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Nine Sins and Insanities

Nine Sins & Insanities

This essay was first published in piecemeal form in 2014 under the name What’s Wrong with the World. Here it is reprinted in full.

Contents

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Part I — Introduction

“Do not suppose, you Greeks, that my separation from your customs is unreasonable and unthinking; for I found in them nothing that is holy or acceptable to God. For the very compositions of your poets are monuments of madness and intemperance.

“And I say nothing of the masculine character of Minerva, nor of the feminine nature of Bacchus, nor of the fornicating disposition of Venus. Read to Jupiter, you Greeks, the law against parricides, and the penalty of adultery, and the ignominy of pederasty.

“Why are you, being a Greek, indignant at your son when he imitates Jupiter, and rises against you and defrauds you of your own wife? Why do you count him your enemy, and yet worship one that is like him? And why do you blame your wife for living in unchastity, and yet honour Venus with shrines?

—Discourse to the Greeks of St. Justin Martyr

It has long been a puzzle to me, a puzzle indeed I recall pondering all my life, why the era into which I was born happens to be so singularly illogical, hypocritical, ignorant, vicious, barbaric, craven, ugly, foolish and confused.

To name the roots of these nine sins and insanities this meditation was written, and to explain why a return to philosophy will be insufficient to rescue the world from them.

The ancient world, to be sure, had its share and more of evils: infanticide, piracy, imperial conquest and oppression, slavery, gladiatorial games, witch-hunts and Inquisitions, and general tyranny, superstition, plague, famine, and the abominable treatment of woman in all ages, but particularly in ancient Greece and Rome, where women could be beaten, or divorced without cause by their husbands.

And yet my youthful reading of history was one of gradual but certain improvement in the West, and a more torpid but still upward progress in the East toward civilization, scholarly, medical and technical accomplishment, wealth and grandeur, and enlightenment. Human liberty and weal seemed the goal of all the grand drama of history.

And then, suddenly, sharply, and without precedent, at about the time of the industrial revolution, midway in the Victorian Age, the world inexplicably went insane.

Instead of glorifying human liberty, the world called it ‘Capitalism’ and gathered a whole hemisphere against it. Free and civilized people rushed madly to embrace the guillotine, the gulag, and the legs of risibly incompetent or mentally unbalanced tyrants.

Poetry died.

Music, art, novels, plays, all shriveled into grotesquery.

Honor was dishonored. Femininity and Masculinity, romance and chivalry, courage and self-discipline, all were mingled into a dripping lard of unisex nonbeing.

Discourtesy was standardized, and political goodthink and herdthink replaced courtesy.

Even such movements toward continued enlightenment as the Civil Rights Movement were somehow involved in an attempt to deconstruct and destroy the very institutions that assured those rights, ushering in a new movements of collective rights and identity politics, which could not possibly be calculated to do more to undo the gains of desegregation. Segregation was reintroduced, this time as race-quotas and as hyphenated-American pride movements.

The family unit was crippled, dishonored, deterred, and sexual license and sexual perversion were lauded as the norm, if not heroic.

Philosophy passed through the hands of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, various schools of Positivism and Postmodernism, descended through stages of slovenliness, to cant and rumfuddle, to ranting, to nonsense, to the mere irrationalism finally to reach nihilism.

Philosophers abolished philosophy.

All educated minds were trying to empty themselves of all reason and learning: scholars were as book-burners, seeking to bury the legacies of learning rather than maintain them.

It was as if the entire civilized world had suffered a violent allergic reaction to modern civilization and was trying to vomit it back up, and to return to the vices and deformities of tribal barbarism.

Having reached the pinnacle of civilization, no one seemed to want to be here.

The world was engaged in a vast and continuing revolt against reason, against liberty, against the mind, against the soul. The world was rotted from its heart, and the disease afflicted each aspect of civilization it could reach.

In my youth, I attributed this rot to a lack of philosophy in the general culture.

Philosophy is the application of reason to the several fundamental questions or paradoxes of the human condition, therefore is the study of reason, of knowledge, of virtue and of civic virtue.

Philosophy is also the exhortation or the schooling of the passions to follow virtue: we still speak of a man bearing privation or pain “philosophically”, that is, with undisturbed equanimity.

Finally, philosophy includes the study of beauty; philosophy includes the study of nature; and philosophy culminates in the inquiry into the fundamental nature of being.

In other words, the disciplines of philosophy include logic, ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, hortatory, aesthetics, physics and metaphysics.

In my youth, I though the era was illogical because my contemporaries (for some reason unknown and unknowable) did not have the grit or good sense to study the classical logic of the schoolmen. I thought so much illogic was on display merely because no one knew the rules of logic.

The era was hypocritical, lacking honor, honesty and good character, because hypocrisy is illogic manifested as human action: acting by a double standard means, in effect, acting arbitrarily, which means, ignoring the meaning and consequences of one’s acts, which means ignoring reality.

Ignoring reality causes ignorance: it takes a particular art of avoiding or eluding thought, a self-imposed self-deception, to remain blissfully ignorant in the face of blatant facts.

The era was vicious because vice is the inevitable product of hypocrisy combined with ignorance in the conscience: it is ignorance when the conscience does not know right from wrong, and it is hypocrisy when the conscience does not apply any standard of right and wrong.

The era was barbaric, because civilization demands the practice of civic virtue; and a people without private virtue cannot pretend civic virtue. The savagery we associate with savages is an absence of justice, moderation, temperance and fortitude on the part of the customs, cults and laws of the people in general.

The era was craven, because cowardice is the vice caused by a defect or deformation of the passions, especially the passion of courage.

The era was ugly, because ugliness was the aesthetic manifestation of a deformation of the passions.

The era was foolish because it abhorred the wisdom tradition had painstakingly gleaned, grain by grain, over the eons, preferring instead to utter paradox and self-disproving nonsense.

Sufficiently deformed passions, such as love of novelty and pride of intellect, deform the reason.

The era was confused, because it had lost its center, lost its soul, lost its reason, and lost its innocence.

To regain its reason, (or so I reasoned in my youth) the era should study logic; to regain its character, the era should study and practice virtue, including the unpopular virtues of self-control and obedience to reason and nature, and including the civic virtues; to regain its ethos, the era should house-break the passions to the commands of the conscience; to regain its courage, the era should school the passions to detest cowardice and love the noble and heroic, chaste and pure; art should likewise follow beauty and truth; to respect one’s ancestors and read their words would bring sobriety and wisdom; to study metaphysics would inform the era of the nature of reality, and thus would silence those tiresome and clumsy excuses for immorality and illogic based in unreality which define modern intellectual life.

The study of metaphysics would silence the claims that language causes thoughtcrime or that genetics excuses vice or that poverty creates crime or that goods can be consumed before they are produced or that empirical science disproves the existence both of cause and effect and of free will.

I look on back on this belief that the special ills of modernity could be solved by an education in classical philosophy with avuncular condescension at my own youthful optimism and naivety.

