The Last Crusade 10: the Majesty of Truth
A former column lists the nine principles held by all men of good will, for which the Last Crusade takes up the cross.
We hold to the majesty of truth; the impartiality of reason; the objectivity of reality. We believe in the authority of virtue; the verity of beauty; the dignity of man; the equality of the law; the glory of patriots; and all the foregoing we hold steadfastly, for we are fast held in the love of Christ.
In a word, the Crusader stands for truth, reason, sanity; for virtue, beauty, dignity; we revere equal justice under law; we salute the flag and kiss the cross.
All nine principles are necessary to preserve the soul of Western Civilization.
Each of the nine principle is held in dispute or held in contempt by a modern heresy whose names are Legion: postmodernism, socialism, political correctness, social justice, tolerance, diversity, Leftism, Gnosticism, nihilism, untruth, barbarism, identity politics, antilife, Morlockery. Use whatever name fancy suggests, since none fit the truth of the matter. In this column, it is called only the Enemy, for it has no being in and of itself. It exists only to drain, to hinder, oppose and destroy the host that gives it life.
The Enemy is not merely a political movement, albeit is cloaked as one. It is a world-view; an ersatz religion; a dark dogma that reaches to every aspect of life and makes an absolute demand for absolute conformity. It is like a religion, but opposite to it.
It is an Anti-religion.
Because it cloaks itself as merely a political movement, this Anti-religion has never been fought except with political means by politically-minded men with pragmatic goals in mind.
It need not be explained why such weapons are insufficient.
Politics by its nature demands compromise; religion by nature forbids compromise. Politics by its nature demands immediate and visible results, and weighs the costs against the gains. Religion by its nature counts no costs save for spiritual ones, and the gains are imponderable, unseen, immeasurable. A martyr counts no costs for his gain, being spiritual, is infinite. And the Enemy has his martyrs also.
The Enemy cannot tolerate to allow even such peripheral matters as trivial entertainments such as science fiction stories, comedy routines, or adventure comics aimed at children, to be free from their political correctness for exactly the same reason Christians ought not tolerate blasphemy, vulgarity, or pornography in stories, jokes and comics. Because the one drives out the other.
Christ’s love demands that his servants be loyal to him in all things at all times, in thought, word and deed. We are to be free from sin in all matters, and no matter is too small to be overlooked.
The hatred of the Enemy makes the same demand from his servants.
They must rebel in all matters, and no matter is too small to be overlooked. If there is a single children’s cartoon show where sexual abominations are not praised wholeheartedly, if there is a single baker who will not bake a gay wedding cake, they must be hounded from here to Antarctica. Compromise is unobtainable and impossible.
And, like Christianity, the Enemy brings not peace, but a sword. Even friends of many years standing are set at nothing; if his best friend offends political correctness, or mentions Christ in passing, the faithful Leftist will immediately savage, browbeat, and traduce his friend in public, and accuse him with the routine accusations (known to one and all to be false) with which Christians are accused, and unleash every calumny and slander the tongue can reach. Because friendship means nothing compared to political correctness, family means nothing, patriotism means nothing.
When weak, the Enemy pretends to be mutually willing to coexist with Christianity. When it is strong, it uses all its power to trample Christ, drive out his servants, silence his word. Since it is incompatible with Christ it is therefore also incompatible with all the things of Western Civilization springing from Christianity or protected and preserved by it.
Not, let us hasten to add, that the Enemy favors classical or oriental civilization, nor any primitive way of life, nomadic, agrarian or tribal, existing outside civilization. Enemy propaganda might praise aspects of life in the East, or might glamorize the noble savage who dances with wolves, when some truncheon is needed to browbeat Western Civilization, but since we see no mass exodus to a preferred place beyond the West, we can safely assume that they are in this matter as they are in all other matters: perfect hypocrites.
All institutions are inundated with a similar perfect hypocrisy.
Modern philosophy is jargon and jabberwocky, devoid of meaning. Modern scholarship deconstructs scholarship, and ever seeks new reasons to declare all reasoning hopeless. The physical sciences are reduced to mutual accusations of perjury by partisans whose motives are partisan. Those once trusted to instruct the young on the differences between right and wrong, instead quarrel over which degree of libertine license is to be allowed to unbridled sin and at what ages. Rubbery and elliptical moral standards are used only to demonize and silence opponents. Marriage has no meaning, words have no meaning, art has no meaning. Motherhood is a failure of contraception, that is to say, a regrettable failure of Antimotherhood. The most dangerous place for children is the womb of a modern woman; but when old age comes, her surviving children will put that same infanticidal mother to death by slow degrees, through starvation and thirst. Popular entertainment is nothing more than an instrument of social engineering, a disease vector for dull message fiction. Animals are said to have rights, and men are said to lack rights, under the rubric that men are animals. Unequal laws are promulgated in the name of equality. Justice is abolished in the name of social justice.
