http://www.lifenews.com/2012/05/15/obama-mandate-forces-catholic-college-to-drop-insurance/

The world is attempting, and with nearly unopposed success, to drive all religion, especially Christians, and most especially Catholics, out of the public square. Our Elite Masters have been willing, in times past, to allow Christians to do the works of charity, care for the poor, see to the sick, educate the ignorant, free the slave.

But no longer.Charities not willing to help freed slaves have free abortions are defunded; institutions not willing to fund and celebrate aborticides, sterilization, contraception are being forced to give up their conscience and their rights of conscience or else give up their insurance.

It is not that these who are in need will have their needs filled by that secular church we call the State — that they will suffer does not come into the calculus of the compassionate and reality-based community. They want to smite their fathers, and we are a convenient stand-in. That is why the Church is being driven away.

http://aardvarknow.us/2012/05/09/letter-to-the-department-of-justice/

Anti-trust laws are anti-just. If you set your price even with your competitors, that is price fixing; if above, that is evidence of monopoly due to market dominance; if below, that is evidence of predatory pricing.

Anti Trust Law was the Progressive Movement first, greatest, and most utterly illogical victory in legislation coming back to bite us.

A reader who, on other topics, I deem worthy of respect, has ventured the following comment in regards the Iraqi war:

“When we invaded, freeing the Iraqi people was not anywhere near the top of the list of reasons given to the American public. Only after a succession of the original rationals turned out to be hogwash, did the administration start using the “promote democracy” argument.”

The implication here seems to be (I am not sure I get his point) that since the “promote democracy” argument was not argued vehemently at first, therefore the democracy in Iraq does not count as really “real”. He is intellectually aware of it, in some distant, numb way, but that is not where the spotlight of his reason and passion are focused: the spotlight is on Bush and Cheney, whom he regards as sinister figures, and he says these public figures were obviously not sincere in their desire to go to war for the right reasons, so we must not trust them now. Freeing people doesn’t “count” unless your motives were too pure to be slandered from the get-go. Or something. Actually, I don’t understand his point at all. So let us put that to one side for now.

If I did not have respect for this man, I would simply call him a liar. As it is, I will argue as if his recollection of the event leading up to the war are valid, and therefore he need only be told the facts of the matter to correct him.

He makes one statement of fact which can be proved wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt and to a moral certainty. The original rationale for the war is the same now as it has always been.

Since someone else has done the work for me, I will simply post his line of argument in full, saving my comment for the end.

Note particularly item 7, the argument to end the brutal repression of the Iraqi people; which is not only not at the bottom of the list, it is the second item after item 6, the argument of a threat from weapons of mass destruction.

http://qando.net/archives/002062.htm

With the end of the Iraq war, comes the question…was the war justified?

Of course, one must define the justification for war first.

Was it human rights? Was it terrorism? Was it WMDs all along, with the others justifications only claimed after the fact?

Well, there’s only one definitive answer, and it always suprises me that this is still debated. The justification for war has long been codified and official.

It is described in the October 10th, 2002 “House Joint Resolution Authorizing Use of Force Against Iraq“, and it is quite clear.

We’ll list the justifications and see if they have been confirmed, or found wanting.

• What’s Wrong with the World Part I — Introduction
• What’s Wrong With The World Part II— Qualifications & Definitions
• What’s Wrong With The World Part III —Illogical
• What’s Wrong With The World Part IV —Hypocritical
• What’s Wrong With The World Part V —More Hypocrisy— Four Puzzles
• What’s Wrong With The World Part VI —Vicious
• What’s Wrong With The World Part VII— Ignorant
• What’s Wrong With The World Part VIII—More Ignorance — The Parochialism of the Enlightened
• What’s Wrong With The World Part IX—More Ignorance — A Digression on Intolerance
• What’s Wrong With The World Part X—More Ignorance—A Digression on Ingratitude
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XI—More Ignorance—The Necessity of Ignorance
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XII—Barbaric
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XIII—More Barbarism—Paranoia
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XIV—More Barbarism—Loss of Authority
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XV—Craven
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XVI —Ugly
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XVII—Foolish
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XVIII—More Folly—The Role of Science
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XIX—Confused
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XX—More Confusion—Seven Deadly Sins
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XXI—More Confusion—The Role of Incoherence
• What’s Wrong With The World Part XXII—Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

wrf3 writes

“I hold to the rules of logic … because without them communication with others is impossible, and because they are required for coherence with the natural world. In other words, if I want my bridges to keep standing, there are certain mathematical forms that I must follow. If I want to talk to you, there are also certain forms that I must follow.”

