Catholic comments on the passing parade.
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The Deterioration of the Western Mind:
1. Modernism: “We have lost our direction. We no longer know what is true, or good.”
2. Existentialism: “We can create our own reality. We can create our own meaning. Morality is just social consensus.”
3. Postmodernism: “Nothing is true or good. Oppose all truth claims. Any claim of truth is authoritarian.”
The Response: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
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| John Keats. |
To be fair, all the other arts are also moribund. Yes, a kind of prose fiction and a kind of movie and a kind of pop music sells, but it is all entertainment, not art.
Meantime, we have seen spiraling rates of depression, homelessness, drug use, suicide.
These two trends are related.
Poetry, and the other arts, bring meaning. Man needs meaning. He does not live by bread alone. Poetry takes the brute events of life and makes them meaningful.
Beauty is the perception of meaning.
By beauty, I do not mean mere prettiness. I mean what can produce the aesthetic experience, the OMG moment.
True beauty requires the sublime. It must convey some deep truth.
It must also be in line with moral goodness; it must be just.
The three transcendentals are the irreducible source of all value: truth, goodness or justice, and beauty. This is what poetry, and art, expresses; and leads the reader to, like a torch held high, like a lighthouse on a hill.
The existence of each transcendental implies the other two. You can’t ever have just one. Beauty requires truth; truth is always beautiful. “Truth is beauty, beauty truth: that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.” Similarly, an injustice or evil act cannot be beautiful.
This is what life is for. We are created to seek the transcendentals, and to create art.
In recent generations, we no longer produce or appreciate poetry because we have given up the search for truth. Worse: we are in full flight from truth. Modernism was a cry of despair, that we had lost access to truth and beauty somehow; all the old verities were gone. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” We kept waiting for Godot, and he did not come.
Postmodernism is something else: it is a declaration that there is no truth, no beauty, and anyone asserting such a thing should be condemned and hounded out of polite company.
This view is the death of art. It is giving up on meaning.
And suicide, drug addiction, depression, mental illness, and a war of all against all are the inevitable consequence. If there is no meaning, everyone just grabs what they want for the moment.
This is why I write: to try to shine a beacon through this wasteland of relativism and despair. To set off a flare.
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| Look! The Moon is Green! |
Kamala Harris has by come commentators been nicknamed “Kamala Chameleon,” because she seems to tell every interest group whatever they want to hear. She is against fracking; she is for fracking. She is against a border wall; she is for a border wall. She wants to confiscate guns; she is for the Second Amendment.
This, since she herself raised the comparison, is something else she and the Democrats have in common with Hitler. This is why historians have trouble classifying Nazi ideology, have trouble defining what Nazism actually was. As William L. Shirer observed in following Hitler’s rise, he would simply promise every crowd whatever he thought they most wanted to hear.
This makes sense, because Nazism’s core value was simply power, ultimately power in the hands of one man. Like the modern left, it saw all of human society as a power struggle. The goal was (and is) to get more power for yourself, not to advance anyone else’s interests. So you make whatever promises will achieve this. Once in power, you then do as you like.
Another way in which the modern Democrats echo the Nazis is in their embrace of the propaganda technique of the “big lie”: that if you keep repeating something often enough, it comes to be, or be accepted as, truth. This is the fundamental ideology of postmodernism. It is why they can assert that men become women, and vice versa, by saying so, and it must then be illegal for anyone to say otherwise. They use the big lie on the hustings again and again, asserting the Russian collusion hoax, the fine people hoax, the Vance sofa hoax, the Liz Cheney firing squad hoax, the drink bleach hoax, and a dozen others, knowing they are debunked.
“Denny went to Catholic school; Denny had tattoos. Even though the Catholics frowned on tattoos, Denny did not seem to resent this.”
This paraphrased from an unpublished manuscript I have been asked to look at.
Something is wrong here. Not just that the Catholic Church does not consider tattoos sinful. Suppose they did. Isn’t the rational response, for Denny, to wonder whether his tattoos were a good idea, and seek to justify them to himself; rather than trying to decide whether he can still tolerate in silence his teachers, his colleagues, presumably his parents who sent him to a Catholic school. and the accumulated wisdom of his ancestors for the past two thousand years?
Noting that nothing in religion is compulsory: nobody is making him do anything. His personal freedom is not at issue.
This seems to illustrate the narcissism and intolerance of our current postmodern milieu.
You can see how this attitude might lead to violence; might lead to assuming the right to shoot up the school for not conforming to your wishes.
We see it spreading to matters other than morals. Now you can condemn your doctor for suggesting that you are morbidly obese, and your health is in danger if you don’t take steps. That’s “fat shaming.” How dare he?
