Blaming the Praiseworthy; Praising the Blameworthy
By one of those quaint and curious coincidences, I came across three criticisms of apparently unrelated things, a novel, a dance video, and a literary manifesto, which betrayed to my recoiling gaze the moral vertigo distinctive of the modern age. I saw the pattern connected the unrelated incidents.
The first was a criticism of my own work.
It would be uncouth of me, indeed it would be insubordinate, to argue to a disappointed customer; and I do not intend my remarks here to be read in that light. Your humble author failed to please and amuse, and there the matter rests. I would not be so bold as to mention the matter at all, save that the anonymous critic inadvertently revealed one of the crucial clues to unlock the savage mystery of modernity.
I cannot repeat in this space the whole of the critique, since it is peppered with the boring vulgarities which sound so strong and manly to dull souls, but will instead extract the single sentence of interest to us here. Speaking of my heroine, the space princess Rania, of COUNT TO A TRILLION:
“Your beautiful anime space virgin waifu was the creepiest part of your stupid story.”
I am not current with Otaku (fanboy) slang. Various online urban dictionaries provided for my want.
“WAIFU: A term coined by Otaku for their 2D significant others; predominantly anime and video game characters. A Waifu, in contrast to a harem, is the love between one man and his one and only Waifu. You treat your Waifu with the utmost respect and courtesy….”
The example of respect and courtesy given (which I am not at liberty to quote) is that the fanboy does not commit the sin of Onan while gazing at the image of his idolatry. That is what passes for respect in the modern day.
For those no doubt fortunate multitudes who have not read my book, Rania is the Virginia Dare of outer space, the first person born under the light of another sun, and her origins are hidden in mystery. She has certain strange superhuman propensities that one expects from the heroine of a story that is unabashedly a space opera.
I am not sure in what way anyone might find Rania creepy, but I have my suspicion based on the words chosen here that it is precisely her down-to-earth normal norms, not her extraterrestrial oddities, which the critic condemns as unnatural.
She is indeed a virgin until her wedding night, after which, once the wedding is consummated in the normal way, she a wife. While such a thing might seem rare to modern readers, it is incomprehensible to me that even someone who found it rare would find it objectionable.
Perhaps the modern mind regards chastity as unwholesome, even unnatural. Monogamy is a fetish and a sexual perversion; the modern norms approve as wholesome only of temporary liaisons with harlots and catamites, preferably anonymously, preferably involving sadomasochism. The modern norm approves only of lonely women, frustrated, abused, unfeminine, unloved, exploited, rejected, bitter. Happy women don’t vote Democrat.
Perhaps the modern mind finds it objectionable that a woman would be attractive to one man, her husband, a man so loyal he will outwait seven hundred thousand years (which is the count to a trillion of the title) for her return, and be faithful that whole time. Limiting oneself to one sexual partner is apparently some sort of obsessive sickness.
Another possibility is that perhaps the objection is that Rania is feminine. This is a characteristic never glimpsed in any Western literature or pop culture in any portrayal of womanhood. Women are portrayed only as strong or sexy or both. The girl characters of Japanimation on the other hand, are sometimes portrayed as inoffensively sweet and loving, or having the domestic instinct modern feminism regards as the main enemy of the female species. Sometimes they even wear frilly dresses or tie bows in their hair. Feminists regard femininity, particularly that domestic and matronly femininity called wifeliness, as the foe.
Surprising as this seems, I recall THE GOLDEN AGE being excoriated for precisely the reason that the hero and the heroine were man and wife, alienated during the story, who then are reconciled and go on a honeymoon. (I made the wry comment at the time that since the Leftists are willing to scream themselves blue in the face over a portrayal of love in a love story, I did not need to promote any of my more outrageous thoughts or opinions to provoke their make-believe ire. They already exist in a constant state of steam-whistle screeching hysteria.)
In sum, the only mind-set I can imagine which deems a beautiful virginal bride to be a term of denigration is one that scorns chastity, or fidelity, or femininity.