Very good: do you also want to be honest with me when you talk to me? Do you want me to be honest to you? Do you want to be honest to yourself in your own thinking when you use the rule of logic on logical propositions, or when communicating, or when building bridges? Because you could of course choose to deceive yourself, use rhetoric rather than logic, communicate lies and nonsense, and let the bridges fall.

My question specifically is about this conversation. Do you want me to be honest with you when we discuss this matter, to tell the truth, not to play rhetorical tricks or change the subject, and not to pretend I have won the debate if I lost it?

If so, what it is you are wanting when you want that?

I submit that what you are wanting is that I adhere to a moral standard we both tacitly acknowledge as having authority over us. Since I did not make it up and neither did you, and I never agreed to it and neither did you, the common sense conclusion is that it is not manmade. Since this rule applies no matter what the laws of physics are, it is not a rule deduced from any empirical perception, any more than the rules of logic or math.

“We generally think it is wrong to break one’s word because that is uncooperative behavior and we, as a species, realize that our biology works better when we cooperate…”

So, if I were a Martian, or a ghost, or a robot, or some other creature with a slightly different or very different biology, would it be morally right for me to break my word in that circumstance?

What makes you think the biological origins are inventing something rather than perceiving something? My eye is a biological organ, but it perceives light, it does not create light.

“You’ve taken a biological fact and enshrined it in mysticism, because you don’t understand the underlying mechanism.”

My theory about the origins of the perception of the moral order of the universe has not the slightest hint mysticism to it. Puh-lease.

But, even granting your argument about the biological origins of morality, what makes you think that cheating at chessgames is not a Darwinian survival trait?

One would think that games existed only so recently in cosmic history, and to be so unrelated to survival chances, that there was no time for a natural selection for good sportsmanship to develop any statistically significant numbers in any particular bloodlines?

(Also, which bloodlines are prone to cheating? Blacks? Jews? Chinese? By your theory, scientists should discover the good sportsman gene, find out which races have it, and sports clubs, for their own self protection, expel any members with that gene, since, by your account, they have no moral rule to follow aside from what that gene programs them to do.)

Or are you saying that, due to a natural selection pressure for cooperation and altruism and honesty, men are naturally and instinctively honest the same way birds are naturally able to fly and build nests? If so, the theory does not fit the observed facts: there were four murders in my local newspaper today, and lies in every section of the paper except the sports section.

Ah, but if you argue that Darwinian selection also selects for non-cooperation and dishonesty, then all we are left with is a statement that humans both have a dishonest instinct and an honest instinct. In my example above, where we agree to a chessgame, and I break my word, and we did not agree to a rule that I ought not break my word, what is the source of any objection you might make to my behavior if I lie?

If you (in the hypothetical) say to me, “But we agreed to the rules that this game would not allow castling, and you broke our agreement” and I say, “But we did not agree to the rule that I should not break agreements,” your response cannot be, “But the laws of Darwin say that you should have an instinctive desire to be honest, ergo to be cooperative, ergo to be a good sport,” because then two things will happen: (1) I will say “But the laws of Darwin also equip me with an instinct for aggression and deception — what makes the Darwinian law of dishonesty more imperative than the Darwinian law of cooperation?” (2) I will break your skull with the jawbone of a smilodon, kill your child and eat his brains, and drag your widow off to my cave and father ten children on her, so that I win the Darwinian competition for survival and reproduction.

Just kidding. I would not actually do that. For one thing, you might be spry and strong. For another thing, you cannot actually believe that the Darwinian struggle bestows any authority on my instincts to make them the legislator of rules I ought to obey whether I am inclined to obey or not, because by that logic, Ghenjis Khan is the most moral man of all time, since his selfish genes can be found spread farther and wider than any other man known to history.