More institutions than merely academia, education, ethics, marriage, motherhood, entertainment, laws and justice are involved in the corruption. Everything touched by the Left takes on this particular essential quality of untruth. The question is why.
Hypocrisy is the most frequently uttered accusation to leap from the lips of the politically correct. By no coincidence, it is also the core of their doctrine. Political Correctness is nothing other than a means to make hypocrisy seem palatable and even noble to those eager to be deceived by it.
Hypocrisy allows a man with low standards or no standards to criticize, demean, demoralize and dismiss anyone with high standards, and therefore to deflect any criticism from himself. Standards are used only as a weapon to sucker punch good and decent people, and make goodness and decency seem untrustworthy, judgmental, oppressive, and unpleasant. But then the flexibility of having no standards means that one can scream like a rabid banshee when accusing the innocent of imaginary wrongdoing, but at the same time one can commit the same wrong, or worse wrongs, while wrapped in an aura of sanctity.
The recent artificial outrage ginned up over, for example, Trump merely boasting of tempting ladies to immodesty when the accusation came from the wife of a rapist known for defending him, shows how the system works. Friends are excused in all things, and foes are condemned in all things. And if the foe has offended no standard, a new standard is invented for the purpose of being to be too high for anyone to clear.
And this new standard applies only to foes, never to friends. Calling a cross-dresser by the wrong pronoun is an offense, but rioters smashing windows, burning dumpsters, and assaulting women to shut down a conservative speaker at a Berkley campus is not an offense.
At one time, it was known and understood that every man owed loyalty to the truth.
Loyalty to truth also implied an open-minded willingness to hear the reasoning behind views opposed to his own. Loyalty to truth implies an open-eyed honesty that looks reality square in the face, howsoever harsh or uncomfortable that reality might be.
Violation of the ethical rules and principles we all tacitly acknowledge to bind all of us is another kind of untruthfulness. Liars are not true to their word, adulterers not true to their wives, and traitors are not true to their flag, and apostates are not true to their faith. In times past, this loyalty to truth also involved truthfulness in art and poetry, for in those days the link between truth and beauty had not been severed.
In the modern age, loyalty to truth is scorned as dangerous, irrational, and hateful. For this reason, those on the Left feel not even the slightest particle of shame when they show no willingness whatsoever to give opposing views a fair hearing, or any kind of hearing.
They regard all opponent as Neanderthals, lunatics, plague bearers and demons, creatures to be quarantined into silence or slaughtered like mad dogs.
Looking reality square in the face has no meaning if reality is what each man creates for himself, or if reality is forever cloaked behind genetic or cultural bigotries imposed on our perceptions unwittingly.
Harsh truth becomes mere harshness in a world without truth.
No one can for an instant believe that all truth is relative, since the statement “all truth is relative” is an absolute. No man can say that no man can say what is true. It is a self-refuting statement. It is nonsense.
How did nonsense come to be modern orthodoxy? How did the Enemy convince otherwise sane men to embrace naked insanity?
Evil is a parasite. It never conquers by its own power, but only by setting a lesser good above a greater good, and using the love in which the first is held to erode the love held for the second. The frog will not leap out of the pot if the temperature s raised one degree by slow increments: By slow increments the second thing is said to be incompatible with the first, then a matter of personal judgment, then an arbitrary choice, then irrational, then dangerous, then evil.
In this case, the lesser good selected for elevation is tolerance. It other name is pluralism.
In the aftermath of the Reformation and Counterreformation, and the wreckage of generations of sectarian conflict and persecution, the just and pragmatic solution proffered by writers during the so-called Enlightenment was to recuse the state from all interference in church affairs.
This meant the disestablishment of national churches which had sprung up during the Reformation, and the removal of secular authority and privileges from the Church. Men were each to worship in the form as his individual conscience saw fit, and the matter was to be private rather than communal, individual rather than collective.
Philosophically, this meant that the truth claims of the denominational differences of doctrine had to be undermined.
Indeed, any man who insisted that his denomination and his alone was the orthodox and God-given truth was now seen as a threat to the public peace, since his insistence might spark discontent, and eventually violence, among the disunited denominations each making mutually exclusive claims of absolute truth.