Now, at this point, many a reader is no doubt thinking that the objection was not to virginity in general, nor wifeliness in general, nor to love and romance in general, but only to your humble author’s unskillful portrayal of it. The criticism did not say that all beautiful anime space virgin waifu were creepy, only that mine was.
So one might think, were this an isolated instance. The point of view being revealed here is not the minority opinion. It is nearly universal. It is so prevalent that I happened to come across two other examples within the same twenty-four hour period.
Here for your viewing pleasure is a demonstration of how to perform the Twerk. Ladies, prepare your buttocks and follow the instructions closely.
Now, which is delightful to me is that this is an example, for once, of a sucker punch from the Right.
We are all used to completely gratuitous inappropriate and obnoxious advertisements for various Leftist causes, such as the normalization of sexual perversion, or the adoration of Communist Cuba, popping up in a single scene or a single line in shows like DOCTOR WHO, books like TIME AND AGAIN, or any number of modern movies. They are moments that have no humor value or plot purpose; they crop up as unexpectedly as welcome as should the author of a play step out from behind the curtain during Act III, breaking the Fourth Wall and breaking wind, and mooning the audience he despises.
In this case, I was tickled pink to hear a woman, any woman, telling her sisters to have no dealings with the male creature (we cannot call them men) unwilling to ‘put a ring on it’ before consummating the love act reserved to honestly married couples.
This clip was brought to my attention on an openly Leftist website, which greatly surprised me. There are some Leftists who retain a rudimentary respect for women, to be sure, but they can give no logical account for the sentiment, since it is a mystery of the Leftist faith to hold that showing respect or honor toward women is a sign of disrespect and dishonor.
The comments in the comments box were the typical mildly sickening and fiercely illogical mental milk-puke one expects from Leftists. There is a pattern to these things, of course. See if you can spot it.
One comment was:
This woman is basically slut shaming. It’s just not right to think that a woman doesn’t deserve respect just because of the way she dances
The reply:
No slut shaming necessary. Women have the right to do whatever they like with their bodies and sexuality and that also includes the accepting the responsibility and consequences now in the real world for whatever actions they take. I’m not talking rape here, I just agree with this video that the men in this world are not mature enough to interpret women’s public sexuality for anything except “she’s asking for it.” Until boys are taught to respect women in any situation, the consequences of public sexuality are just not worth it. I guess I’m old now, but for me there’s no place for behaving openly sexually in our current society. Sex is private.
The reply to the reply was:
Were you born in the Victorian era?
This last sentence, dear reader, should be preserved for all future generations as an example of the ironic timelessness of the Leftist mind set. I do not mean timeless in the sense of an eternal truth; I mean timeless in the sense that the Radicals are still in rebellion against the mores and manners of their great-great-grandfather’s day. Now that the last year of the Nineteenth Century is upon us, and the steam locomotive and transatlantic steamship have opened up new worlds for our exploration and commerce, the new scientific era of coal and electrical lights, of telegraph and gramophone is upon us! We must rise up as one and throw off the old unfounded prejudices of the Victorian Era! Someday, soon, Man shall invent the heavier-than-air flying machine, and all the old boundaries which separated the nations will be a thing of the past! Free Love is the March of the Future! Votes for Women! Chain yourself to a gas lamppost with Mrs. Pankhurst today to defy the injustice of the Edwardian Age! Hurrah for Woodrow Wilson!
In case my point is not clear, the Free Love rebels of the Flower Power Generation of the 1970’s were merely repeating the formula, shopworn and stale at the time, of the radical thinkers of the days before the World War One. The posture of rebellion against the Victorian moral code was topical back in the days of Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells. Now that it is older than a hundred years, we can safely call it an antique.
So the first part of the pattern is this: the moral code of the Left is hopelessly, comically, pathetically, out of date, hundreds of years out of date, but it still somehow regards itself as new and fresh and rebellious. How is that possible?