Which leads to my final question. Consider my hypothetical of the two chessplayers. I won’t you me and you as an example, so let us call them Spassky and Kasparov. They agree to play a variation of chess where no castling is allowed. In the ninth move, Kasparov castles. There was no formal agreement to the a stated rule that both men should keep their word.

Do you agree that Kasparov has a general obligation to be honest, and that breaking his word is a violation of that imperative?

If so, the would the obligation exist if, bitten by a radioactive spider, the genes controlling Kasparov’s instinct for cooperation were marred, so that they no longer influenced his glands and nervous system?

In other words, if morality has a biological basis, once the organ or gene or physical substratum creating the instinct fails, is the moral obligation gone?

If so, then in what why is following a moral rule different from following a natural inclination or instinct? Are there two instincts, one governing selfish and dishonest desires, and the other governing tribal and social interactions which urges selflessness and honesty? If there are two instincts, on what grounds do we chose what we ought to do?

If not, then there are situations where a man ought to obey certain moral rules despite the lack of an instinct to obey them. In the situations where the instincts are giving us shortsighted or wrong information, on what grounds do we chose what we ought to do?

“But it’s possible to show what morality is and how it arises in a purely materialistic framework.”

Not even slightly. All one can show is that, given an moral imperative, such as that a man ought to survive, certain secondary moral imperatives, such as that such-and-such behavior, if it aids him to survive, therefore is also something he ought to do.  Such arguments assume what they are trying to prove.

Indeed, your argument would seem to imply that cheating at chess is bad because it hinders my survival rate. Let us suppose in our hypothetical that Spassky is sterile and Kasparov has twelve children and made donations to a sperm bank. No possible outcome of their chessgame, whether Kasparov cheats or not, has even the slightest effect on their survival and reproductive chances.

Please show me in what way the moral rules of the universe are arbitrary and manmade, like the rules of chess, and can be set aside by mutual agreement, like the rules of chess. Are the rules of logic arbitrary and manmade? Spassky and Kasparov agree that it is morally correct to boil puppies alive and despoil the graves of their fathers, does this make it morally correct? Is it morally correct for them but not for others? Neither the puppies nor the dead can get a vote in this. Can the rules of morality be changed even for those who cannot participate in the process of making new rules?

You say

… Tacit agreement to have an honest conversation on this topic is evidence that we recognize that cooperation is beneficial to both of us. The “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, when iterated, has higher payoffs over the long term when the players cooperate. It’s mathematical, based on biology.

What do you mean when you say we both recognize that cooperation is beneficial to the both of us? Are you claiming that I am under no duty whatsoever to be honest with you in this conversation? Because I solemnly assure you that the payoff goes very much in the other direction. I will win both the admiration of my readers and a sense of cheap superiority by answering you in a Dawkins fashion, with rhetoric, lies, snappy answers, ad hominem, sarcasm, and bad comedy.

But even granting this highly dubious assertion, am I under a moral obligation to seek my own long term benefit? For, if I am not, what becomes of our tacit agreement?

Why should I be honest, when honesty is not cost effective, is clearly not pleasant in the short term, and most likely not pleasant in the long term? None of this produces in me an obligation to be honest, and none of this explains the primary and irreducible fact of psychology of which we are both aware: you and I both, as moral men, are aware of times when the moral imperative is not in our best interest, long or short, or even the group’s best interest.

I would not kill an innocent child to save a tribe, even if it were my own tribe. I would not shove an old lady past childbearing years out of a lifeboat to make room for myself, even if she were not a blood relation.  All civilized men would agree with these examples.

You either have to find a different basis for morality than the prisoner’s dilemma, math, biology, or say that the civilized men in these examples are making the wrong moral choice. Or can you reconcile the two?

If Reason herself, armed like a goddess with the lightning and Medusa-headed hoplon of the chaste Minerva, cannot smite nor deflect nor defeat the Cthulhian indignity, ugliness, insanity and inanity of the modern rebellion against life, liberty, nature, and reason what, then, is to be done?

