The End of Days and the Rule of Gray
I had an interesting, and admittedly disturbing experience, which made me reflect upon the end of the world.
I was listening to a radio debate between a Leftist and a Conservative concerning whether or not the Administration lied by making repeated, emphasized, and unambiguous assertions that the (ironically named) Affordable Health Care Act would not outlaw any plan, any policy or any doctor you yourself wanted to keep, if you were satisfied with it.
Here is a reminder:
As I listened to the debate, a sense of disgust and weariness overtook me, for I was certain, before hearing a word, that nothing the Leftist would way would be on the topic, or would actually defend the point in contention.
Then a little cartoon angel on my shoulder appeared in a puff of pink cloud, and told me that, as a gentleman, I should give the Leftist the benefit of the doubt, and hear the argument she had to give. Whether good or bad, it would not harm me to hear the argument, and it would be an offense against openmindedness to decide without hearing.
So I listened. The Leftist, while sounding sweet and light as honey at first, personally attacked the Conservative with whom she was debating, accusing him of wanting to deprive the poor and middle class of health care: the attacks became nastier as the conversation proceeded, and when the Conservative pointed out the illogic and unfairness of this, she haughtily objected that he was attacking her.
This, while the Conservative happened to be someone in the middle class himself who was being deprived of his health care plan, the health care plan that he liked and wanted to keep, deprived by the operation of the law.
In other words, she answered his argument that he was being deprived of his health care plan that he liked by accusing him of wanting to deprive others of theirs. WHen he objected that this was an ad hominem attack, she answered by accusing him of making an ad hominem attack against her.
Her other argument to prove the point that the President’s claim about being able to keep one’s health care plan if one liked it was not a lie was to say that (1) many states have laws requiring health care plans to carry options which the buyer does not necessarily want (2) workers can shop around on the exchanges to get a better plan than the plan the law canceled (3) the worker does not have the wit and wisdom to make a good decision as to whether he wants to keep his plan or not, therefore the government guidelines will make that decision for him.
In other words, when the President said “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” these words, properly understood, meant that whether you like your plan or not, the law will decided whether you can keep your plan or not, because the law knows what you should like better than you do.
In other words, not a single word was on the topic, or defending the point in contention. The debate was not on whether or not Obama had promised you could keep the health care policies his administration thought you should. The debate was not on whether or not Obamacare imposed more burdens or less than certain state laws. It was on whether or not Obama had promised you could keep your plan if you like it. You cannot.
So I reached up and took the good angel on my shoulder and crushed it to death with my fingers for having wasted my time.
Likewise, I overheard a lengthy debate between several famous Leftists, including Michael Moore and Richard Dawkins, on the question of whether the Christians were as dangerous and deadly as Islamics. The Leftists without exception affirmed that Christians kill as many people with as many suicide bombs, are just as eager to establish theocratic forms of government, just as willing to stone and defenestrate sodomites to death, and send just as many young men in suicide vests loaded with dynamite into public squares to kill innocent bystanders as Islamicists. The number is the same, the degree of violence is the same, the methods are the same. This was the view presented as normal. And audience hearing these false, absurd and overheated claims applauded.
Likewise, I overheard an argument concerning Orson Scott Card. Without going into details, it was the same pattern: the Leftist made outrageously false, absurd, and overheated claims, that Card wanted to maim and kill homosexuals. When confronted by the evidence (that is, Card’s actual quote of what he actually said) the Leftist replied that he did not trust Orson Scott Card to quote Orson Scott Card.
No doubt you are wondering, dear reader, what this has to do with the end of the world?
I am not predicting the end of the world based on the fact that a politician lies or that Christ has detractors or that perverts hate and scorn decent men. These things are built into the order of nature and flow from the fall of man. They will be with us always.
But there is one thing that will not be with us always: the Neutral Zone. At the moment, there is strip of the mental landscape occupied by those unconvinced souls who do not see that they need to take one side or the other. The motto in the Neutral Zone is that the Conservatives are as bad as the Leftists. The idea in the Neutral Zone is that you do not need to be in favor of Christ or against Christ, but can listen to both sides of the argument, and select the best ideas from both sides. You can worship God and Mammon. You can serve two masters.
