John C. Wright's Blog, page 148

On What We Lost — an Afterthought

Only today, a year after the event, did I come across this headline:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1337159/Glastonburys-2000-year-old-Holy-Thorn-Tree-hacked-vandals.html

I had never heard of the Thorn of Glastonbury until I came across a reference to it in a SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND  by GK Chesterton. The legend is that the staff of Joseph of Arimathea traveled to England after the crucifixion, bearing the Holy Grail, and has staff as he approached Glastonbury stuck fast and took root, becoming this tree. The Puritans hewed it down as a paganistic relict, but locals saved plantings of the tree and replanted them.

And then last year the limbs were hacked off during the night.

This the what it looked like before:

And after:

I cannot tell you how immensely disturbing and disgusting I find this hatred and contempt expressed, not in the act of vandalism itself, but in the spirit that cheers for vandals, as expressed in the comboxes below the article.

On commenter wags his head and says, "So let 'god' (or any imaginary friend of your choice) miraculously replace the tree to it's former state…"

This is hardly an original thought: "He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.  He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God.  The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth."

Other comments include a somewhat Puritan spirit casting contempt on Christians showing respect for the miraculous tree, and more than one of more modern spirit saying that, even thought the tree cannot be tied to any supernatural events (there being no such thing) it is cruel nonetheless to those who respect such things to destroy them.

To repeat the point made before: Professor Tolkien's trilogy is an enduring work, and beloved by countless fans for two generations running, precisely because it was like that tree: a hint that something greater moves in the world than merely worldly powers. He has been hacked and hewn and hated from the beginning by the modernists, to whom Joseph is a myth, the Grail a fairy tale or a pagan remnant, and a tree merely lumber.

The modern age has lost or corrupted those imponderables on which civilization rests: civility, decency, piety and pity. Orcs hew down good trees, and hoot at those who weep for them. Those imponderables rest on something even more imponderable, a sense of the sacredness of God and His creation, man, and his creation, the City from which civility and civilization takes their names, and the laws, the customs and order of tradition those civic walls, literal and spiritual, defend.

When I say that the modern age has lost its magic, I do not mean that we have lost our gullibility to mummers and sleight of hand — that remains. I do not mean we have lost our regrettable primitive superstitions — that remains, and is stronger than ever. Consult your local phone psychic, or Army Chaplin performing a Wicca ritual if you don't believe me, or talk to a glassy-eyed believer in Global Warming.

I mean we have lost the Thorn of Glastonbury.

To me the loss is more piercing, because it was a treasure I did not know was mine.

You see, my world, the world as it is, allows that this could indeed have been the very wood of the wand of Joseph of Arimathea, who walked the green hills in ancient times of England, and, by a miracle no odder than those which science teaches (is it not a miracle to create life from seawater, or man from ape?), to bring dead wood to bloom again.

In your world, the narrow make-believe world of the modern thinker, perhaps, the Thorn of Glastonbury could not grow, without being either a merely pagan idol or a piece of lumber to be cut down, or, worst of all, a tree to hug more deserving of life than a man, never to be cut down.

That hints to me that there is something wrong with your soil, or you are not getting enough light. Or you need Ents.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

On What We Lost

In some of the comments surrounding a recent article in this space, champions both of the virtues and modernity and of the vices of the pagans (called by the charming term 'values') have risen to object that there is very little in the past worth regarding: modern man having achieved the maturity and wisdom of accumulated millennia of learning, that is, scientific learning (nothing else is worth noting) that it is vain, nay, merely childishness or invincible ignorance to look with nostalgia or regret to our ancestors and the world they knew.

And at least one comment trumpeted as if with a horn of brass the victory of modern joy and happiness over the pale gray breath of the Galilean  prophet, flourishing the banner of modernity, on which in letters of purple and tittles of gold, is writ the slogan of the modern mind: we define our own values!

It is a sentiment worthy of the Pepsi Generation.

I am puzzled, and contemptuous, of those who claim it is progress to return to an intellectual world that is formless and void, as if no human race had ever existed, nor any forefathers ever learned any moral lessons in life, in order to create for oneself, by fiat like a god, a personal cosmos.

Are you going to write your own Periodic Table, O Demiurge, after you are done writing your own Ten Commandments?

My puzzlement comes from the illogical of defining moral reality according to personal sentiment or whim. Obviously, if it is reality, it is objective, something one can observe, but not something one creates.  Logically, one must possess a 'value' before one attempts to define one's own 'values' — and this original value, whatever it is, cannot be self-defined.

The unspoken guilt, of course, is that the 'value' of being someone who disobeys virtues is that it grants short-term pleasure. To trumpet such values as modern and free is like praising a drunk for being the brave standard-bearer of 'Intoxication Liberation' — as if merely calling an old vice by a shiny new name changes the degrading nature of the act, or turns the slavery we call vice into a type of liberty: freedom from being good, or wise, or just, or righteous, or fully human.

My contempt comes not from the boldness of the act, but from the result: the "new values" are all the same old vices, the dead-ends, and hopeless dreams and self-indulgent filth from which prior ages so painfully and so slowly pried themselves and their children free.

This is not the joy for which the pagans of old are recalled. They were aware of the tragic shape of the human condition, and spoke of it more pointedly and bitterly than we. The Greek warns in every play and poem against hubris, overweening ambition, deadly pride, which moderns laud as a virtue, calling it self-esteem, a value necessary for a robust capitalist system.

The pagans knew about sin. It is not a Christian invention. Christianity's novelty was that it promised a cure, a water of life that could wash the stain of sin away. The Jews had their Eve and the Greeks their Pandora, but there was no New Pandora in the Greek stories: only in Christianity is Mary the New Eve, whose child undoes Adam's fault.

Permit me to quote G.K. Chesterton, the apostle of common sense, who expresses my sentiment more clearly than could I myself:

t is said that Paganism is a religion of joy and Christianity of sorrow; it would be just as easy to prove that Paganism is pure sorrow and Christianity pure joy. Such conflicts mean nothing and lead nowhere. Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided. And the really interesting thing is this, that the pagan was (in the main) happier and happier as he approached the earth, but sadder and sadder as he approached the heavens. The gaiety of the best Paganism, as in the playfulness of Catullus or Theocritus, is, indeed, an eternal gaiety never to be forgotten by a grateful humanity. But it is all a gaiety about the facts of life, not about its origin. To the pagan the small things are as sweet as the small brooks breaking out of the mountain; but the broad things are as bitter as the sea. When the pagan looks at the very core of the cosmos he is struck cold. Behind the gods, who are merely despotic, sit the fates, who are deadly. Nay, the fates are worse than deadly; they are dead. And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened with incurable despair. It is profoundly true that the ancient world was more modern than the Christian. The common bond is in the fact that ancients and moderns have both been miserable about existence, about everything, while mediaevals were happy about that at least. I freely grant that the pagans, like the moderns, were only miserable about everything — they were quite jolly about everything else. I concede that the Christians of the Middle Ages were only at peace about everything — they were at war about everything else. But if the question turn on the primary pivot of the cosmos, then there was more cosmic contentment in the narrow and bloody streets of Florence than in the theatre of Athens or the open garden of Epicurus. Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides, but he lived in a gayer universe.

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. This is what I call being born upside down. The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss. To the modern man the heavens are actually below the earth. The explanation is simple; he is standing on his head; which is a very weak pedestal to stand on. But when he has found his feet again he knows it. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

American Prophets by Ronald L Dart

Those of you who believe that republican government can exist on Earth without the prop and lantern of Christian faith, have a faith in mankind which neither history nor reason confirms, nor any authority worthy of our ears. The non-Christian democracies of the world have long since become bureaucratic welfare-states, nanny-states, and to watch their histories unfold is to watch the activities of a slave-market, where, generation by generation and year by year selfish and anile strumpets sell their liberty in return for ease, for favors, for false promises, or for nothing at all, until they are citizens in nothing but name, subjects in all but name, or wards, or cattle.

Your faith in agnostic democracy is not supported by the voices of the only men who ever constructed, in a world otherwise entirely run by Monarchs and Aristocrats, Czars and Emperors, Sultans and Shoguns, a working federal democratic republic. Hear what the Founders had to say about the role of the Christian faith in public life.

The speech below is from Ronald L Dart, a transcription of the BORN TO WIN radio program broadcast this day.

I draw your attention particularly to the quote by Patrick Henry, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not only religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here."

Let me also draw attention to these words of Noah Webster, which bring to mind most markedly the current administration of the nation, and the tragically laughable incompetence and inexperience of our Commander in Chief:  "If the citizens neglect their duty, and they place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted. Laws will be made, not for the public good, so much as for the selfish or local purposes. Corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws. The public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men and the rights of the citizens will be violated, or disregarded. "

Such is my respect for this speech, that I risk offending the man who gave it, by reproducing it here in full without his permission: I hope he will be kind enough not to mind.

Read the original here.

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. 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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Do you recognize those words? Of course. I wish every American child had them committed to memory because they're among the most important words ever committed to writing by the pen of man. This is the opening of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

Declaration of Independence

The thinking behind this document is at the core of the most fundamental liberties of man, and while many of the men who signed this document were slave owners, these same men set in motion the wheels that would bring an end to slavery in the civilized world. They tell us it was in the main, the words of Thomas Jefferson, that the leadership of all the existing states put their signature on it, and it honestly reflected their values and their beliefs. Perhaps the most stunning idea put forward in this declaration is that men, all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. I say stunning, but that is only in the light of modern politics.

Our Founding Fathers Believed in God

To the men who signed this declaration, it was obvious, it was a self evident fact that men were created equal and were endowed with rights by their Creator. In other words, they believed in God. They considered God to be the guarantor of the liberties of man, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For these men, to speak of God as the creator, was as natural as breathing for they were all believers. One of the most interesting things about them was that they were not much inclined to sectarian religion, perhaps there had been too much suffering at the hands of the state church for them to feel comfortable in any way with an established church, or with any particular church at all, but the belief in God, now that was another matter. In the minds of the men, by far away the majority of them, who signed this declaration, the belief in God was beyond question in their minds.

John Adams

John Adams, who became the second president of the United States said this, he said, "A patriot without religion, in my estimation, is as great a paradox as an honest man without the fear of God. Is it possible that he whom no moral obligations bind, can have any real Good Will towards men?" What he is saying simply is that a belief in God, a belief in the law of God, and the fear of God lies at the root of the moral structure of men, and when they don't have that, they don't have anything to fall back on.

Adams saw something that is strangely absent today. He saw religion as the source of man's moral obligations. Our schools now, since they can only advance the ethics approved by the state and not by God, are like, in Adam's words, "An honest man without the fear of God." Is that what we really want?

I know we want a separation of church and state, but do we really want an educational system that advances only the values that the state approves? We are in grave danger in this country of having the state become a religion in its own right and since it is the state, it would be an established religion in spite of everything. The only saving grace that would be for it, it would not be called a religion or called a church.

I ask, is that what we really want? Because we are the government here or at least we are so far, I want to pull together for you some remarks of John Adams from the Constitution of the United States. These are not necessarily in the order that he gave them, but he said these things about the Constitution. He said, and I quote,

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution like a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other, and as we day by day become a less moral and religious people, our Constitution becomes increasingly inadequate to the task."

I don't think many of us remember that it is our Creator who guarantees our rights, not the government. Those rights are granted to us by our Creator, by God, not by the government. If we forget our Creator, we are a people who will find ourselves unable to govern ourselves, and only able to be governed by armed power.

Avarice, ambition, revenge, and even gallantry are cutting through our Constitution day by day as we watch.

John Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson and in the letter, he said these things,

"Have you ever found in history, one single example of a nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterward restored to virtue? Without virtue, there can be no political liberty. Would you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly."

Adams was a deeply religious man, and his words rang like a prophet. It is not surprising in a way for a man who read his Bible regularly. His son, John Quincy Adams, made a point of telling his son, "He reads the Bible every day of his life. He reads all the way through the Bible every year."

Now if you think about Adams words in the light of history, you will know he was right.

Once a nation has become thoroughly corrupted, they can no longer govern themselves and must in the natural course of events, lose their liberties, and many people see, looking around our country today, more and more of the people of this country are willing to lay down their liberties for ease, for safety, for protection from the government.