You see, there are basically only two theories as to what causes human evil: the Socratic and Pauline.

Socrates thought virtue was a matter of instruction, and therefore that a defect of virtue could be cured by instruction and education. You will encounter this language frequently among intellectuals, who speak of teachable moments and re-education camps.

St. Paul thought virtue was a matter of inspiration: he speaks of how we can know the good and yet still not do the good—the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

The Socratic theory is the more optimistic of the two, and, in my opinion, a foolish optimism. As Socrates himself would be the first to tell you, he knows nothing. The pagan commandment written on the doors of Delphi, ‘know thyself’ was one the pagans in their gloomy hubris could not follow, but St. Paul in his glorious humility could.

In my youth, I was a follower of Socrates, not of St. Paul, and I thought the rot could be cut out, purged, scorched and scotched.  I am now convinced that even St. Paul was too optimistic. What follows here is an explanation of this conclusion, presented as a memorial of in intellectual journey and not as a persuasive argument.

In what follows, let me describing what is wrong with the world, mentioning when and how that particular ill came to my attention, and why I no longer believe that philosophy, nor any human force, can cure it.

But first, a word about qualifications and definitions.

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Part II — Qualifications & Definitions

In what follows, I make no apology for speaking in broad terms without the various qualifications and exceptions which of course obtain. I discovered long ago that qualifying one’s statements is not needed for those who read with the purpose of understanding the author, and is vain for those who purpose is to misunderstand. I speak of general things—generalities are inevitable.

The other difficulty is terminology. A concerted effort by the majority consensus of writers over decades has rendered the vocabulary used to label the modern school of thought almost entirely meaningless, if not misleading: like the Gnostics of old, the Moderns take particular care that their school of thought not be identified, their doctrines not be defined.

When I speak of the so-called political Left, the socialists and national socialists of Europe and the Far East, the Fabians and Marxists, I include both Nazis and French Revolutionaries and Modern Islamic Fascists in their ranks: this point has been so deliberately obscured for so many years that I can only take recourse in saying that I use a term “Left” to mean what it really means, not what other writers, who lie, say they mean by it. Also, I speak of a more general movement of which socialism is merely a branch.

Likewise, when I speak of the practitioners of Political Correctness, I mean the Orwellian movement of Left. The frequently made assertions by the Left that the Right has a similar program of language devaluation is a lie, but even to those who believe it to be true, I aver that in this essay, I use the term to mean not merely the attempts in the political branch of the intellectual movement, but the more general modern tendency toward nominalism.

When I speak of “intellectuals” I usually mean those persons who, lacking any genius or even talent in things of the intellect, take upon themselves the coloration of intellectuals by repeating or reciting meaningless but fashionable opinions promoted by the smart set. An “intellectual” is a stupid person pretending to be smarter than a smart person by means of parroting nonsense, or an indecent person pretending to be more righteous than a decent person by means of expressing approval for perversion and unwholesomeness.

Because of these and other terminological difficulties, I merely refer to these and their allied schools of thought as “Modern” and “Modernist”, and in this essay, I ignore what other definitions other writers have for these terms.

Not everyone who lives in the modern age follows modern thought or believes modern nonsense—indeed, the majority of people living in the modern day follow the same eternal truths as their forefathers, and pay no heed to these temporary intellectual fashions. The ‘modern man’ mentioned in these pages does not include that majority who lives in the modern world but do not conform to faddish worldly thought.

Furthermore, not everyone who follows one aspect or the other of modern thought follows all of them. Indeed, a truly consistent follower of all aspects of modernism would be an odd creature indeed, since a main point of modernism is to avoid consistency. Nonetheless, those who recognize similar tendencies and trends among the thought of philosophers following Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre are welcome to share my conclusions.

By the way, for those of you whose native language is not English, or for those of you who speak English but do not know the rules, the word “Man” can either mean a human being of either sex (Man as opposed to Dog), can mean an adult as opposed to a child (Man as opposed to Boy) or, in certain limited contexts, can mean a male as opposed to female (Man as opposed to Woman).

You see, the ruthless oppression of the Mary-worshipping Catholic Church, together with the ruthless matriarchy of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria of England altered the English Language (still ruthlessly called “The Queen’s English”) so that we poor male Men do not have a word particular and special to us. That privilege is only reserved to the fairer sex, who has spent eons since the cave-man days ruthlessly trampling we males under their shapely high heeled shoes (ruthlessly called “stiletto heels”).

Likewise, there is no particular pronoun to distinguish an antecedent of either sex from one who is male. When the antecedent is a human being of either sex or undetermined sex, the word used is “he”; only when the antecedent is or must be female, the word used is “she.” This word is also used to refer to those natural or inanimate things worthy of fear and admiration, such as nations, ships, the planet Venus, and hurricanes. As part of the ruthless oppression of the masculine sex, there are no particular uses for the pronoun “he” to refer to natural or inanimate things, except the Divinity. If any of my readers find the gender rules of the English language uncomfortable or insulting, I suggest we speak together in some gender-neutral language used by people who are world-famous for their gender-neutral respectful belief in the equality of women, such as the tongue of the Latin, Greek or the Chinese.

I am kidding, of course. Those who pretend to be offended at the rules of the English language would be robbed of an inexpensive pastime requiring neither skill nor aptitude to play, if their game were denied them. But it is not a game that I, or any honest man, should care to play or tolerate being played on him.

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Part III — Illogical

The first glimmerings I had that the rot afflicting the Modern Age was much deeper than suspected came, as I recall, in the 1980’s, when I saw a news report on what was being called political correctness or “PC.”

The new form of censorship came not from the Right but from the Left. It seemed that the Left, those freedom-loving nonconformists always willing to utter a swearword calculated to give the vapors to the small-minded bourgeoisie in order to advance the cause of liberty of speech and expression, wished to curtail liberty of speech and expression, not just of those things that gave them the vapors, or provoked their ever-more-hypersensative ire, but also to curtail even the possibility of honest and straightforward discussions and reflection on any topic related to their dogmas.

The sheer gall of the project appalled me then and still does now. The Moderns have an allergic reaction to the truth so deep that certain taboo matters cannot even be discussed. Not only do the Moderns erect psychological defense mechanisms to avoid confronting the truth, they have schemed to have the general society around them erect social, political and legal mechanisms.

It is appalling to me that the general society has so gracefully acceded to their irrational demands. Honest folk, whom I know in no way support man-hating feminism, will use “he or she” as if this is the correct pronoun for a human; honest folk, whom I know in no way wish to offer a mortal insult to their forefathers, will use “C.E.” (Common Era) rather than “A.D.”

To call political correctness ‘insane’ is to trivialize it. Of course it is insane: but it is a deliberate, coldly calculated, if one might say, sane form of insanity. Political Correctness is the deliberate corruption or confusion of speech in order to confuse or corrupt thought. This is done with the ultimate purpose of altering reality, by altering the perception of reality.