The flag of the Neutral Zone is a median shade of gray.
I submit that as the world ages and comes to the fulfillment and finish of its purpose that gray strip of mental landscape will narrow and narrow until it becomes a hard, bright line.
Bear in mind that the debate about Obamacare has nothing to do with helping the poor get medical care. That could have been done any number of other ways, including increasing the scope of Medicare, altering insurance regulation to create more opportunity for competition, or decreasing the regulation of doctors so as to lure more candidates to enter the field and therefore drive down prices. Obamacare will increase the cost to the poor of medical care, or decrease the value of the services or the availability or both. That is known to all informed parties in this debate. That these alternatives are not discussed, or even admitted to exist at all, betrays that lowering cost and increasing availability is not the point.
The debate surrounding Sandra Fluke and the War on Women shows the true purpose. The purpose of socialism is control. It is an expression of power lust pure and simple. It does no one in the world the tiniest imaginable particle of harm to allow Catholics to exist without forcing them to pay for the imaginary safety contraception provides to fools eager to fornicate, and who make a fetish of this means of avoiding birth and venereal disease. It is not to prevent any harm to anyone that Catholics are now forced to buy abortion drugs for miscreants. It is to stick a thumb in the eye of the Catholic Church. It is to prove the supremacy of the State. It is to show whom the Americans will worship and serve from henceforth: Caesar, not God. Why make an issue of it, otherwise?
The illogical nature of the debates surrounding Obamacare — pardon me, I mean the illogical nature of the screaming and shrieking by hysterical lying-ass Democrats about Obamacare — betray the fact that we are not hearing a debate on the issue. Issues are debates in a forum where the two parties have a common ground and a common context, an agreement on the nature of the disagreement, an agreement on the nature of the debate, and the ground rules.
We are dealing here with another creature entirely. What makes such blithering stupidity, such screaming irrationality, such hatred, such contempt, seem reasonable and right to the Left? I submit that is it because we are dealing with a worldview, with a vision. The Leftist love the vision and they needs must hate anything hindering or demeaning the vision. Any disagreement with the vision is akin to insulting a man’s wife or innocent mother, an insult he must avenge at any cost, by any means.
In this case, the vision is the one exemplified by the song ‘Just Imagine’. Imagine a world without boundaries, without hatred, without religious belief or religious wars, a world were there are no possessions and no poverty, and the benevolent and all powerful loving Caesar cares for us and strokes us and pets us and gives us cellphones and health care and good jobs and self respect. Caesar gives us everything freely and without limit. Compare the beauty of that vision with the crass stupidity, evil, ugliness, injustice, and hatred of this world. Anyone who is unconvinced to serve and love the vision is obviously a partisan in favor of crass stupidity, evil, ugliness, injustice, and hatred. Who is so wretched and diabolical as to favor war over peace, want over plenty, hell over paradise? Well, obviously the enemies of Caesar are devils. They are racists bigots, homophobic bigots, Islamophobic bigots and bigoted bigots.
I suggest that, at the moment, there is a gray area between those who serve the vision and those who serve God. Today, right now, you do not need to make a decision. You can be a libertarian, and be opposed to Obamacare on purely rational grounds that it does not work and cannot work, and that it is immoral to rob men, even when you rob in the name of the poor. Right now, you can be a Christian and a Leftist, and say that you are serving Christ by using the government to see to it that the poor are fed and the sick receive care. The decision is not yet utterly black and white.
But I observe that the gray strip is shrinking. The Democratic Party is unwilling to mention God in the Party platform. The calls for outlawing Biblical teachings on homosexuality in the name of preventing hate speech get louder, and bromides about being willing to die for speech with which one disagrees dribble off into silence. The number of non-Christian conservatives shrinks.
