Belloc Foresaw This All
Whenever I hear the one and sole argument ever leveled by the Left, that, namely, all who oppose the self defeating schemes of the Left are motivated by loathsome yet unadmitted hatred, ignorance, and phobia, ergo their opposition to unreason is ritually unclean and need not be entertained, then I see an insolent dismissal of truth.
Whenever I visit a modern art museum, and see literal crap and literal blasphemy, poop slung on canvasses or in tin cans, urinals hung on walls, scrap metal, a crucifix in urine, unspeakable degenerate graffito marring images of the Virgin Mary, then I see a neurotic hatred of beauty.
Whenever I hear Leftists crowing about how their moral superiority consists of their craving to destroy marriage, to destroy fatherhood, to unman boys and force girls into male roles, to celebrate those sick souls who want to castrate themselves and wear their mother’s dresses, to legalize not merely addictive drugs but every form of addiction, material and spiritual, to any and every vice, provided only it is loathsome and cheapens human life; and the ultimate pinnacle of their vaunted moral superiority is their nauseating celebration of prenatal infanticide, then I see a satanic hatred of virtue and goodness.
But Hillaire Belloc foresaw and foretold all this 85 years ago, with admirable prescience matched only by his compatriot GK Chesterton.
Being Atheist, it is characteristic of the advancing wave that it repudiates the human reason. Such an attitude would seem again to be a contradiction in terms; for if you deny the value of human reason, if you say that we cannot through our reason arrive at any truth, then not even the affirmation so made can be true. Nothing can be true, and nothing is worth saying. But that great Modern Attack (which is more than a heresy) is indifferent to self-contradiction. It merely affirms. It advances like an animal, counting on strength alone. Indeed, it may be remarked in passing that this may well be the cause of its final defeat; for hitherto reason has always overcome its opponents; and man is the master of the beast through reason.
Anyhow, there you have the Modern Attack in its main character, materialist, and atheist; and, being atheist, it is necessarily indifferent to truth. For God is Truth.
But there is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others. Therefore with the advance of this new and terrible enemy against the Faith and all that civilization which the Faith produces, there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; and immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue.
This hatred for virtue takes four forms, since there are four cardinal virtues.
Hatred of prudence, particular that prudence in the sexual passions called chastity, which places a check on the passions and restricts them, if not to what is lawful, then at the least to what is natural, that virtue is now dismissed as bigotry; and love of virtue is savaged and slandered as being a psychopathic fear and hatred worthy of contempt, for which a silly sounding neologism must be coined: homophobia. With the brazen coining of a single counterfeit word, all generations before this, and all tribes, nations, races and peoples are dismissed as psychopaths.
Hatred of temperance rears its head also in the legalization of addictive drugs. Any check on any self destructive excess is regarded as prudery. The mercantile ambitions that half jokingly announce that greed is good is just as addictive and just as self indulgent.
Hatred of fortitude is heard in those voices who call upon the police and military not to keep order in the streets and not to fight the enemy abroad, but at the same time applaud and encourage the tumultuous rioter and urge the mortal foe to ever more appalling enormities. Hatred of fortitude is equally present in voices urging the patient to be intolerant to all bonds of law and civilization as urging the bold to be indecisive, ineffective, and conciliatory in the face of the foe of civilization.
Hatred of justice is the very core of Leftism, for its claims that a man’s race, origin, class, sex, or sexual neurosis defines how law and society must treat and view him. Mascots of the right race and sex are to be lauded and upheld regardless of merit, and declared innocent regardless of guilt; whereas scapegoats of the wrong race and sex are to be defamed and savaged regardless of merit, and declared guilty regardless of innocence. In a world of nothing but mascots and scapegoats, there is no justice and no possibility of justice.
Belloc says:
Whether we call it “The Modern Attack” or “anti-Christ” it is all one; there is a clear issue now joined between the retention of Catholic morals, tradition, and authority on the one side, and the active effort to destroy them on the other. The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us.
Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men live.
The duel is to the death.
That Belloc and Chesterton, men of ordinary perspicacity, provided they are armed with Catholic teaching, should have the clarity of prophets, when geniuses who lack that teaching have misread the shape of things to come with a tragicomic shortsightedness, is a quaint fact that should give those who lack that teaching pause for thought.
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.