Benjamin Franklin

Another great name in our history is Ben Franklin. Speaking to the assembled Congress in 1787, Ben Franklin had this to say,

"I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured in the sacred writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our partial local interests. Our projects will be confounded. We ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword down to future ages and what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, more than conquest. I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and His blessing upon our deliberation be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to do business and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service."

Here was a man who understood the stakes that he was playing for and he recognized that the freedom of the entire world depended in the end on the freedom of the United States.

By some miracle, our Congress still continues this practice of prayer, although we do not allow it in our schools.

But Franklin was right, nothing has changed. "Without God's concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building, no better than the builders of Babel, we shall be divided by our partial local interests. Our projects will be confounded. We ourselves will become a reproach and a byword down through future ages."

He sounds like a prophet

Patrick Henry

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased by the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." Every schoolboy knows the words of Patrick Henry. He was speaking on March 23, 1775, and I wonder how many schoolboys know that he said what I'm about to read to you,

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not only religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here."

Think about what he's saying. What Patrick Henry is saying is that nobody else did this, it was Christians. It wasn't religionists, it was a people who follow the gospel of Jesus Christ who believed in the Bible. Plainly and simply they believed in the Bible and followed the teachings of Jesus. It was out of the teachings of Jesus that freedom sprang. It was because of Christian principles, and the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is because of this reason that people of other faiths can find asylum and prosperity and freedom of worship here.

"The Bible," Patrick Henry said, "is worth all the other books that have ever been printed." "Bad men," he said, "cannot make good citizens. A victiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom. It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains."

Where did Patrick Henry get his ideas? What informed his conscience? The Bible, what else.

Thomas Jefferson

Now the man who actually wrote the verbiage of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, had an interesting thing to say, sort of along the same lines. Thomas Jefferson said, "Indeed I tremble for my country, when I reflect that God is just and that His justice cannot sleep forever. To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which He wished anyone to be, sincerely attached to His doctrines in preference to all others."

Thomas Jefferson speaking, "I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by Himself to contain the outlines of the sublime system of morality that has ever been taught. But I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it, which have been invented."

Strong words, a strong rejection of a corrupted Christianity, which he saw around him in very many places, and even in his own day, he was very concerned about what a just God might do when he awoke and looked upon His nation.

"A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have ever seen", said Thomas Jefferson, "of the gospel of Jesus." He said the document has improved as a real Christian. That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.

This man, is the man who wrote, "That all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

The Bible really lays at the roots of the ethical system, the moral system, the general guidance of conscience of many of the men who founded this country.

William Penn

William Penn, who was a founder of Pennsylvania, who turns out to read like a prophet, said this, "If you would rule well, thou must rule for God, and to do that, thou must be ruled by Him. Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.".

I think William Penn and the others saw this as inevitable, that whenever a man gives up on God, when a man rejects the power and authority of God, he is left with nothing, except the power and authority of men.

As Lord Acton said, "Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The problem with men is, when they had no chains, no limitation, when they have no God, when they have no higher power to whom they owe allegiance, they owe allegiance to their own lust, their own desires, and their own wants.

George Washington

George Washington didn't say as much about religion as some of the others did, although he did say, "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible," but he said something else, something very chilling, he said and I quote,

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." You will never read a more telling commentary about government than those words of the father of our country, "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

I get the distinct feeling in the modern world that we have forgotten that. Somehow we think that the government is reason, maybe it is eloquent. No! The only thing that the government has is force, and when the people are not governed by morals, when people are not governed by God, when they are not self governed, there's nothing left for the government to use but raw force.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster is a name that is familiar to all of us, from the days of our founding fathers. Daniel Webster said, "Hold on my friends, to the Constitution and the republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6000 years may not happen again." He realized that this document that they were putting together, "The Constitution of the United States," the very founding ideas of this country were a miracle and it only happened once in 6000 years of human history, and it may never happen again. "Hold on to the Constitution.," he said, "for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world."

If the American Constitution fails, Daniel Webster said, "There will be anarchy throughout the world." What did he see? What was he looking for? He said,

"If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper. But if we in our posterity neglect its instruction and authority, no man can tell how suddenly a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity. Let us not forget the religious character of our origin, our fathers were brought here by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society and to diffuse its influence in all their institutions, civil, political, or literary. Lets cherish these sentiments and extend this influence still more widely with full conviction that it is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity. God grants liberty to only those who love it, and who are always ready to guard and defend it. The hand that destroys the Constitution rends our union asunder forever,"

thus says Daniel Webster.

Noah Webster

Noah Webster has been called the father of public education in America. And it's really interesting to go back and read this man's words, in the light of what is going on right now in public education in America.

He declared that government was responsible to discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political and religious duties. He declared that education is useless without the Bible. He said that the Bible was America's basic textbook in all fields. He said that God's word contained in the Bible has furnished all necessary rules to direct our conduct.

Further he said,

"In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children under a free government ought to be instructed. No truth is more evident to my mind, than as the Christian religion must be the basis of any government that is intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."

In 1832, Noah Webster published his history of the United States. In this history, he wrote this,

"The brief exposition of the Constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government, and it is a sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament for the Christian religion."

"The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and His apostles, which enjoins humility, piety and benevolence, which acknowledges in every person, a brother or a sister, and a citizen with equal rights. This is genuine Christianity and to this we owe our free Constitutions of government. The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all of our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition and justice, slavery and war, proceed from there despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible. When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting of public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty."

It's really striking, all these generations later, looking back on this man to see how prophetic his words are.

He continued to say this,

"If the citizens neglect their duty, and they place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted. Laws will be made, not for the public good, so much as for the selfish or local purposes. Corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws. The public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men and the rights of the citizens will be violated, or disregarded. If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws. Corruption of morals is rapid enough in any country without a bounty from government, and the chief magistrate of the United States should be the last man to accelerate its progress."

This was from Noah Webster.

American Prophets

It's staggering, isn't it, to read, what these old wise men who founded our country had to say. They were the Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Micah and Zechariah of their day. When I read their words, I can't help but recall what Thomas Jefferson said, quote, "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and His justice cannot sleep forever."

And then when you read John Adams' letter to Thomas Jefferson, where he said, "Have you ever found in history, one single example of a nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterward restored to virtue?"

There is hope, but it doesn't lie with us.

When I was a child I knew nothing of Independence Day. I only knew about the Fourth of July. It was a holiday with fireworks and hotdogs and watermelon and picnics and games. Later in life, I grew to understand what it means to be free, and what a terrible price that has been paid to gain our freedom and what a price we must still pay to keep it.

This Independence Day, spare a thought for what the day really meant to the men who made it happen. They were winners. They were born to win.

Until next time, I am Ronald Dart.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

This article was transcribed with minor editing from a Born to Win Radio Program given by

Ronald L. Dart titled: American Prophets

Ronald L. Dart is an evangelist and is heard daily and weekly on his Born to Win radio program. 

The program can be heard on over one hundred radio stations across the nation.

You can contact Ronald L. Dart at Christian Educational Ministries

P.O. Box 560 Whitehouse, Texas 75791 

Phone: (903) 509-2999 – 1-888-BIBLE-44

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Not Last Long, Even as Slaves

I was reading a guest post at Blood of the Muse called Slums of the Shire by Daniel Polansky. (Read his piece here: http://www.bloodofthemuse.com/2011/08/guest-post-slums-of-shire-by-daniel.html) He utters a thought most readers of High Fantasy, at some point, must ponder.

Perhaps it's my being a history buff, but the past sucked. For about a millennium and a half after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe just seems like a real sh*t place to reside. Lots of rooting in filth until you die at thirty, a half mile from where you born. Nominally the nobles had it better, but still, your fever would have been treated with the application of leaches and your pretty young bride had like a one in two chance of surviving child birth.

This probably is why I don't understand fantasy—that is to say that collection of high medieval tropes collected by Tolkien and gleefully reproduced by two generations of descendants.

Take elves for instance—though perfectly capable of imagining a world where higher intelligence evolved in a species separate from humanity, my powers of make believe fail when positing that the relation between said species would be anything beyond unceasing warfare.

He goes on to say

Even when nestled comfortably in a quest to kill a dragon or overthrow a dark lord or what have you, strange thoughts plague me. What does the shady side of Gondor look like? How many platinum coins would a dime bag set me back? What is the point of hobbits? They're just short, fat people. People are plenty fat as it is.

Sauron the Great himself (who rules was is literally the shady side of Gondor, a swank joint on Upper East called Minas Morgul) could not have voiced that last sentence more clearly. Hobbits are no use, and have no point. Sauron is occupied with modern ideals, industrialization and total wars of extermination: Hobbits would not last long, even as slaves.

Mr Polansky goes on to hawk his novel LOW TOWN, which he advertises as a low fantasy "film noir" sort of grim and gritty tale of murder and intrigue among spies and drug dealers.

Low Town centers on the conceit that a world with magic wouldn't be altogether different from a world without it. People are still (on the whole) selfish, stupid creatures, focused almost exclusively on the immediate satisfaction of their basic desires, only now some of them can shoot fire out of their hands.

It sounds like an interesting conceit and I wish him healthy sales and many happy fans with it. I might pick it up myself.

Some of the best SFF I ever read was precisely written by this formulae: talk the film noir tropes and put them into a speculative fiction setting.

I am thinking of DINOSAUR BEACH by Keith Laumer and NINE PRINCES IN AMBER  by Roger Zelazny, the first of which could be described as Philip Marlowe as Time Traveling gumshoe, and the second as Sam Space meets Machiavelli in Elfland.

Believe you me, I got nothing against Low Fantasy Noir.

But.

Oh, you knew there was a 'but' coming, right?

But the good Mr Polansky, if he is cracking wise with his lip about the Dark Ages, or, as historians call it, 'Late Antiquity' or, as we Catholics call it, the 'Lost, Glorious, Honorable, Ancient and Most Chivalric Golden Age of High Christendom', makes a good wisecrack, and we should laugh along with it.

But if the comment is meant to be taken seriously, we should laugh at it.

I say 'it' and not 'he' for the comment I wish to take to task, not the man. I know nothing of him but this pair of paragraphs I quote, not even so much as to know how he meant the comment to be taken. But the comment, taken at face value, if meant seriously, shows a true lack of understanding of high fantasy, a laughable ignorance, but a lack of understanding which perhaps a few words can fill up.

No one wants to die at thirty, half a mile from where he was born, unless of course he likes his home, and any patient would prefer antibiotics to leeches, I grant you. But man does not live by bread alone, or even by jet travel and space age medicine. We paid the price to enjoy the mixed blessings of the modern day, and something beyond the price we paid was lost, something precious.

To look at mankind, who so clearly yearns for some sort of communion or reunion with nature that the pagans people the woods with nymphs and satyrs, or the nursery tales or Aesop fables with talking animals, and conclude the only possible relation between man and elf is mutual genocide is a Darwinian rather than sacramental view of life: it is simply blind to what in man, weak though it may be, is not devout to totalitarian modernism and ideas of total war.

It is the world view of François de Robespierre, who guillotined the aristocracy of France like vermin, not the view of Francis of Assisi, who saluted the verminous wolf as his brother.

As an honorary Houyhnhnm, I of course applaud any author choosing to satirize the race of selfish, stupid creatures we call Yahoos. My only concern is the one not lose sight of the fact that satire is satirical, an eructation of mirthful scorn, not an objective and dispassionate report (such as we Houyhnhnms love) of the truth of the human condition. Mr Polansky was careful enough to say that humans on the whole were selfish, and focused almost exclusively on their base appetites. Ah, it is through this tiny crack he leaves to us that some sunlight streams.

What's the use of fat people?

No use, to those who forget what famine is like. And that includes those who forgot what spiritual famine we modern men who are (on average) so physically fat must suffer.

Hobbits are jolly! What other point do you need to get?

If you don't get Hobbits, let me say that the Harfoots, Stoors and Fallohides serve as clear and striking a mythical representation of what we love about heart and home and family and simple life as dragons are a mythical representation of hoarding, iron-hearted greed — or, if not dragons, then mills and factories and smogs of Mordor.

To be sure, Ye Goode Olde Days were indeed When Things Were Rotten, and the contrast between the high ideals and the low stench is worthy perhaps of the merriment of a Chaucer. But you have to appreciate what high things the heights were trying to reach before you can even see the contrast.

Perhaps more than a few words are needed, for we must discuss Noir and Fantasy both High and Low, and say what each in its proper place should be, and then we can see how the odd miscegeny of Hard Boiled Elflanders can be done.

