Stephen Roney's Blog, page 179

Introducing Mr. Hyde

 

Man's fate.

It seems clear to begin with, that civilization is crumbling. Why?

Postmodernism is the immediate cause, perhaps. But postmodernism seems more symptom than disease. Postmodernism arises from the failure of the scientistic world view.

Scientism is the elevation of empirical science to a religion, to the fountain of all truth.

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard

But where does scientism’s attraction come from?

I think it is from scientism’s denial of a distinction between right and wrong. Granted, science has allowed technology and engineering to accomplish many things, giving it much prestige. Other tools, in other times, have achieved idolatrous status for the same reason: written language, or metalworking, or mathematics. We have seen in recent times superstitious reverence accorded to anything done with computers, or to radioactivity. The Frankenstein legend was based on a brief period in which newly-discovered electricity was thought to be the essence of life. But I think at least a large part of it is that science demands “objectivity.” That means, for scientism, assigning no particular value to anything. That means no right or wrong.

This is immensely liberating. Now we can all do as we like.

But we cannot. The attempt to behave just as we like comes up against an innate awareness of the difference between right and wrong.

Nietzsche wanted to argue that, without God, there was no longer any necessary morality. 

“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident ... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.”

Nietzsche went mad; perhaps this was why. He was wrong. His conscience caught up with him. Perhaps this is what madness, psychotic madness, always is—one’s conscience catching up with one. For the “Christian” morality indeed is self-evident.

When we speak of “conscience,” we are tacitly acknowledging that the difference between right and wrong is self-evident.

Benjamin Franklin said so boldly in the core passage for the US Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This states the essence of social morality. All men are initially of equal moral worth. Their ultimate worth is determined by their actions. To deprive another of their life, their liberty, or their property, is the essence of immorality. (Jefferson had altered Locke’s prior “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”; and I think wrongly. Pursuit of happiness is already covered by “liberty,” and property is not.)

It follows from the truth that all men are created equal that one must “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—see them as equal to yourself, and treat them as equal. This Golden Rule is a phrase found almost verbatum in all the world’s moral codes; strong evidence, again, that it is self-evident.

Kant asserts again that the basic principle of morality is categorically imperative and impossible to deny. He phrases it as “act always as you could wish everyone else to act,” or, “treat others as an end, never a means.” These are simple reformulations of “do unto others.”

This imperative to act morally cannot be escaped. Nevertheless, there is an eternal desire to escape it and to deny it, in order to do what we will and see ourselves as superior, in effect as god. This is the eternal struggle between good and evil in every soul. 

Quite simply, to continue to struggle to do what is right gets you to heaven, but inevitably through suffering—like Jacob wrestling with the angel, like St. Paul “fighting the good fight.” To stop struggling and cop to the claim that there is no evil, no Devil, no right or wrong, it doesn’t ultimately matter, gets you to hell. If you have started down this road and are lucky, you will instead through the offices of some good angel go mad, and through the madness recover the true path.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Benin Bronzes Returned to Nigeria

 

The morality of it all gets complicated...

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

All Hallows Eve

 

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell

And many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night.

And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel

Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

Halloween is coming. There is an annoying misconception, among both Christians and secularists, that Halloween is a pagan holiday.

It is “All Hallows Evening”—the evening of All Saints Day. It forms an important part of that celebration just as Christmas Eve is important to Easter, or New Year’s Eve to New Year’s, or Holy Saturday vigil to Easter.

The usual claim is that Halloween is the continuation of an old Celtic seasonal festival, Samhain. But All Saints’ Day is celebrated, and celebrated on roughly similar ways, throughout the Catholic world. Mexico’s “Day of the Dead” is one famous example. Are the Mexicans Celts?

The seasonal festival of Samhain was held on the same day. But our first references to Samhain are from Ireland in the 9th century, when that country was already well Christianized. For all we know, it never had any more pagan religious associations than our own modern harvest festival, Thanksgiving. Indeed, it would make more sense to see Thanksgiving than Halloween as a continuation of Samhain.

