Stephen Roney's Blog, page 209
December 28, 2020
God Indicted
It’s time to put God in the dock. How has he allowed 2020?
Perhaps we are just too used to having it too good. But then, how did he allow the Holocaust—the many holocausts of the 20th century? How does he allow the poverty of so many lands? How does he allow children to die of malaria and tuberculosis? Christopher Hitchens condemns God for allowing awful parasites to infect small children. Why make the innocent suffer?
Isn’t he ultimately responsible for all such evils? He could stop them. He does not. Can we overlook this?
I can accept that suffering is not itself evil. Suffering it seems to me has mysterious benefits. It builds soul. We are vaguely aware of this when we relish the pain from physical exertion. Or when we step off a roller coaster. Or go to see a horror movie. And God promises to compensate in the next life: blessed are those who mourn.
We do not want suffering, on the whole, beyond familiar limits. That does not make it evil.
More troubling to me is injustice; watching evil triumph over good. COVID itself troubles me less than the venal and self-interested reaction of so many: of the drug companies, the politicians, the “experts,” the government of China, Antifa, Black Lives Matter. Why doesn’t God intervene on behalf of his own? What message is he sending?
Why does Anne Frank die in a concentration camp, and Stalin in his bed?
Jesus responds with the parable of the wheat and tares: the weeds will not be pulled up until the harvest, for fear good grain might be uprooted too.
The striking thing about that parable is how clearly it goes against good gardening advice. Of course one pulls up the weeds—they will stunt the growth of the grain.
It has to be that souls work differently: that weeds, suffering, improve the crop. “Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come.”
But has he left us without a sign? Without assurance that the universe itself will resolve towards the good?
In fact, the Bible, the Old Testament, insists that he has given us just such a sign: that God will intervene for his faithful on the battlefield. As he repeatedly did for the Israelites.
Perhaps he does. It does seem that the trajectory of history, as someone has said, arcs towards justice. Just not within each lifetime. Stalin may have died in his bed, but the Soviet Union eventually collapsed suddenly, as if a miracle. The Berlin Wall fell as abruptly as the walls of Jericho.
Nazi Germany collapsed in flames, and its name became infamous.
Leaving aside revisionist history, the Central Powers were the bad guys in World War I, and they lost. The North were unambiguously in the moral right in the US Civil War, and they won. The South held slaves, and the South fired the first shots. Rome, against the odds, won the Punic Wars. The Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice. The colonials, against the odds, achieved independence from the British Empire. The colonials were fighting under the banner of human equality and human rights.
Sometimes, no doubt, there is no clear moral superiority of one side over the other; but that is a rarity, for without some egregious act on one side or the other, why would things come to war?
Is there any clear example in history of an immoral society subjugating a clearly more moral one?
One can respond, of course, that “the winners get to write the history,” but that is not actually true. Historians almost by definition come by to do their work long after either side to a conflict has passed on. They may have their prejudices, but these will not be consistent historian to historian, and much of the point of history as a discipline is spotting and countering such biases when they appear.
No doubt there is a limit to divine intervention. God cannot be too obvious about it: he cannot intervene immediately to defend Jews from the Nazis, or the Irish from the British Empire, or the Jews from the Roman Empire. If he did, he would eliminate the opportunity to be moral. One would simply be moral out of immediate self-interest.
In other words, the spiritual grain needs weeds nearby in order to reach maturity.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 27, 2020
How Many Do You Remember?
How many do you remember?
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
Blue Christmas
December 26, 2020
A Case for Aristocracy
Reviewing images of the First World War, preparing to teach All Quiet on the Western Front, I am struck by an obvious fact: Eliot’s “Waste-Land,” and Beckett’s barren landscape in Waiting for Godot, are no-man’s land.
The modern meaningless, the slow suicide of civilization, rises from the trenches of the Great War.