How soon before doctors dare not diagnose cancer, for fear of prosecution?
I’ve been saying for years that we are sleepwalking into everything about Weimar Germany that ended with the rise of Hitler. The parallels are getting faster and more furious. We are now at the point of public calls for Jewish genocide.
It begins with the rejection of conventional ethics. Weimar Germany, endorsing Nietzsche’s scorn for “slave morality,” was a place where anything goes, or went, at first, and most appealingly to the average German, in sexual affairs. But the wall between right and wrong was broken down, and so one could just as properly, in principle, murder and steal. And the greatest danger was not the couple in the bar, but those with great power—the bureaucracy, the industrialists the government. Once the invisible restraints of morality are gone, they can use their power entirely for their own self-interest.
All that mattered was the triumph of the will.
And we see this again in our day. We rejected conventional morality again in the 1960s, first, and most appealingly, in sexual affairs. “Free love.”
And now morality has broken down in the halls of power. Governments and industrialists are colluding to run their Lolita islands, to silence dissent, to manipulate the news, to throw people in prison for protesting, to apply the law unfairly to help friends and punish enemies, to give and to accept bribes, and so forth. In Weimar Germany, Spartacist were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and even extrajudicially assassinated, while Nazis and stormtroopers committing similar crimes were let off with perhaps a slap on the arm raised in salute. We see the same bias now: BLM or Antifa do what they please, while Proud Boys or the January rioters are thrown in prison on petty grounds.
Those in power again feel free to use that power as they see fit to advance their own interests.
The proliferation of “gay pride” rainbow flags is even eerily similar to the proliferation of swastika flags in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Both represent a political ideology; and the same political ideology, the triumph of the will of the collective, the group, over morality and ontology.
And it inevitably comes to antisemitism. First, because Jews represent symbolically the moral law. They introduced ethical monotheism to the world. Second, because once morality is abolished, Jews provoke the sin of envy. They are too successful, just too good at everything.
Say Biden is Hindenberg, or perhaps Petain. If he is re-elected, some faceless bureaucrat is likely to emerge below him, someone heretofore utterly unobtrusive and unremarkable, as Hitler originally was, or Stalin, or Putin.
If, on the other hand, Trump is elected, is he, perhaps, a Churchill? He is similarly hated by those in power
One of the features of the Saint John Exhibition—formerly the Atlantic National Exhibition—which I attended yesterday, was an art competition featuring entries from across the region.
And the work of these amateurs was remarkably good—a few things worthy of hanging in a genuine art museum.
I have found the same from a Facebook page I follow, “Artists trying to make a living with their art.”
But what do we so often see in art museums? Drek. Sometimes literally. Things like a room filled with actual garbage.
One has to wonder why.
I credit it to the academicization of art. True art needs inspiration, and inspiration does not come on call, or with regular attendance at class. Nor can one be educated into it. So something else must be substituted to fill those classroom seats; something must be taught.
What is taught must not require talent, let alone genius. It must also be counter-intuitive. You cannot teach what everyone already knows.
From the point of view of the professional artist, as well, it is best to find some trick that does not require actual inspiration or even fine craftsmanship--so that you can crank it out. Inspiration is a shaky foundation on which to build anything like a career. And spending too long on any one piece is going to hurt your income.
So stuff must be made up, which would appear to the average person to actually be bad art, to keep out the amateurs, and then those who do not appreciate it can be scorned as the philistines.
The philistines with fat wallets will buy it if told to, because it makes them look sensitive and bohemian and not the philistines they are.
Hence all this conceptual nonsense. Hence the only good art left will be folk art and popular art. The art of amateurs.
It is the same in poetry. I recall a book fair at which I overheard one well-dressed woman pick up and read to another William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say”:
Ending with “Isn’t it marvellous?”
And her acquaintance was obliged to assent or lose face by admitting she saw nothing in it.
Anyone without talent can write like this, but it conforms to and illustrates an academic theory. By appreciating it, you show you know what “imagism” wants in a poem: essentially, just an image, of something perfectly ordinary and mundane, with no comment or obvious symbolism.
It is anti-art, which is most often these days the point.
The essence of CRT/CT, postmodernism, “wokeness,” can be expressed in one simple statement: “Reality is a function of belief.” I think that is Kierkegaard’s formulation. Or here is William Blake’s: “A firm persuasion that a thing is so, makes it so.”
There, I defined it; and the left claims nobody can.
So, say the woke, there is no truth; there is only “your truth.” There are no rules, no right and wrong; only a need to impose your own preferred reality on others. As in, demanding they use your pronouns.
Men declaring themselves women is the currently fashionable test case. If it looks relatively harmless, just wait for what comes next.
