Exactly right
Here is a comment from Mark Shea at CATHOLIC AND ENJOYING IT. The perfect rightness of his remarks merits that they be reprinted in full:
“We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” – C.S. Lewis
Over at Rod’s blog, there are various discussions going on about the West’s lackadaisical and baffled response to Radical Islam, all having the inadvertent effect of bearing out my point that only a healthy spirituality can cure a diseased one.
Currently the West is trying to confront the inflamed disease of Radical Islam with something called “Western Values”. This means, basically, a tepid commitment to my personal truth of the moment, modified by various fears of theocracy, lack of abortion rights, getting killed, and bad cable access. It also means “unfettered commitment to the needs of my groin” and “a vague sense that I am entitled to something”. Various other things go into the stew as each Imperial Autonomous Self seasons to taste. But what does not go into it is a common creed or even a sense of the common good.
Consequently, Westerners are flummoxed by the hollowness of their own response to Islam and, in particular, by the alacrity with which we are willing to cave into Islam’s threats of forced conversion.
I’m not one to boast “Lord, evenif everyone else were to deny you, I will never deny you!”. I’ve heard that song before and pray “lead us not into temptation” lest I make an idiot of myself. But that said, I have to add that, if I were not a believer, I don’t see what the big deal would be if I pretended to convert to Islam in order to save my skin. If all I’m betraying is Madonna, Planned Parenthood, the Glory of Sodomy, You Deserve A Break Today, and similar Western Values, then I don’t know that some inchoate tribal fealty to them would persuade me to make my wife a widow and my children fatherless. I *hope* that, as a Christian, I would have the stones to take a bullet rather than renounce my Lord, who bought me with his blood. But I don’t know what I’m made of, the heart being desperately wicked and all.
So I’m not particularly appalled by the acts of the FOX News guys, since I have no particular reason to think they were betraying some ultimate trust. They may well have simply been figuring “This will get me home to my family”. If they were Christians or Jews, it’s a different story. But if they weren’t, it seems to me we Christians have to do as Dante would have done and judge pagans by their own standards, not ours. Our culture has labored for 40 years to create a populace in which all reference to the Transcendent has been stamped out of existence. To suddenly be appalled when a man’s vision is no higher than a cow’s is a strange reaction to men who acted exactly as all our Manufacturers of Culture have programmed them to act.
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.
