The Age of the Accuser

I have written in this space in recent days about the modern world view, what I here called Dehumanism. Let me say a word about that word, and also say a word about the spirit of the age.

To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a beauty that breaks the heart, and a good that sates the conscience. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find no rest, no happiness.

Consider the scene from the MATRIX movie where Cypher, one of the awakened in the real world, sells out his comrades to the machines in order to enjoy a life of pleasure he knows to be illusion.

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

I doubt anyone in the audience agreed with Cypher’s pragmatic empiricism: we would not be happy eating steak we knew to be nothing more than electrical stimulations having no reference to reality, or taking money we had not earned or to which we had no right, or living in a lie, no matter how comfortable. Certainly the film makers expected the audience to react with distain toward the character thus presented. The idea that there is no truth, which is the cornerstone of the Dehumanist doctrine, reduces us all to the same moral level as the character of Cypher.

The other two articles of faith in the dehumanist dogma are that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that therefore rank ugliness can be made “Art” merely by declaring it to be so; and that the conscience does not exist because all values are relative. We no longer even talk of virtues, or the strength of character needed to act in a praiseworthy fashion. We no longer talk of the self discipline needed to pursue one’s self interests rightly understood. The relativity of all values at one stoke eliminates goodness, and beauty, and truth.

A creature that exists without goodness, truth, and beauty, no matter what else he is, is not a human being, any more than Gollum is a Hobbit.

Yes, Smeagle had been a Hobbit at one time, but now he was a ruined thing, a thing with no true self, no soul, which could therefore only speak to his own precious self in the plural. A tiger that is born a tiger lives and dies as a tiger, for its nature is decided by nature. A man is a different case. A man can be born against to life than is more than a man; or can ruin himself. Humans have the power to become inhuman.

Such inhumanity this is the goal and the purpose of the spirit of this age: this is the goal of dehumanism. Sometimes it is admitted, other times, ferociously denied, but even those denials are tacit admissions.

The ancient wisdom of the world, older writers such as Saint Augustine, pagan sages like Confucius or Buddha, or philosophers like Aristotle, embraced a notion of liberty as that which most fully fulfilled the nature of man. The East speaks of enlightenment and of proper conduct in terms not far different from the West speaking of stoicism and sanctity.

Addiction is slavery. A man can freely make himself a slave by allowing alcohol or opiates, or even the more subtle drunkenness of anger or the opiate of lust eat away his life and soul. This is not a Christian doctrine only. When Buddha spoke of detachment and the achievement of Nirvana, he did not mean one reached release from suffering by opiates. When Confucius spoke of the proper behavior and code of conduct for a gentleman, he was not including sexual excesses and self-indulgence as a proper form of behavior. The ancients saw freedom as freedom from the base and perverse aspects of human nature, the slavery to sin. The dehumanists see freedom as the freedom from criticism when they sin.

The goal is addiction. The logic of the dehumanist position requires they take from you, or, better yet, from your children, any strength of character needed to resist addiction, sin, degradation. The goal is not freedom, unless you mean freedom for pornographers. The goal is speech codes, thought police, mind control, dehumanification.

Should we be shocked at this? It is the logical outcome of rejecting objectivity. Reject reality, you get unreality. Reject logic, you get nonsense. Reject truth, you get an empire of lies.

Should we expect the elite, once the elite has rejected both supernatural faith and natural reason, and therefore, like it or not, rejected not only Christendom but civilization both of East and West, therefore, like it or not, rejected truth and justice and beauty and life, to be other than Gollum?

If we are shocked, my fellow Christians, it is because we are ignorant of our own faith and the teachings of the Church. Saint Paul warned us clearly enough what happened to the minds of men once they rejected the evidence that the natural world presents to the natural reason that God exists and rightfully commands us to be righteous.

Here is his description:

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

We have all done some wickedness in our lives, but not all of us spend all our efforts excusing and aiding and abetting it. Yet  such is the dominant theme and leitmotif and central conceit of our day and age: indeed, those future historians who do not call these years “The Blood Years of the Aborticides” or “The Slaughter of the Innocents” will no doubt call them “The Days of Accusation.”

For our modern morality consists only of one command, that we not accuse sinners of their sins, but tolerate, permit, nay even celebrate their sins, and cheer when their sins devour them like a rotting disease and gain complete power over them.