How have they failed to notice that the Victorian world freed the slaves worldwide, ushered in an era when famine was unknown and prosperity and liberty flourished, and war was at its least ebb in a millennium? How have they failed to notice that the Victorians treated women like human beings and the moderns do not?
We will understand the first part of the Leftist Code when we understand that it is not based on evidence. Indeed, it takes self-righteous pride in its utter indifference to evidence.
The second part of the pattern is seen in the second comment. The writer there breezily asserts that women have the right to do anything they wish with their bodies, but that, as a practical matter, men behave so immaturely, that a woman dare not indulge in public flirting, flaunting and mating behaviors, lest they attract a man eager to mate, which would be horrible. Men are lacking the delicate gentlemanly instinct needed both to have sex in public and to treat a woman with respect, ergo sex must be private.
And the third part of the puzzle comes from the first comment: nothing is said about the merits of the case. There are two raw statements, almost perfect as examples of the utter mindlessness and nonsense of Leftist belief.
The first raw statement condemns, ad hominem style, the woman urging modesty. No argument is deemed necessary. Merely to label the advocacy as ‘slut-shaming’ is sufficient to shut off and stopper all further thought and inquiry on the topic. The convenient catchword needed to express the ritualized righteous indignation of the Left for the decent, normal and sane has been uttered, like the clang of a ritual gong in some Oriental rite of devil worship, and the celebrants utter the ritual ululation of the two-minute hate against the ideologically unclean. Their brain activity is shrieked back into cowed silence, and the world may continue on its way down the wide and crooked downward path to dissolution and destruction.
The second raw statement is merely a renunciation of reality in the name of rights. You do not have the right, if a woman deserves disrespect, to deny her respect. We have a right to engage in the behaviors that rightfully earn disrespect, without any disrespect being earned. We all have a right to keep the cake and eat it too
Every woman has the right to be a tasteless freakish exhibitionist, without somehow attracting the low animal lusts of the voyeurs; but no one has the right to have taste, to disapprove of freaks, or to explain to the naïve what are the expected results of exhibitionism.
Taken together, it sums up the pristine unreason of the postrational, postchristian nothingness that passes for modern thought. To condemn a behavior according to a moral code is the only thing the modern antimoral code condemns.
All three comments are composed in terms of women’s rights, as if whether or not someone urges you to modesty is a political act. As if a sense of shame and embarrassment when you realize shaking your primate buttocks in a sexual display will indeed attract primate lust (at least from those who do not turn away in disgust) is a depravation of a civic right, as much as loss of life, limb, goods, or liberty.
But what so-called right is being discussed? None. What is being discussed is the craving to do a grotesque stripper-style or ape-style mating dance without attracting the kind of man, or ape, naturally attracted to strippers.
It is the craving to be sexy without being sexy, to be tasteless without being tasteless, and to be offensive without anyone being offended.
It is the central craving of all spoilt brat doctrine. It is the craving to enjoy free this and free that and free the other thing, here extended from the political realm to the spiritual. It is the demand of the harlots and those who imitate them to be treated as Vestal virgins without the annoyance and effort required to keep one’s virginity intact and the sacred flame burning.
They want the losers to get the winner’s prize. In this case, the prize is merely the unspoken admiration society reserves to those who adhere to its norms of decency.
They want respect without the need to act respectable.
They want the impossible and they want it now.
How can this pattern of morality, or, rather, antimorality, emerge onto the modern stage without being laughed aside as merely immature lunacy? What has made this lunacy the default moral and social code of the age?
We must examine a third piece of the puzzle for the picture to become clear. This is the discussion of a particularly odd and ugly literary manifesto named Reality Hunger promulgated by a wretch named Shields, discussed at some length at FIRST THINGS http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/08/faith-in-fiction. I quote the book review at some length, because its meaning is deep and appalling.