In other words, PC is the deliberate confusion of thought for object, symbol for reality. It is deliberate insanity.

It is a massive project of play-pretend, where thousands and millions of innocent dupes and unwilling collaborators are swept up into the project of playing make-believe as false as the flattery once paid by cringing courtiers to a tyrannous emperor, telling him with one voice that he was immortal, godlike, and his invisible new clothes were impeccable.

The modern manifestation of this cringing flattery is even more incomprehensible, wicked, and stupid than the flattery paid tyrants, because there is no emperor on the throne to punish a truth-teller.

It merely adds irony to insult to hear this insanity and inanity preached with fiery zeal from the sect that has always preached liberty and nonconformity, as well as preached the moral goodness of pornography, insult, and impoliteness. The coercion applied to the nonconformist is hence nothing more terrible than the frown of hypocrites who pretend to admire nonconformity.

If you are not philosophically inclined nor morally straight, I doubt you can comprehend the deadly hatred with which I, and all honest men, regard political correctness. For us, the honest, defining terms correctly is the essential single act which makes logical reasoning, and any rational or systematic thought such as law or science, possible.

Imagine trying to study physics without an agreed-upon definition of the basic measurements, values or properties of objects being studied; imagine a murder trial where the elements of the crime, the standards of proof, the procedures of the court were not defined.

Now imagine that an evil deceiver has deliberately, with the intent of preventing scientific research, with the intent of obstructing justice, redefined the standard names and terms of things to mean their opposites: you will have a notion of what moral, intellectual, and political chaos is created by a host of such deceivers injecting their nonsense words into the middle of otherwise ordinary discussions. There are certain political, social, and moral problems which we cannot solve, nay, we cannot even discuss, because the Orwellian vocabulary of propaganda has replaced the vocabulary of truth.

The madness here is radically and fundamentally ontological. The Moderns have a wrong theory of the nature of being. They think reality inheres in words, and not in the real things toward which the words point.

The Moderns are witch-doctors who cannot tell the difference between symbols and the objects symbols represent. To the modern, metaphorically sticking a pin in a doll is a crime (specifically, a hate crime), because the doll is the person; whereas actually sticking a scissor-blades into the skull of a man (particularly an unborn man) is not a crime, because a person is merely a manikin, an “unperson” to them.

The modern theory of ontology is that whatever we imagine in words is real: reality is hence personal, subjective, and optional.

Now, in real life, logic applies to reality, and paradoxes and self-contradictions exist only in words. The modern mind, since it has a diseased ontology, hence must have a diseased theory of reason: the moderns conclude or tend to conclude that reality is a thing of paradoxes and self-contradictions, and that if such paradoxes are discovered in speech, thought, or action, well, that can be dismissed either with a shrug of Gallic insouciance, a sniff of British condescension, or a scream of Prussian rage.

Hence modern philosophy takes no notice of logic at all, except, perhaps, to scoff at it.

In Communist theory, for example, it is held that the categories of thought, that is, the logic of the proletarians, and the logic of the bourgeoisie, are incompatible and incommensurate.  In Nazi theory, it is held that the categories of thought between the master race and the under-man races are incompatible and incommensurate.

This theory is called ‘polylogism’ and it is honestly and actually believed by no one, not even its promoters, because if meant honestly, the polylogists would enunciate the various differing categories or rules of logic utilized by the different economic classes or racial castes: that is, the polylogist would say why “A is A” is true for Aryans and not for Jews, and what rules of logic Jews have instead.

Formal polylogism, far from dying off with the destruction of the Nazi regime or the fall of the Soviet Empire, has re-emerged in an understated or unstated form as Political Correctness in America and Europe, where it is merely assumed that members of non-White races, members of non-Christian religions, members of the fairer sex, and persons who indulge in sexual deviant behavior, have such different psychologies and mental categories from Caucasian Christian males whose sexual behaviors are chaste, wholesome and natural, that no understanding and no sympathy is possible between the two groups.

Such a massive repudiation of thought could not take place in a society with either a normal level of cultural self-confidence or a normal level of brainpower.

Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by design, the education system, firmly in the hands of the political Left, has lowered the standards and infantilized the students falling into its machinery to the point where most modern students cannot even comprehend the issue of what might be wrong with utter irrationality, utter subjectivism.

Hence their only mode of answering criticism is an ad hominem argument, preferably an ad hominem tu quoque, best of all an ad hominem tu quoque on a topic unrelated to the topic of discussion.

My complaint here is not that political correctness is dishonest. My complaint is that political correctness is knowingly, calculatedly, insolently dishonest: back in the 1980’s, I first realized that the rot of the Modern World was deeper than it seemed because I realized that the Modern mind rejected even the idea that words were supposed to represent things.

In real life, a word is either honest or dishonest. A word is honest when it represents what it is meant to represent. A word is dishonest when it misrepresents what it is meant to represent.

Modern philosophy teaches that words and symbols have no nature, no innate meaning, that indeed words and symbols are utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.

This theory conveniently frees the propagandist to invent any set of words or phrases he wishes to have any emotional impact he seeks, without being chained to truth or honor. He never has to pay for his lies because if all words are equally meaningless then no one can ever call him on it.

For the Modern, words are either effective or ineffective; they either strike a target and achieve an emotional impact or they do not; they either move the listener or fail to do so. All speech is Madison Avenue advertisement, all writing is Pravda propaganda.

The Moderns call all speech and writing propaganda because all their own terms and words are propaganda: the pretense that these rude and vicious vermin are motivated by kindheartedness or a desire to include those whom the innate prejudices of languages exclude is contemptibly risible. The kind of people who call the Soviet Union a “Republic”; or who call National Socialists (Nazis) by the same word (“Right-wing”) that they call Republicans; or who label sound economics “Capitalism” as if the freedom to trade and labor were a coercive ideology rather than a description of the nature of man;  or who use the name of Senator McCarthy as an synonym for Witch-hunting paranoia; or who use “he and she” rather than “he”; or who use the term “C.E.” rather than “A.D.” — such people cannot be reasoned with because they do not want to be reasoned with. Reason is the enemy to any  who count self-deception their friend. The heart of a liar is not motivated by kindheartedness, but by a desire to deceive and to be deceived, and hence a hatred of truth and of the truthful.

Philosophy, the study of formal logic, cannot cure political correctness.

A person fallen into such a theory cannot be educated out of it, because he will dismiss the truth as propaganda, an attempt to manipulate.  A person who embraces Political Correctness cannot be reasoned back to honesty, because (1) the process of reasoning presupposes honesty; and (2) the point of embracing Political Correctness is to halt the mental process of reasoning by effacing the meaning of words.

It is darker than it seems. The man of the modern mind is not illogical because he has not been trained in logic. The modern man is illogical on purpose, because he rejoices in unreason.

He thinks this servility to unreason makes him free. But free of what?

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Part IV —Hypocritical

My second glimmering that the rot was even deeper than I feared came in the 1990’s, when the Clinton Scandals were defended by the National Organization of Women.