An exception was made for science. Since science made no claims that could not be checked against observation and experiment, and since no scientific claims were to be accepted on authority nor by tradition, the claims of scientific theories to absolute truth were not a source of civic danger. Science alone was allowed to claim absolute truth for its findings. (Which is ironic, because the scientific method forbids science to make any such claim: all conclusions of science are probationary and conditional, that is, “true until disproven.”)
But this gave the physical sciences a glamor and a prestige previously only held by the Church. It was now the sole source and font of absolute truth.
In America, for many decades, this armistice of absolute truth could be maintained (and disputes kept in the calm and private sphere) because the mainstream Protestant denominations agreed on so many basic points of morality and law. All were willing to uphold a somewhat vaguely common consensus: monotheism, monogamy, private property, the dignity of man and the equality of the laws, and so on. This allows soldiers and Boy Scouts, for example, all to be ready to join in public prayers of a vaguely Deist sort.
In return for peace, all men agreed politely not to make public claims of absolute truth. When the Jews settled in America in increasing numbers, they also tacitly agreed to the armistice, and the consensus came to be called the Judeo-Christian values. (It should be noted that pagan religions need not agree to any such armistice, since they are syncretic in nature, and therefore make no claims to an exclusive absolute truth. It should also be noted that Mohammedanism is a heretical in nature, not pagan, and makes a claim of absolute truth, but agrees to no armistice.)
With the failure of the French Revolution, however, and the rise of Socialism, the Enemy found an easy method to sap and undermine this consensus, so that they could come armed to the armistice, and break it with impunity.
First, the Socialists claimed that their truth claims were based on science. In the case of Russian socialists, it was called scientific socialism. In the case of German national socialists, it was call race science. This meant they alone of all religions had no need to abide by the polite courtesy of making no claim of absolute truth. The rule only applied to others, not to them.
Second, since the socialists held all theology in scorn, they could claim not to be a religion on the quite reasonable grounds that they did not worship a god. That they are a religion in every other respect was held to be insignificant. This meant that they could approach the sovereign with demands that their worldview be supported and enforced by the coercive power of the law. No other religion is so supported under the Enlightenment scheme. The separation of crown and miter only applied to others, not to them.
Third, since natural philosophy had found no clearly obvious nor popular secular grounds for upholding Christian standards of chastity, chivalry, courtesy and decency, the Enemy could claim that because Christian faith was a matter of private opinion, the laws and customs relating to chastity, chivalry, courtesy and decency was likewise matters of private opinion.
This tossed the ethical and moral standards of Western civilization out of the consensus protected by the armistice and into the private sphere. Of course, the politically standards of what is and is not “appropriate” to speak or think are still firmly held to be absolute and to apply to all men at all times. The rule that ethics are a matter of private opinion does not apply to their ethics, only to yours.
By this argument, the Rights of Man, being sacred, therefore must include an inalienable and god-given right to be an unchaste, discourteous, and indecent cad and caitiff, scoundrel and boor.
And so the same armistice that applied to matters of religion, in order to bring peace to religious quarrels and tumults, was extended to moral questions. It became impolite to make exclusive claims of absolute truth on questions of morality, including ironically, the lighter questions of morality, such as what is and is not polite.
The courtesy of being willing and able to listen to opposing viewpoints, and the moral duty to render a just, fair, and open minded judgement only after hearing both sides of a case, also fell by the wayside, and for the same cause: to preserve the peace. If morals are a matter of personal opinion, then so is reason.
Chastity, that is, a man being faithful to his wife, is a collective proposition. No one can be unchaste without at least one partner to aid him in the affair. Since the matter involves trysts between male and female, the unchastity is either universally condemned by the consensus, with laws and customs to punish the deviant and unfaithful, or, if it is permits even limited exceptions, it eventually permits all things to all men.
If two or three women out of ten agree to copulate with any lover in or out of marriage, the eight or seven out of ten attempting to maintain a standard forbidding out of wedlock affairs will be undermined for the same reason low-priced goods outsell high-priced goods of the same quality. The remaining eight or seven must either combine to punish the two or three, to drive up the moral hazard of unchastity, or the market will punish them for holding a standard higher than the consensus will tolerate, that is, prospective mates will desert them seeking easier markets. The eight or seven rapidly become six, four, and two as women desert the standard to attract a mate. In other words, nine or ten out of ten of the women in society must agree to uphold the standards of the consensus, or else they will not be upheld.