The political issues severing the Right and Left fall into irrelevance. There is no political issue in the question of mandated funding of abortion by private companies. There is no great cry for this, no need for it, no one who suffers a political or civic loss if the issue is decided one way or the other. This issue is purely one of rights in the abstract, purely a moral issue. Either the Catholics have the right to serve God (which includes obeying Him on issues of sexual morality) or they serve the Vision, which says to do the opposite of the law of God.
Likewise, there is no political issue surrounding sodomy laws or gay marriage. This issue of purely one of rights in the abstract, purely a moral issue.
Likewise again, there is no issue at all, because there is no question, on the relative dangers from Christian suicide bombers versus Islamic suicide bombers. No one outside Bedlam equates these two dangers, a real one with an utterly imaginary one, for any purpose other than to serve and promote the Vision.
The Vision is a vision of paradise, whose gate is barred by an authority figure, usually a white male Christian, either God or a stand-in for God. The Vision is about rebellion against authority in the name of victimhood. The vision requires, even when Leftists are in authority in the government, in the media, in the academy, in the courts of law, in the entertainment industry, for the Leftists to be the victims of tyrannous oppression by the authority and to be in rebellion against authority. There is never an outside enemy or mutual foe. There are no Islamics, no Soviets, no Nazis. The Islamics are fellow victims of the evil authority of the father-figure of the Republicans, the White Man, or God, the Soviets are noble freedom fighters against God, and the Nazis are the Republicans.
The Church says that God is the source and the goal of all happiness. The Vision says God (or whatever stand-in authority figure is being demonized) is the enemy of happiness, and stands in your way to what you really want, what you really deserve, and what you really need.
The only problem with this vision is that it is false-to-facts on every point, it contradicts itself, and it is utterly insane. If even part of it were sane, the Leftists might be tempted to compare the vision with reality and find it defective. As it is, it is so disconnected with reality, there is no temptation.
And the Vision is growing.
The Vision now reaches to more things, touches more people, makes more demands, shows up on more places, than ever before. I have seen it grow in my lifetime from almost nothing to almost everything.
And the more and more the vision grows, the more sanity and reality and decency and logic, the more God, in other words, is crowded into the margins, and either falls silent or takes a stand and fights back.
The issues more and more become questions of stark loyalty: either one follows the Vision or one follows God.
What is the purpose of the world? It cannot have no purpose at all, for there is too much richness and meaning in life for life to be purposeless; nor can the purpose be something each man invents for himself, arbitrarily and experimentally, for then all walks and ways of life would be equally rewarding, and experience shows the opposite. The world cannot be merely a penal colony, meant for pain, for there is too much joy and good in the world, too much that is sublime, nor an illusion, meant to deceive, for there is too much that is true; the world cannot be merely meant to make us happy, merely a stage for us to seek pleasure, for there is too much that is painful, gross, and full of sorrow.
There are perhaps other options. They prove equally inadequate as explanations upon examination. One purpose only the world always seems to serve, one thing only any life of any man, even the weakest and worst life, is always called to do. Every day, every hour, a man by his acts or by his prayers can decide to serve Christ or to rebel against Him. Even a man on an empty island, even a prisoner in a jail cell, even the dying man in his sickbed can do some act or say some prayer to the glory of God, to pray for his fellow man. Those who are not lost or imprisoned or sick to death can use their hands to aid their fellow man, and so serve God. There is no day that passes where some deed cannot be done. There is no event, howsoever painful or pleasant that cannot be used either as a temptation to turn away from God or as an opportunity to repent and serve Him.
Every other choice in life has a gray area or a third alternative. Not this one. The choice is either black or white. There is no one who has no opinion about Jesus Christ, or a mild opinion. Those who do not love Him, hate Him. There are those who wish not to pay Him the compliment of finding Him worthy of hatred, so they will dissemble and pretend merely to have pity or contempt for Him or His followers.
Perhaps, at this time, there are still men who have not made up their mind. They still weigh and balance the arguments and evidence, and search their hearts for wisdom.
The Vision crowds them out of the world. They will soon be forced either to declare for the Vision and for the culture of death, and trample the crucifix and curse the name of Christ, or to declare for Christ, who is the way and the truth and the life.
I choose life.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