If, as every Christian man since the First Century has believed, we live in the Last Days, and that mere months or moments separate us from the Second Coming, the only thing to be done is to carry on through the remaining fragment of time with the cheerful stoicism expected of saints and martyrs.

In such a case, the only thing to do is to await in joyful hope for the Deus ex Machina and then the curtain to be lowered on the stage of the tragic drama called Earthly history, so that we may join in the comical cast party held immediately after, shake hands with the Playwright, and gaze in wide-eyed, childlike wonder that the actors playing Hamlet and Laertes are not only not dead, but are the best of friends.

However, the cheerful stoicism with which Christian actors on the stage of the tragedy of Earthly history are expected to carry out our parts also includes that it is not our part to abandon the Earth to the foetid, chthonic and mephitic gargoyles of modernity: our part indeed is to drive them back into their sewers, holes and caves.

Joyous Christian stoicism requires hope and good cheer that gloomy pagan stoicism does not require. When all worldly evidence conspires to announce that the Age of Reason, so brilliantly begun, has ended with the Age of Unreason is upon us; Reason herself, her torch extinguished, sees no hope. But Christians do not limit their hope to worldly things, no more than the conquered peoples in Vichy France or Quisling Norway put their hopes in the Nazi occupier. There is something beyond Reason that supports her, and gives Reason her authority and power.

In my youth, I thought a return of the exiled philosophers would bring light to the darkened world; but I despaired, because if all lamps of thought and learning are smashed, and the Vestal fires of ancient tradition quenched, whence comes the fire to light to candle again?

The despair that in my youth clouded my wit was born of the simple error of cause and effect.

As I mentioned above, to me it seemed as the world had gone insane at around the Victorian Age, deepening in insanity throughout the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the modern intellectuals, as if afflicted with a case of St. Vitus’ Dance, seemed busily engaged in tearing away all the limbs and organs of the mind of man, as if eager to blind and lobotomize the world. At the time I regarded this as a revolt against modernity civilization, a rebellion against rationality.

I submit that my youthful prognosis was wrong and was too optimistic. If it were merely human reason that the modern world rejected, reason could cure it, because unreason is self-defeating and self-destructive, and reason enjoys such obvious advantages over unreason both for human felicity and human potency. Unreason is literally weak and powerless: to sweep it away, all that would be needed (so Ayn Rand might suggest) is a general strike by the rational men, the men of the mind, who could stand nonchalantly to one side, perhaps smoking a cigarette marked with a dollar sign, while the men of unreason destroyed themselves, and could emerge against after the shouting and dying was over to restore civilization on a rational basis.

As I said, too optimistic, if not utterly naïve. For I was an atheist in my youth, and during my bachelorhood and early fatherhood, and so I mistook against what it was that the modern world was rebelling. I dismissed Nietzsche because he was irrational, a polylogist,  a mystic, but I did not dismiss him because he was an atheist. I thought, as most atheists think, that faith in God and loyalty to the principle of logic and reasoning were mutually exclusive. St. Thomas Aquinas, had only I believed what I read in him, would have put me right: Logos, the Greek principle of Logic, as well as the Christian Word of God, is one and the same.

The moderns were not rebellion against reason. What philosopher can rebel against reason? They were rebelling against the thing from which Reason sprang. They were rebelling against the fountainhead, not the stream. It was Faith, the mother of Reason, who was the target of their incoherent ire. They were rebelling again God, and they had to rebel against Reason in order to make their Miltonian rebellion work.

Much as it will pain my atheist friends to hear this, the role of reason in the Western world was invented by the Greek, upheld by the Romans, and when those Romans became Christians, Reason was merged, melted and mated to the Christian religion so that one cannot accept Christ without excepting reason, and cannot accept Reason without accepting Christ.

Reason without Christ, if elevated to the sum and final Good of Man, leads to inhuman anger like Marx or inhuman selfishness like Ayn Rand, or inhuman angry selfishness like Dawkins, or inhuman inhumanity like Peter Singer.