Sophisticated, ambitious, and widely praised as an exemplar of our age’s ethical-literary sensibility, Shields offers a polemically narcissistic, aggressively atheistic vision of how and why literature should matter to us, premised upon the willfully inward, selfish turn that follows from rejecting God and religion. If Augustine counseled us to read literature as a means of increasing our love of our neighbors and ultimately our love of God, Shields counsels us to read literature to increase our love of ourselves, because there’s no one else that matters.
As he declares in his most influential work, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, “So: no more masters, no more masterpieces. What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror.”
Shields won wide and admiring notice for this 2010 effort from outlets like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, and indeed it was named a “Best Book of the Year” by some thirty different publications. Critics collectively positioned Shields as a brave new literary prophet: “America is losing faith with its fictions,” and Reality Hunger “lays out a compelling case for the prosecution,” declared one reviewer, almost perfectly anticipating Elie’s lamentation without any of the lament, while another predicted “Shields’ book will become a sort of bible for the next generation of culture-makers,” and still another breathlessly reported that the book has “already become required reading in university spheres, galleys passed from one student to the next like an illicit hit of crack cocaine.”
Exactly what makes Shields so appealing for so many contemporary critics, readers, and, as an apparent campus addiction, future writers? I think he appeals because he’s an ethically minded atheist bookworm. He’s an exceedingly well-read provocateur and scattershot evangelizer for a fiercely anti-traditional literature of belief, one that prizes nonfiction over fiction, fragment over unity, self over all others, disenchantment, honesty, and mundaneness over the true, good, and beautiful: a literature that affirms our mortal selves and this-worldly reality as our only selves, our only reality.
Shields offers all of this in Reality Hunger, which is made up of 618 aphoristic arguments in support of his two main reasons why, as readers, we must abandon our longstanding faith in fiction. The first reason: Fiction is too cohesive and ordered to reflect or reckon with who we are and how we experience reality today. We live in an age where truth is fluid and fey; it comes in bits and pieces that we must put together ourselves because we can only believe in what we’ve constructed for ourselves or in what we can tell is obviously constructed.
Shields’ book exemplifies in form and method the argument that it advances. It’s a hyper-self-conscious collage composed of quotations and premises openly stolen from an endless array of sources.
The second reason we must abandon our faith in fiction, according to Shields: It serves as troubling evidence of a malingering crypto-faith in God, insofar as we depend upon the novelist’s capacities to conjure a whole world, complete with morally legible figures and recurring norms of right and wrong, good and evil, all of which is governed by an omniscient intelligence. This dependence needs to be overcome so that we can at last be free to find writings (like Reality Hunger itself) that, compared to the opiate authority of novels, better help us reckon with the barren basic truth of every human life, as he has it: “The final orbit is oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”
Shields can, or at least tries to, offer us an exemplar of what this calculation involves in his latest book, the salvifically titled How Literature Saved My Life. Early on, he makes clear the higher-order question that governed Reality Hunger and this work too: “In the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?”
He appreciates the stakes of his project, the nullity and nihilism that ultimately characterize a godless existence, and challenges his readers to join him in what he regards as courageous atheism: “[F]or many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.”
I am particularly taken with the exquisitely puerile clumsiness of the final line. The phrase ‘dancing in the abyss’ has a certain strength and dark majesty to it, as does the phrase ‘grieving in the abyss’; whereas the phrase/BS of dancing/grieving is ugly-stupid/stupid-ugly and contains the literary merit found in voice menus on a telephone. If dancing is brave, press one; if grieving is brave, press two. The stench of shallow pretentiousness clogs the nostrils and brings tears to the eyes. Normal conjunctions like ‘and’ or ‘or’ are not slick enough for the slasher?
However, a grudging admiration is due to Shields for breaking the code of silence which stoppers the mouths and minds of his contemporaries. He is at least honest enough to say what his true purpose is. He wishes to replace the joy of heaven and the love of God with the self-love of Narcissus and the empty misery of the outer darkness, where there is wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
Unlike most postrational postmoderns, there is no ambiguity about his aims. Shields is like the Princeton Ethicist and Moral Retard called Peter Singer, who has neither, at the time of this writing, been discharged from his post for fraud, nor hanged from a lamppost by a mob. Singer’s argument, such as it is, is that since pain is bad, we should free farm animals and kill babies. But at least he is open about what he believes and straightforward about what are his darkly grinning and goggle-eyed idols to which he wishes to sacrifice human life and happiness.