I have been hearing versions of this dogma—dogma is the word—since undergraduate days back in the 1970s. It took decades for me to fully shake this off, if I even have. One must not, in any circumstances, be “judgemental.” One must not get “hung up” on “meaning,” as one prize postgrad essay in religion asserted. Marcuse was hot back then: “Beware: even the ears have walls,” as one graffito said during the Paris uprisings. This idea has been drilled into our young people now for perhaps 3.5 generations.
The idea is attractive to the young. Sensitive or intelligent young people must realize that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy”—that philosophy being the dominant materialism. Postmodernism seems to offer the response, segueing nicely from LSD: we are not limited to the material, but can live entirely in our imaginations.
Heck, it even seems to be endorsed by the Christian tradition: Blake and Kierkegaard were, or considered themselves, Christians. Jesus said “if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20). Martin Luther emphasized faith as both necessary and sufficient for salvation: the whole ball game.
But there is something critical missing in the postmodern formulation: God. The faith spoken of by Jesus, or Blake, or Kierkegaard, is not faith in self or in the will. That’s Hitler. It is faith in God.
Consider the traditional solipsist conundrum: “If a tree falls I the forest, and no one is there to hear, did it make a sound?”
And the necessary answer is, it makes a sound because God knows. God is the touchstone of all existence, the ground of being. Without faith in God, as Descartes, for one, explained. one has no warrant that anything else is real. It is then possible, as Chesterton pointed out, to randomly believe in anything. Madness is inevitable, the only alternative to such faith.
Accordingly, if God says a mountain will move, it must move. If he says it will move at your command, it will move at your command. Because God. Nothing else is or is anything here or there except because God. But this magic works if and only if you are following God’s will, not your own.
And, of course, it is generally God’s will that a mountain be where he put it.
In denying God, we are collectively pulling the plug on everything. It is mass madness, and it is the madness of the proverbial lemmings.
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| The flagpole at my local school. |
A friend who originally emigrated from Pakistan laments that, over the past few years, his eyes have been opened: at the higher levels, Canada is no better than Pakistan. Our leadership is corrupt. His Canadian dream was only an illusion.
His companion, Canadian-born, says the sudden appearance of “gay-pride/transgender” flags on public buildings everywhere looks to him like the swastikas appearing in Germany with the rise of the Nazis. They announce the power of an authoritarian political ideology. You will obey.
Did I mention that these two guys are gay?
They think we are doomed; that there is no way back. The best we can do is try to survive.
Who would have thought, a few years ago, that the following conspiracy theories would look plausible:
That the 2020 US election was rigged.
That the past two Canadian elections were rigged.
That the Canadian prime minister and the US president are in the pay of China.
That the Canadian government would try to control the media.
That “Canadian health care” would become a euphemism for murder.
That “Eyes Wide Shut” was a documentary? That there are pedophile rings involving the participation of the rich and famous? When a film came out about the fight against pedophile rings, there would be an effort to suppress it?
That “drag queen story hours” for children would not just be permitted, but made mandatory?
That the CIA shot JFK. Maybe RFK? Maybe MLK? How about John Lennon? One former CIA operative has confessed to killing Bob Marley. Has the US effectively been run by a dark cabal since the 1960s?
That we were all forced to inject ourselves with an experimental vaccine that had not been properly tested.
That the pharmaceutical companies are prepared to suppress effective medicines for the sake of profit.
That some conspiracy can have enemies suicided at will, even within a high-level prison, and then can prevent an investigation.
That UFOs have been real all along; but the government has been suppressing this fact.
That the FBI is engaged in such activities as suppressing news for partisan political purposes.
That there is a conspiracy between government, the media, and big tech to impose censorship and control the news.
And on it goes.
Given that last one, that news is being suppressed, all conspiracy theories now become plausible. We know there are conspiracies. We know we are not being told the truth. Which conspiracies are real is anyone’s guess. There can no longer be any public trust in our institutions.
My own thoughts are still optimistic. I think we are seeing the thrashing about of a beast in its death throes. Social media makes conspiracies harder now to conceal, and we are beginning to see behind the curtain. At the same time, a depraved ideology that traces roots back to the 19th century, variously known as postmodernism, relativism, critical theory, existentialism, fascism, or the New Left, is reaching the point of reductio ad absurdum, slipperly slopes being real and really slippery, and the common people are beginning to see how mad it is.
And the convoys are coming.
I still believe there is a way back, and the future will be better than the past.
J.J. McCullough divides art into three categories, pre-modern, modern, and postmodern, and opines that now, after postmodernism, there is nowhere else to go.
