Sheep, Wolf, Sheepdog
As ever, C.S. Lewis puts an idea into words better than I could hope. It is an idea we desperately need in this hour when vulgarity, misogyny, boasting, brutality, bullying, and the lowest and most craven forms of shrieking and hysterical girlish cowardice are all combined in our elites and role models.
In the current day, the concept that the most important element of character is imposed by art, not by nature, has been dismissed and derided.
That element is chivalry.
My comment:
Ours is a putrid time, when we are solemnly told by scientifically illiterate charlatans, frauds, and hatemongers, that a man’s character is determined by his genes, by his race, or by his class or sex or sexual abnormalities, or by his membership in some identity group of which he is always a member by birth, not by voluntary loyalty.
The idea of forming character, or possessing character, or attempting to be of good character, is strangely absent from all public discourse. We live in an age when no one is responsible for himself.
Everything that is not genes is upbringing; whatever is not due to fate or fortune is due to deities or destinies, or the blind machinery of history.
The far left tells us the black cannot befriend the white, since each man must forever hate the oppressors of great-grandparents. The genetic evil of being white cannot be cured: they are racist without even being aware of it, like an original sin that no savior can wash away.
The oppression of the blacks is ongoing and ever-present, even though neither the blacks are aware of any particular act of oppression, nor are the whites aware of committing any. It is taken for granted. It is called systemic racism, which means, utterly invisible and impalpable racism. ONly those virtuous enough to see the Emperor’s New Clothing can see the fine and delicate threads.
Oddly, the only laws on the books making note of race are affirmative action laws granting the minority special benefits, and hate crime laws granting them extra protections other races do not enjoy.
No one speaks of the blacks forgiving the whites, which is the sole way the racial hatreds in this nation can be solved.
Blacks once suffered at the hands of white Democrats in the South, and the black could not nothing to free himself. Terrorism by the Democrats in the KKK, and social humiliations by Democrat-controlled states imposing Jim Crow laws followed.
Now the role is reversed, because nothing the whites say or do can ameliorate the hatred rotting the minds and poisoning the souls of the blacks. They must forgive, or else the hatred continues forever.
What kind of man would forgive a foe? Such forgiveness is a gift, an act of incomprehensible Christian charity. It cannot be asked nor earned.
Only a man of sterling character, a truly gentle and brave man, a chivalrous man, could imagine such a thing.
Meanwhile, the so-called far right (albeit they are leftist in tone, goals, tactics, and rhetoric) tell us the gentile cannot befriend the Jew, since each man must forever hate someone who may some day do him some unspecified ill.
The Jews (or so we are told) have some monstrous defect of their character which makes them seek each others’ company for self protection. Apparently this is not a rational response to the irrational and satanic hatred that erupts without warning even in civilized times during civilized ages, among law abiding peoples. Apparently this is sinister.
Horrible Jews! We beat and kill them, and yet they flinch at us and act paranoid! Beating and killing them more will surely cure them of this irrational fear!
And because they have been libeled, exiled, dispossessed and murdered so often in history, this means they are an insular folk, which is something allowed and welcomed in every other race of man, but in the Jews cannot be tolerated an instant. Therefore must be identified, exiled, dispossessed, or destroyed.
One Far-Right Lefty solemnly assured that the Jews must be evil. I asked him to name one evil act their race ever accomplished, or who they oppressed, or who they enslaved. He could name no one. But, so he reasoned, because the Jews have been hunted and hated by Christian, Muslim and Pagan since the dawn of time, and therefore they must deserve it! His logic: men are such angelic creatures that we would never attack the weaker people, merely because they were weak.
Of course, the fact that anyone else treated as the Jews have been usually do not recover to be savaged again did not occur to my interlocutor.
No one else has conquered the Sioux and confined them to a reservation aside from the Americans because no one else moved onto Sioux lands. There has been no second Armenian genocide, because there are insufficient Armenians for anyone else aside from the Turks to attack.
As for the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, and Amorites, they are all long dead and gone. No stone of the Hittite empire remains standing on another stone, and not even the memory of their gods and festivals remain like echoes in our calendars and common names for things.
Catholics have been the victims of sustained programs of mass murder by most or all of the totalitarian states of the Twentieth Century, and history shows that when they were minorities in any nation, yes, even in free and liberty loving America, they were despised and assaulted. In less free nations, from England to Japan, they were martyred in droves.
The Left makes much more ado out of the race hatred directed at Jews by other leftists, particularly National Socialists or Nazis, than they do about the anticlerical hatreds directed against Catholics. This is because the main bulwark standing against the Left is the United States, where we have a just and due pride in our fairness and fairmindedness.
Not a single Leftist program nor principle can tolerate nor be tolerated by a fairminded people. That fairmindedness, it was long ago decided, must be destroyed. The best way to destroy it was by a two prong attack: the first was to encourage racism in all forms, and the second was to criticize and condemn simply everything, no matter what, as racism.
The two halves of the Leftist attack, Far Left and Far Right (which has nothing to do with the Right, but is actually another flavor of Far Left), have done nothing but level false accusations ever since, condemning the West for a problem which no one else has ever solved and no one else has ever seen as a problem: racism.
I once challenged anyone who cared to answer to produce evidence of any anti-slavery or abolitionist society or movement or philosophy or even a single sermon on the topic produced anywhere in the world outside of Christendom, before the coming of the white man. One wag, evidently not grasping the question, found and listed a number of laws in pagan and heathen lands and time regulating things like a sale of slaves, and when they could be beaten or maimed. The difference between that and “all men are created equal” was apparently lost on him.
For fairmindedness is also a part of chivalry, and it cannot coexist with collectivism of any sort, neither with racism nor with class warfare nor with identity politics.
Identity politics by its very nature decrees that judging individual men on their individual merit is either pointless or pernicious or both. You are condemned or praised by your birth, either the race or class you were born into, or your sex. To praise a man for bravery or for stoic self restraint, or to blame a man for cowardice or self-indulgence is likewise anathema to all identity politics partisans.
For them, virtue is innate and inborn into the favored identity of the innocent victimized group, and vice is universal, absolute and inescapable in the identity of the damned reprobate group. Different forms of identity politics offer different groups as the innocent and the reprobate, but the form of their argument and the adornment of their rhetoric is the same.
And, of course, as one might expect for a philosophy that denounces chivalry, honesty and honor, these people lie without the slightest twinge of conscience, always and everywhere, and on every topic, even ones where telling the truth would do their cause more good.
The one form of identity politics cannot find a single smart Jew, not even Einstein; the other form cannot find a single morally admirable white male, not even Abraham Lincoln. Ghandi, who is non-white, can be admired, or the Buddha.
And both forms mock Christ, who preached that in Him, all men, Greek and Jew, Slave and Free, Male and Female, were as one.
The Far Left flavored identity politics openly mock Christ as an opiate of the peoples. The other kind from time to time might pay lip service to him, as Hitler did, while his men were gathering the names of priest and nuns to go to the death camps.
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.