These days, the only context in which the pagan sages and their work is viewed is through the restorations, writings and interpretations of the Christian saints. If the two were not linked, the Moderns would embrace Reason and reject Christ: and to be sure there are Deists and Objectivists who do. But their relative obscurity implies the position is a balancing act, difficult to maintain, almost ad hoc. The position of a Deist or an Objectivist, someone who worships the God of the Philosophers or who vows to live life for no other man, this is not a position leading to a sufficiently robust theory of ethics, politics, aesthetics and norms to serve real human beings as sufficient guides to duty and happiness in real life. No one in a sick bed calls for a Deist preacher to fly to his side, so that he might recite the Watchmaker Argument one last time.

The role of reason as an objective and authoritative instrument for determining true from false, certain from uncertain, makes sense and serves practical use in life in the context of Christian metaphysics.

In Christian metaphysics, we believe in an objective and rational creation created by an objective and rational Creator, who both designed Man and granted him the power of reason to deduce the unchanging moral and physical laws of creation; and designed the creation with moral and physical laws vulnerable to the mind and reason of man.

What other metaphysical system supports reason? Confucius is a pragmatic rather than abstract thinker, and speaks dismissively of metaphysics. He comes to the same pragmatic conclusions as a Machiavelli or a Hobbes, and deduces that the best way to rule the commoners is by iron law; Lao Tzu is mystical and will not even speak of the Way, since the Way that is spoken is not the Way; Buddha rejects the world as Maya, illusion, and seeks the answer to the world’s pain in the renunciation of the world, the retreat into the stillness of non-thought; al-Ghazali put paid to Avicenna’s thought or Averroes’ that cause and effect, or the objects of the created world, had their own unchanging and rational nature, but instead proposed a world as arbitrary as the Maya of the Buddhists, except it was the will of the incomprehensible Allah; and the various neopagans who pretend to follow the lore and wisdom on the classical thinkers are merely persons who adopt a Christian worldview but leave out Christ, or add a belief in reincarnation, or want a universe where magic is licit, or sexual deviance, but above all one where they are never criticized, judged, or condemned—the thoughts and writings of Aristotle and Plato, much less Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, will not be found among the neopagans, but will be found among the Christians.

Modern metaphysics, to the degree that such a ragged collection of junk can be said to have one, speaks fondly of reason, when and only when it is a useful stick to beat the cur of Christianity, but then goes on to say:

(draw a deep breath)

…. the universe is incomprehensible or irrational or lacks cause and effect because science proves the universe exists in a noumenal realm of which we have no knowledge; man is incomprehensible or irrational because he is but a machine or a beast or an evolved creature who is merely occupying a waystation to the next step of evolution, the superman, the Moorlock, whose moral code we have no way to comprehend and no right to judge … Science has disproved free will, and hence neither man nor superman actually has a moral code and sexual perversions are determined by genetic defects, therefore to condemn or judge any person on a moral and ethical ground is immoral and unethical and an abuse of your free will according to the non-laws of the non-universe … Meanwhile, reality is subjective and words have no innate or stable meaning, therefore reality is what the Party says it is, and words mean what the misinterpreter wants them to mean, not what the speaker means them to mean. Women are men and children are men and dogs and cats are men and everyone is a man except for men, who should act more loving soft, and girlish … Except that girls are men, so to use the word girlish to describe a feminine trait is an insult … Except that all cultures are relative, all words mean nothing, so that there is no standard of chivalry decency or courtesy we enlightened must uphold; except that political correctness trumps factual correctness, so that there are very strict and very ruthlessly enforced and utterly arbitrary standards of courtesy that we define according to real or imaginary offenses that victimized hence morally superior victim-groups can define; and we, the enlightened, not members of those groups, get to define what offends them on their behalf, whether they agree or know or not … And your brain is merely a collection of meaningless atoms thrown together by selfish genes, and your feelings of unselfishness are chemical influences distorting your thought, therefore proper moral conduct consists of abiding by altruistic and unselfish impulses, on the grounds that the self genes created them in order to propagate the species; and the first, highest, and only principle of human conduct is to screw as many partners of either sex as frequently and vehemently as possible, using birth control to ensure sterility, killing your children in the womb whenever convenience, angry boyfriends, or whim so dictates, and killing inconvenient old people as soon as they are either brain dead or might be an inconvenience to maintain. Such are the absolute yet relative moral commandments deduced and not deduced from the scientific principle of reproduction of the fittest, to be unselfishly and selfishly followed…

(whew) Need I go on? There is no role for reason in a nonsense world.