Pre-modernism, he says, is characterized by beauty, craftsmanship, and religious values.
Modernism is defined by rationality and efficiency, rejecting beauty, craftsmanship, and religious values.
Postmodernism is defined by the rejection of rationality and efficiency. “Subverting whatever art is supposed to be.” “Weird for the sake of weird.”
McCullough sees these as the only possibilities; and we have exhausted them. So from now on… he suggests perhaps we will see a mix of them all.
His analysis seems flawed. To begin with, it takes no account of non-Western art. And restricting ourselves to Western art, there is a strange imbalance in his timeline. Pre-modern goes up to the late 19th and early 20th centuries; postmodernism appears in 1917 with Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” Leaving perhaps 17 years for modernism. McCullough suggests that postmodernism too is now exhausted and done.
If these really are the three inevitable approaches to art, why is it that only one of them ever occurred to artists in the millennia up to 1900? Why wasn’t art always a mix of them all, as McCullough suggests it should be in the future?
Rather than three approaches to art, it looks as though we have art, then two failed approaches to it. Art is craft plus vision; it means to convey the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Rejecting craftsmanship and religious values means, then, rejecting art.
If, as McCullough says, modernism is about rationality and efficiency, “form follows function,” we have a problem. Art performs no obvious function. Again, this is a rejection of art.
As is postmodernism, as McCullough says, it is “subverting whatever art is supposed to be.” That speaks for itself.
What we have is a collapse of the arts about the beginning of the 20th century, which has since then progressed to the point of nihilism. Not three approaches to art, or even two, but just one. Duchamp’s “postmodern” “Fountain” actually appeared three years before Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” from which modernism dates in poetry.
The real difference between modernism and postmodernism is simply that modernism lamented the loss of art; postmodernism celebrates it.
Which is why there is now nowhere to go. The last embers of the gallery have been burned down to ash.
It is the suicide of a culture.
These days, being in the arts is generally thought to mean being politically on the left. Despite the fact that some of the biggest names have let slip that they are not really with the program: Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol.
Folks forget that a couple of generations ago, such literary lions as W. B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot or Hermann Hesse were publicly on the political right.
I think this marks the difference between modernism and postmodernism. The modernism of the early 20th century saw Western civilization as in a state of collapse, lamented the fact, and sought with little hope for solutions. The postmodernism of the late 20th and early 21st century sees Western civilization as in a state of collapse, and wants to hasten the process by whatever means necessary.
Eliot or Yeats celebrated the old aristocracy, as a class freed from the tedium of making a living and able to live the aesthetic life. Yeats referred to the need to earn as “this rock” we all live under. Re-reading “The Waste Land,” it is clear Eliot feels contempt for both the working class--Sweeney and Mrs. Porter; and the bourgeoisie--Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant. He mocks popular art, the music hall and the gramophone, contrasting it with the old high art of the landed aristocracy, which he considers superior. Hesse similarly laments the gramophone.
In sum, when Yeats or Eliot mourn the decline of Western civilization, they are thinking of the decline of the old ruling class; Yeats’ “ceremony of innocence.” This is what died in the First World War. They see this as meaning the decline of the culture itself, into crass “bourgeois” values.
The left, in theory, champions the working class, not the old aristocracy; they agree on hating the bourgeoisie. But this looks like a con. The working class has its own traditions and tends to be conservative. Who the left really are is the remnants or wannabe successors of the old privileged class. They react to their own declining fortunes by wanting to pull down the entire culture instead.
It seems to me the notion that the landed aristocracy has a finer appreciation of the arts is not tenable. Why should it be so?
No doubt the argument is Plato’s, that they are educated into it. But art is inspiration, and the spirit goes where it wants. How many mute inglorious Miltons, in the words of Grey, does a class system exclude from consideration? Shakespeare was from the petit bourgeoisie. Blake was working class. Given all their free time, the aristocracy has contributed surprisingly little to the arts, other than appreciation.
This preference for the upper classes in the judgement of art also violates the teaching of the Bible. That ought to matter to Christians. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls specifically to the “little ones,” to the poor, the meek, and the oppressed, to “let their light shine,” to be “the salt of the earth,” to express themselves through the arts.
Moreover, they are those who will understand the arts: “those who have ears to hear.”
With Andy Warhol, I find greatest beauty in the folk arts, in popular art, and in commercial art. Most recently, in comic books, in folk music, in rock and roll, in some film and TV. Yes, most of it is junk. Most of everything is junk. Great art of the past is just that 5% that was good enough to survive. But much of the current sense that art is moribund is due to looking in the wrong places, at the galleries and concert halls and academies.