Let us emphasize the elements of the code, which Shields announces with admirable clarity:
First, life makes no sense. This is the clarion call of unreason.
Second, God is dead. This is the motto of atheism.
Third, Art must contain neither beauty nor unity, lest it reflect glory to the nonexistent God and waken lofty longings in the human breast, a craving for reason or love or life. Uncle Screwtape is displeased whenever the clients feel such ethereal longings, lest the ape-things lift their eyes above the tall gray walls and heavy black chains of that prison Hell wishes to make of all the Earth and all the dreams of Man. Happy people don’t vote Democrat.
Art must be without unity in order to be without logic, reason, balance, proportion, sense. The purpose of reason is to convince men that reasoning is vain. For no other reason do the fallen angels and their Morlock allies permit it. The artistic parallel to unreason in logic is disunity and ugliness in art, to create on the emotional level the same confusion and despair unreason creates on the mental level.
All this, of course, is expressed in the language of freedom. The new aesthetic of despair is to free us to embrace the hopelessness and dance/grieve/blow your nose in the wreckage of the wrecked hopes of wrecked and rectangle wretched reeking wrecks! Or something. Readers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your taste!
The problem is that this is the same literary manifesto we heard from the literati of a hundred years ago. It is the cry of the Hollow Men and the Wasteland we have heard TS Eliot and James Joyce describe at length. How is Shields and those who praise him in such breathless terms unaware of the literary and absurdist and nihilistic artistic movements which have dominated the world since the time of Picasso? This is not the Beatniks of the 1950’s nor the Decadent Movement of the 1930’s; it is the Fin de Sciele movement of the 1890’s come again. It is Nihilism.
So, what, finally, is the pattern to all this? What do all three examples show?
I strongly recommend a slender book by Bruce Charlton called THOUGHT PRISON. It explains in a series of epigrams and observations the pattern of thought underpinning Political Correctness, which is the dominant philosophy of our day.
Political Correctness has the same relationship to classical liberalism as Gnosticism has to Christianity: it is a parasite and a heresy, a system of thought which keeps all the relations of ideas intact, but reverses the values placed on them, so that good becomes evil and evil becomes good.
Hence, Gnostics still spoke of salvation and enlightenment as Christians did, but with God as the Devil and the Devil as God. Salvation meant escaping from God and the world He made, and following the Devil into a higher heaven better than the heaven of God.
So, here, the language of freedom and the Rights of Man is kept by the Political Correctoids, but merely inverted in value, so that to be free means having fewer possessions and liberties and less opportunity to exercise them, lest someone be offended with you.
Example Inversion Number One is the use of the terms virgin and waifu (wife) to denigrate the normal chaste sexual relations between men and women. Note that only lawful and prudent sexual behavior (virginity outside of marriage, sex within marriage) is denigrated; hence only unlawful and imprudent sexual behavior (fornication, adultery) is exalted.
Example Inversion Number Two is the exaltation of imprudent lewdness and the loss of self-respect and the respect of one’s menfolk under the guise of protecting the rights of women. The right being protected is not the right of decent women to protect their moral environment from the pollution of lewd women and the type of low men lewdness attracts and encourages; no, not at all. The only ‘right’ protected is the right to be lewd regardless of consequence. In order to achieve this inversion, the Politically Correct mind must regard every behavior, no matter how anti-social and disgusted, as sacrosanct, and must regard every attempt to regulate behavior, even by such non-violent and gentle means as sarcasm, as an intolerable act of tyranny. It is the reign of gluttony and lust and imprudent raw appetite.