With no supernatural and no natural laws there is nothing for reason to reason about: no cause and effect and no free will, no human dignity, neither properties in the philosophical sense nor property in the legal sense, nothing but the endless whining of the endlessly selfish self-indulgent slaves of vice. If the world is meaningless, then everything in the world—life, logic, truth, justice, fairness, freedom, honesty, love, romance, dreams, ambitions, hopes, as well as ideas and ideals and science and the chaste goddess Reason herself—likewise is meaningless.

Now, to be sure, there are in the West still some Aristotelian philosophers who take no notice of Christianity: but in that case their view of the role of reason and their explanation of why it works tends to follow the Aristotelian, that is, the Christian view. Those moderns are not rebellion against reason, but are its advocates (albeit in a strictly limited way, since such will not admit the role of reasoning, say, in theological matters).

If the moderns are abandoning reason, but not in rebellion against reason, what do they rebel against? It may seem as if they are rebelling against life.

Ayn Rand was right that the followers of collectivism and communism are being driven to death, and that only a massive structure of lies could deceive the people into embrace a system that promises wealth and delivers misery. What she mistook was the source: no sane person actually wants to kill himself. The Progressives are not seeking suicide. The evil spirit that leads the Progressives, however, is trying to kill them. The Father of Lies was a murderer from the beginning.

We Christian men, and whatever allies we can find among men of good will in other faiths, or among atheists who adore the foundational concepts of liberty and law on which this nation is based, we are not fighting an alliance of Progressive fascists and Islamic fascists.  We are engaged in spiritual warfare with that same Dark Lord who has deceived the all the unwary sons of Eve, and now deceives all the addicts addicted to falsehood and envy and perversion and corruption. We struggle against principalities and powers of this world. The pagans and agnostic and Christ-bashers and intellectuals and screaming goofballs and sneering know-nothings are not our enemy, no more than a madman is the enemy of the doctor. The disease is the enemy. Darkness is the enemy, not those who are blind in the dark because they have thrown their lamps away.

Philosophy is the rational approach to life, but it is not life itself. Philosophy is the reflection on worldly and divine things, but it is not itself divine. Philosophy is the handmaiden of religion, but cannot (despite the comical attempts of the French Revolution to the contrary) be elevated to the status of religion itself. The attempts to make a philosophical principle the soul and center of life always end either in obscurity, as in Deism or Stoicism, or in horror, as in Communism.

When the American sense of life is found again, and placed on a correct footing, the Western philosophy will return to sanity.

Where is the tree of life? Where is life to be found?

Can anything bring life to a dead culture? When Egypt fell, she never rose again, and no new pyramids were reared, and no new hieroglyphs deciphered. Likewise Babylon, and the Empire of the Hittites. The Medes are no more found. Is there anyone, save for scholars, who speaks their languages or worships their gods? And of the Persians, how many Zoroastrians still light the sacred fires?

Ah, but there in the fires of the Magi we have a hint of light. Zoroastrians still read their ancient texts and worship the Wise Lord. That is the element of the ancient world that survives.

Judging from history, there is one and only one world civilization that fell into destruction and was resurrected without loss of its identity: and that is the Roman Empire, which shattered, suffered attack from Paynim and Norsemen and Nomad, collapsed to barbarism, but revived in the form of a renaissant Christendom, and rose the greatness unsurpassed in the history of the world. The thing that revived Christendom was Christ.

The America has uniquely, several times in history, drawn back from the brink of destruction and returned to her foundational principles. She has shed the blood of tyrants and patriots, or led revivals of Christianity to astound Christendom and to appall the kingdom of Antichrist. Such could easily be in our future: the Progressive have already successfully aborted their children to the point where the demographics favors the followers of the faith of Abraham.