It is probably true that the feast is held when it is for the same reason Samhain was held when it was: because November 1 is halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. It therefore serves as a celestial marker for the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. As a point at which the dark half of the year abuts the light half (more or less), it represents symbolically the link between the visible world of the living and the invisible world of the dead. So it is a time when the living should remember the dead, and perhaps equally when the dead might remember the living.

The hostility towards Halloween among Christians probably comes from the Protestant prohibition against praying to the saints. As a result, All Saints’ Day would have been anathema to them. Any idea of contact with the dead was and is, to them, necromancy.

Halloween is really the first day of a three-day festival. All Saints’ Day proper is for the saints in heaven. November 2, the next day, is All Souls Day, for the souls in purgatory. There is a third place that souls might go. Halloween proper is when we hear from them.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

On the Subway

 

A young black man suddenly takes offence to a white woman walking past him. He berates her for several minutes, calling her a “nigger” and a “vampire” and throwing something at her.

As he leaves at the next stop, he shouts “Your mother is a Jesuit pig.”

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Jean Chretien on the Residential Schools

 

Jean Chretien circa 1970

Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is being criticized for saying recently that, when he was Indian Affairs Minister from 1968 to 1974, he never heard of any problems with the Indian Residential Schools, now commonly held to be genocidal.

Chris Selley, in the National Post, lists specific complaints of abuse that were actually sent to the Department of Indian Affairs while Chretien was minister. How could he not have known?

But this misses the point. In the same interview, Chretien acknowledged that sexual abuse was going on at the Quebec boarding school where he was once a student. Abuse was par for the course. The reality is that, until recent decades, we simply assumed that a certain amount of sexual abuse and bullying was going on at any residential school. This was regrettable, but unavoidable. Welcome to real life. Was one going to close the schools? The question was, and remains, whether the Indian Residential Schools were any worse than any other residential schools. Or, for that matter, than the typical home, on reserve or in the general population.

We do not really know, because nobody has ever done a study with proper controls. It is often noted that in the great majority of reported cases of child abuse, the perpetrator is a close relative.

I recall Robertson Davies’s novel Fifth Business, published in 1970—in the middle of Chretien’s run at Indian Affairs. In it, the protagonist, a teacher at a private school, is accused by his good friend, a school trustee, of regularly buggering the boys, and warned that if he did not stop, he would never make headmaster. 

There was no question of his being fired; no question of this affecting their friendship.

John Addington Symonds wrote in the 19th century of his experience at Harrow, among the most prestigious of British public schools,

“Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's 'bitch.' Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover.”

C.S. Lewis seems to take pedophilic homosexual activity for granted in his 1955 school memoir, Surprised by Joy. 

Child abuse in institutions became an issue only recently, and pretty much still only when it comes to institutions run by the Catholic Church.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year--Year 2

 

Out and about in downtown Toronto yesterday. In the Eaton Centre, the Food Court seating is cordoned off. To enter you must wear a mask, and show your vaccine passport and some form of ID. 

As I was sitting there with a friend, a group of perhaps five blonde women of varying ages walked past me, opened the cordon, walked out, then replaced the cordon. None of them were wearing masks. They did this right beside a group of five security guards and police, standing around talking to one another, presumably there to enforce the rules.

It seems obvious to me that this was a planned act of defiance. No doubt there were other places where they could have left the seating area that were not right beside a gaggle of security guards. It was anything but sneaky. It obviously did not affect anyone’s safety. It would have been little or no inconvenience for them to have just walked out by the designated exit; to leave, they would not have had to show anything.

One of the security guards challenged them. “Do you think you’re special? Do you think you don’t have to follow the rules like everyone else?”

I imagine this is what they had wanted. The women assembled in front of him. One of them responded, in a distinctly Eastern European accent: “we are doing this for you. You will thank us in two or three years. We are from a Communist country. We know how this is going to go. We are fighting for your freedom.”

The five stood there and took turns arguing with the security guard, remaining relatively calm. One turned to me and apologized for the disturbance.

I was impressed.

I hope they are wrong.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Chinese View

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Alec Baldwin Kills His Cinematographer

 

Baldwin

Most peculiar news: that Alec Baldwin accidentally shot the cinematographer and the director of his current film, using a prop gun. The first is dead, the second in intensive care.