There are good cultural and technological reasons for the decline of the old ruling class. What that really was all about was the rise of the lower classes, to greater prosperity, more leisure time, better communication, better access to information, to the arts. The upper class is increasingly superfluous.
We should see as a result a great blossoming of the arts. What we see now is the academy and the old mainstream in a rearguard effort to suppress this great blossoming.
That bloom may come soon.
The government shutdown in Canada has forced me to homeschool my kids by distance, as they are trapped in the Philippines by the dysfunction for three years of the citizenship and passport office. At the same time, I am coaching other kids after hours who are attending Canadian high schools and American universities as international students.
Interesting that they apparently had no such troubles getting their student visas. One wonders.
When I see what is on my students’ curricula, however, I begin to think it is just as well my kids are not attending. Maybe I can give them a real education instead.
Even when I went through the Ontario schools, back in the 1960s, I thought it scandalous how they wasted our time on subjects most of us would have no use for in later life—algebra, trigonometry, the sciences—while not teaching us essential skills like logic, parliamentary procedure, bookkeeping, and rhetoric.
Yes, I am saying that teaching STEM in high school is a dumb idea. It is. College is the time for such specialization.
But it has gotten worse since I went through. In literature courses, my students study no literature as such. Instead, they get excerpts, second-rate movies and recent popular novels. Rather than read them and consider them as they stand, the students are directed to issues they supposedly illustrate.
From a parent:
“They finished the discussion ‘What is identity? How is it formed?’ ‘Philosophy: What is your true identity (Perceived by self VS perceived by others)’ ‘Identity beyond one's self. What else has an identity?’ ‘Identity and location - can a city have an identity?."
The text is, literally, just a pretext.
And the discussion seems guided in a particular direction. The students are being told what to think.
For example, only two possibilities are given: either your identity is as perceived by self, or as perceived by others. Either assumes there is no external reality. Either assumes our identity is a construct. None of the world’s great philosophical systems would assert such a thing. This is postmodernism. Instead of being taught the established wisdom of our culture, of all cultures, students are being carefully led away from it. This is an anti-education.
Perhaps more sinister is the next line of questioning. What else has an identity? Can a city have an identity?
One suspects the required answer is yes; and this is the gateway into identity politics, collectivism. Blackness is an identity; indigenousness is an identity; transgenderism is an identity.
And this is the gateway, in turn, into fascist thought. The individual no longer exists except as part of the collective.
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| Canute explains global warming to his courtiers. |
It is exhausting dealing with other Canadians; because most Canadians are insane. They believe in delusions. We noted the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness last post. It is nonsensical at best, yet over 85% of Canadians buy it.
Other examples abound. The average Canadian accepts as true that there has been a huge conspiracy in all cultures throughout history to oppress women. But they scorn "conspiracy theories" out of hand. They believe that homosexuality is inborn, although this violates the Theory of Evolution, which they also believe. Any gene for homosexuality would be bred out within two generations. They believe that American Indians lived in peace and comfort until the evil Europeans arrived with their agriculture, technology, and law enforcement: the “noble savage” myth. They believe that building schools for the Indians was oppressive, demanding apology and reparations. They believe that a man can decide to be a woman; or be a woman because they believe so. But even though it is all in the mind, and biology doesn’t matter, it is still essential to give hormone blockers and cut off their genitals to suit. They believe, as King Canute never did, that the government of Canada can order the tides not to rise, or the equivalent: "global warming." Canada can apparently fix global warming with a carbon tax, though industry can simply move to China. They believe that by raising the price of carbon, the tax will cause everyone to use less of it. But a minimum wage, by raising the price of labour, will not cause anyone to use less of it.
They believe, and will say in so many words, that there is no objective reality.
This is the definition of insanity. It means no rational conversation is possible. How does one respond when talking to a madman? Just nod your head and back away? The main concern is that they may become violent.
Not a pleasant intellectual climate.
I think Jung had it right that the human mind is easily drawn by “archetypes” away from reality.
I may be too optimistic, but I feel not everyone is as crazy as Canadians are. I lived in the Philippines for years, and with a Filipina longer, and I do not think Filipinos are nearly as crazy.
I think the clue is in Chesterton’s observation that “those who stop believing in God will believe in anything.” We need meaning, and if we reject God, we will deify almost anything: science, nature, sex, Adolf Hitler, you name it. Call them archetypes, idols, pagan gods; it is the same thing. The Filipinos avoid this because they still, most of them, believe in God. Those who don’t are still kept relatively sane by those who do.