The cure of the world is not a return to philosophy. Philosophy will return once we return to Theology.

Even those who disbelieve, or despise the Church will in times to come realize that they have no palatable options but to support her, unless they want to support the yawning void of nihilism, the mindless love of violence and vice and self-indulgent self-destruction which is rapidly becoming the only other option. The void of nihilism is the gate to Hell.

That void is all that is left once the soul and once the philosophy of a civilization has been lost. It is a void of infinite darkness. Only an infinite Light can fill and vanquish it. And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

1

You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

wrf3  writes:

The sum and substance of all this foregoing is that, for the Moderns, evil is good and good is evil. Virtue is vice. Ugliness is Beauty. Lies are Truth. Men are beasts and beasts are men; men are women; adults are children; chastity is indecent and indecency is decent. Everything is nothing and Nothing is all that there is. A is non-A.

The error here is fundamentally philosophical: the Modern Age is the first age in history with no metaphysical beliefs, aside, perhaps, from a self-contradictory and crude form of materialism.

Without a metaphysics, nothing else in philosophy coheres.

Without a metaphysics, the very basics of human thought, such as the question of whether humans think are not, are clouded by doubt and debate. Things so painfully obvious that they cannot be denied are doubted if not denied outright.

In the meanwhile, things very doubtful indeed, if not disproven and exploded (such as a the theory that language shapes thought, ergo changing vocabulary is  socially useful and morally imperative way to produce harmony and peace; or such as the theory that diversity of nations and races each maintaining defiantly separatist loyalties only to its own members produces social harmony and sustains the common good) are not only noised about as if they are too obvious to discuss, they are enshrined in law, language, cult and custom: pious falsehoods held sacrosanct.

Philosophy cannot cure this. The modern age, lacking any metaphysical framework aside from half-broken and half-insincere pseudo-metaphysics of Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, leavened by  Hegelian misinterpretations of Darwin, lacks the ability to distinguish certain from uncertain, opinion from fact, sound conclusions from airy speculation. This of course includes conclusion about such questions as what is wrong with the world and whether and how it should be fixed. Reason, the only key heaven has provided us to unlock these chains of falsehood and idolatrous idiocy now enmeshing us, is the very key the modern man more vehemently throws as far away from himself as possible.

• What’s Wrong With The World Part XXII—Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

And what happens when each passion is left to advocate its own justification?

Lust is sanctified and disguised as a rebellion against a mean-spirited and antiquated if not pernicious monogamy. I direct your attention to the list I mentioned above of the intellectuals who kept mistresses. Unnatural lust is sanctified as a Civil Right. Sexual excesses and sexual deviation is the new Black, and laws and customs which coerce conformity to chastity are the new Jim Crow, which the zealots of progress seek to abolish.

Envy is sanctified and disguised as concern for the children, or compassion for the poor, or for the conservation of the environment. The desire to punish the allegedly rich doctor and allegedly rich medical insurers for the sin of being rich is never far from the minds of the so-called reformers seeking to destroy the American Health Care industry.

Avarice for public money is sanctified as an appeal to fairness: each constituency demands, rather than asks, for largess from the public coffers as a matter of right. The absurdity of demanding rights in a world which, according to the intellectuals, contains neither right nor wrong, neither rights nor duties, needs no emphasis.

Wrath is sanctified and disguised as self-righteousness, that pompous and overbearing habit of the modern mind to substitute either loud screaming or a whispered set of sneering discourtesies for reasoned discourse. It is the prime and default condition of modern philosophy, particularly on the Left. Note the difference between the anger, the gushing anger, of a crooked figure like Nietzsche or Marx compared to the solemnity of Aristotle or the humility of Socrates, who did not even curse the city that poisoned him.