What is the meaning of High Fantasy genre, or, as we professionals call it, Tolkien Ripoff? For that matter, what is the meaning of Low Fantasy, or, as we professionals call it, Robert E Howard Ripoff? While we are on the question, what is the meaning of the Hard Boiled Detecteive genre, also called Noir, or, as we hacks call it, Dashiell Hammet Ripoff?

You are no doubt puzzled by the Linnaean classification by which we professional writers categorize our targets, er, I mean, our genres. This is not because all true professionals merely rip off better ideas better executed by talented and classical models. No, not at all. First, we also rip off mediocre ideas from peers and inferiors. Who can be picky when you have to make a living? Second, there are original professional writers in the field! Or, if not writers, then writer. I think his name is Harlan Ellison.

Be that as it may, let us attempt an answer to our last question first: what is Noir?

Dashiell Hammett famously described the archetypal Sam Spade as a man who has seen the wretched, corrupt, tawdry side of life but somehow loyally retained his "tarnished idealism."

Had Sam Spade put the black bird in his pocket and gone off to Las Vegas with Brigid O'Shaughnessy at the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, or, in other words, had there been no ideal to provide the 'tarnished ideal' of Noir, there would have been no film .Without the monologue by Spade at the climax where he turns the dame who maybe he loves and maybe he don't over to the police merely because it is the right thing to do, the tale would have been entertaining, tawdry, disappointed, and forgotten, rather than the defining landmark of the genre. (Which genre would have been called instead Raymond Chandler Ripoff).

Speaking of Chandler, allow me to quote the opening paragraphs of THE BIG SLEEP, so that I might make a comment about Noir and Knights, medievalism and perhaps lead to a point about High Fantasy.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood Place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him.

The knight who is not trying very hard to rescue the damsel is the opening image of the work, and the central conceit not just of this novel, but Noir generally.

Noir is about knighthood: Tarnished but not vanished knighthood.

The armor does not shine much these days. But Chandler captures the mood perfectly in the final line of the paragraph: since the knights are not doing their jobs, Philip Marlowe, Chandler's paladin and cynical gumshoe, will climb the heights to lend his mettle and main as well. As, perhaps, end up climbing the walls.

But notice the immediate parallel here between Noir and High Fantasy. The tarnished knight of the grim gumshoe is not looking forward hopefully to the higher ideals which one day will shine on his darkened world: the tone is one of a man who has known and lost higher things. The tone is of a present darkness remembering a past brightness. The tone is nostalgic.

High Fantasy rests for its paramount appeal on nostalgia: the longing for a world once known, now lost. An Uzi is a more efficient killing machine than the great sword Excalibur, but the Uzi is never to be described in words like these: "The winter moon, brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth and sparkled keen with frost against the hilt: for all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth work of subtlest jewellery."

By the same token, the sewers and streets of New York are cleaner than the crooked lanes of Athens, but New York is famed neither for her acropolis nor her philosophers. And again, a Panzer tank is better armored than a cataphract of Byzantium or a Paladin of Charlemagne, and an ICBM more dangerous than any dragon.

But.

Oh, you knew there was a 'but' coming, right?

But we all know, or should all know, that modern society for all its hard and metallic glories and all its cold and soaring skyscrapers, and for the miracles of moonshots and penicillin shots, and the blessings of good plumbing and the opium of twenty-four-hour television, has lost something.

Anyone who does not sense or suspect that modernity is missing something, something important, has no heart and no taste for High Fantasy.

The difference between a culture that respected and reveres the virginity of the maiden fair and the bravery of the warrior prince, and the cult that reveres the bravery of the transgendered community and protects the crooked penis of a presidential adulterer with comically ferocious self-righteousness, is not merely a difference between an ape and a man, a savage and a savant. I mean that it is not an evolution to a better state to despise virgins and destroy marriage and then demand the military accept Marinesses to serve alongside Marines: and while the wealth and happiness which issues from the dark Satanic mills pours forth the blessings of a cornucopia into the comfortable fatness of our overweight era, it is not a mixed blessing. The Middle Ages may have been evil and cruel and dirty in many things, but they were never held Mutually Assured Destruction by thermonuclear annihilation to be a work of wise political policy.

Don't get me wrong: modern medicine saved my life, and the modern world provides me with luxuries that Caligula and Nero could not have enjoyed, nor the robust Empress Messilina. The modern world also provides me with dangers and temptations beyond those that lured Dr Faustus into the inferno.

Despite the extravagant claims of some scholars in the speculative fiction world, who wish to include Ariosto or Dante or Homer in our ilk, modern fantasy in the sense we mean the word started with William Morris, and it was part and parcel of the Pre-Raphaelite medievalism and romanticized longing for the world lost when Merry England became Modern England, unmerry and industrialized. It was a genre despised by the worldly-wise, who rushed to heap adoration on realism.

The only tales ever told in the history of the world without any element of magical or the supernatural were those told in the modern age. It is for this reason that the extravagant claims of those who call Dante an SFF writer are worth pondering: because there is a common thread linking speculative fiction with romances and epics and fairy tales of old. That thread is an acknowledgement that the world is wider and wilder and weirder than we suspect, and that there are fields beyond the fields we know where elves might dance in moonlight or demons rage in flame or angels clothed in brightness soar at their lord's command on errantry to deeds immense of which we mortal men hear no slightest fame.

The thread of course is broken. The epic tales or fairy tales of old were told to men who, even if they did not necessarily believe in fairies, believed they lived in a world where such things might exist, or dragons beyond the white space at the edge of the map.  The modern fantasies are told to men who, even if they wished so dangerous a menace as a dragon might exist, believe we live in a world where no such thing can exist: all our maps of Earth are quite filled in.

As to what is the appeal of High Fantasy, that is a mystery I am reluctant to state, since, once stated baldly, it will lose some of its subtle and subversive appeal, or, rather, superversive. By subversive I mean that the current world in which we live, the current age of darkness, rests on certain assumptions which High Fantasy undermines: the assumption that might makes right, the assumption that man is the master of his own fate, the assumption that the universe is a machine and everything in it (including man) is merely a raw material to be exploited in the restless search for pelf and pleasure. It is the kind of warped assumptions from which we moderns draw conclusion that label perversions as brave while labeling virgins as contemptible.

The appeal of High Fantasy is that it is Catholic: its mood and atmosphere and tropes hearken back to the High Middle Ages, when Europe was Christendom, and kings were not the heads of churches.

Now, to be sure, to any reader not quite carried away by the Romance of medievalism, or whom the air and atmosphere of Catholicism makes him wretch like Gollum tasting an elfin wafer of bread from the Golden Wood, will not be carried away by the appeal of High Fantasy, the epics of Tolkien and Mallory and Morris and their epigones.

But he might still like Low Fantasy, the sword and sorcery of Howard and his imitators.

I do not regard "Low" Fantasy as a low term or an insult, because I like the tastes of the common man. Low Fantasy is based on an air and atmosphere which once again, I hesitate to mention, or whose secrets to reveal, for fear that it will lose its subversive or subversive power over the unwary.

At the risk of offending my Protestant friends, Low Fantasy is Protestant and Germanic in much the same way that High Fantasy is Catholic and Gallic. Consider the philosophy and attitude, either spoken or implied, in the exploits of Conan the Barbarian. The assumptions of the modern world are cowardly and dishonorable assumptions, and Low Fantasy undermines them by showing the reader a glimpse of a world where the strength of a man's arm decided the triumph or downfall of cities, and the honor of his word and the courage of his heart decided the strength of that arm.

After the Reformation, it was all the rage among English intellectuals and apologists for the New English way of life to demean and despise the old England. Protestant England did whatever it could to divorce itself from the reality of Catholic England, and this required an entirely new version of history, or, to use the technical term, a whopping pack of lies, to replace the memory of the land. So instead of England being part of the Roman World, and instead of the land who received Brutus as founder or whose green hills welcomed the Grail bourn by Joseph of Arimathea, or whose cities sent Constantine to the Throne, the revised version of history make England a colony of a mythical race called Teutons, and all the Roman customs and Catholic attitudes and institutions, such as the free elections by which abbots and mayors of burgh were elevated, were attributed to German savages and pirate chiefs. Anyone reading these words, which are in English, no doubt has heard and absorbed the English version of history without being aware that there is any other. German scholars and Protestants performed a similar amputation of historical facts and made a similar effort to Romanticize the only elements of Late Antiquity with whom modern civilization had no trace and from which it takes no inspiration: the filth and barbarism of slave-holding savages beyond the rim of the ecumenical Empire. The romantic view of barbarism attributed to them powers they posses, such as the ability to overthrow civilizations. The Empire collapsed from internal rot, and the barbarians were invited in, and became Romans, and were baptized as Christians.

But we need not trouble ourselves with debates between visions and revisions of history now: all this to one side, even if the English view of history were admitted as accurate, it must be admitted also that it portrays barbaric life as the source of a healthy liberty and manly fortitude seen to be lacking, or feared to be lacking, in modern life: modern philosophers from Hegel onward often criticize civilization as weakening the nerves of discipline and emasculating the raw splendor of the Noble Savage.

A love of the savage darkness of barbarism, like a love of civilization of the Dark Ages, is subversive of the smoggy darkness of an industrialized, unromantic, and spiritually dead modernity. The appeal of Low Fantasy is that sometimes a young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of splitting the shrieking skulls of brutes and crooked warlocks with an ax, while his vision turns red with invincible rage, and his ax-arm up to his armpit red with blood.

If you scoff that I call Low Fantasy 'blue-collar' I ask you where, were he transported to the modern day, we would be more likely to find Conan brooding over his drink: a restaurant serving fine wine from France, or a Honky-Tonk serving beer? Where would Conan have more amplitude to act like Conan, in the skyscrapers of Manhattan, or in the hills of West Virginia, where (as we all know from the true histories of Silver John by Manly Wade Wellman) warlocks still in darkness lurk?

Armed with these answers, let us turn to our final question: how can Noir and Fantasy be wed? What will their child look like, or should look like?

I submit you cannot have the one without the other, the high without the low. So if you are attempting a Noir style Fantasy, you must retain at least of hint of the high ideals now lost.

Absent the soaring ideals that illume the dawn-blazing golden minarets of some tower of an elfin sorcerer-king, you cannot with any conviction describe the filth and litter of the footpads rolling a drunk in the open sewer gutter so far down below, breaking that same king's peace. If that high gold is not there, all you have is something like MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. A perfectly entertaining movie (and I can quote as much of it from memory than I can quote of PRINCESS BRIDE, which is considerable, so don't accuse me of snobbery)  but it is just satire. No deeper emotion than mirth mingled with wonder at the low folly of sad mankind is possible in satire, a kind of Jovial, aloof and fond contempt.

Much as I like NINE PRINCES IN AMBER, there is more than a little contrivance and conceit in the idea of plopping modern cynicism down into an age of crusades, holy endeavors, feats of arms and high attempts,  or thrusting such a deliberately incongruous element into the high and misty twilight wards and haunted mountains surrounded elfland, into which realm no mortal passes unchanged, and even poets, mayhap returning sane from those far lands sublime, weep for what they cannot catch in words.

The incongruity is the appeal of Fantasy Noir.

Incongruity comes from placing two disparate elements next to each other, such as a hard-boiled cynic like Carl Corey (not his real name) waking up in a crooked sanitarium and tossing him into a Ren Faire Fairyland where mad mages create worlds by inscribing the mystic patterns glimpsed burning in the core of magic gems with lighting and blood into the primal chaos, or treasonous brothers, surpassing all mortals with the blade, fight their way one step at a time up the narrow switchbacking stair that guards the sacred mountain where the eternal city of gold and emerald gleams.

The writer, and the reader, must both believe in, if not love, both elements: or otherwise the tale just turns into satire, something akin to Duffy Duck joining the Green Lantern Corps. In other words, if it is not to be a satire, the fantasy element in the Noir Fantasy must be taken seriously: the City of Amber at the center of all worlds must be fair and beautiful beyond all cities of men, even if the treasonous and fratricidal princes, assassins, warlocks and schemers who inhabit it are dishonorable, conniving and, yes, even low above all men. Everything can be sullied and dirty and falling apart: but some shining dream, even if only a fugitive as a glimpse of an uncaught or sacred white unicorn, must be pure.