It seems extremely improbable for there to have been a live round in a prop gun on set. It is doubly improbable, then, for there to have been two. It seems extremely improbable to have shot and killed one person by mistake. It seems doubly improbable—we are up to multiple improbabilities--that, having shot the first person and seeing the gun was loaded, you would still go ahead and shoot someone else—accidentally.

It seems plausible that an actor might be shot accidentally—by a prop gun no one realized was loaded, during a scene. But why would a prop gun ever been fired at the cinematographer, or the director.

Perhaps some explanation will surface. But it looks to me like murder. The only question is whether it was fully premeditated, or done in a moment of rage. 

It seems to me it must have been premeditated—it takes time and some planning to load a prop gun with real bullets. Why would anyone do it, unless murder was premeditated?

If Baldwin is not charged with murder, I suspect a fix.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Diversity R Us

 

If the political term “diversity” actually meant “diversity,” I would be the ultimate diversity hire. Like many whose ancestors have been in Canada for some time, I am diverse ethnically in my own being. Some of my genes, are Irish, some Scottish, some English, some French, some Flemish, some Mohawk. My cousins and in-laws have Indian cards.  I have no known African blood, but because of my Irish blood, most African-Americans are probably distant cousins. There is a reason so many American blacks have Irish surnames.

I am culturally as well as genetically diverse. To begin with, Canadian culture is a melting pot of elements from all over the world. I grew up in NDG, an immigrant neighbourhood in a bilingual city. I went to school with kids whose parents were from Italy, who spoke Italian at home, or from Poland, or Latin America. The kids on my block were one generation removed from Poland, Greece, Lithuania, the Ukraine. One of my best friends in high school was from India, one from Greece. My first girlfriend’s parents were from Latvia. My first wife was born and raised in Pakistan, and my second in the Philippines.

I do not think this is so unusual for a Canadian. 

As an adult, I have also lived in Asia for almost thirty years, in China, Korea, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. I have studied non-Western cultures and the classics of Asia at the doctoral level. I have published on Hinduism in India, and on Buddhism in Korea. I have lectured the Hadassah Society on Judaism.

Yet, according to modern political usage, I do not count as “diverse.” Apparently, that has only to do with the colour of my skin, which is rather pale. Instead, government and businesses hire people with little knowledge of the world, with little experience of cultures other than their own, often little or no interest in cultures other than the one they grew up in. And little aptitude for living with people from other cultures. And they hire them in the name of “diversity.”

More evidence that the world is mad.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Indian Horse

 

I hear from a fellow teacher that the kids in grade 8 are now reading a book titled “Indian Horse,” by Richard Wagamese. Not a part of the literary canon when I went through. Apparently it is a fictional account of a First Nations child’s life in one of the Indian Residential Schools.

It is fiction, of course, so Wagamese is free to make things up, and cannot be called on it. However, I’m not sure eighth graders are sophisticated enough to realize this. To be honest, I’m not sure the average high school teacher is sophisticated enough to realize this. They are all going to think it is an accurate description. 

It is chock full of accusations against the residential schools and the Catholic Church. In a sane society it would be recognized as “hate speech,” and would not be allowed in the school library, much less taught there.

A representative passage:

At St. Germ’s the kids called me “Zhaunagush” because I could speak and read English. Most of them had been pulled from the deep North and knew only Ojibway. Speaking a word in that language could get you beaten or banished to the box in the basement the older ones had come to call the Iron Sister. There was no tolerance for Indian talk. On the second day I was there, a boy named Curtis White Fox had his mouth washed out with lye soap for speaking Ojibway. He choked on it and died right there in the classroom. He was ten.

And then, of course, he was thrown into an unmarked grave.

This is almost at the level of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. It is likely to end in violence.

It is perhaps worth noting, and perhaps significant, that Richard Wagamese, the author, never went to an Indian Residential School. Although ethnically Indian, he was also not raised as an Indian. Abandoned by his birth parents at age two, he was raised by “white” adoptive parents in St. Catherines. He has no more knowledge of the reality of residential schools than the next Canadian.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.