Until that time (to admit my naivety now causes me a pang of shamefacedness) I actually thought the feminists were either in favor of women or were at least neutral toward women. The National Organization of Women famously flew to the defense of Clinton (or, rather, to use the infelicitous phrase the feminists of the time proposed, they knelt to his defense on their kneepads of oral sex) on the grounds that killing girl babies in the womb was the paramount, nay, the sole cause and sum of the Women’s Movement. Apparently a powerful adulterer spraying semen into the face of a woman young enough to be his daughter and using the vast resources, prestige and powers of his office to humiliate and silence her was as nothing. Hearing feminists defend the modern Muslim fanatic practice of putting women in trashbag-shaped head-to-toe garb could not be more shocking and hypocritical.

Again, I was at a loss for explanation. I admit I was a scion of the sexual revolution, a firm believer in sexual equality, a fan of fornication, and I bought into all their thinking uncritically, and it shocked me to my core to hear it so casually and so completely repudiated.

But for feminists to fly to the defense of a woman-abuser was not merely insane, not merely hypocrisy, not merely evil; it was a form of insolent evil, rejoicing in evil, evil for evil’s sake that did not even have the crass justification of self-interest to support it.

The feminist women were announcing to the world that they wanted to be abused, exploited, humiliated, betrayed, treated as sex toys, abandoned when inconvenient, and in all ways to be treated with the same respect due the contents of a chamber pot.

The speed with which the Office of the Presidency was desecrated and humbled even to this day astonishes me. I recall conversations taking place less than a year after the scandal, when folk I thought honest and innocent would reassure me, with no gleam of fanaticism in their eyes, that every president since Washington had kept and abused mistresses, and that this practice was normal and unexceptional—indeed, it was then hinted broadly that to dwell on the matter further was impolite, and could we not simply Move On?

In one year, the norm of what we expected from our Presidents and what the office stood for went from being something every schoolboy was taught to salute and admire, to a sink of filth I would not dare describe in detail to my seven-year-old son.

“Daddy, is it OK for the President to shoot semen into the face of a young intern who trusts and loves him, when he is married to another woman?”

“Ho, ho, of COURSE, my son! And I want you to betray those who trust and love you—everyone cheats on his wife, and everyone performes unnatural sexual acts out of wedlock, and everyone, everyone, everyone lies. Everyone admires a weasel who cannot define what the word ‘is’ is.”

“Is it okay if the pale sticky love goo gets in her mouth?”

“Okay? Why, it is expected! If she does not swallow, slap the whore bitch around your office a few times! It’s the way I treat your Mom, and the way I want your sister’s anonymous and unmarried lovers to treat her! Because I respect women!”

I could not fathom the feminist defense of this woman-hunter. I kept telling myself in disbelief that no one could be that smirkingly evil as to betray everything for which he had taken a stand since the days of Susan B. Anthony merely for a four-year political gain. I could not explain it.

My eyes were opened by, of all things, my archenemies. I was an atheist at the time, and not just an atheist, but a zealous evangelistic proselytizing atheist. My mission in life was to talk all of mankind, one man at a time, out of the madness and self-deception of religion. While switching channels on the radio I came across a preacher, and not just any preacher, but someone with a low-class Southern accent so thick that he sounded like central casting had sent him up to answer a casting call for inbred Appalachian Fundie Baptist know-nothing.

Except he was not a know-nothing. The so called “yokel” explained something no conservative commentator I had heard could explain: Clinton’s continued popularity as an adulterer, perjurer, liar, womanizer, and possible rapist.

His theory was that Clinton was popular because he gave to his followers the one thing they wanted most of all in the world. What they wanted most of all was for their consciences to stop goading and annoying them.

Your conscience can never be silenced (so the preacher said) because it is the Voice of God.

The only thing you can do is drown it out for a time with the clamor of the voice of other men. So if your leaders, and the society around you, and your peers, and everyone you respect tells you that your sins and filth and fornication and adulteries are perfectly fine and innocent, while you do not for a moment believe them, the voices of flattery and falsehood sooth you.

Even if adultery is not your particular vice, whatever your vice is, hearing that the President, and, by extension, everyone whose opinion and example we admire and follow, are sinners as bad or even worse than we are, it acts as a balm on the inflammation of the conscience, or a gag to stifle that still, small voice of the little angel sitting on your right shoulder.

Such was the preacher’s theory: Clinton was popular because the people want and crave an immoral and devious leader. A Clinton supporter is unlikely himself to be personally harmed Clinton’s crimes or sins, and a Clinton supporter cares very little about the public weal. To him, the dishonor in the abstract means nothing; to the contrary, the crimes and sins of a unscrupulous and dishonorable leader soothes the supporter, and justifies his own adulteries of mind and body.

If everybody does it (so the warped thinking goes) then to single me out for condemnation betrays double standard in the accuser—whereupon the accuser can be accused of unfairness, bias, bigotry, witch-hunting, and, in a word, hypocrisy.

Got that? The game is simple and any fool can play. All you do when accused of anything is to say that everyone does it, and to accuse your accuser of hypocrisy.

Of course, the fool playing this game does not notice, and does not care to notice, that he himself is uttering an accusation which can be excused by the very standard he himself uses to excuse the accusation he seeks to escape.

The rule the hypocrite uses to break the rules is a rule that by its own logic the hypocrite cannot use, either to break rules or for any other purpose.

When the fool playing this game says, “Everyone commits adultery and lies about it! Ergo you are a hypocrite if you condemn me!” you can reply with logic no less valid that everyone seeking to weasel out of a condemnation accuses his accusers of hypocrisy, but that accusing all accusers of hypocrisy is itself hypocrisy, for it assumes a double standard. Your sin of adultery can be excused because others have committed it? Why, if so, then my sin of making a hypocritical accusation against you sin can also be excused because others have committed it, including you.

In case that is too confusing, let us note a simple truth. In order to maintain a double standard, one must tacitly maintain no standard. This means, in effect, that one must deny reality. It is no coincidence that one of the most famous weasel-phrases that emerged from the weaseling surrounding the Clinton impeachment was that “it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.”

In effect, any hypocrisy is an tacit assertion that existence does not exist. ‘Is’ either may or may not be ‘is’. A is not A.

The study of philosophy cannot cure this. Philosophy assumes that anything being studied has a nature, that is, that the object of study is what it is, and is not what it is not.

Indeed, the basis of all philosophy is ontology, the study of existence, the study of being. Whatever one might say or believe about being, the essential property is that ‘to be’ is ‘to be’.

‘Is’ is ‘is.’

Existence exists.

Someone who tacitly or openly denies that existence is existence, or who thinks the relationship is optional rather than necessary, cannot study philosophy. The most he can do is play increasingly boring, pointless and stupid word games, or ponder whether the statement “the cat sat on the mat” truly means what it seems. The contempt the modern world has for modern word-game philosophy is entirely deserved: of such drivel do modern so-called philosophers occupy their days. They are not seekers of truth—in a world where ‘is’ is not ’is’, there is no truth—they are apologists for hypocrisy.

