John C. Wright's Journal

A reader with the egressive but singular name of Exit Only opines:

“But I don’t see a major house-cleaning of the Do-Nothing Republicans ever happening.”

Fair enough, but consider:

Thirty years ago, I was in the newspaper business, and I saw then that the news was utterly corrupt and utterly dishonest, and was willing to lose money rather than cover stories that told the truth and gave both sides of any debate. It was like living in the Matrix. The news was fake, and I knew it, and could prove it, and could recite chapter and verse of the lies, propaganda and distortion — and no one believed me, no one cared, no one could be bothered to listen.

And I do not mean strangers did not believe me. I mean friends and family, who knew very well what a sterling reputation for honesty I had, simply did not want to hear the message.

I would have had more luck if I had told people that the Moonlanding was fake, or that the Earth was hollow with a city of called Agarttha of superscientific snake-people living at the core.

At least that kind of thing people like to hear.

But the idea that the gentlemen they saw every night on the telly were cooperating with each other to create a deliberate and meticulously crafted false world?

But the idea that Uncle Walter, who told them the Viet Nam war was hopeless when, in reality, the foe was within inches of defeat, could not be trusted? The idea that it was not a civic responsibility and red badge of courage to listen faithfully to NPR every night?

One might as well tell an infatuated schoolgirl that the married man who was promising to divorce his rich wife for her was less than earnest.

No one would listen to my tales of news malfeasance — despite that I was in the industry myself and saw it happening.

And then, one day, something happened.

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We often complain about complainers, but our understanding might be more charitable if we understood the different breeds of complaint.

While there is much overlap, some differences of purpose can perhaps be discerned.

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An observation:

Every age has the temptation to regard themselves as the best of times, except, perhaps, the Middle Ages, whose memory of the glory that was Rome was still fresh in the mind, and could be seen in the Roman road and aqueducts littering the landscape.

However, all prior ages had some sort of rule about respect for ancestors and respect for tradition. Confucius makes this the linchpin of his philosophy. Our age, the age of science, prizes novelty, and has been mesmerized by the idea of an evolution of ideas, whereby some mysterious force of history makes the latest innovation the highest and best product of man, rather than (what it too often is) an untried and untested flight of fancy.

All ages are tempted to pride, but the chronological snobbery, the attitude that our own grandfathers were primitive fools who could not even walk on the moon, is, as far as I know, unique to modernity. The idea springs out of the Romantic poets, and out of Darwin, Hegel, and Marx.

So, in other words, this idea that the current generation is the best because only modern ideas are right — that is a Victorian idea, and, by its own measure, is now out of date.

Yesterday was Thomas Sunday. Like most of the modern calendar, the meaning of the day has been lost, and its name forgotten. 

Allow me to quote from Mr Jake Tawney of The American Catholic.

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