Example Inversion Number Three is the exaltation of the meaninglessness of life, and, in the name of honesty and authenticity, the destruction of every trace, even indirect, of sanctity, rationality, unity, order, logic, illumination, brightness, goodness and divinity in art, and eventually in life. It is the exaltation of nihilism and the denigration of truth, beauty, goodness.
This is both the culmination and the precondition of the Inversions Numbered One and Two above.
This principle of Inversion extends to every other field of thought imaginable. The Inversion denies reality and exalts unreality.
Political Correctness in the field of the natural sciences is the denial of the scientific method. The theories are arrived at by ‘consensus’ or by ‘expert opinion’ not by, you know, looking at evidence. Looking at evidence is messy, and sometimes arrives at correct answers which are not politically correct.
The first and paramount step of all Political Correctness, is to abolish Factual Correctness, that is, evidence, from the discussion. That is the point of Political Correctness. That is the meaning of its name.
Without evidence, everything becomes an assertion of authority and a question of faith. Without evidence, every argument is an argument over this authority is less honest, less trustworthy, less moral. Hence Peter Singer argues that his foolish arguments should be followed because he himself is a swell fellow who gives money to charity. Hence Global Warming fetishist argue that Global Warming is fact, because anyone who says it is not a fact is just like a Holocaust Denier, and they pick their noses.
Science by consensus is not science at all, but the attempt to halt scientific reasoning, and milk the prestige of science to cow the gullible into supporting otherwise obviously lunatic political scams. It is anti-science.
That is why the Political Correctoids can still be in rebellion against the Victorian Era, and still cling to ideas as relevant to the modern day as the Boer War. The only fact in their universe is the fact that facts don’t matter. Their motto: What difference does it make?
Political Correctness in the field of economics is socialism, that is, the arrogant and foolish denial that economic scarcities influence the prices and availability of goods and services. Socialism is the abolition of the pricing system, the market system, private property, and the law of cause and effect. Socialism is the demand for goods and services produced from nowhere for no reason. It is a system that rewards sloth and inefficiency and punishes productivity, but promises to lower inefficiency and raise productivity. It is not, come to think of it, a theory of economics at all, but of millennial utopia. It is a denial of economics. It is anti-economics.
So, too, in politics, Political Correctness is the denial of political reality. It is the attempt to use absolute and unhindered power to solve all human evils without regard to human nature, and without the painfully learned checks and balances either of an imperial, a monarchic or a republican system of government. It is an attempt to run a system of government without a system. It is anarchy.
In morals, Political Correctness is the denial of morality, even the limited and slight morality involved in telling young women not to shake their buttocks in impersonation of the sex act lest the behavior demean them by its lewdness. The only moral rule is that it is forbidden to make any moral rules. Political Correctness is pure appetite, especially the sexual appetites, most especially the perverted and unwholesome sexual appetites bent on self destructive behaviors. It is the attempt to live as if acts had neither moral weight nor practical consequences. It is the morality of unmorality.
The moral code of Political Correctness is particularly diseased and stupid. Notice in the examples above how, if a butt-wagging harlot wishes to behave in any fashion she likes, but if she does not like the result, then it is the maturity of the menfolk around her on to whom the blame is shifted.
By this logic, she has a RIGHT to dance like a pole stripper, but, alas, the men nearby, who have been programmed and conditioned since birth to regard women as sexy but not feminine, equal but not worthy of any gentle practice or chivalrous habits, strong and not in need of deference or defense, are ‘too immature’ not to be lured by the lure of sex, which is the only lure used to sell half the commercial products and movies in the marketplace.
She has the RIGHT to flaunt her body, but they lack the right to wolf-whistle at the body flaunted thereby to them.
They are expected to behave like gentlemen, but society has bent its every genius and art to train and condition and beat all trace of gentlemanlike behavior out of the sissy-boys modern schools produce. The Political Correctoids complain there is some evil conspiracy afoot to thwart their craving to act like whores and be treated like princesses, having driven long ago into hiding any man man enough to want to treat a girl like a princess.