Most of the rest of us are spinning out of control. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
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| Graffito, Paris, 1968 |
Although she claimed on the stand that all she wanted was to put it all behind her, and she wished Johnny could do the same, Amber Heard refuses to put it all behind her. She continues to dog Johnny Depp on social media, claiming her defeat in court was a grave injustice to herself and for all women. Important elements of the legacy media, including the New York Times, seem to be taking the same stand. Ignoring the judgement of nine jurors who heard the evidence, and indeed of the vast majority of those who watched the trial online, they still insist that Heard was abused by Depp.
The problem is that, to the narcissist, the only definition of good and evil is that “good” is whatever is good for me, and “evil” is whatever is not. Accordingly, it is good to maintain that something untrue is true, if the lie is good for me. If it is best for women that we should believe all women, any evidence to the contrary must be declared evil and shouted down. And it does not matter what happens to any male as a result.
The issue is obvious to me because I grew up with narcissistic parents. I recall as late as my late twenties still trying to reconstruct, in light of my childhood, what “good” really meant, and what “real” meant. Any child of a narcissistic parent is bound to be confused on this, because what they have been taught is both wrong and, to anyone other than the narcissist, incoherent. What is good is whatever is good for my parent? What is real is whatever my parent says is real? Despite my senses, despite reason?
Living in the latter half of the 20th century, or the 21st, does not help. There is a narcissistic philosophy permeating society and its institutions, postmodernism or critical theory, sometimes called cultural Marxism. I can trace it back at least as far as the Frankfurt School. I think the Frankfurt School was a continuation in turn of a philosophy found in Nazism. A bit of graffiti seen during the Paris uprisings in 1968 read “Beware! Even the ears have walls!” The rebellion was against any concept of reality itself. Freedom meant freedom to invent and have “your own truth.”
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| Graffito, Paris, 1968 |
“Reality is a function of belief.” I remember that as a watchword back then; I thought it came from Kierkegaard, but perhaps not. Or Blake: “a firm persuasion that a thing is so, makes it so.”
It was seductive, and I was myself at least half seduced in grad school.
But thinking this is insanity, straight up; and sanity is being aware of the good and the true.
We live today in a world gone mad.
Friend Xerxes has revealed himself to be a pantheist; or, more precisely, a panentheist. That is, the created universe is divine and a part of God himself.
I pointed out to him that this leaves us with a God who is evil; or, put another way, with evil as divine.
To which he responded that “evil is a concept invented by humans.”
This does not address the problem: God is still evil. The more so since Xerxes holds that man, creator of the concept, is divine. So I assume he really means to say that evil is an arbitrary concept with no real content.
This is a common idea nowadays. This is “cultural relativism”; this is constructivism; this is postmodernism.
Kant demonstrated, though the categorical imperative, that the moral good was unconditional and absolute. The Bible shows creation itself, from beginning to end, as a struggle of good against evil. And if you accept the “morality is relative” claim, you are implicitly accepting that Hitler or Charles Manson did nothing wrong, that we only persecuted them for holding different opinions.
The Christian believes that all men have a conscience, an internal compass that tells right from wrong. This is reinforced by the often-noted fact that all major religions contain, somewhere in their scriptures, a near-identical phrase: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Friend Seiko suggests that Buddhism does not concern itself with morals. Yet Buddhism too has its five precepts, binding on all men, which correlate well with the Ten Commandments. In the legend of the historical Buddha, his ultimate enemy, Mara, is a figure of personified evil. Making the struggle of good and evil as central to Buddhism as to Judaism or Christianity.
There is an obvious reason why so many want to deny the moral good, despite it being so universal and so certain.
It is because they are conscious of having done wrong. They do not WANT there to be a good and evil.
This is, perhaps, the sin Jesus called the one unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit. One cannot be forgiven if one refuses to admit one has sinned.
With its reaction to Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal, at least a large portion of the left has surely shown themselves to be delusional, and a danger to themselves and others. Neither logic nor evidence can penetrate their “narrative.” Even after the trial and verdict, many are insisting that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” who transported a weapon illegally across state lines in order to kill blacks. Assuming it was an expression of left-wing ideology—we do not know yet—what could be a more dramatic image of pure evil attacking good than the video of an SUV ploughing into a Christmas parade? It has become this stark. Now parents who complain about their children’s schooling are “domestic terrorists.” Anyone who defends the doctrine that all men are created equal is a “racist” and a “white supremacist.”
This poses an eternal problem for a liberal democracy. What do you do with a popular movement that itself denies liberal democracy? What happens if, as in Weimar Germany, it manages to attract a plurality of voters?
Ed Driscoll has put out a video, based on Harold Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, that posits that America was seeded with the same ideas as Weimar Germany beginning in the 1920s. It all came originally from German thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud—not to mention Marx. Bloom summarizes it as “value relativism.”
History tells us where that ends. It would seem to be an inevitability.