In seeking an ontological reason to support a double standard, or to support no standards at all, modern philosophers seek something that, by its own terms, cannot exist (no matter what “exist” might mean).

A “standard” means that which exists, the coherent and essential property that endures or defines a set despite changes or the appearance of changes of accidental properties. When applied to moral reasoning, a standard is that by which human actions are judged, despite the accidental property of the identity of the moral actor. A double standard is not just fatal to moral reasoning; it is fatal to any reasoning whatsoever.

A person fallen into such blatant hypocrisy as the feminists defending an exploiter of women cannot be talked or trained out of it, because to return to a non-self-contradictory and coherent standard would be antithetical to the deliberate purpose of the hypocrisy, which is, namely, to undermine the standard.

Such people are deliberately illogical, deliberately dishonest, deliberately evil because they think it makes them free: free of standards of right and wrong; free of the authority of conscience.

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Part V —More Hypocrisy— Four Puzzles

Four Puzzles of Hypocrisy

When the preacher said his theory, four other questions arose to puzzle me, which (as it turned out) the ramifications of his answer also eventually answered.

(1) Why was there so much happy-sappy talk about self-esteem in the modern era? The ancients never talked of self-esteem; they talked of honor and courage, justice and moderation, and how to endure sorrows and wounds with patient silence.

(2) Why is there so much happy-sappy talk about how the conscience has no authority? The Modern theory is that the contents of the conscience do not tell right from wrong, but instead merely registers a collection of unquestioned bigotries, a flotilla of taboos, which the enlightened man may ignore, or perhaps even has a duty to ignore.

(3) If the moderns had so much self-esteem, why were they so loud and angry, insanely angry, insanely self-righteously angry? Why were they never angry about things that would move an honest man to anger against a real enemy, but always about trivial, superficial, symbolic or unreal things, and always the anger is directed against the most willing, the most weak, the most patient of targets, that is, not against enemies but against authorities?

(4) Why are the children of the modern age, the freest and least responsible people in history, always, always, always talking as if they are about to be repressed, as if the jackbooted thugs of the dread and dread Theocracy were seconds away from kicking in the door to drag the screaming victims off to the torture chambers of the Grand Inquisitor? Why so paranoid?

Years passed ere the answers became clear.

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Part VI —Unvirtuous

Let us look at the first question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(1) Why so much self-esteem?

I realized when I heard the theory that the vicious love vice because it justifies them, that all the vapid talk of Modern Man about self-actualization and self-esteem was just a smokescreen for the simple, ugly truth that man was sinful, and Modern Man simply wanted his conscience to shut up.

He was like a debtor who does not want to pay the debt, but be excused from it; but, upon being excused, instead of being grateful, the debtor also wants to be congratulated on his thrift, and applauded for how promptly he pays his debts.

If Modern Man really and honestly wanted self-esteem, he would do those things worthy of earning his esteem, such as avoiding vice and practicing virtue: but modern happy-sappy talk about self-esteem is always talk about gaining esteem without practice and without effort.

It is talk about getting esteem without doing anything worthy of esteem.

It is talk about how to be elevated with happiness while descending to wallow in your swinish vices: How to cheat on your wife and feel good about yourself; how binge drinking is your sacred and personal form of self-expression; how abandoning your husband and children to find yourself is an spiritual journey of heroic dimensions; and most of all, ever and ever repeated, how any criticism of your vices is an example of hatred, hate-speech, bigotry, hate-bigotry of hate-filled bigoted haters, racismsexismhomophobia uttered by that evilest of evil enemies, the man who dares to say to you the same thing your conscience is whispering.

Let us look at the second question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(2) Why demote the conscience?

Far later, I was to realize that all the modern talk about socialization and society’s role versus nature’s role, education versus genetics, and other modern jabberwocky is merely what you get when you stop acknowledging the authority and role of the conscience. The modern theory is that the conscience is nothing but the echo of what parents and nursemaids tell you in the crib.

In other words, the modern theory of conscience is the same dumb trick as the modern theory of logic, and played for the same dumb reason. The polylogists preach that logic is subjective and arbitrary, and ergo lacks all authority, in order to excuse their own dishonesty and illogic in thought, speech and writing; likewise, here, the subjectivist preaches that the conscience is merely a habit of social conditioning, hence is subjective and arbitrary, and ergo lacks all authority. This is done in order to excuse their dishonesty and infidelity in their acts of vice.

The moderns point at the fact that the British drive on the left of the road and the Americans on the right; or that the Mohammedans are polygamists whereas the Christians are monogamists, or that the Callatians eat their dead fathers whereas the Athenians burn their dead fathers; or that those noble savages growing up in Samoa practice guilt-free fornication whereas the Christians preach chastity.

From these and other examples, the Moderns conclude that there is no conscience, and that it has no authority. Hence (so the intellectuals conclude) there is no reason to criticize Shelley for deserting his first wife, his mistress, or his bastard children; no reason to criticize Marx for seducing his wife’s servant girl and fathering a bastard child on her, which he later pressured Engels into assuming paternity; no reason to criticize Freud for the way he treated his wife and daughters and followers; no reason to criticize Rousseau for this endless string of mistresses, whores, and for abandoning the bastard children he fathered on them.

A society which repudiates the notion of conscience also repudiates the notion of duty; inevitably, this also repudiates the notion that a rational man has a duty to be rational. Duty, no matter what else it means, means doing what is right even when you are not inclined to do so. The idea that one should and must believe what is true, even when one is pleased by lies, and do what is rational, even when one is pleased by unreason, is an idea that only an honest society could uphold. No society that desecrates the conscience and forces the conscience to abdicate its sovereignty can be honest, because the conscience is the voice of honesty within you.

Philosophy cannot cure this. The study of ethics assumes that a standard of goodness exists, and that a man can know it.

One cannot reason a man to turn away from his vices and practice virtue if all men are convinced that no virtues actually exist, not even the virtue of listening honestly to reason.

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Part VII— Ignorant

The mere fact that the Samoans, as well as every other sane tribe, nation, and race on the planet, adheres to a marriage custom and rules that deter fornication, and the mere fact that tales spun by jocose natives to fool gullible palefaces pretending to be anthropologists with stories so outrageous that no one but an intellectual would believe them, these facts do not halt the progress of Modern nonsense-theories that the conscience has no authority and words have no meaning, because whatever partisans of nonsense do not care to notice, they do not notice. They create a mental blankness, partly a pretense and partly a psychosis, which enables them to not notice ungood thoughts. What is never noticed need never be answered, refuted, or denied.

The Modern Man proposes to prove that there is no such thing as right and wrong.

Of course, he does not notice that to embark on a proof, any proof, is tacitly to accept that there are standards of right and wrong, since a proof by its nature is an appeal to the objective authority of reason.