Gluttony is upheld by modern men both of the leftwing and the rightwing as the proper attitude toward accumulated worldly goods. The one exception is that socialists from time to time trot out a condemnation of gluttony in order to dispraise Capitalism; but since the doctrinaire socialist goes on to claim that socialism is more efficient and will more abundantly create and more widely distribute more and finer worldly  goods, the hypocrisy of the claim is pellucid. (Ironically, with the abundant death, poverty and general misery created by socialist schemes, one hears that claim of the superior economic efficiently of socialism more and more rarely unfurled these days—but since socialist claims are still being made, even the pretense that socialism is a theory of economics rather than a cultic belief in an atheist form of Calvinism is incrementally being dropped.) Nonetheless, the Left have more cause to boast than the Right on this one point: environmentalism, health concerns, the romance of living simply and closer to nature and vaguer spiritual concerns are often uttered by the Left as chides against gluttony. In the same way Wrath is the leitmotif of the Left, Gluttony is the leitmotif of the Right.

Sloth is sanctified and disguised as self-discovery and spontaneity. Just do it. The Moderns excuse and even condone when mothers walk away from husband and children to seek their own personal form of happiness and satisfaction. The routine drudgery of office and field work likewise is despised by modern males, to whom only recreation and preferably drunken recreation offers reward. The Puritan idea of sanctification through hard work is antithetical to the modern apotheosis of the passions. Hard work is inauthentic.

Pride is sanctified as self-esteem, which I discussed above. The absurdity of raising children to play games where there can be no winners and no losers, or the folly of lowering standards to admit women in the military or on to squads of firefighters when such women have not demonstrated the physical capacity to perform the task, or again the folly of replacing a system that rewards race or minority status rather than rewarding merit and hard work, all are manifestations of the passions of self-aggrandizement called pride. We are not talking about pride of workmanship nor pride of accomplishment: we are talking about that passion, never far from the surface of the human mind, to claim the rewards due another on the grounds of self-love, to exclude all others from praise and consideration, to absorb the attention and glory and direct it toward one’s own vanity.

And, of course, the same process works in reverse. The Modern mind not only sanctifies the profane, it profanes the sacred.

Humility, the adverse of Pride, is condemned as a psychologically unhealthy and unsightly lack of self-esteem. Moderns are supposed to give each man to himself that same adoration ancient pagans paid to demigods—but of course, freed from the tyranny of cause and effect, the Modern is supposed to praise himself as brave as Achilles, devout as Aeneas, and cunning as Odysseus, but without actually going to the trouble of being brave, devout or cunning.

Zeal, the adverse of sloth, is condemned as being the ghastly mental disease a workaholic, if not a fanatic. (Albeit, only Christian fanaticism is condemned. To condemn Islamic fanaticism is racist bigotry.)

Temperance, the adverse of gluttony, is condemned as being both joyless and a killjoy. What are you, a Puritan?

Patience, the adverse of wrath, is condemned as indifference to whatever imaginary complaint provokes the self-righteousness or panic of the panicky self-righteous. It is treason to defend the witch from the witch-hunter.

(I recall recently being called a “racist” on the grounds that I objected to calling researchers racists during discussions about unpleasant or politically incorrect empirical facts, rather than, say, questioning the facts. Hearing the case laid out by a rational if mistaken opponent on a scientific question is now one and the same as race-hatred. My accuser was careful to qualify his statement by saying that I was unaware or unwilling to admit my race hatred. Of course, my real thoughtcrime was being willing to be patient and non-wrathful with Goldstein during the Two Minute Hate.)

Generosity, the adverse of Avarice, and Love, the adverse of Envy, and Self-control, the adverse of Lust, are likewise dismissed as either treason to the cause, or mere imprudence, or psychological defects of repression, or sinister desires to control and punish and harm others.

*  *  *

The age is an age of confusion.

The loss of the center, soul and sanity of whole culture entails a complete repudiation and reversal of virtue and vice: the moral compass of the modern age points South rather than North, so that the greater a man’s desire for goodness and righteousness, the more swiftly will he be driven into vice and the more firmly planted in it.

• What’s Wrong With The World Part XXI—More Confusion—The Role of Incoherence

Also, to my surprise, there was no liberal ‘sucker punch’ hidden anywhere in the film, no flourish of liberal credentials. There are even one or two lines uttered by Captain America so wholesome and reverent that I was pleasantly surprised, even proud, that the director Joss Whedan put storyline above partisanship.

It is a movie conservatives can love.