In closing, it occurs to me that there may be some readers who are unaware that the subgenre of Noir Fantasy has been around since at least 1970. It is hardly a new idea. To drive home my point, allow me to quote a few lines from FAREWELL MY LOVELY mingled with lines from  NINE PRINCES IN AMBER, and I leave it as an exercise to the reader to see how well the voices match.

A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night. I dived into it. It had no bottom.

It was starting to end, after what seemed most of eternity to me.

I attempted to wriggle my toes, succeeded. I was sprawled there in a hospital bed and my legs were done up in plaster casts, but they were still mine.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them three times.

The room grew steady.

Where the hell was I?

The room was full of smoke.

The smoke hung straight up in the air, in thin lines, straight up and down like a curtain of small clear beads. Two windows seemed to be open in an end wall, but the smoke didn't move. I had never seen the room before. There were bars across the windows.

I yelled: "Fire!" That made me laugh. I didn't know what was funny about it but I began to laugh. I lay there on the bed and laughed. I didn't like the sound of the laugh. It was the laugh of a nut.

The one yell was enough. Steps thumped rapidly outside the room and a key was jammed into a lock and the door swung open. A man jumped in sideways and shut the door after him. His right hand reached toward his hip.

"It's time for your shot."

"Are you an M.D.?" I asked.

"No, but I'm authorized to give you a shot"

"And I refuse it'" I said, "As I've a legal right to do. What's it to you?"

"You'll have your shot," he said, and he moved around to the left side of the bed. He had a hypo in one hand which bad been out of sight till then.

It was a very foul blow, about four inches below the belt buckle, I'd say, and it left him on his knees.

"____ ____!" he said, after a time.

I threw the bedclothes over his head and clobbered him with the metal strut I'd removed from the head of the bed.

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Occupy Yourself

My good friend Mark Shea is convinced that the Occupy Wall Street mob represents an honest protests against the excesses and dishonesty of bankers and capitalists, and that the bad publicity they have been receiving in the media is due to an ideological slant trying to make them look bad.

He points out how badly the Tea Party protesters were and are portrayed, and cautions his readers not to take the media presentation as unbiased.

Since I used to work in the newspaper field, both as writer and editor, for two newspapers that were both bankrupt (I suppose hiring me acts as the reverse of the curse of Midas) I am not hasty to dismiss Mr Shea's complaint of news bias.

I am, however, willing to aid that bias in this case, whether it is a bias or not.

Take a look:

http://www.lookingattheleft.com/2011/11/zuccotti-utopia-portraits-of-revolutionaries/

I had to sit and listen to Lefty dunderheads call my best friend Mark "The Man" Whipple and my martial arts guru Cory "Divine Wind of Ninth Heaven" Comstock get called racists, not to mention myself, on the grounds that we supported the Tea Party protests against excessive government spending and the demand to return to Constitutional limitations on the Federal power. Mark is black, and was adopted by white parents; Corey married a fine young Japanese lady who can break boards with her head; and I have one or two Chinese daughters and/or Goddaughters living in my house, so if we are racists, then our leader, Herr Hitler, is spinning in his grave.

Now, to me, the Occupy Wall Street people look very different from the Tea Party people.

Occupy Wall Street:

In case you don't recognize him, Guy Fawkes is a Catholic mutineer attempting to blow up the English monarch with gunpowder and restore England to religious conformity with Europe. This is his reincarnation from a funnybook by Alan "Kiddie Porn" Moore as a fighter against the malefic tyranny of Thatcherite England — a less likely emblem for Anarchy cannot be imagined.

Tea Party:

Now, to be sure, one might object that Jack Kirby's super patriot was not Rightwing. He has always been more like an FDR Nazi-fighter figure. To which I answer, yes, but that was back in the days when the Democrat Party represented someone other than the very bankers and corporations and billionaires, so roundly reviled by the current administration, who are cronies, conspirators and catamites of the current administration.  Cap would not applaud the take-over of GM by DC, or the shenanigans between Freddie and Fanny and Goldman-Sacks: the relationship between the Glorious Leader and the state-run syndicates was precisely the definition of the fascism Steve Rogers was fighting.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Underrating Gene Wolfe

The previous post was written as a reply to a wisecrack I overheard as a Sci-Fi convention, so, for reasons of completeness, let me mention those events and thought which provoked my meditation on HOME FIRES and 'Fifth Head.'

I was serving on a panel where the topic of discussion was whether God and other divine topic can fit into a naturalistic genre like Science Fiction. As when any science fiction fans gather in amity, the panel was a diverse smattering of opinion on the topic, and including catholic and heretic, pagan and Gnostic and postmodernist, and at least one proselytizing atheist.

The question itself did not provide much amusement, I fear. All and sundry knew too well that there are as many stories touching on Heaven in Outer Space as on Earth, and it would take very shallow view of religion to decree the topic out of bounds of a genre including STARMAKER by Stapledon, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH by Lewis, DUNE by Herbert, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Heinlein, or CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Miller, LORD OF LIGHT by Zelazny or even GODS OF MARS by Burroughs, and all viewpoints Catholic and heretic, pagan and Gnostic and atheist.

My opinion of the question is not hard to guess: I hold that speculative fiction is a natural vehicle for stories concerning the things that most concern mankind, genesis and escahton, hope and despair, salvation, transcendence, incarnation and reincarnation, the role of man lost in the lonely universe.  One hardly can address deep themes when fettered by the artifice of mainstream lit, which has to pretend the modern worldview is the only view.

The atheist on the panel amused himself and bored the audience (or at least one member thereof) with his blasphemies, pretending to shock the subjects of Queen Victoria who happened not to be in the room. He waxed poetical on his all-consuming hatred of CS Lewis, I assume because Lewis does not bow down the idol the atheist fears and adores, which is called pain. The atheist was bitterly offended that Lewis did not lose his faith while suffering the pain and agony of the loss of Joy his wife, because he considers it dishonest to seek comfort in present pain from the balm of faith in the promises of Christ.  I sympathized with his opinion, having once held somewhat similar myself, and I said worse when I was an atheist— so none of the blasphemies against God shocked me.

I was shocked, however, when he blasphemed Gene Wolfe. He contradicted my statement praising that author as being the finest who wields living pen, both among sciencefictioneers and muggles alike, for he dismissing Mr. Wolfe as overrated.

It is a dangerous business for any author publicly to criticize another, lest his own work come under scrutiny and the contrast be seen. This is why I am always slightly embarrassed or moved to pity, for example, when Michael Moorcock, who writes entertaining and lightweight hack potboilers (but potboilers I rather like) waxes indignant over Professor Tolkien, who like a resplendent demiurge creates a world of enduring beauty and sorrow, sublime almost beyond words, a triumph to last the ages; or when Philip Pullman writes one third of what should have been an exquisite trilogy, then wanders into the wasteland of preaching, stumbled from his path, his plot and his point, and perishes amid the sun-bleached ox skulls of storylessness, but has the effrontery to dismiss the brilliant and well-cobbled tales of CS Lewis as hateful.

Since I myself am a writer not equal either to Mr Moorcock or (when he sticks to his calling of story-telling) Mr Pullman, let me hasten to add I am aware that I invite the pity of others by criticizing giants rightly famed in the field, nor am I unamused by the irony of criticizing critics for being critical. As Walt Whitman says, 'Do I contradict myself? I am vast; I contain multitudes.' In my case: vastly pompous, and multitudes of self contradictions.'

Be that as it may, I cannot remain silent when the glory of Gene Wolfe is besmirched! Anyone whom both Neal Gaiman and I both like must be doing something right.

Honestly, is there a writer alive today to address such deep themes as Mr Wolfe, concocts such eerily realistic and well constructed worlds, who has characters so vivid and well drawn, plots so tightly woven and deftly twisted with paradox and cunning reverses, so many layers of meaning, who is such a master of auctorial voice?

Wolfe can fill an entire page of dialog, and not once pause to mention the name of any speaker, but because their methods of expressing themselves are so clear, each voice unique, he need not. Can any other author accomplish this, not in one book, but in all of them? Compare the erudite overcomplexity of expression of Severian the Torturer, who comes from the Fin de Siècle of all ages, with the teenage simplicity and directness of Sir Able of the High Heart.

To pick one trifle out of the treasure house, is anyone else amused that the fencing master in the city of Viron, where all men are named for living things, is called Xiphias? Xiphias is the archaic name for swordfish.  What other fish does one name a fencing master after?

Or does anyone note the self-referential subtlety of this quote: "The great question then, that I pondered […] is that of determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last."

Nearly every tale by Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein, or Jack Vance contained one theme that was pounded into my head as a child, and only with great effort of intellectual asceticism have I been able to work the spike free and examine it: that is the idea that men are plastic, and are molded entirely by society.

It is, of course, a natural conceit for a science fiction story: the same way whodunits concern murders, SF concerns the changes technology make on the human condition. Those elements of the human condition that cannot change, that do not change, are less apt materials from which to spin out new worlds.

But some of the false air of sophistry, the lightness of a man who tells a joke, or who argues a position not because he believes it, but because he is skilled at debate, hangs over this conceit.

Does anyone really believe that, as in an Asimov story, a world would go insane at nightfall if it had never seen the stars for generations? or that world with inexpensive teleportation would forget every man jack of them how to walk out of doors? or that the world with inexpensive robots would become neurotically adverse to human contact, or that every man jack living in crowded cities underground would be agoraphobic?

Does anyone really think the members of the Church of All World concocted by Michael Valentine Smith could have wife-swapping orgies without jealousy among the Water Brothers? You would have to be a man born on Mars to know that little about human nature.

Compared to such shallow thought-experiments with conveniently cardboard humanoids, the phantasmagorical worlds of Jack Vance seem like the sober report of an anthropologist.

The infinite malleability of man is however a theme much of the science fiction I read in youth addressed. It is an interesting theme, as profound as one might encounter in a typical sophomore bull session in college, and certainly one schoolchildren should encounter in their reading. But it is not a deep theme.

If Gene Wolfe were a typical science fiction author of typical skill, he would perhaps address themes no more profound than this.

He is not typical. He is not shallow. He is, however, subtle, and I think he means to lure the unwary sophomore reader into contemplating themes which serve to subvert, or, rather, to supervert, the dominant paradigm of this our present age of darkness in which we live.  I hesitate to discuss them lest that unwary reader be warned and shy away: by my own obscurity acts as a shield.

I myself can only imagine two reasons for dismissing the work of Gene Wolfe:

(1) ideological. Persons who engage in the nameless mental activity, like thought but the opposite of thinking, known as politically correctness are famed for their willingness to sabotage their taste in art on the altar of political messages. Mr Wolfe makes no profession of Politically Correct opinions — indeed, he does not use his story telling as a platform for preaching any 'messages' at all, preferring perhaps to use Western Union for that chore — and so the Brahmans and keepers of the Sacred Faith of the deeply thoughtful haters of thought might indeed sneer at him for that reason.

(2) Opaqueness. Mr Wolfe famously cuts the reader absolutely no slack and makes no allowances. He never explains himself, and I suspect he will go to his grave with his secrets. There are perfectly cromulent readers who balk at this most unforgiving of writers, and who cannot be entertained when they do not know what the heck if going on. In Mr Wolfe's more experimental novels, I feel the same way and cannot work my way through them. I need an interpreter, and no man who can interpret the novels to me, will do so, lest he spoil the jest. Any reader who feels likewise with conclude that Mr Wolfe is making a basic mistake in the art of writing, and trying to be needlessly opaque.

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Home Fires by Gene Wolfe: those who dwell in Hell also keep them burning

This is not a book review but a comment on a certain artistic tool or trick or conceit I have notices in a writer I greatly admire.

I have been reading HOME FIRES by Gene Wolfe and was fascinated to discover a theme, or, rather, an artistic conceit of great subtlety and power which the author there uses. It is one which I hesitate to tell those who have not noticed it, for fear of spoiling the effect; but it is also one which I suspect every Wolfe reader but myself has noticed long since.

Many have noted and commented upon the conceit of the 'unreliable narrator' which Wolfe uses so well and which so many authors use so poorly. This is the conceit where the narrator does not tell the whole truth, and it is up to the reader to notice the narrator's blind spots, errors, and discontinuities so as to recognize the narrator's particular neurosis or bias or coign of vantage. It is, to say the least, a very difficult artistic trick to pull off, requiring the meticulous attention to detail we expect of detective story writers, and requiring a readership to do the detective work without the narrator's (other than inadvertent) aid.  The author has to draw the reader's awareness to the negative spaces of what the narrator does not day, unspoken assumptions of which the narrator is unaware.