Our one command is to take pleasure in those that do things worthy of death, whether we do them ourselves or not. The saints are supposed to cheer for the sins of the sinners, and to encourage them, lest any be seen as judgmental.

The only way this law of non-Accusation is enforced is by accusing the accuser, usually of some fault, real or imagined, that undermines his authority to condemn.

Likewise, modern politics consists mainly of accusations, that is, it consists of demands by the vexed or oppressed that their grievances be redressed from the public coffers, and when this proves not enough, by laws suppressing anything but praise and support for them.

Modern history and theology consists of nothing but accusations, either against the White Race, or against America, or against the Free Market, or against the Christian Church, or against the masculine half of the species, or against all at once.

The only sanctity and righteousness remaining to the modern mind is the sacred art of whining, which our customs allow can only be used by those who have a right to whine, perhaps because their grandparents suffered some forgotten injustice, or perhaps because life has not given them everything their inflated self-opinion thinks they deserve, and so to be a victim is a prize to be sought and a passkey to all the rewards our social system can bestow.

This is why we suffer such absurdities as the accusation that using the word “he” correctly in a sentence is “gender non-neutral” — because in the modern age, even the lightest word is a sign of a system of evil oppression: but stoning innocent rape victims to death, if it done by Islamic Fascist barbarians, is nothing to be discussed nor condemned. Even to bring up the real crimes of Islam is to invite an accusation of racism (despite that Cat Stevens and Cassius Clay are not members of the same race); even to defend the innocent from crimes they have not committed is to call down an accusation of sexism, or some other invented “-ism.”

Why? Because the accusations of the Age of Accusations mean nothing unless they are false accusations.

And to have so many victims, we must have victimizers; and the victimizers must be accused, accused, and accused.

Public debate has descended into a vampire-orgy of mutual accusations and recrimination.

Why should this be? Why not? It is the nature of the human race. It is natural, as natural as sin and disease and death. Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent. Satan is the Accuser as well as the Enemy of mankind, and so in any era where his world is made more to his liking, he has more work to do, and more accusations to make.

The degradation in the modern age of the study of philosophy can be explained by merely looking at the use to which it is put. In older times, philosophy, the handmaiden of faith, was the sober study of truth, and where philosophy could not reach far enough, Socrates and other great and ancient philosophers resorted to myth—which is as it should be. But in the modern times, modern antiphilosophers seek only to make accusations and to escape them.

Read, for example, the famous passage of Karl Marx in his Manifesto justifying communism as opposed to capitalism: it is nothing but ad hominem. Every accusation he mentions being leveled against Communism is true, and he also responds to each one merely by saying that the system of private property, law and order and peaceful exchange without looting or robbery is somehow worse, or is guilty of something vaguely bad.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population…

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine….

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.  … this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.

Marx’s rhetoric, given above, boils down to this: do not accuse the Communists of wanting to abolish private property since you have already abolished it for nine-tenths of the population; do not accuse us of abolishing the culture, since you abolished it for the proles; do not accuse us of abolishing marriage, since the proles have no marriage; do not accuse us of abolishing nations, since the proles have no nations; do not bother to argue or debate the matter from a philosophical or religious standpoint at all:

The charges against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Gee, I dunno Marxie boy. Looks to me like the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of the common people, the ideas taught the children in the crib. It looks to me like all the power is in the gentle hand that rocks the cradle.

The overthrow of pagan beliefs and practices (such as sodomy, or exposing infants) of Imperial Rome was not imposed from above because Caesar converted to Christianity. In fact, the only era in which the ruling class seems to be trying to impose its beliefs (such as gay marriage or abortion) is this one.

The entire secret of Marxism and its appeal is contained in that last three paragraphs. An man unwilling or unable to answer philosophical or theological or historical or idealistic objections, a man unwilling or unable to debate or deduce any truths about economics or politics, is permitted, in Marxism, merely to mutter the lame and unconvincing ad hominem accusation that his accusers ideas are old fashioned, determined by his circumstance, and voila, the dimwit gets to preen and tell himself he has bested the intellectual at intellectual debate. That is the secret.

The secret is to accuse your questioner rather than to answer his questions.