The fact that women are remarkably more unhappy under this new system than under the old, as testified by their rising rates of divorce, childlessness, insanity, drug abuse, and suicide is one more truth that, since it cannot be claimed as an absolute, need never be addressed at all. Those who mention facts need only been shouted into silence, demeaned, and called bad names.
And, by the same logic, as long as eight or seven out of ten women demean and outshout any woman expressing unhappiness with the false promises of feminism, the consensus will be maintained. Women now work outside the home, but instead of enjoying the liberty and zest jealousy told them men possess, they found they are now part of the rat race, a turmoil once exclusively shouldered by men, whose unhappiness with it could be soothed in the oasis of domestic life. Now there is no oasis for either sex.
Please note that the feminists of the modern generation do not blame their unhappiness on their own failures, but continue to blame men, whom they continue to expect to act as princes on white steeds riding to the rescue of damsels in distress. The essential hypocrisy of their stance is the difference between suffragettes (who the Republicans overwhelmingly supported, and Democrats opposed) and modern feminists (whom Democrats overwhelmingly support, but who Republicans, out of courtesy, cannot bring themselves to oppose).
The basic legal inequalities were removed, and the problem was solved, and so the Left moved in to make women miserable.
Likewise, when the cause of equality between the races was based on truth, including Biblical truth, as it was during the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, it was overwhelmingly Republican. Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Nathan Bedford Forrest are all Democrats. Now, when the cause of equality between the races has been reduced to squabbling over imaginary micro aggressions, the cause is overwhelmingly Leftist.
The basic legal inequalities were removed, and the problem was solved, and so the Left moved in to make blacks angry and petty, and cut back law enforcement to help the drug abuse epidemic, and brought in welfare schemes to break up black families, and brought in Planned Parenthood to kill black babies.
And so for all political causes. Not until it becomes rank hypocrisy does it become part and parcel of Leftist policy.
Political Correctness, then, offers its partisans a get-out-of-logic free card, since their claim is that they merely utter scientific truths based on solid evidence: and that among these are the truths that mankind does not and cannot possess absolute truth in any matter of religion, ergo of morals, ergo of courtesy, ergo of reasoning and logic. Which means, no one can make any claim of absolute truth at all. Except them.
With this, we come to the utter desolation promised by the lyrics from Lennon’s IMAGINE: there is no heaven, no property, nothing to kill or die for. But no one enters the realm of utter desolation until he first denounces his loyalty to truth.
The devil’s bargain offered is the offer of peace and order. All we need do is surrender our laws, customs, powers of reasoning, faith in God, all our possessions, and everything that makes us human. In a word, we will have peace, once we surrender our souls.
The bargain offered by heaven has better terms. Each man knows in his heart of hearts that truth is more than just dry scientific facts. Truth is beautiful, and demands a love akin to the patriots love of his home land. Truth is majestic, and, like all majesties, demands we bow the knee, and we know this demand is right and good and just. A falsehood uttered even when convenient, even when spoken to spare the feelings of the weak, erodes honor, erodes manhood, erodes virtue, because it spits in the face of the virgin purity of the truth.
It is at this most basic root of all thinking – the question of whether or not human thought is true or not true – that the most basic battle is fought.
We were told not to fight this battle, because the price was too high and the losses would be too severe.
But the Left lied. The Left did not and does not abide by the cease-fire: so they shoot at us and we shoot not back.
We were told not to fight this battle. Truth is a matter for philosophers and intellectuals, and it is too airy and high a question for a plain spoken honest man to speak plainly about.
But the Left lied. Left stirs up violent mobs, or busses in hired protestors, to commit acts of violence against honest and innocent men, and this matter is not somehow too ethereal for every common man to understand. We need not be geniuses to know the difference between truth and falsehood, only to be honest.
For decades, in the name of tolerance and pluralism, we were promised peace if we surrendered all claim of absolute truth, like Lot surrendering his virginal daughters to the mob. And, like the mob blinded by the angels behind Lot, we have lost sight of what truth is, how to find it, how to recognize it.
But the Left lied. The promise of peace was false, and the peace did not come. Instead, the Twentieth Century saw the violent death of more human beings, in the name of Communism, Socialism, Leftism than any other century.
Instead of the absolute truth based on reason, logic, and revelation, we have absolute political correctness. An honest man bows to the truth, because a truthful man is humble. Political Correctness is based on the power of the establishment to control the narrative, silence dissent, and stir up mob violence to intimidate. A political correct man bows to the powerful because he has the heart of a slave.
Honest men will bow to the majesty of truth because we will not bow to the mob named Legion.
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.