An example from Wolfe might be Horn's dwelling upon the murderous malice of his son in the book ON BLUE'S WATERS: it takes the reader a while to realize that nothing the son says or does justifies Horn's attitude.

Science fiction, moreso than any genre wearing the horse-blinders of modern realism, can explore the conceit of the unreliable narrator simply because science fiction stories are allowed to put up for question and exploration axiomatic assumptions about the plot and setting which mainstream literature cannot. A man in a mainstream story might not be who he thinks he is because of amnesia or brainwashing: a man in a science fiction story might not be who he thinks he is because his brain information has been transferred into another body.  Hence, in a science fiction story, the unreliable narrator might actually think he is, for example, a man seeking the promised messiah without realizing that benevolent aliens transferred his dying soul into that messiah's body, so that he himself is who he seeks in vain: and the reader must deduce that the first-person narrator in book three is not the same person as the first-person narrator in book one, even if he thinks he is.

But the conceit of the unreliable narrator is not the conceit I noticed when reading HOME FIRES. I noticed something else even more unreliable, even more subtle, and, under Gene Wolfe's masterful pen, even more striking and perilous.

I first notice this conceit with Gene Wolfe's first famous and perhaps most famous short story, 'Fifth Head of Cerberus.'

As in HOME FIRES, Wolfe focuses the reader's attention on the central mystery of the identity of the unreliable narrator Number Five, and leaves the reader to piece together the clues to discover such things as the narrator's name, and his relationship with the man he thinks is his father, or the machine he thinks is his tutor. The society there has a high degree of genetic technology, and we discover the father runs a bordello, and that the father and the narrator are twins, or, rather, clones of a line of clones reaching back five generations to the machine-remnant of the original man's memories. But for reasons he cannot fathom (although, perhaps, the reader can) he destroys himself in the person of his father and recreates himself in the person of his own son and murderer, committing an endless cycle of intergenerational suicide. And he cannot discover why he makes no progress, conquers nothing, achieves nothing.

But the true horror of the society in which Number Five lives and moves and has his being is never emphasized, indeed, almost not mentioned. For example, there is a hint that the women of the bordello are genetically tampered with to satisfied the sexual tastes of the house's clients. It is mentioned in passing that parents sell their daughters. It is almost not mentioned that the four-armed freak whom Number Five strangles to death is his twin brother, merely one sold like an animal and chained as a guard dog, created by the genetic science of the father.

The spiritual and physical slavery and the brutal inhumanity of the city in which he lives is as invisible to Number Five as water is to a fish in a fishbowl: so deftly does the author paint the colors of a society that has lost its soul to dehumanizing transhumanism that the unwary reader (such as the child I was when I first read this tale) will not even see it.

HOME FIRES concerns a wealthy man whose contractual beloved, a soldiergirl, returns from a tour of military duty among the stars. Relativistic time dilation has kept her young while he has aged. Seeking a gift worthy of her homecoming, he purchases the girl's mother, and has this mother's memory and personality downloaded into the body of a younger woman (whom he has also purchased) to greet the daughter for a merry family reunion. And he books passage aboard an expensive pleasure cruise clippership. Complications arise as the soldiergirl turns out to be a download occupying yet another young woman's body, whose memories are perhaps not entirely suppressed. The cruise ship is attacked by pirates; murderers seek the mother's life; other mysteries abound. The society described is so remarkably corrupt, that the lawyers must debate or threaten or bribe the coast guard to rescue the ship from pirates, which the coast guard is reluctant to do for fear of lawsuit from the pirates.

As is the norm for this day and age, the wealthy man has love affairs more or less permanent with his secretary, with the purchased mother-download, and every other woman in his life, and meanwhile the soldiergirl copulates with various men in her military unit or aboard the cruise ship, and every other man in his life — and all the while the two lovers, the wealthy man and the soldiergirl, profess their undying contractual love for each other. At one point, the mother mentions an ancient ritualized form of love-contract called 'marriage.'

Neither the author nor the narrator ever draws attention to the background of the society's attitude toward love and marriage, towards the assumptions made by call the characters and never questioned by them. Indeed, between the murder mystery and the pirate attack and the confusion of memories of various downloaded individuals, so much sound and fury is taking place in the foreground, that this background detail and theme is likely to be overlooked.

The author never says a word, but the society described is one where every single human relationship has become mingled with a sexual relationship. No woman is hired as a secretary without expecting to copulate with her boss, nor a cruise director with her clients, nor a military officer with her men.

The author never says a word, but each character talks as if the social myth, the shared societal assumption, is that all such relationships are voluntary and produce no other bond or responsibility or relationship. A man is expected to couple with both the mother and the daughter, without either expressing the least surprise or jealousy.

The author never says a word, but each character acts according to the normal human logic of jealousy and possession. It is painful to watch the characters torture themselves trying to live down to a standard of orgiastic indifference to each to each other, to act as if sex means nothing, when, by their actions and reactions, it is perfectly clear love means everything.

One cannot share one's body without sharing one's soul. To drive this point painfully home, the author places the narrative in the middle of a world where the technology for transferring souls from body to body exists. As with the sex act, one person intimately enters into another, and, once intermingled, they cannot be sundered without amputation: even thought the social myth treats these chimeras of wrong souls inside the wrong body as if they are merely the person they pretend to be.

In 'Fifth Head of Cerberus' Gene Wolfe deftly portrays a society that has fallen symbolically into Hell, having entered the house guarded by that wolf, where treating one's own sons and daughters as commodities and as the raw material for genetic experiments has produced an eerie stillness. The character play out the same pointless tragedy one generation to the next, because they are as frozen  by their loss of their human  nature as the souls depicting in the ninth and final Circle of Dante's Inferno, buried to the neck in ice but still gnawing on each other.

Likewise here in HOME FIRES, the characters are adrift in their lives as in their rudderless clippership, having lost their souls, floating as helplessly as those tormented by the stormwinds of anchorless lust of the first Circle of Dante.

Since I live in a society where marriage exists in name only, where divorce is commonplace and abortion considered a civic right rather than an abomination of Moloch, it is almost impossible for me to see the waters in which the characters in HOME FIRES drift.

They live in all the books Robert Heinlein described in his later period, when he stopped writing juveniles and started writing seniles. They live according to the philosophy of Playboy magazine. Their social code forces them to each and all pretend that they are not jealous when betrayed, do not seek permanence in matters of love, that they are atomized and isolated individuals who can copulate with each other without sharing anything with each other: sex at arm's length.

We ourselves in modern America have already drifted too close to the world of HOME FIRES to see the true horror and the true emptiness of a world where all love is sexual, all sex is profane and selfish, and the sacrament of marriage desecrated so entirely that it is forgotten.

As with all Gene Wolfe books and short stories, there is of course a lot more going on in 'Fifth Head of Cerberus' and HOME FIRES than I have mentioned here. Both are worth reading. For the science fiction fan, however, 'Fifth Head of Cerberus' is essential reading. Had Gene Wolfe just written it and nothing else, the short story would be as justly famous as 'Flowers for Algernon' or 'The Cold Equations.'

 

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Guest Editorial by Jim Frenkel of Tor Books: You Must Read to Write

My beautiful and talented wife is asked every would be writer who wants to hear the scoop, straight from the horse's mouth as it were, to drop by her website and leave a kind comment.

Today, we have a real treat at Wright's Writing Corner…a post from my editor, James Frenkel of Tor Books.

Please come by and see what a real editor has to say about how to become the writer of your dreams!

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/215486.html

Excerpt:

Reading and Writing

When I first started editing books I had already been an avid reader for more than fifteen years. Throughout my youth, I read everything I could get my hands on. i'm not sure why I was such a voractious reader. I never s aw my parents reading anything except the newspaper, or maye Newsweek Magazine. But for as long as I can remember, I have loved to read.

Fiction, non-fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, biography, history, sports, contemporary realistic fiction, romantic fiction, thrillers, true crime . . . I can recall books from as long ago as when I was eight or nine, that I borrowed from the library-a biography of Kit Carson; a Landmark book about the Panama Canal; Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein, The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, the Hardy Boys mystery The House on the Hill by Franklin W. Dixon . . . I could go on and on.

Don't ask me how I remember titles. My wife tells me I have a ridiculous memory for trivia, and she's probably right. My own theory is that I remember particular titles that caught my fancy when I was very young and impressionable. Of course, I also remember a number of books I've read in the intervening years, decades. And remembering some of the best books I've read gives me great pleasure.

Yes, I am an incurable literature junkie.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Political Correctness is the Substance of Darkness PART II

Continued from Part I here.

In our last episode, we discovered that  PC is (1) unreal (2) stupid (3) illogical (4) hypocritical (5) delusional (6) vehement (and sometimes violent).

Let us examine each point in more detail.

(1) Deny reality. The writer here does not merely deny that Political Correctness exists, he says the word is a deliberately undefined buzz-word used by racist misogynists wife-beating drunks. He certainly does not admit that he himself is loyal to Political Correctness and zealous in its cause.

My first dizzying glimpse of the true and appalling lack of honesty into the empty souls of the PC crowd came when I was at a science fiction convention, listening to a panel on the topic of Political Correctness, and one otherwise sane-looking individual stood up, and pronounced in tones of smug and utter certainty that BOTH Right and Left were equally guilty of political correctness, and therefore morally equivalent, therefore the Right could not criticize the Left for being Politically Correct under the principle of equality we lawyers call estoppel. She acted as if she did not think anyone would contradict her.

The cold-blooded sangfroid of the psychopathic lie uttered by the sane-looking individual gave me chills then and still does. I do not know what is more disorienting and appalling: that she believed it, in which case she is insane beyond measure, or that she did not, in which case she is dishonest beyond measure.

(2) Stupid. The words selected by PC-niks are aggressively false-to-facts, the more false the better. The overall effect of adopting their Newspeak terminology is, as Orwell correctly autopsied back in 1948, is to prevent the speaker from speaking sense about reality. PC makes you stupid.

Let us not mince words. While there are some Politically Correct thinkers who have the gift of the gab, or have achieved either modest, or, in rare cases, success in some unrelated field, by and large when it comes to matters of economics, politics, ethics, philosophy, religion, history, or any discipline of thought or learning requiring rigor of thought, clarity of insight, or knowledge of reality, the Political Correctness thugs are grossly unintellectual if not anti-intellectual.

The cannot express themselves in their incoherent lingo because their lingo exists for the purpose of being foggy, paradoxical, vague, and emotionally provocative.

Political Correctness is stupid. It is knowingly, deliberately, in-your-facingly, butt-achingly, vomitously, venomously, blatantly stupid.

To be PC, you have to say things like, "She is the first African-American of any country to win a medal at the winter Olympics."  You cannot tell from the sentence if she is the first black from America or the first black in the world to achieve the goal. And, considering that it is only her race which makes the victory history, the PC is left in the stupid position of referring to race as if race is all that matters, while, at the same time, pretending race does not matter, and, indeed, race does not exist at all, but is merely an arbitrary social  construct.

To be PC, you have to refer to people as having a "gender" rather than words in a declined language, meanwhile pretending that sex does not exist but as an arbitrary social construct.

To be PC, you have to refer to the first year of the First Century as being "1 C.E." the Common Era, but you have to pretend that there is no particular reason what makes it common to anything nor can you say to whom it is common nor why, nor can you adumbrate what event took place then from which are dated all the calendars of Christendom (whoops! BLANK OUT! There is no such thing).

To be PC, you also have to pretend someone, Jews or atheists or someone, both have a right to use the Julian calendar, and a right to be offended by the initials A.D. so that to insist on the factually correct terminology is tantamount to trampling the First Amendment, or committing a social gaffe or solecism. It is, of course, nothing of the kind, and if it were the PC crowd would not care, since they admire neither civil rights nor civility: but the process seeks to use your own sense of fairplay to destroy your sense of honesty.

The celebration of the event form which the calendar is dated, which (how convenient for you!) you still get off work, is referred to as the 'Holiday' because Christmas has also carefully been airbrushed out of the official pictures by the hardworking counterfeiters at the Ministry of Truth.