You simply hope that no one notices that the things you accuse him of doing, are things you intend to do far more and to a far greater degree. You accuse him of hypocrisy so that you can indulge in an entirely non-hypocritical, utterly sincere, absolutely self-consistent apocalypse of evil.

Marx uses his sophomoric notion of a material dialectic, and mad and meaningless yet mortal conflict between imaginary economic categories to indulge in his bloodthirsty wet dreams about a worldwide revolution: he pants and sweats to see the clean and angular head-chopping machines of the French Revolution, the high and narrow guillotines, set by the millions in motion again. Sadism is never far from the Progressive imagination. And every lie told and crime committed in the name of the People, or the Party, or the Revolution can be excused with Machiavellian indifference to reality: we are all just helpless blobs being carried into conflict by mindless and natural economic and political forces, are we not?

Materialism likewise is a philosophy, or, rather, an antiphilosophy (for if Materialism were true, then human thoughts are determined by physical quantities only, and are therefore irrational, and therefore philosophy is irrational) where the only real use is to silence debate: when someone criticizes your fornications and addictions, you say genetics made you born that way. No one actually believes Materialism or acts as if he does.

Moral Relativism is likewise merely a tool, or a lame tactic in debate, to silence criticism or silence the conscience. When one does something wrong, one merely accuses the accuser of being arbitrary, a mere by-product of cultural bigotry or historical accident.

Darwinism is likewise merely a tool to silence criticism: moral codes are merely the epiphenomenon of brain atom vibrations which are controlled by genetic molecule arrangements which happen to be those that happened to reproduce in sufficient numbers to be carried on, so all our notions of goods and evil, altruism and brotherhood, are merely the hiccups of inattentive molecules, a disease of brain chemistry.

Existentialism is likewise merely a tool to silence criticism: if I and I alone, heroic soul isolated and lost in the cosmos, and I am not only free of all bourgeoisie and conventional morality (by this we mean the Ten Commandments, of course), but I am duty bound in my blazing Promethean genius to invent my own moral code, and I may chose to define good and evil as I see fit, and my hands shall write the stone tablets brought burning down from the mountain. This is a rather more poetic way than normal, and rather more empty a way, of saying “Shut Up!” to your conscience and to your mother when you are living with a girl to whom you are not married, and you have decided to take money from her, pack up, and depart without a forwarding address because she has had the ill sense to get pregnant.

The Fulminations of Nietzsche are likewise a way of telling your conscience to shut up when you want to sleep with whores; and the wrathful diatribes and syllogisms of Ayn Rand, it pains me to say, are likewise merely a way of telling your conscience to shut up when you want to fornicate with Howard Rourke, smash a statue, dynamite a building not your own, get a divorce, get an abortion, have an affair, and be generally selfish as a swine.

I say it with reluctance, because Ayn Rand stands head and shoulders above the mired filth and degradation of the modern philosophical scene, because she has only devolved back to an Aristotelian and pagan world view, where virtues were hard to practice, based on clear reasons, and power was the thing to be idolized.

A pagan who idolizes power at least is honest and forthright: a nihilist who idolizes death is damned. Ayn Rand is like a fallen angel who has not plunged all the way into Hell, but who still enjoys the sunlight and meadowgrass and noble pagan pleasures of this mortal world: let us envision her as in the train of Titania or Oberon, fallen no further than from upper into middle airs.

But her philosophy will not serve, for like the moderns, she has the Athenian love of Eros that betrays an abiding contempt for marriage and she has the yearning to expose infants or throw them in the Apothetae of the Spartans, the Greek version of Tophet where unwanted babies go.

The culmination of all this excuse-making and accusation and evasion of reason and evasion of accusation of the Age of Accusations is the antiphilosophy fitliest called nihilism.

The degeneration from romanticism to subjectivism to existentialism and finally into nihilism is the degeneration of the system of ad hominem excuses the fuddled intellectual and antiphilosopher uses to silence just criticism of his daffy schemes and elliptical paradoxes: nihilism is nothing more or less than the command that God shut the hell up, and that all good men shut up too.

Nihilism is the Nothingness that waits outside of those who reject the great “I AM” who is also the All-in-All; nihilism is the lie that welcomes and consumes those who flee from Him who said “I am the Truth.”