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
You might be wondering what’s behind “cancel culture.” How did we so quickly descend into apparent mass psychosis?
The answer, I believe, is postmodernism. Specifically, it is the idea that there is no objective truth. If this is so, everyone invents their own narrative, making the world whatever they want it to be.
The current battleground is transgenderism because it establishes the basic principle: I can be whatever I want to be; I can choose my reality.
The naïve postmodernist imagines this leads to a world of “live and let live,” in which everyone gets to be and do whatever they like. But the necessary consequence is the opposite. Without any objective standard to appeal to, there is no possibility of compromise of or coming to any accommodation. Instead, when my “reality” inevitably conflicts with your “reality,” the only course is to silence you, and ultimately a battle to the death.
That is what we are seeing now. A quite similar movement, operating from the same premises, led to Nazi Germany. It is the triumph of the will.
Xerxes, with enthusiastic agreement from much of his readership, has determined the original sin to have been reason: "I wonder if humanity’s original sin might be our obsession with labelling and categorizing our experiences.” One respondent characterizes this as a flaw of Western civilization. Another chimes in, “Judgement dams up the works! No sooner do I make a judgement, i.e., apply a label, then I stop considering alternatives and limit all the possibilities that might be realized by continuing consideration. Acceptance, on the other hand, permits flow, movement, discovery!”
This is a non-starter for Christians. One might point to Biblical verses like “judge not, lest ye be judged,” or the woman taken in adultery. But, importantly, these are about judging other people, not making judgments as such. And they themselves call for judgement—it is not that we must not judge others, but that we must judge ourselves first: ‘first, take the beam out of your own eye.’ ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’”
John 9:39: And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.”
As for naming things, God himself brings the universe into being, in Genesis, by his words—by calling it into being. Then, as if in echo of this divine act, he has Adam give names to all the animals. The implication seems to be that it is precisely in naming and clearly defining things that we are acting in the image of God, and in accord with the divine will.
Jesus is the Logos. He is judgement incarnate.
In sum, nothing could be less Christian—or more diabolical—than this postmodern doctrine of unreason.
Acceptance of everything requires acceptance of the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, and Charles Manson. This was precisely the philosophy Mason preached to his followers.
Why are zombies so compelling? And not compelling only to me; they have earned a central place in popular culture.
And if they are so compelling, where were they in the past? Our modern conception of zombies dates only from Night of the Living Dead, 1968.
I think everyone half-understands what the zombies represent. We knew in the 60s. They represent the growing postwar trend to godless materialism. To reject God and the absolute—truth, beauty, and the good—is to lose one’s soul. One is just a walking carcass.
The zombies are antifa, the postmodernists, the critical theorists, the Nazis—see Ionescu’s 1959 play Rhinoceros. All these mass movements that rely on aggressively enforced shared delusions.
And they are coming to get you.
An analysis of a longer passage by my friend Xerxes, elaborating on his claim that “No one does something knowing that it’s wrong.” It is important, because it sums up postmodern morality, and postmodern morality seems to be taking over even mainstream Christianity.
First, his position:
“You assume that the perp will recognize that something is wrong, because the rest of us think it's wrong. Conscience has nothing to do with it. The Mafia will murder because that's the way they settle things. For them, it's right. The Ponzi scheme organizer doesn't believe he's doing wrong -- his job is to make money, and the effect on others is immaterial. You yourself refer to the narcissist killing because other people are happy; if it makes him feel better, he will think it's right. You shouldn't assume that because YOU know it's wrong, someone else will also hold that belief.”
It is a little unclear to me whether he is advocating the full-on postmodernist view that there is no right and wrong, but truth is negotiated into being, “constructed,” by groups and society; or that groups can indeed be morally right or wrong, there is such a thing as objective morality, but individuals can never know what it is—their thinking is entirely conditioned by their social group.
The problem with the latter position is, of course, that he must be equally unable to know right from wrong.
But let’s look at each of his sentences in turn, and try to puzzle it out.
“Conscience has nothing to do with it.” “It” seems to mean “our actions.” So he does seem to be denying there is such a thing as conscience, no innate knowledge of right and wrong. Notions of right and wrong seem to come from doing what those around you do—the Mafia example. But then, not necessarily. The lone individual also has the right to declare whatever “makes him feel better” an absolute moral good.
As to morality being “constructed” by the group, I refer to the Bible:
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Non-Christians are free to reject the Bible, but if you accept its authority, so long as we are just doing what we see others do, we are on the road to destruction. We must make moral judgements for ourselves, not just follow the crowd, or we are objectively immoral. And I think in the end the truth of this is evident to pure reason. If you just do what others do, you are actually avoiding any moral choices.
