What’s Wrong With The World Part XII—Barbaric
Barbaric
The barbarism of the modern age, for anyone not incurably parochial, is evident. The Twentieth Century has killed, starved, exiled and deracinated more people than any other century, more than all previous centuries combined. The mass deaths promulgated by modern ideologies are so astronomical that new words have been coined (such as “genocide”) to define their enormity.
More Christians have been martyred for the faith worldwide in the past hundred years than all the previous centuries combined, beginning with the decimation of the Armenians by the Turk, a systematic slaughter of 10% of the population, and the event for which the word “genocide” was first coined.
There has always been tyranny, but never has there been such a systematic, scientific deliberate study and practice of methods of tyranny, torture, of terror, of the commissions of mass exterminations for merely symbolic or irrational reasons: the single example of the extermination of every individual found wearing eyeglasses in the Cambodia of Pol Pot will serve as an example for countless parallel nightmares.
We live in an age of ghastly brutality. The revolutionaries are filled with wrath.
Let us look at the third question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:
(3) Why so angry?
From the ignorance and vice of the modern mind, we see the relation to the revolt against the conscience. From this, it can clearly be seen why the Moderns are so angry, eternally angry, why to disagree or demur, or even to ask an innocent and polite question, is to open oneself up to retaliation of insane savagery.
The image of the Modern “thinker” is one of a crowd of similar microcephalic dwarves, each with his fingers stuck in his ears, his face red, his mouth open in a scream, his bloodshot eyes starting from his head with self-righteous outrage. Ours is the Age of Outrage.
Question: Why so angry? Answer: The Modern man, in addition to being a spoiled brat, a creature raised with no self-control and no dignity, screams to drown out his conscience.
He knows, deep down, that he is wrong, and that his philosophy, his view of life, have squandered and betrayed all that is fine and good in him. And so to criticize, or even question his selfish and empty and narcissist life, is to touch a raw spot. That raw spot is chafing and inflammation of the conscience.
Anger is by its very nature unjust, because it is never impartial and it is always immoderate. Anger is the mere opposite of cool and impartial prudence. Wrath is an intoxicant that clouds the judgment. Anger is an inability of fortitude: anger is the twin brother of cowardliness. All the four classical virtues (justice, moderation, prudence, fortitude) are hence antithetical to anger.
These four are the virtues of civilization. What fair-mindedness is in an individual, so is justice when embodied in laws and customs; what moderation is in an individual, so is limited government, a set of checks and balances, the brakes applied by respect for precedent and due process, a polis not easily swept into popular passion or popular folly, when embodied in the laws and spirit a civilization; what prudence is in an individual, so is respect for precedent, learning, tradition and experience in a people; what fortitude is in an individual, so is liberty in a state, the ability to tolerate freedom and honest dissent.
Modern laws and customs, the laws of the French revolutionary, the law of the guillotine and the secret police, are based on the anger of the Modern mind, hence are barbaric.
The laws of the anger of the Moderns promote are laws which undermine respect for law, which punish Christian speech as intolerant speech; which punish honest speech as hate speech; which punish deviations from the politically correct forms of thought with the self-righteous fury of a witch-burner.
Barbarians form closed societies, meddle in each other’s business, expropriate individual property for tribal use, and savagely retaliate against slightest deviations from their mumbo-jumbo taboos. The particular signs by which barbarism is known is the savagery of its laws, the immoderate excesses or enormities of war or retaliation, its collectivist contempt for the individual, the intemperate or trivial or symbolic nature of what triggers those excesses, and the general inability to suffer or tolerate dissent or nonconformity or the liberty in others not to conform.
The barbarism is open when the Modern is allowed absolute power, as in Hitlerian Germany, Maoist China, Stalinist Russia: the barbarism is merely in speech and in the draconian illiberalism of the laws when the Modern expresses himself more peacefully and more legally in an institutional framework, as in a eurosocialist or Fabian nation-state, or the chair of some institution of higher learning.
That the modern Leftist accuses everyone and anyone but himself of these, his own defining characteristics of savagery, illiberalism and mean-spirited conformity, merely is an ironic comment on the psychological shortcomings the modern world view involves.
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.