To be P.C., you have to consider it a serious question whether sodomites should marry, or whether teenage girls should compete with lusty teenage boys in school wrestling, or whether perverts performing bestiality should wear a state-supplied condom to prevent the spread of penis-rotting diseases, or whether a waiter's lawsuit to get employment as a Hooter's Girl is a valid EEOC complaint.

To be P.C., you have to take completely seriously the complaints, no matter how stupid, which complain that ordinary language, ordinary thoughts, human institutions, age-tested traditions, are deeply offensive to whoever and whatever claims to be offended. Since no one actually believes that the offense is legitimate, the PC must make up for the innate incredibleness of the complaint by uttering the complaint in a shrill, scenery-chewing  spew of swearwords and insults and threats, preferably anonymously, preferably in a mob.

To be P.C., you have to say that all that is needed for disparate groups to get along is to have more state-forced diversity, as Jewess lesbians mingling with Jihadist Muslims.

Then say you can borrow your way out of debt.

Then say disarmament produces peace.

Then say policework causes crime, or is worse than crime.

Then say dropping the a-bomb of Hiroshima was racism.

Then say the US Constitution was based, not on English ideas of legal theory, but on Iroquois tribal federation arrangements, which the White Man copied from the Red Man. (Except you have to call him a 'Native American' even though that word means ANYONE born in America, and you have to call naming a sports team after a tribe of them a racist slur akin to Nazi Jew-Hatred.)

To be P.C., you have to say Islam is a race, and not a religion, and that opposition to Jihadist terrorism is racism.

The essence of PC is to define all opposition as a psychopathology: Islamophobia. Likewise a concern, either moral or medical, for the damage done to self, partner, family, or society by normalizing deviant sexual behavior is a psychopathology. It is defined as insanity: homophobia.

Likewise, there is no legitimate argument or valid reason to withhold consent from the more extreme claims of eco-alarmists preaching the End of the World. This is likened to Holocaust Denial. To believe that Global Warming is not settled science is defined as insanity: Climate Deniers.

The sheer improbability that all human beings whatsoever from all history and all nations except for that small circle of like-minded conformists to which one belongs, that same small circle which recites whatever the slogans and pieties of this season's fashionable causes happen to be are, one and all, insane, is an idea so stupid that no one can believe it. The idea that there is no honorable opposition, no point on which reasonable men can disagree, and that fashion controls that agenda, is — I speak with regrettable bluntness—a stupid idea.

To be P.C., you have to say stupid things that sound stupid without giggling.

And yet, for all this, the PC regard themselves as intellectually your superior in every way.

You can quote Aristotle and Homer in Greek, let us say, or solve a quadratic equation, or write a sonnet, or change a tire, or run a business. They studied Antebellum South American Lesbian Puppetry, and got a major in Grievance studies and a minor in Whatever Dude.  That makes them an expert in climatology, and, despite any evidence to the contrary, smarter than you.

These morons boast about their smarts like Bizarro from the cubicular Bizarro World boasting about his good looks.

A related bit of make believe business is to pretend that someone of authority and predominance, usually a scientist, has already proven some matter (usually one no one can possibility prove, such a whether or not men have free will) with such abundant clarity and persuasive power and publicity that no one could disagree—ergo all disagreement is profoundly dishonest, a product of moral corruption or intellectual incompetence, if not loutish ignorance.

From this bit of business we get the risible spectacle of sophomoric half-educated halfwits pretending the geniuses who disagree with them, Aristotle or Aquinas, are half-wits.

A parallel bit of make-believe concerns their moral superiority. We behold the equally risible, but far more disgusting spectacle of pro-perversion pro-deviancy antinomians and moral anarchists holding up their lack of moral character as proof positive that they occupy the moral high ground, that they are superior on the moral plane, and speak with the authority of the saints,  and have the right to despise and condemn the common decency of common men.

Why? And since it is so obvious that PC is false to facts, why does it win victory after victory?

Political Correctness was started by Marxists who, disappointed after the Russian Revolution that Utopia, as scientifically predicted, did not eventuate, and annoyed that reality did not conform to theory, decided quite deliberately to abandon reality. What they adopted instead was a strategy called 'Critical Theory.'

Critical Theory is the theory that, instead of just criticizing the current Capitalist world system on the basis of economics, to criticize anything and everything in the current world system on any basis whatsoever, and NEVER to offer any alternative. To destroy, but not to rebuild. To tear down, but not to offer any plan for what might be put in its place.  In effect, the mainstream of Leftwing and Socialist thought departed from the Marxist philosophical roots and became anarchist. The departed the materialism which formed the metaphysics of Marxism and become nihilists. Materialist believe in matter. Nihilists believe in nothing. Their point is to deconstruct reality.

The idea of 'Critical Theory' is to be critical of everything, every institution. The idea is to make so many absurd claims that reality would be smothered in the white noise, and the opposition would not know which absurd claims you really mean, and must be fought, and which can be safely ignored.

Since, ultimately, the principle of Political Correctness is simply the principle of inversion—good is bad and bad is good, black is white and day is night and property is theft and speech is repression and love is rape and sodomy is love, etc—it does not matter where the conservative chooses to defend. Any nonsense he does not answer can be used next season and promoted as unquestioned verity.

The point is the nonsense. PC is stupid on purpose: and the purpose is hellish.

You cannot drown out Right Reason in the human soul without first driving out Reason from the human mind. That has been the point and the purpose of every modern thinker from Nietzsche to Hume to Sartre to Freud to BF Skinner to Peter Singer. They don't really care if you are a soul in a body as opposed to a meat robot programmed by environment: all they care about is quelling the faculty of reason, because without a paralysis of the reason, the conscience cannot be silenced.

(3) Illogical. In attempting to silence the conscience, Political Correctness uses the very axioms it criticizes. The picture of Political Correctness is of an idiot lumberjack sitting on the very tree branch he is busily sawing off.

For intellectuals to pride themselves on their inability to reason, and on their incompetence at basic syllogisms is somewhat startling to those of us who live outside Cloudcuckooland.

In previous years, some Political Correction Officers made attempts to write up a coherent set of doctrines or arguments to support their world view, but since their world view is one that fundamentally has no place for a world view, the efforts always involved some self evident contradiction, or glaring unwitting confession of hatred, inanity and insanity.

Karl Marx, for example, is regarded with just contempt by real economists. Real economists talk about things like the effect on wage rates of high tariffs. Karl Marx talks about the apocalypse at the end of history and the New Jerusalem it will usher in, and he never set foot on a factory floor in his life, but pretended to be the Darwin of economics, pretending to set all the thought of economic affairs and the rise and decline of civilizations on a scientific footing. He did this by ad hominem: he called all sober economists puppets of their class interests, whose consciousness was conditioned by the material properties of the tools of production around them.

Nietzsche is regarded as one of the most popular and insightful philosophers of the modern day, albeit no two thoughts of his that I have ever read were ever connected one to the next by any logical sequence. His books are like reading stream of consciousness philosophy: James Joyce doing Socrates. His most famous moment came when he declared God was Dead. He did this by ad hominem: he called those who believed in God cowards.

BF Skinner is regarded as a psychiatrist. His basic thought was that all human thought is meaningless because conditioned or caused entirely by material stimuli in the environment. He attempted to argue in favor of this point rather than simply describing the environment into which we should put ourselves so as to be conditioned to believe it.

Freud believed all human thought is created by subconscious infant trauma. He supported this theory by ad hominem: when Jung proposed a different theory, Freud had him expelled and anathematized, and attributed the aberration to some subconscious infant trauma in Jung.

Political Correctness proceeds from the basis of a world view that is fundamentally hostile to the norms of human experience, tradition, reason, wisdom, and logic. Its basic world view is irrationalism: in a nihilistic world where there are no facts, no reality, no standard, the only thing that serves as a basis to accept or reject a thought is the person on whose authority one accepts it.

Hence, all PC thinking at its root is conformist and totalitarian. The anger and outrage, the plethora of insults and slanders that issue from the organs of PC against those who dare question it, is the anger of a petty and uncertain tyrant whose authority is challenged. They ALWAYS respond with a personal attack, because they feel in their hearts that for you to challenge their authority is always personal.

Hence, argumentum ad hominem is their first, last, and usually their only line of attack. There is never a defense, only an attack.

(4) Hypocritical. The Ad Hominem attack is usually nothing more than a confession of the attacker's own guilt. He accuses others of being what he himself is, or doing what he himself does. Hence you have the grotesque spectacle of the Democrat Party, the party that supported the South during the Civil War, and supported Jim Crow laws, and supported the KKK, and opposed the Civil Rights Act (at least, in greater numbers than Republicans) calling the people who armed the blacks with firearms after the war to protect themselves from whites, the National Rifle Association, racists. No Republican ever stood in a schoolhouse door to prevent a black student from entering.

Political Correctness is a virus in that is uses the very institutions it is attempting to destroy to destroy them, in the same way a virus destroys it host to reproduce.

The peculiar helplessness of Conservatives in the face of aggressive Political Correctness attacks is akin to the helplessness of the West in the face of suicide-bombers. We have no way to engage the suicidal in our Western way of war, which attempts to minimize civilian causalities and to attack an enemy head-on. Likewise, there is no way to engage an aggressively illogical foe, one who regards logic as weakness and folly, with a logical argument.

The Conservative, being a logical thinker, always attempts to engage the topic being discussed. But the only topic being discussed really is the hatred of the PCnik for the Conservative. There is no other message. It does not matter what is being talked about.

This is another reason why the Conservatives are singularly helpless before the onslaught of nonsense. The PC hypocrite has no particular loyalty to whatever the fashionable cause of this season happens to be. He will betray women's rights to placate the Islamic terrorists the moment feminism is no longer useful to denigrate Western civilization and Islam is. As of that tipping point, whenever it appears, Eastasia is no longer at war with Oceania and has never been at war with Oceania; Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia.

One second before the tipping point the PC are so careful and solicitous of the rights of women that they insist women engage in school wrestling matches with boys as equals, and that the nuances of pronoun use in the English language be altered to accommodate them, and that offering to walk a female employee to her car to protect her from muggers in an unlit parking lot is grounds for a sexual harassment lawsuit;  one second after the tipping point, the PC are defending the President Clinton's use of this office to slander and punish females objecting to his ruthless sexual exploitation of them, the PC are calling the Playboy Bunny suit "empowering" rather than humiliating, the PC are writing up praises of wearing head-to-toe burkas to indoctrinate schoolgirls into the belief that fundamentalist Islam  is egalitarian and pro-feminine. I am not making any of those examples up.

As with women, so with Jews and blacks and child-murderers and gays and any other minority or special interest group or deviant cult the PC takes under its wing. The nature of the Political Correctness process forbids it from forming loyalties. You are only being used as a weapon to destroy the institutions of the West. The moment a better weapon comes along, if it is incompatible with you, aside you go.

How is the Conservative mind to address such ever-shifting chaos? If you speak to the issue the PC is clamoring about that season, you are wasting your time, since that is never what the conversation is really about; but if you speak to the real issue and ignore the clamor, they claim you dodge the question.

The essence of PC is when racists call non-racists racist because of the non-racists do not want to set up a Nazi-style government bureau tracking everyone's race.

No matter what your stance on the bureau (or whatever the topic of the day might be) anyone and everyone can be accused of racism who takes or fails to take a stand on it. A person who claims that man should be judged on the content of his character rather than the color of his skin is called a racist. Because PC operates by the principle of inversion, being a sheep in wolf's clothing, no matter what you do, they win: if the shepherd drives the sheep-dressed wolf away, the wolf accuses the shepherd of hating sheep or failing to protect strays like it pretends to be; if the shepherd for any reason lets the sheep-dressed wolf into the fold, the wolf eats sheep, and again accuses the shepherd of hating sheep or failing to protect sheep. The point is not to eat sheep but to desecrate the office and authority of the shepherd.

The reason why PC is hypocritical is not an accident. It is because PC is the attempt to use hypocrisy to destroy the current institutions. The 'Critical Theory' is merely using axioms you do not admit you do not believe to attack conclusions you do not admit you do believe. It is demanding police protection for your riot.