And apparently any girl who wants to be treated as something more dignified than a whore is a ‘waifu’, some sort of creepy, clinging beastie.
In art, Political Correctness is propaganda, ugliness, disease, despair, filth, hopelessness, nausea, and grotesquerie. It is vile for the sake of vile. It is the attempt to have art be the opposite of art. It is artlessness run amok.
In epistemology, Political Correctness in nihilism, the disbelief in any absolute or fixed truth, which means, any truth at all.
In ontology, Political Correctness is radical subjectivism, the disbelief in real reality. Everything is a dream; everything is a product of your will and yours alone. Believe in yourself. Only unreality is real.
In philosophy, Political Correctness is the triumph of the emotions over the reason, and further triumph of neurotic, bratty, dishonorable, childish, stupid, violent, lustful, wrathful, slothful and proud emotions over any finer sentiment, sense of honor, or delicacy of regard. It is feeling good about yourself, especially when you are committing an act of self-deception, self-degradation, and self-destruction. Political Correctness teaches that reason is futile and that all talk is an act of violent oppression. In other words, the philosophy of Political Correctness is an attempt to silence debate, discussion, thought, and, in a word, philosophy. It is anti-philosophy.
It religion, Political Correctness is retaliation against God. Its religion is not atheism, which has a certain dignity to it. Atheism says God never existed. Its religion is the hatred for a God is says does not exist. It is the religion of saying God is dead (which is a stupid thing to say even about Osiris and Balder, come to think of it).
If God is dead, then there are no rules, and if there are no rules, we are all equal and we are all free. Each man may do whatever he likes without regard for consequences, since modern education has made the contemplation of consequences difficult or impossible for modern brains.
And so we get stupider and uglier and less free and more impoverished, and the lights go out in all the libraries and ivory towers of the world.
The promise is that we will have peace if there is no conflict, and that there will be no conflict if we have no opinions, draw no conclusions, love no homelands, have no families, seek no wealth, and eschew all competition which might offend the losers. If nothing means anything, and nothing is worth doing, then we are infinitely free, free of reason, free of morality, free of reality, free of the annoying buzzing noise called thought, and everything is provided for and nothing can hurt us. That is the promise.
The promise is utterly and completely false, risibly false, grotesquely false. The reality is that Political Correctness is the most radically violent creed in all of history, far outstripping the Aztecs and the Huns in their brutality and violence. A new word, Democide, had to be invented to describe the astronomical numbers of innocent people killed in various socialist utopian experiments in the Twentieth Century.
The reality is that even the non-violent strains of the Political Correctness disease are, and by nature must be, the most intolerant, vicious, imprudent, loudmouthed slanderous bastards the world can imagine, because their philosophy is based on ignoring facts, ignoring reality, and following whichever demagogue most thoroughly assassinates the character of his opposition.
When your whole theory of epistemology is based on character assassination, you breed character assassins.
See the pattern yet?
The old-fashioned liberals wanted to get rid of Christ but keep the benefits of Christian civilization, such as rule of law, wealth and industry, technology and science, a stern and solemn moral code, including compassion for the poor, the equality of man, and all the things which spring out of classical learning and civic virtue, which in turn springs from a respect for human life and for decency which regarding human life as sacred provides.
In effect, the old fashioned liberals wanted to separate spirituality from materiality, making economy a public good and spirituality a private matter. They thought they could maintain both, but, alas, once the two are severed, there are only three outcomes:
Outcome One: The new-fashioned materialist liberals (Socialists) wanted to get rid of Christ and rule of law and wealth and industry, while somehow keeping the material benefits of that civilization; also they wanted a stern and solemn moral code, compassion for the poor, the equality of man, but wanted to abandon the respect for the sanctity of human life needed to justify any moral code.