And the thing that was shattered then was largely the old aristocracy:
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
The First World War swept the active aristocracy from most of Europe: from Germany, from Austria-Hungary, from Russia, from Turkey. Not just titles and monarchs, but the functioning guts of the most aristocratic states. In those others that had retained kings, they were presiding over functioning democracies. Austria-Hungary and Russia were the models of autocracy.
It feels odd to realize that Eliot, and perhaps Beckett, laments their loss. It feels odder still that, in reading The Waste Land, or visiting the museums of Istanbul, I lament their loss too. This was the “ceremony of innocence” that Yeats saw drowned in a “blood-dimmed tide.” Now the falcon can no longer hear the falconer—a reference to the most aristocratic of sports.
There was a genuine beauty in the pageant and plumage of the old aristocracy; something is lost.
Yet it is aristocracy against which America was founded, and modern liberalism. As a Canadian, and indeed as a Christian, I have always scorned titles and class distinctions. Aristocracy violates the fundamental principle that all men are born equal, with equal protection before the law.
It is also undeniable that the European aristocracy brought about their own ruin, along with untold suffering for the population at large. It was the most autocratic states that bore the greatest responsibility for the war: Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany.
Life in Austria-Hungary or Russia was also notably lacking in democracy and human rights; government was oppressive. Economies were underdeveloped.
On the other hand, the successor governments, once these autocracies collapsed, were far worse: The Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Young Turks, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian genocide, the ethic cleansings of the Balkans. A blood-dimmed tide indeed. I had not thought death had undone so many.
And what passes for an upper class in Britain or America has often produced its best leaders: George Washington, Winston Churchill. What tends to mark them is a commitment to principle over either personal advantage or ideology. There is something to be said for that.
Perhaps these upper class twits, these preening peacocks, were necessary to European Civilization; perhaps with their collapse, it lost its ridgepole.
One advantage of an aristocracy is that it can be bred for power; as Plato recommended for his Republic. That is, to wield power responsibly. Because position comes with birth, aristocracy does not advantage either the ruthless or the egotistically ambitious. Because the charge is passed on generation to generation, one is able to educate and train for the function, inculcating essential values of chivalry, fair play, and sportsmanship. Because the charge is passed on within the family, there is incentive not to loot or overreach; one wants to pass on the family business in good order to one’s grandchildren.
An idle class—idle at least in times of peace—also has the time to devote to the finer things in life. They become sponsors and advocates of the culture. While much can be said for popular culture, the average man, forced to forge a living by his sweat, does not have the time to devote to poetry or to art. There is not the time to develop a truly discerning taste.
Lacking such aristocratic patrons, artists are required to rely either on popularity or on government largesse. Neither are going to be as discerning as an aristocrat.
Our arts have grown moribund since the aristocracies fell; perhaps as a direct result.
The aristocracy serves, as well, as a check on the enthusiasms of the mob. It stands as a bulwark of tradition. This was the idea behind the Canadian Senate or the British House of Lords: “chambers of sober second thought.” We have reduced their power, offended by their anti-democratic nature. Perhaps this has been a mistake.
The role that once was played by these bodies, of standing against the popular will, has increasingly been taken up by the courts, the press, and the academy. Yet the courts, the press, and the academy do not do nearly as good a job at it: rather than upholding precedent, they seem to be in the vanguard of overthrowing it. They emerge, after all, from the same class as did the Russian Bolsheviks or Robespierre. Perhaps, lacking the principle of inheritance, the incentive is overwhelmingly to leave their personal mark on history by initiating some great change.
I am not sure I have a solution. Perhaps it is to identify the most intelligent among us in infancy, something that could now be done by IQ testing, and educate them to aristocratic positions in a new Senate or House of Lords. Since IQ is largely hereditary, they might then still have the incentive to preserve things for their progeny.
This would more or less correspond to both the Platonic and the Confucian ideal. Of course, it would not be democratic and would not be egalitarian. But might it be better nevertheless, even for all concerned?
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
Happy St. Stephen's Day
December 25, 2020
Christmas in the Drunk Tank
Come to the Cabaret!
Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) in a recent livestream hit upon several themes I too have been stressing, here and elsewhere:
1. That the current situation in the USA looks dangerously like the Weimar Republic
2. That the source of all our current civil strife is the loss of moral values.
3. That “scientific language” (I say scientism) has encouraged this loss of values.
He also makes reference to the transcendentals, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, as the source of all values.
I’d almost think he had been reading my notes; or that I had been reading his. But the explanation is that the problem has become obvious.
The Weimar Republic was a time of the dissolution of values. Think of the “Roaring Twenties”: Germany was their world epicentre. All established mores or assumptions were suddenly open to question. The chief lure, then as now, was free sex. Josephine Baker danced naked in Berlin and was declared an “erotic goddess.”
Why was Germany the centre? The war had swept away much of the political establishment, the old aristocracy. If the political order was open to question, what else might be? The aristocracy had also been the arbiters of culture, manners, style. Germany, as the loser in the war, must have felt this effect most powerfully, with perhaps the exception of Russia. And then there is the local legacy of Nietzsche, with his notion that God is dead and we are now free to do whatever we will. Add to this a strong local dose of incipient scientism, A Prussian and German infatuation with science that Kipling decried in “The Recessional” as “heathen heart that puts her trust/In reeking tube and iron shard.”
Mix it all together, and you get—Hitler and the triumph of the will.
The USA today does not have cataclysmic war as a motivator, but our scientism and our questioning of traditional values began to grow again after the Second World War, with the “Sexual Revolution,” and has grown steadily since. It has perhaps been accelerated recently by “future shock”: the rapid advance of computer technology has tended to upset many established assumptions. Rapid “globalization” and mass immigration has added culture shock.
This, back in the Weimar Republic and now in America, segued naturally into fighting by rival factions both in the streets and in the corridors of power. Society operates on a series of gentlemen’s agreements. When all values are questioned, it is adrift and subject to the winds. There are no longer any honest brokers or umpires: you can no longer trust the experts, the government, the police or the courts to be disinterested or apolitical. Everyone is out for self-interest or their preferred “narrative,” their chosen delusion. There are no more shared values to settle disputes. The rule becomes “might makes right.”
The advantage then goes to the most ruthless, the most prepared for violence, the least principled. In Weimar Germany, that was the Nazis. In the US currently, it looks as though it is the “progressive left,” Antifa, BLM and “the Squad.” To be frank, the parallels between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hitler are striking.
Worn down by the strife, the bulk of the population will meekly allow this worst element to take power, in vain and cowardly hopes of settling things down: by allowing the strongest force to ride roughshod on any dissent.
Scientism contributes by stripping out moral values. Science has no ethical dimension: it denies morality. This has generated both Marxism and Nazism, both claiming to be strictly scientific approaches to society and government. The modern left similarly wraps itself in the mantle of “follow the science.”
The rise of Hitler to power over the moral chaos of Weimar was prompted most directly by the Great Depression. COVID and its aftermath may be a comparable economic shock, leaving a lot of discontented and unemployed young available for organization into paramilitaries and for mayhem in the streets. As we have already seen, last summer.
Last time, it took a Churchill, emerging almost at the last possible minute, to save civilization. Trump might still be such a figure; but now it looks as though he is about to be sent, as Churchill was more than once, into exile.
But Nazi Germany was a far smaller player, on the world stage, than would be a Nazi America. And Churchill was able to operate in freedom outside the reach of that Nazi government. If America falls, who can stand against her?
Not China. We already have, in effect, a Nazi China. The program of the Chinese Communist Party today is identical to that of the German Nazi Party in all but name: mass elimination of minority races, a seamless integration of government and industry, lack of human rights, corporatism, sacrifice of the individual citizen to the state, expansionism abroad.
What happens if we suddenly have a Pact of Steel between China and a USA?
Who indeed can stand against this?
Was Hitler only the opening act?
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 24, 2020
Canticle of the Turning
O Come, Divine Messiah!
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