A proof that meets the standard of evidence is right (proven) and what does not meet the standard is wrong (not proven). The tacit assumption is that it is wrong, morally wrong, an act of intellectual dishonesty, to ignore an honest proof.

Every proof, even something as abstract as a technical debate between empirical scientists concerning the merits of the Steady State Theory versus the Big Bang Theory, tacitly assumes the honesty of the discussion and the integrity of the evidence: it is vain to offer proof to someone who does not adhere to the duty of an honest man to admit (despite his inclination otherwise) his cherished theory might be wrong.

To prove there is no such thing as right and wrong, the Modern Man has to maintain that all previous assessments of right and wrong were utterly arbitrary. No two eras, no two nations, no two religions, no two philosophies (so the Modern argument runs) can agree on anything; ergo (so the leap of logic leaps) no one is correct; ergo (so the leap of unlogic leaps) only the Christians are despicable, and everyone else is praiseworthy.

Clitoris mutilation carried out by Mohammedans on their female children is merely their particular contribution to the rich diversity of cultural multiplicity, and therefore neither right nor wrong; whereas monogamy as practiced by Christians is abhorrent, and to teach children the Christian religion is child abuse.  So the Moderns say, or, rather, would say, if somehow they could be forced to speak without recourse to that mental blackness which enables them to utter nonsense and evil while pretending not to notice what they are saying.

In order to pull off the massive false-to-facts deception, the man of the modern mind has to ignore all of history and to remain blissfully aware of what other men of other lands and eras preach and teach.

No one (except, perhaps, an intellectual) can read the Koran, the Sutras, the Mahabharata, the Analects of Confucius, the writings of Lao Tzu, the Havamal of the pagan Norse or the learning of the pagan Greeks and not see much the same moral precepts endlessly repeated. All men have the same basic knowledge of right and wrong: the differences are either differences of a barbaric practice as opposed to a civilized (as monogamy versus polygamy, or slavery versus abolition, or infanticide versus holding human life sacrosanct) or they are trivial differences of custom or ritual, not related to ethical principles.

But the Modern Man does not just argue that barbarians disagree with civilized men about the morality of polygamy. No, indeed. He also argues that BECAUSE there is no such thing as right and wrong, some Caesar should be granted an unchecked and absolute power over the speech, acts, and thoughts of his neighbors, and should take money and land and personal property from whomsoever Caesar deems and grant the same to whomsoever Caesar favors.

The Modern furthermore argues that the current crises and emergency requires a repudiation of precedent and legal practice, and a radical reinvention of any and all ancient institutions, and any other act by the state as might be needed to correct for historical injustices, or to make manna fall from the sky to feed the poor, or to bend all swords into ploughshares as war shall be studied no more, or to wipe all tears from the eyes of men, and bless and love them forever and aye.

This is not merely a confusion of theology with political economics. This is a manifestation of gross ignorance is in the realm of political economics.

The only way the same policies that failed in ancient city-states (and failed every place and each time they have been attempted) could be seriously proposed and debated is if the debaters or the audience of the debate is utterly ignorant of the basic facts of history which have been known since the days of Thucydides, and basics of economics which have been known since the days of Adam Smith.

The only way it seriously could be debated that even though all previous attempts to give one man or one small faction extraordinary and unchecked power have led to the corruption of the laws, but nonetheless the modern intellectual’s version of Caesar is appointed by History with such shining moral virtue that he will never get corrupt, is if the debater or his audience indulge in an unprecedented, nay, an awe-inspiring degree of naivety and self-imposed ignorance.

The only way it seriously could be debated that, even though all previous scares and panics and panicky scares and scary panics about overpopulation, DDT, Alar, ozone depletion, acid rain, global cooling, global warming, nuclear winter, genetically-altered grain, this current scare (whatever it is) is honestly and truly a cause for panic and immediate creation of a dictatorship as the only solution to avoid this current catastrophe (whatever it is), is if the debater or his audience know little or nothing about science.

The only way it seriously could be debated that fundamentalist Islamic is not a threat, but is indeed a collection of well-intentioned peaceful souls, perhaps stirred momentarily to understandable if regrettable violence by the unforgiveable atrocities of Jews and Christians, whereas fundamentalist Christianity is a looming and immediate menace to the life, liberty, even the sanity of the innocent world, is if the debater and his audience ignore the current situation, and ignore the last decade, last century, and last millennium of history, and the millennium before that.

That requires a lot of ignoring; a gigantic ignorance, a cyclopean ignorance, a titanic ignorance, a celestial and Uranian ignorance so vast beyond the measure of the universe as to be invincible.

Such titanic ignorance aids the deceiver and the self-deceived.

It is not ignorance at all, but pretense; telling oneself a fable.

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Part VIII—More Ignorance — The Parochialism of the Enlightened

One of the linchpins holding the self esteem of the modern mind in place, for example, is fable the Modern tells himself the modern age is the only enlightened age: it is the age of science. This requires him to say that the previous age, the Age of Faith, was backward and unscientific, and indeed that the progress of science was hindered and opposed by the Christian religion. No one with even a smattering of history could maintain such an obvious absurdity.

Christendom invented science and the scientific method, as its foremost and nearly sole promoter in world history; whereas the scientific method becomes subordinated to politics and falsehood, that is, stops being science (as Lysenkoism or Climate-gate) in lands and eras that repudiate Christendom (as the atheist Soviet Union or the postchristian University of East Anglia).

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Part IX—More Ignorance — A Digression on Intolerance

Likewise, the modern man tells himself the fable that, in the same way the modern age and only the modern age discovered Relativity and invented rockets to the Moon, so too the moderns invented a new form of moral and ethical enlightenment unknown to the crude and unwashed ape-men of prior eons. The new principle is called ‘Tolerance’ and it consists solely of being intolerant of the ethical precepts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

(Despite that fact that all other traditions, pagan, Near-Eastern or Eastern contain precepts as strict or more so concerning sexual morality or respect for elders, for some reason these are never condemned as intolerant.)

‘Tolerance’ consists of this one rule: All the wise men of the ancient and modern world were ignorant bigots; all persons of the opposing political camp are ignorant bigots; everyone but me and mine are ignorant bigots; except of course any members of non-Christian religions who happen to disagree at some point or another with a Christian ethical teaching—such folk, no matter what else their lore or customs, are delightful expressions of their own rich cultural heritage, redolent with spiritual insight and admirable ethical teachings.

The Aztecs (so I have had it explaining to me with sneering condescension by a modernist) were innocent victims of an atrocious Christian genocide. Their nightmarish practice of mass human torture followed by mass human sacrifice, the capering of their priests with offal smeared in their hair while wearing robes made from the flayed skin of little girls (which little girls were slowly beaten to death so that their tears of pain might magically conjure rain) — these are what we tolerate; whereas a White man who opines that men should be chaste, romantic, loving and respectful toward the women in their lives — he is a bigot, a benighted fool and perhaps a racist, who cannot be tolerated.