Outcome Two: The new-fashioned spiritual liberals (New Agers) wanted to get rid of Christ and the rule of law, wealth and industry, and learn to do without the material benefits or selfish desires of civilization, but they also mistrusted the zeal and unity of great moral crusades, and so wanted an undefined and pantheistic form a spirituality, and an armistice declared forever concerning all debate, discussion, and difference of opinion. They wanted to keep the spirit and abandon truth. They wanted to abolish all moral codes and rely on ineffable feelings and intuitions. They wanted an end of reason.
Outcome Three: And the newest-fashioned liberals (Political Correctness) want to get rid of Christ and the rule of law, and they are willing to get rid of wealth and industry, but think there is no benefit to spiritualism, love, morality, or reason. They want to get rid of it all. Everything has disappointed them.
All the newest-fashioned liberals want out of life is endless pleasure and entertainment, endless porn, endless food and drink and dancing girls, and a life with no work, no difference of opinion, no effort, no war, no bothers, and the instant gratification of their every self-destructive whim or wish. They want to kill babies in the womb to make it easier to deflower women, and they want to kill old people to alleviate the expense of providing them medical care.
And most of all, they want someone to hate and someone to blame for everything that prevents all the instant gratifications of their ungoverned and unexamined passions and appetites.
The pattern is inversion. They take evil for good and good for evil. The motive is selfishness.
The cloak to hide the motive is screaming, shrieking, shrill self-righteousness alternating with pouty, sniveling, sarcastic, whining self-righteousness.
The means selected are parasitism both in sociopolitical matters and in spiritual matters: they want what others have earned, from a gold coin to a compliment.
They do not want the opportunity to earn it themselves, for that would merely grant them the liberty God awards to all rational creatures. They want your rewards which they have not earned, and therefore want your liberty curtailed.
And the parasites hate the productive hosts who earn their lives as despots and oppressors.
Their ultimate aim is death. They do not want to live. They want you to die.
Their ultimate reason for all this is hatred of Christ. They find cannot reject Christ without rejecting the products of Christian civilization, which includes everything from the latest technology to the most ancient classical learning, everything from the rule of law to perspective in painting to diatonic music to technical progress to the concept of equality of rights and objective rules of law.
They are willing to give all that up, and life itself, if only the light of Christ can be smothered in the darkness that they love.
They want their mothers and sweethearts and daughters to be whores, if only the light will go out; they want their children killed in the womb and their grandparents killed by doctors, if only that light would go out; they want poverty, war, plague, folly, tyranny, madness, if only that light would go out. They want nonsense in economics, nonsense in politics, nonsense in morals, nonsense in art, and to abolish truth, love, life, beauty and virtue, if only that light would go out.
No doubt you are crying out in horror and alarm, but why? Why? Why? Why such evil? Why such madness? Who would rather die and would rather have the world around him die, rather than look at himself in a clear light?
Who indeed? Any man. All men.
To give up sin is like dying. Repentance is an act like crucifixion. Any man who thinks of himself as one and the same as his sins, the sins he loves more than he loves life itself, to ask him to renounce and repent is like asking him to die.
You can only ask a man to die if he has faith in the resurrection. So do not cry out in horror and alarm at the insanity and the evil of this world: because it is not alarming, but familiar. You know it as well as I. We all love our sins and cling to them as drowning men cling to straws.
So the Inversion of these modern Gnostics, these postmodern postrational illiberal liberals and incorrect Political Correctoids cannot be surprising. The choice is simple, stark, binary, and inescapable:
If you love the proud and self-satisfied evil within you, then you hate, hate as you hate anything that threatens your self esteem and life and soul, hate with a passion beauty and reason and truth and virtue and eventually you come to hate life itself. You choose death.
But if you choose life, you surrender pride and self-satisfaction, and you come to love beauty and reason and truth and virtue, and that love will answer you, and grant you life eternal.
Life or death. Logic or illogic. Sense or nonsense. Virtue or vice. Truth or lies. Beauty beyond all dreams or ugliness beyond all nightmares.
That is the choice. Eternal life or eternal death.
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.
