead, they got themselves bogged down in a vast land campaign in China. 

Germany, rising quickly towards the turn of the 20th century, made the same mistake in the opposite direction. A land power, needing always to defend their borders, they diverted resources into trying to become a sea power; turning the UK from a natural ally to a deadly enemy. They became too ambitious and overextended.

The USA, like the UK, is a natural sea power. Protected by oceans, it does not need a large standing army defending its borders. It can build up and support a large land army if necessary for short periods. But it must avoid becoming involved in land wars. Trump’s idea of withdrawing from Europe and letting the Europeans pay for their own defense is wise. In Asia, the best idea is to maintain an island perimeter. Vietnam was a mistake for this reason: America must avoid land wars in densely-populated Asia.

In other words, if it keeps its powder dry, China has no reason to fear the USA. Its invincible defense is its huge population, as Russia’s invincible defense is its vast land area. Time and again, this defeats possible invaders, and allows it, or Russia, to develop into a great regional power.

But not global powers—a land power almost by definition cannot extend its reach overseas, as a sea power can.

China now wants, like Germany towards the close of the 19th century, to become as well a great sea power. It wants to seize the island of Taiwan, control the trade route through the South China Sea, and project its power globally.

There is a reason why China has never been a sea power. Geography. This is a fatal mistake.

China must always maintain its large standing army. Russia, to the north, is also a great land power. India, to the south, is also a great land power. Like Germany having to worry about Russia, Austria, and France, there is always the danger of a two-front war.

So it must maintain parity on land with Russia and India combined, while also, if it wants to challenge at sea, developing and sustaining parity as well with the USA and Japan combined, two natural great sea powers.

Not to mention significant peripheral players like Vietnam and Korea.

The lessons of history suggest this is too tall an order for any nation. China does not have the natural advantages to make this possible. It may, like Germany or Japan, make a lunge, but unless the other power make a series of catastrophic errors, China is going down. Even when the UK made fatal errors, Germany still lost two wars.

There's Something about Mary

 

Many traditionalists are angered by the recent document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Mater Populi Fidelis.” They call it insulting to Mary, because it discourages use of the titles “Co-Redemptrix” and “Mediatrix of all Graces.”

On this issue, I am entirely in agreement with the Dicastery and the Vatican. It feels good to say that.

I have always been disturbed by those very titles. “Co-Redemptrix” sounds blasphemous to me. Jesus is uniquely our redeemer. It sounds like a feminist attempt to subvert this truth. “Mediatrix of all Graces”? So the saints must petition her, and have no direct line to God? Did she mediate the graces she herself received? We are to go to her of necessity instead of Christ?

No; this is paganism.

Mary is the paradigm of the perfect disciple soul. Elevating her to some more active role violates her immaculate nature. Subservience is her essence, and it is this she models for us. “Let it be done unto me according to thy word.”

Thank you for the clarification, Pope Leo.

The White Poppy

Tuesday is Remembrance Day. Inevitably, I have received an invitation from a leftist friend to buy and wear a white poppy instead of the traditional red poppy. The idea is that the red poppy glorifies war; a white poppy protests war, calling instead for peace.

Today I attended the annual prayer service at the cathedral for Remembrance Day. I missed any reference to war being a good thing. The closest they came was a passage from Ecclesiates: “a time for war, and a time for peace.” Which of course is true. The atmosphere was solemn, not celebratory; like a funeral. The theme, as the name of the day implies, was remembering the dead. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.” The climax of the ceremony was a lone bugler playing the Last Post, as is traditional at a military funeral.

Remembrance Day endorses war in about the same way attending a funeral endorses death. If the deceased died of cancer, does honouring him mean you are endorsing cancer, and wishing more people die of it soon?

It is true that Remembrance Day does not claim their deaths, or their lives, were meaningless. It points out that these young men, some only teenagers, died in a good cause, and honours their courage and self-sacrifice.

Suppose this is wrong? Suppose those who volunteered were just fools, or psychopaths, and those who were conscripted were just cannot fodder. It would still be disrespectful to say this at their funeral. Right or wrong, they gave their lives.

Wearing the white poppy is equivalent to this. In my mind, it is like the Westboro Baptist picketing the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq, or the victims of Sandy Hook. It is offensive to make a funeral political.

I wear the red poppy, and I stand and applaud the surviving veterans who attended the ceremony. I feel contempt for those who wear the white poppy.

What Rough Beast?

I think it is probable that we are witnessing the collapse of Islam. 

Islam as an ideology is particularly vulnerable to the increased communication produced by the Internet. The apparent recent radicalizing of Islam, more women wearing hijabs and more Islamist political movements, compared to only a generation or two ago, looks like a defensive move, a circling of the wagons. Another example of the ostrich’s philosophy of sticking his head in the sand; or the child’s of sticking his fingers in his ears. The upsurge  of “Islamic terrorism” is a further symptom. You resort to violence when you irretrievably lose the argument. It is fair to say that Islam always sanctioned violence in a way other religions do not. Nevertheless, there has clearly been a recent upsurge. Islam abided in relative peace with the rest of the world for several centuries before this.

One major problem is that the Quran makes self-contradictory claims. It states, and the average Muslim believes, that the Christian trinity is Allah, Jesus, and Mary. Easily disproved with contact. 

If the Quran is wrong about this, it cannot be the direct word of God, can it? What else might it be wrong about?

The Quran states that Jesus did not die on the cross; that Allah only made it appear so. Yet this means that Allah is a deceiver, prepared to deceive mankind, and must have known this particular deceit would lead to the development of the world’s largest religion. Christianity would be based on a fundamental error. This would be Allah’s fault. If Allah was prepared to deceive, how can we trust anything in the Quran, as the word of God? He might be deceiving again.

This is without even bringing up the celebrated issue of the “Satanic verses,” Muhammed’s own statement that some verses that he dictated as from God were actually, he later realized, from Satan. So what other Quranic passages might be?

The Quran claims that its truth is confirmed by comparing the prior scriptures, the Torah and the Gospel, which it affirms, and seeing they are all in conformity: it cites them as its evidence. Yet the Quran differs from the Torah and the Gospels in many of its historical claims; although the Torah and the Gospels agree with one another. It says Abraham sacrificed Ishmael instead of Isaac, for example. It says Mary’s father is Amram, not Zechariah, and Aaron is her brother--seeming to confuse Mary the mother of Jesus with Mary the sister of Moses.

So by its own standard, the Quran is disproven.

Militant Islam now looks as though it is spent. There have been fewer attacks in most recent years. The theocratic regime in Iran seems to have done much to discredit the idea of political Islam. Some surveys suggest widespread apostasy in Iran, and in other Muslims lands like Saudi Arabia. It is not visible, because apostasy is punishable by death. But that façade may soon be unsustainable.

The rise of militant Islam, as of 9/11, 2001, has had profound effects, however. It first gave birth to the “New Atheism.” Influenced by political correctness, these New Atheists could not see Islam specifically as the problem—that would be “Islamophobia.” So they put the blame on religion per se, and attacked Christianity instead. 

This both provoked and legitimized Islamic militancy, rather than countering it.

Leaving it to Christianity to emerge as the response and alternative to militant Islam, and as the defender of truth and good against what is, objectively, an evil and destructive mass hysteria—a group of people in a state of panic, of “cognitive dissonance.” The doctor is in.

The net result is likely to be a Muslim collapse and a Christian revival.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.