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Part X—More Ignorance—A Digression on Ingratitude

The leitmotif of these intolerant and intemperate partisans of Toleration and fablers about Modern Enlightenment is their ingratitude.

A most striking example of this I came across recently in a discussion, of all things, about Robert A. Heinlein.

Now, wherever you, dear reader, may have first come across and most vehemently and persuasively heard defended the core values of Modernism, feminism, individualism, and the modern sexual revolution, all I can say is that I came across them in the writings of Robert Heinlein.

Fearless of controversy, Heinlein was an unstinting champion of the equality of women and the individualism of men. No one person had more influence to persuade me of the rightness and good judgment of the modern contempt for the ancient virtues of chastity and self-control than Bob Heinlein. I venture to say that many, if not most, in the science fiction field who march beneath the banners of the sexual revolution would agree.

But such credentials carry no weight with the more modern Modernists: I have heard Robert Heinlein repeatedly excoriated because he was not a sufficiently vehement partisan advertising homosexuality and incest (even thought I can recall at least three novels of his where he does so).

The typical witch-hunt mentality of the Left was brought to bear on these discussions: Heinlein, an advocate of sexual liberty in all things, was now a sexist and a homophobe. Heinlein, the only and the foremost author of his day willing to have non-Whites as not only major characters but main characters, and who never portrayed bigotry or racism as anything but the most vile and reprehensible of traits,  was now a racist and a bigot.

The wardroom of the dropship Rodger Young in STARSHIP TROOPERS was more crowded with more minorities than the bridge of the starship Enterprise, and the main character was a Filipino living in Brazil—and yet this book was dismissed as racist on the grounds that the enemy being fought were subterranean bugs, and for grunt in time of combat to call enemy forces by derogatory slang is the same (so goes the leap of logic) as race-bigotry.

The mere inhuman ingratitude on display among these folk I can but liken to the practices of Saturn: the Left castrate their own fathers and eat their own children. No mentor with an eye to his own self-interest would teach his students that the honorable repayment a student owes his mentor is to revile him, and to continue in the mentor’s teachings while robbing him of honor and of credit.

To this day, Robert A. Heinlein is condemned and derided by his own. This bold voice condemning race-bigotry at a time when none other in the science fiction field dared to do so, is routinely dismissed by up-to-the-latest-fad groupthink poseurs as a bigot. Creatures this ungrateful cannot be reasoned with, cannot be compromised with, cannot be left in peace. Since they do not honor their own, there is no chance they will honor reason, or the terms of a compromise, or the mutual benefit of a mutual peace. Surrender terms they not honor; parley they do not desire; quarter is not possible.

Yet such is the outcome of the fable of Darwinian enlightenment, such is the evolutionary necessity behind the Hegelian and Marxist fable of evolution saying that each new generation not merely supplants but rebels against and savages and destroys the old.

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Part XI—More Ignorance—The Necessity of Ignorance

Now, in order to maintain this make-believe pretense that modern man is enlightened and that all prior ages were benighted, one must take very special care never to discover any real history, never to read any recent nor ancient authors, never to know anything outside one’s little precious circle or clique of like-minded ignoramuses.

Normal parochialism can be cure by exposure to other ways and other times, either by travel or reading or even the simple act of imagining things other than they are. Deliberate parochialism is incurable.

To be Modern means to be incurably parochial. To be a Modern man means to know nothing and to want to know nothing about any other land or culture, any other period of history or prehistory, and not even to know the teachings of one’s own tutors. Ignorance is strength.

In order to justify this ignorance, modern philosophy goes to great pains to invent flimsy excuses that, since perfect and apodictic knowledge is impossible for men to know, therefore (so leaps the leap of logic) all knowledge is opinion, no knowledge is certain, no knowledge is true, and no means of distinguishing  true from false exists.

Those who propose this argument do not notice or do not care to notice that it refutes itself. If no knowledge is certain, the knowledge that no knowledge is certain is itself uncertain. Obviously this is not proposed as a serious theory of epistemology; it is a verbal trick, a polite word-noise made to excuse oneself from the necessity to know a theory of epistemology, or indeed to know anything.

Philosophy cannot cure ignorance if the ignorance is a matter of deliberate policy.

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Part XII—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 denote 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 dwarfs, 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 heretic-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.

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Part XIII—More Barbarism—Paranoia

Let us look at the fourth question posed by the puzzles of hypocrisy:

(4) Why so paranoid?

This question was brought to my attention in 2000, when I realized that none of my liberal friends, not one, knew about the persecution of homosexuals in the Middle East, even thought all my liberal friends knew about the death of Matthew Shepard. The Islamists throw gays off rooftops, whip, stone, and murder gays. The Naughts (as we may call the decade now ending) came after the information revolution, so all my liberal friends, by typing into Google the words “Islamic persecution of Gays” could get about 23,200,000 results in 0.50 seconds. But apparently half a second of research is too much to ask.

Oddly enough, none of my liberal friends are afraid of any Islamic terror-masters, who will both announce that he wants to torture and kill them and theirs, and also boasts when he and his accomplish the same; but my liberal friends are all afraid of the Catholic Church, the 700 Club, or President Bush (who neither perform such atrocities nor say they will perform them).

My liberal friends are terrified, for they think the Inquisition and the CIA are poised to swoop down on them like enormous, blood-drinking, black-winged bats.

Again, the reason why the self-righteousness of the allegedly outraged is always directed at the authorities here to protect us, and never against the enemies those authorities protect us against, flows from the same cause as the anger itself: guilt.

The guilty flee when none pursue: the guilt-ridden flinch when no hand is raised against them; the guilt-haunted are paranoid, and see a sinister conspiracy against life and liberty in trivial or symbolic things.

I still recall with a Vulcan crook of my supercilious eyebrow the ear-splitting shrillness of the shrieking hysteria surrounding the idea that the PATRIOT Act and only that act would be allowed sinister government agents to subpoena your library records to see what books you might have read (a misstatement of the law—any pertinent records are vulnerable to subpoena upon the signature of a magistrate). The hysteria was purely symbolic and purely trivial, having no relation to reality, prompted by no examples of misuse, and possessing no application to real law enforcement, and hence was meaningful only to those who cannot distinguish between symbolic gestures and reality: a group that, without breaking a smile, calls itself the “reality-based community.”

The mental disease of paranoia has the added feature that it urges the persecuted to make a common cause with everyone and anyone else it sees as persecuted, even enemies. Hence, the totalitarian regimes in the Middle East and Far East, who stand for nothing the Moderns say they stand for, and who oppose with fire and firearm and pulpit and rack and gallows everything the Moderns say they want to promote, somehow become the mascots and allies of the Moderns.

Some Moderns are willing to expose their own persons to discomfort, danger and death to protect their own ruthless foes, willing to act as human shields to stop air raids, willing to lie down in front of bulldozers.