“The Mafia will murder because that’s the way they settle things. For them, it’s right.”
Mafia types have no awareness that it is wrong to murder? That kills the premise of Godfather 3, in which Michael Corleone seeks redemption for his evil life. It also makes the Nuremberg trials illegitimate. The Nazis were just doing what they thought was right, and what was approved by their society. Indeed, as soon as you accept the phrase “for them, it’s right,” different rights for different people, there is no basis for judging any act more moral than any other. Morality is just whatever is imposed by those in power. There is no option but to bully or be bullied.
You could pull back and say: “No, morality is objective. Nevertheless, the Mafia sincerely if erroneously believed that murder, extortion, and theft were moral. So they cannot be blamed.” But if you accept even this weaker claim, now how can you know that it is them who are wrong, and you who are right? Perhaps you have it backwards.
“The Ponzi scheme organizer doesn’t believe he’s doing wrong—his job is to make money, and the effect on others is immaterial”
Surely this argues it is moral to pursue your own self-interest, and not care about others. Yet this is immoral by definition. The Golden Rule is found almost word for word in every moral tradition: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or frame it as Augustine did: “Love, and do what you will.” Kant demonstrated that the basis of morality is self-evidently true, a categorical imperative: we must treat others as an end, not a means; we must act only in ways we could wish all others to act. If you are looking out for your own self-interest and not caring what this does to others, you cannot pretend to be acting morally.
“You yourself refer to the narcissist killing because other people are happy; if it makes him feel better, he will think it's right.”
This seems to say that whatever makes you feel good is right. If you enjoy murdering strangers or raping women, what right has anyone else to judge?
To the contrary, one is only acting morally when acting against your own self-interest or what makes you feel good. Otherwise, as Jesus says, “you already have your reward.” There would never be a conflict, and there would be no possibility of sin in the world.
Eve looked at the apple, saw that it was good to eat, and desirable for bestowing wisdom. How could anyone suggest she did wrong?
Abel had provoked Cain by being happy. How could anyone blame Cain?
St. Paul understands life differently:
“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” – Romans 7: 18-9.
Morality is a struggle between animal desires and raw selfishness, on the one hand, and the duty to love others.
“You shouldn't assume that because YOU know it's wrong, someone else will also hold that belief.”
This seems to assume that anything anyone believes to be true must be true. “True for them,” in the hackneyed postmodernist phrase.
If, then, someone does not believe in gravity, gravity does not apply to them. I would not try that at home.
For a thing to be sinful, the perpetrator must know it is wrong. Not to realize this is a legitimate possibility: a small child, for example, is not responsible for their actions.
But if, as noted, the core of morality is so simple as “do unto others,” there is very little scope for sincerely and with good intentions not grasping the concept. Even severely mentally retarded folks can grasp this.
We are also morally obliged to educate ourselves and reason over our acts to avoid sin; for the same reason that “criminal negligence” is a crime, and “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” To not continually make the effort is immoral in itself.
At the supermarket checkout, I saw the cover of People magazine had a photo of Prince Harry and Megan Markle, with the heading “Our Truth.” (If I recall correctly, it was “Our Lives, Our Truth.”
To speak of “our truth” is simple insanity. Truth is truth, unconditionally, one truth cannot contradict another, and you cannot declare yourself Napoleon Bonaparte as “your truth.” What Harry and Megan Markle claim is either true, and the Royal family is guilty of racism, or it is false, and the Sussexes themselves are guilty of slander. It is unjust to the innocent to leave the matter ambiguous, and say that anything said must be true. Nor can Hitler escape censure by declaring that Aryan superiority and Jewish depravity is “his truth.” People magazine is either endorsing insanity, or endorsing evil.
This same day, I witness a video clip of Don Lemon on CNN objecting to the Vatican refusal to bless gay marriage because “God would never judge us.”
Judgement is what we are here for.
Did God not judge Adam and Eve in the Garden? Is Jesus not coming again to judge the living and the dead? Why then did God create us? Just as cute pets? With no responsibilities? And if everyone gets to heaven, why did he not create us in heaven, and instead leave us to suffer here on Earth?
And why does the Bible condemn Pontius Pilate for refusing to judge Jesus? Why is Pilate the villain, and not the hero of the piece?
Why do we condemn the neighbours who reputedly let Kitty Genovese be stabbed to death in a stairwell rather than intervene? Who were they to judge?
As infuriating is the often-repeated claim that parents are supposed to show their children “unconditional love,” and never discipline.
That’s a perfect way to raise a psychopath or a narcissist. Or a helpless house pet.
Unconditional love is not love at all. It is ownership.