The hypocrisy is even more obvious as Political Correctness ages, for the current institutions are the ones previously erected by the former generation of Political Correctors. When PC, to destroy the home, wants women to be in the workplace rather than as housewives, it encourages women to be pretty stewardesses and Playboy bunnies, and they ally with pornographers like Hugh Hefner. Does anyone remember those days? Later, the PC turn on the surprised pornographers, and declare that women being employed for their looks is exploitation, and they insist women find full time careers, and marry late or, better yet, not at all. Meanwhile they insist on reforming the free market by establishing endless grievance-based regulations to control the male-female ratios and interactions. Later, to destroy marriage, the PC side is no-fault divorce, allegedly in the name of freeing women from male control, because the bond of marriage is a contract, like the free-market contract, and therefore not sacred. Later, the PC side with homosexuals declaring their attempting to form households together (it is not marriage and cannot be called so) to be a matter of civil rights, the idea being the marriage is so sacred that it cannot be denied to sexes who cannot biologically wed, and who suffer from a mental disease they themselves admit is genetic in origin.

Each time, the PC uses the opposite of what they mean to destroy the opposite of what they were destroying last season. No proponent of gay marriage proposes an abolition of "no-fault" even though, theoretically, if marriage were sacred they would be vocal advocates of restoring the sanctity to this institution. No proponent of allowing women to compete freely in the free market advocates the abolition of the de facto quota laws allowing some women to be promoted above where the market would freely put them, even though, theoretically, if the free market were a respected institution, they would be as vehement about abolishing quotas as libertarians. No proponent of pornography encourages this demeaning exploitation of women on the grounds that it makes the house and home a safer and more sacred place, and exalts maidenhood and motherhood, and no one really believes that being a porn model exalts women or makes them safer from male sexual predation or makes the erotic pleasures of marriage more full of joy, and so on. And again, no one argues that restoring women to their traditional roles as wives and mothers, housewives and matriarchs of large families is what women really want, even though facts, those pesky things, show that by and large it is.

It is all hypocrisy. As with feminism, so with any other issue one could name.  The PC are not truly in favor of any of the things they support, because their world view is based on a metaphysic that says nothing is truly real.

Ah, to be sure they are sincere about their issue. Sincerity is a different thing. Sincerity is an emotion. Emotions they have in abundance, and to the exclusion of reason.  More on this paradox later.

(5) The delusion is an aggressive make-believe. They sometime change from decade to decade, so it does not matter what this season's fashionable make believe is. The point is to believe in something, believe in anything, believe in yourself—just as long as what you believe in IS NOT REAL.

The make believe is aggressive, because it only takes one little boy to point out that the Emperor's New Clothes do not exist at all, and that the emperor is naked. It must be aggressive, because one voice can shatter the spell, or wound the self indulgence of utter narcissism. The crowd can use their power of pretense to pretend the boy did not speak in the same way they can pretend the Emperor is not naked, but if he continues to speak, they must call him a racist, and if he is not cowed, must stone him.

This explains the particularly over-the-top aggressive tone in Mr. Chang's paragraph above. He is like an Inquisitor not accusing a heretic but like one accusing a witch.

Consider: The Inquisitor accusing a heretic must list statements made by the accused which contradict specific points of established doctrine. This requires careful effort from the prosecutor's office. But a witch can be accused of anything from flying a broom to consorting with cats to whistling up storms: anything goes, and the more outrageous, even deranged, the accusation, the better. You see, because a heretic need only be wrong to stand before the Inquisitor, but the witch needs to be not only evil, but utterly, absolutely, irredeemably evil: evil without limit. She has to be accused of everything, including things no one believes. (I am trying to think of the last book by a conservative political commentator complaining about political correctness who called his wife a bitch and then went to a bar to beat his chest and masturbate in public. No names spring to mind.)

But in the make-believe world of Cloudcuckooland, conservatives are ape-men and sexual deviants and foul-mouthed racists, not to mention hicks and rednecks and KKK members, whereas, in Cloudcuckooland, Democrat members of congress are not now and never were KKK members, and so there are no conservative political commentators. There is Rush Limbaugh, who takes drugs, and Bill Bennet, who gambles, and therefore nothing they say can be trusted, unlike Dan Rather, who is objective and neutral and nonpartisan and honest.

That is merely their model; their make-believe. Since it was never based on facts, no facts can undermine it.

PCniks are not merely uninterested in evidence, or skeptical because the evidence so far is insufficient: they are utterly immune to evidence, and an enemy of evidence. Indeed, the MORE evidence there is in favor of a proposition, the greater in their mind is the laudable strength of will and firmness of purpose in ignoring it. Why, anyone can disbelieve rumors of Yeti, for who has seen one? That is a weaklings disbelief! The true hero can disbelieve in the law of supply and demand, or, more to his credit, disbelieve in the law of cause and effect! The fact that Socialism fails wherever it is tried PROVES we need more of it.

The reason why PCniks are consumed with hatred for Nazi Theocrats and fascists, the reason why they call everyone and everything fascist, is because there are not fascists, or, to be precise, the number of neonazis in the world is roughly equal to the number of flatearthers or practicing Albigensians.

You can find Nazis, if you look hard enough, stuffed away into the corners of freakland, but no leftwing political philosophy has been more entirely discredited than National Socialism of Germany and Fascism of Italy. (Yes, they are leftwing: socialists, radical, anti-tradition, anti-Second Amendment, anti-Ancien Regime, the guys all those conservatives in the 1940′s killed to smitherines. Their philosophy is the same Darwinian survival-of-the-selfish-gene nonsense as modern science-idolaters.)

But the important point for PC is to accuse Republicans and Christians and Catholics of being fascists. They know we are not fascists, and they do not expect the accusation to be believed. It is a ceremonial behavior, a make-believe, like the Two Minute Hate delivered against Emmanuel Goldstein. The fact that Goldstein does not exist and never existed means nothing.

PC Apparatchiks are utterly immune to evidence. They are nihilists. If you don't believe reality is real, then you perforce believe truth is what you make it.

(6) Vehement. PC is hate for what it opposes, and hysteria for what it affirms, but it neither opposes nor affirms anything in particular.

PC is always intemperate and vehement, and sometimes breaks out into violence. It is mob psychology. In the savagery with which the Soviet treated their foes, the deranged hatred offered up against George Bush and Ronald Reagan before him, the vehemence of the 'Occupy Wall Street' protesters makes a marked contrast with the peculiar formlessness of the reason for the hate. What are the protestors protesting for, again, exactly? When an excited, nay, hysterical mass media selected candidate Obama for our next president, and, to the eternal shame of our democracy, the mass media got away with herding and controlling public opinion so the voters to affirmed whom the media had anointed, what exactly was the hope for which they hoped, or the change they wanted changed?

It is not eerie how these things for which PC stands so firmly seem not to have an substance, but to change and adapt like the Darwinian emergence of species, one form after another, with no fixed end point?

Whatever is true, whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, that is what the PC Spirit of the Age opposes with all the strength of their dark and monstrous hearts, and all the wit of their chaotic and hate-poisoned intellects.

They do not disapprove of the good and beautiful, they hate it with a passion. (In the example of Mr Chang above, one does not call people masturbating apes if you disapprove of them, but only if you hate them.)

When the hate is hot, they scream; when the hate is cool, they sneer, or pretend to ignore you. Contempt is hate, not indifference, even when it is delivered in lofty nonfunny joking tones as if one had just uttered a witticism. Note, for example, the word-play above between chest-beating and beating off—it is meant to be a witticism, except it isn't.  

Indeed, one of the principle bits of make believe in which PC apparatchiks indulge to act as if, when sneering at normal, true, beautiful or honest things, a witticism has already been spoken, at which, as if on cue, they are to nod and smirk, even though nothing really was said.

Please note the anarchic nature of PC. Like fashion, there is no formal leader, no party, no apparatus aside from voluntary conformity to an ever-changing consensus.

Like fashion, to be caught out of fashion is both unexpected and the penalties are immediate. I will not draw your attention to actors who made "gay" jokes and then found themselves, no matter what their previous credit with the mavens, pressured into Soviet style public self-criticism sessions, reeducation and sensitivity training: my stomach would turn if I even provided a link. I assume you are aware it happens.

No one is safe among the vampires, because they prey on each other without warning, whimsically, with total hate.

I have often wondered, aghast, at the lack of loyalty or memory or love among the PC. For all their gushing expressions of kindness and courtesy, the moment any icon of theirs, or any stalwart of the past generation, no matter his contributions to the cause, is denounced by the Big Brother of fashionable rumor, instantly he becomes Emmanuel Goldstein.

I recall being horrified at the treatment afforded Robert Heinlein, once he was dead, by the sexual revolutionaries he spent his entire adult career serving and inspiring and popularizing. He was the man who introduced me, and my generation of science fiction readers, to the notion that all cultural norms were relative, and that all sexual norms should be absolutely as free and liberal and libertine as possible, no matter one's culture. But in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND the pro-homo scene was too indirect for the mavens of PC, who demanded a more open adulation of the misbehavior, and so Heinlein was subject to the Two Minute Hate. All he had done for them to make them mainstream was forgotten.

But this vehemence, and this ever present threat of riot and violence (for no man  would pay the least attention to demonstrators who stand for nothing if they did not threaten violence) serves to maintain the cohesion of what otherwise would be a disintegrating and mindless herd. The herd members each fear betrayal and denunciation, and so each is eager to support the latest cause of the season with utmost fervor.

And since PC does not really stand for anything, it only stands in eternal rebellion against Christendom and Western Civilization, the utmost fervor is always some form of vehemence or cruelty and insult or hate or contempt or open violence.

To recap: PC is lying by means of rendering words meaningless for the end of spreading nihilism where the nature of PC renders it (1) unreal (2) stupid (3) illogical (4) hypocritical (5) delusional (6) vehement (and sometimes violent).

With this sixpart definition in mind, let us answer the question why Conservatives are helpless before it.

Whenever we Conservatives, like Ann Morgan Guilbert in the clip above, see the arrant and aggressive make-believe of the Joey Bishop of PC in action, we are at the same loss as to what to do as she is.

Because, first, we cannot really believe that anyone is that dishonest, that they would lie so blatantly, or so gullible that they would believe that lie. So we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt and think that they are sincere, and will respond if we address them reasonably.

Second, we cannot really believe that anyone is so malicious that they would hate so deeply, and on so many topics, and that hate would be the first and foremost element of their political philosophy. We cannot believe that they do not want to live, they merely want us to die.

So we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that some compromise can be reached, whereby all parties can get part of what their goals are. But, of course, there are no goals to PC. It is a process, a virus, a method of attack. It is not a political philosophy. They are not attacking us to get something out of us: they are attacking us because they hate us.

Third, we cannot really engage illogical people with logic. Both the democratic process and the free market process assume a minimal measure of rationality on the part of all persons in the system. Neither one has any mechanism for vomiting or producing antibodies to remove from the system an irritant or virus whose point is to destroy the system.

Indeed, Christian charity and English ideas of fairplay and Capitalist incentives to please customers act against any exclusion or isolation of the enemy irritants within them.

Fourth, Conservatives assume a man is innocent until proven guilty and that he has a right to speak any matter not slander nor fighting words nor treason nor pornography; whereas the PC assume a White Male Christian is guilty no matter what the proof of anything of which he can be accused, and that he has no right to speak other than correct thought as pre-screened by Big Brother. The two when placed on contact with each other always favor the PC over the Conservative. He condemns us while we are still trying him, being fair, gathering evidence: he uses the First Amendment as a tool to make porn and treason and slander legal and legitimate, whereas he uses speech codes and the thousand petty harassments of a disorganized and headless mob to eliminate words and phrases and arguments and policies from public discourse.

Fifth and most importantly: you are wondering, dear reader, how the PC apparatchik can both believe such utter putrid nonsense and monstrous folly, and be seriously about destroying himself and the civilian around him, and also be so flippant, and frivolous, and cruel,  while at the same time being concerned, civically responsible, orderly, neat, and do things like recycle and give to charities that help starving Spotting Owls in Asia?

No one you know matches the bugbear I have hear described. No one can be that evil on purpose: not one can be that ignorant and be making so monstrous a mistake innocently.

This is an old, old debate. Socrates thought all evil was caused by ignorance in the mind, and that proper and patient instruction would lead mischievous boys to be virtuous men. Saint Paul speaks of evil as being caused by a corruption of the will, and laments that man can know the good and yet will the evil.

Without resolving that debate, let me point out the fundamental, aye, the very basic difference between PC and all other human systems of thought, ancient or modern, Christian or Pagan.

Political Correctness assumes at its root that political considerations trump all aspects of truth or falsehood, reality or make-believe, logic or illogic.

PC is nihilism. It is the worship of nothing, loyalty to nothing, glorification of nothing.

THEY DON'T BELIEVE REALITY IS REAL.

This unreality, which you or I or any sane man would regard as terrifying as the discovery that we were trapped in the Maya of Buddha (or, to use a pop-culture reference, in the Matrix of Neo) they regard as liberating.

If there is no reality, there is no God, and therefore there is no moral law, all things the corrupt heart desires can be achieved, and the voice of conscience must be silenced.

The unreality liberates them to believe in whatever they need to believe in with all the strength and passion of their dark hearts and all the short-circuited voltage of their feverish and lopsided brains, just for so long as they need to believe it, and not one second longer. That is why they can throw feminism under the bus for the sake of a pro-Abortion president without batting an eye; that is why they can throw gays under the bus for the sake of appeasing Jihadist terrorists without even a Dear John letter.

The reason why such nice and reasonable people can, without any hesitation, support such monstrous evils as abortion, as Stalinism, and can apologize for dictators and fly to the defense of terrorists and murderers is that it is all, to them, in their world of nihilism, a make-believe.

They are not REALLY lying, not even to themselves, because they occupy a mental space where the difference between truth and lies is moot. They are not REALLY evil, because likewise the difference between good and evil is a matter of opinion or taste. They do not really believe what they are saying and they do not really disbelieve it. They are shallow and empty.

They react with overwhelming hate and passion and violence when confronted for the same reason a drug addict resents being wakened from an opium dream, or a book reader snatched out of his favorite fairy tale in time to do the yardwork, or why patrons shush the loudmouth who talks during a stageplay, or a group of children playing tea when someone will not play along with the play pretend, and points out the cups are empty. Even a single jarring moment, even a single word, breaks the spell of suspension of disbelief.

In this case, the spell is not meant to lure a reader or theater goer into what is merely a diversion of an afternoon. The spell of PC is meant to fill up the void of nothingness which is the center and the idol of the meaning lives of men who have been told that they are beardless apes or meat-robots programmed by brain atoms, brought forth of nothing for no purpose and destined for nothing but eternal oblivion.

The spell is meant to fend away the image of an empty and indifferent cosmos which otherwise must drive them mad.

The thin tissue of make believe is all that hangs between them and the chaos of utmost nothingness. Their self esteem, the meaning of their meaningless lives, their loves and hates and the precious silence that benumbs their consciences is this thin tissue.

Small wonder they fight like mad wildcats if any word disturbs it.

While the spell lasts, they can dream of creating paradise on earth. If you speak against the paradise, such as by asking how the Islamic terrorist is going to fit in next to the gay libertine, or if you question who is going to pay for all pie coming down from the sky, or dig up the gold wherewith to pave the streets, you do not merely snap them out of a pleasing opium dream, O Conservative: you become, for them, the foe of paradise, the enemy of heaven and thus of all that is good.

The obstacle preventing paradise is not reality—there is no reality in nihilland—the only obstacle is YOU. Small wonder their hatred is without temperance and without bounds. Small wonder they are so impatient of legal niceties and constitutions and economics and history and all.

The only thing to which I can liken this weird psychology, and to explain how they can be so utterly sincere in causes which make no sense at all and which can be forgotten in the blink of an eye when the Big Brother of fashion so commands,  and why they can turn on each other with the remorselessness of sharks, and savage their own without compunction, and still be perfectly nice neighbors who recycle, is the enthusiasm of cultists for an idol or gamers for a role playing game.

No idolater actually thinks his statue of bronze and brass contains the divinity: he merely makes a false-to-facts association in his mind to blend the two in consciousness, that he might treat the statue, the image or symbol, as if it were the divine reality, the thing the symbol represents.

No gamer in a role playing game actually thinks he is a half-elf split character class ranger/bard from Ladyswood. But he gets into character. While the game is going on, he may speak in an accent, and use Shakespearean, or at least Stan Lee-ean, archaisms. He takes it totally seriously, and, for him, it is real. Real make-believe.

The PC crowd is the same way. They are half-educated sophomores make believing  to be smarter than the rest of us, and so they use long and sonorous Latinate words like the half-elf using archaism.  They are greybearded adolescents arrested at a primitive and emotional stage of development make believing to be scientific and rational. They are hysterics pretending to be cold-eyed and cooly rational philosophers, who reached all their determinations by pure logic.  They are conformists pretending to be bold rebels.

They are old men with guilty consciences, failures at life, eager to break moral laws or, better to see others break them, and they are old women who have killed a child she should have loved and brought to term: or they are young men and women without experience or wisdom who like the game of pretending that they are wiser than their elders, because this frees them of all responsibility to be responsible for anything in their lives. The duty to learn from history evaporates; the duty to live up to standards is gone; the duty to be fully human becomes optional.

Raising a child is hard. Killing a child in the womb is easy. Killing him is far easier when you use a play-pretend verbal formula to call the child something other than what he is: fetus, or blob of cells, or product of conception. Far easier when what you do it presented to your conscience as a dignified necessity of civic right, or of woman's health, or of equality, that blessed estate above all others that justifies, in the modern world, all crimes.

Being honest is hard. Men will revile you. Lying is easy. Lying is even easier if all the lies are nice, safe, soft, inoffensive, and politically correct.

Working is hard. Collecting welfare is easy. It is yet easier if all trace of manly pride, all hint of the moral code that says a man must support his family and rule them and lead them is jackhammered out of one's conscience.

Prying the sturdy poor off welfare is hard. Merely letting them rot is easy. All one need do is spend other people's money. Spending other people's money is even easier, once you use a meaningless verbal formula to assure yourself that need trumps greed and that property is theft.

Building a family is hard. Breaking a family is easy, especially if the conscience is benumbed with the meaningless verbal formula that says that you were born that way, that your true self, your authentic self, is an adulterer, and that marriage is nothing more than a business contract, dissoluble at the whim or either party. It is easy to say Love Conquers All.

Virtue is hard. That is why no one speaks of virtue any more, only of 'values.' A virtue is a reality, a type of strength or power needed to be human and be happy in a given area. (As chastity is the virtue needed for happiness and honor in sexual matters, or courage the virtue needed in combat, or honesty the virtue needed for freedom of thought.) But a value is something you pick for yourself because it pleases you, like a consumer picking shoes.

Worship of God is hard, for He is the ultimate reality, and the one thing without which all human philosophy is vanity and flatulence, stubble and straw. Without God, there is only nothing, for God is All.

Worship of Nothing is easiest of all, for one can sleepwalk through life, snarling at anyone who threatens to jar one awake, protesting against moral order, and complimenting oneself because one is brave enough to fight fictional fascists, and bold with the boldness of Prometheus, for the courage to rebel against reality, the audacity to take up arms against sanity and reason and conscience and logic.

All the sleepwalkers need do is recycle, or some other pointless and purely symbolic act and, like Jesus Christ, they have saved the planet.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Bruce Charlton on Pagan Missionaries Revisited

I posted a link here to this article by Bruce Charlton, advocating sending out pagan missionaries to bring the modern world to the point of the pre-Christians.

Some of the comments lead to be believe Mr Charlton's apothegmic style is too acute and sly to reach some readers, so at the risk of belaboring the obvious, permit me to belabor it:

I sometimes think we need pagan missionaries, almost as much as we need Christian missionaries. Indeed they could be the same people – adjusting their strategy.

Christian missionaries are very good at converting pagans, but nobody seems able to convert modern secular hedonists.

The jump between secular hedonism is too great – between believing whatever you like to believing a complex set of interlocking propositions (which perhaps don't make any better sense than secular hedonism unless they are all present and correct).

But maybe, simple paganism could be restored – and later on the person might be amenable to Christianity?

I suspect Mr Charlton is indulging in a bit of a joke, or irony. He is pointing out, as GK Chesteron and others have pointed out before him, that modernity is more primitive and vicious and benighted EVEN than the pagans, who, sickened by the unnatural practices, superstitious excess, fatalism, hopelessness, and joyless frivolity of paganism, turned with gratitude to the waters of baptism: conversions that were (with exceptions so few as to be prodigies) peaceful and voluntary, rapid and nigh-universal.

In other words, Mr Charlton is not seriously suggesting we send out missionaries to preach the gospel of Jove or Isis, Odin or the Great God Pan. He is pointing out that these hopeless and fatalistic and joylessly frivolous pagans were MORE highly enlightened than the hopeless fatalism of the Darwinist who considers himself an Augmented Ape, or the idiotic materialist who considers himself the meatpuppet of a Selfish Gene. The pagan at least tried to cover their joylessness, not spread it. Achilles bemoaned that it were better to be the slave of a dirt farmer than to be a shade in the underworld: the modern nihilist considers that value judgment subjective therefore void. Heraclitus the philosopher pondered and considered all matter in motion to be chaos, without consistency or form. The modern philosopher considers pondering an act of void chaos, and avoids it.

His point is not to praise paganism. His point is that pagans, real pagans, had advanced to the step of being able to understand the Christian message. Their twilight fairy tales gave them enough of a taste of truth that when the true sun rose, they were able to recognize and rejoice in its light. The modern man is blind, and for him, days and night alike is ever-during dark.

Christianity is a cure for sin and death. The Modern world, unique in all of time, rejects the universal testimony of history, and firmly asserts that death is final and incurable. (This, even though, statistically, more people have seen ghosts than have witnessed murders.)  Sin the modern world seeks to cure by defining deviancy down: if you eliminate the guilt, so goes the reasoning of unreason, the act is no longer blameworthy, indeed, no longer even exists, no more than exists a fading cloud of dream. Reality is simply wished away by a sustained effort of squinting make-believe.

This is why the first, last, and only line of defense of Political Correctness is vicious personal attack, sneers, counter-attacks, bullying, screaming, sneering, one-liners, cruel jokes, half-wit witticisms, et ad nauseam.This is because to argue, or even to question, to use the intellect at all, snaps one immediately out of the suspension of disbelief.

The whole point of a communal make-believe is that it only works if everyone in the group plays along.

No one, not even the most devout fanboy, erects a rational or objective defense to a beloved make-believe. We all know STAR WARS is not real, it is merely fun made for nothing deeper than fun. There is no real galaxy long, long ago and far, far away, any more than there is a Never-neverland inhabited by pirates and cannibals and savage Red Indians, fairies and lost children. But Political Correctness rests on the prime directive of Nihilism: the conceit that nothing is 'really' real, that all is a social construct, an narrative, the ideological superstructure of class interests, or the epiphenomenon of brain atom motions caused by the mechanical action of selfish genes. The PC know their world is fake. The foes they fight, Nazis and White Supremacists and conspiratorial Theocrats, are all as make-believe as Emmanuel Goldstein. (This can be seen by the reaction of abetting infatuation the Political Correctionists have to real theocrats, e.g. Islamic Shariaists, step into the stage of history.) And the core of the falsehood of their pasteboard world is a steadfast denial of the reality of moral law, or of sin, its violation, or of death, its consequence. The first two they say do not exist; death they distract themselves to ignore, and none of their philosophers speak of it, or how to deal with it, except when they promote euthanasia, whereupon it becomes an adjust or accessory of personal sovereignty and personal dignity, a civic right like the right to vote.

By no coincidence, those vices in which they most deeply indulge (intolerance, suppression of freedom of expression, the belief in a fantasy world, the unwillingness to face facts, the inability to think rationally) are the very ones which form the core of accusations they make against Christians. They, who by their own design know nothing of human nature or human happiness or how to achieve it (how is that endless orgy of the Sexual Revolution working out for you, Baby?), accused us of being blind to facts. Meanwhile, they believe in global cooling, or global warming, or whatever the fashionable hysteria for this season might be. (Emmanual Goldstien is now conspiring to ruin the weather of  Oceania!)

The modern world mired in make believe will never understand the Christian message. They cannot even understand the message of Marcus Aurelius, or Socrates, or Zoroaster, or Lao Tzu, or even understand what ills these sages and philosophers and visionaries were attempting to address or cure. Political Correctness silences all debate by defining logic, evidence, experience and reason as out of bounds, oppressive, sinister, old-fashioned, irrational.

The mind without reason is a void of chaos, and the modern world fills the chaos with noise, distraction, clowns, gossip, scandal, pornography, raucous noise, outrageous noise,  shrill noise, and screaming noise, depending on the several entertainments of rock music, rap music, political riot, and torture-porn flicks.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.