A similar selfless love, nay, adoration was paid by Moderns of the previous generation to the Soviets and Maoists: the Moderns did everything in their power to aid their destroyers and hinder their defenders.

Question: Why? Why such paranoia? Answer: Because the Modern men are more afraid of the Theocracy, that all-powerful and utterly imaginary world-girdling conspiracy of Jews and Capitalists and White Christians, than they are of either international Communism or international Terrorism, which were and are very real world-girdling and highly effective conspiracies.

No one is actually afraid of McCarthyism, whose very shadow sends the modern rhetorician into epileptic paroxysms of self-righteous terror. The number of people jailed, tortured and killed by the attempt in the 1950’s of the American government to find and expel paid enemy agents in the State Department or among airheaded Hollywood entertainers still hovers at around zero.

Had McCarthyism been a real persecution, it would be ranked as the least effective and least noticeable in history: the drunk driving of Senator Kennedy is responsible for more deaths than the anti-Communism of the McCarthy era.

Likewise, no one is actually afraid of the Theocracy. The concept is ridiculous. Any who were actually afraid of the Church would not dare insult her, any more than they insult the Mohammedans.  When folk such as this are actually afraid, they flatter, apologize, and self-righteously defend the people that frighten them: see the Danish Cartoon Riots and their humiliating aftermath for details.

If their fear is make-believe, what do they truly fear?

They are afraid of their conscience and the persecution of their conscience, and so anyone who says the same kinds of things their conscience says, even trivial or symbolic things, instill in the paranoiac an exaggerated overreaction of fear and hatred.

Civilization is the art of quelling factional dissent and calming natural the lusts and avarice of Man, and replacing those wild passions with the institutions and traditions, the social mechanisms, whose operation maintains peace and order.

These institutions include deliberative bodies (from councils of tribal elders to moots to parliaments); include leaders in war and peace, such as veterans or sages, worthy of the loyalty of their followers; and include a sufficient respect for law and custom that the duties, rights and liberties of subjects or citizens are sufficiently clear and fair to allow for the preservation of order and the encouragement of private and civic virtue. Civilization is civility; civilization is trust.

In contrast, anger and paranoia combine to dismantle civilization.

Paranoia requires a mistrust of public institutions, whose operations can always be interpreted as sinister, and a trust of enemy factions, who are regarded as allies against the danger posed by sinister public institutions.

Anger halts deliberation, and overthrows both loyalty to leaders and piety toward ancestors. Paranoia is innately factional, and dismembers the society into non-reunifiable and hostile camps. Anger does not seek to preserve the peace: it seeks short-term advantage over enemies with an eye toward the long term goal of their humiliation, their damage, their defeat, their extermination.

Anger feeds paranoia; paranoia feeds anger. Both discourage civic virtue and encourage the return of barbarism.

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Part XIV—More Barbarism—Loss of Authority

At the core of this discussion is the concept of authority. Authority is not power: any thief or brigand has power over his victims. Authority is the moral right to demand obedience. When an authority makes a demand beyond his mandate, this is called an over-reach of authority, or an abuse of authority: the demand is literally “unauthorized.” In such cases and only in such case is disobedience or rebellion justified.

But to the Modern, all authority is dismissed as arbitrary, mere coercive power, blind power, oppressive power, and hence all rebellion is always justified.

(The rebellion, of course, that is never justified as nonconformity in thought or deed to the pieties and jabberwocky of the Modern herd-mind, which is never to be questioned: in that case, any nonconformity is always to be punished as savagely and unjustly as possible.)

The traditional view is that even when a lawful sovereign or a father or someone else to whom obedience is owed lacks the power to compel submission, it is morally wrong to disobey.

The traditional view is that someone who possesses the power to compel obedience, but who lacks the authority, may be disobeyed when prudent to do so; and even imprudent disobedience is morally acceptable, perhaps laudable, and perhaps heroic, as witness the deaths of Socrates and Christ.

Society, despite the elaborate structure of laws intended to compel obedience, is fundamentally a voluntary affair: customs have more force than laws, and even criminals tacitly recognize the moral authority of the police to arrest and punish them, except for those very few criminals who resist unto death, thinking themselves martyrs of insupportable injustice.

However, imagine a group of factions that recognize no common authority who has the moral right to command the voluntary obedience of all groups. Any attempt to coerce the obedience of such factions will be rejected as tyranny, a mere exercise of arbitrary power. Such a group of factions can never be brought to parley and to compromise, since they cannot be brought to have loyalty to the authority seeking peaceful reconciliation for all. Paranoia and anger are, by their nature, by definition, destructive and mutually exclusive with reconciliation. An angry man does not want reconciliation; a paranoid man does not trust it.

The current world is riven into two mutually hostile and mutually irreconcilable camps: whatever consensus once existed no longer obtains, and the common ground of agreement is ever-narrowing.

This great dissolution is called ‘The Culture War’ and it is the spiritual form of a civil war, which, even if it never breaks out into open violence, is incompatible with a civil society, because neither faction will recognize the authority of the other to make or unmake laws and customs.

Where common ground exists, some mutually inclusive beneficial arrangement is possible. Where no common ground is left, however, only mutually exclusive gain or loss is possible: a zero-sum game where each gain by one side entails a loss to the other.

Liberty does not crave reconciliation and compromise with tyranny. Those who seek a robust defense in wartime do not and dare not crave compromise with those collaborators who seek preemptive surrender. Those who want a society free of unwholesomeness, pornography, abominations do not seek compromise with those bent toward the desecration of decency and the abolition of innocence and purity. We cannot live in peace if only one side wants peace. We cannot form a civilization where half the members crave barbarism.

Where anger and paranoia have reached so deep, all common ground is annihilated, and hence reconciliation is impossible and unwanted.

Philosophy cannot cure this. The study of civics, law, politics and political economy is founded on the idea that man is a political animal, which means, a rational animal, and that man dwells among fallen men in a fallen world.

Politics is the attempt to find the ideal yet practical basis on which men can put aside their desire for barbaric beastlike existence so as to erect laws, customs, and institutions that preserve the peace, protect life, and encourage the good.

The study of politics presupposes a common ground or a common desire for life and weal. When one faction desires primarily those things that lead to a dissolution of the common weal, to the degree that such desires are not innocent, that is to say, to the degree that the desire for dissolution is deliberate policy, the study of politics is vain.

The enemy is not attempting to preserve the commonwealth, neither of the United States nor of the world community of civilized nations. The enemy seeks the destruction of the commonwealth, either to clear the ground for a fanciful utopia,  perhaps based on sharia law, or perhaps based on socialist daydreams, or perhaps because they seek destruction for its own sake.

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Part XV—Craven

The third glimmering that came to me that the rot was deeper than it seemed came in the year 2001 after September 11th.

The World Trade Center attack, and many others of its kind, were acts of war by the most dishonorable and despicable enemy in the history of warfare: an enemy indeed that not only was unwilling and unable to face our fighting men in combat, but which went out of its way to attack the weakest, most helpless, and most inoffensive of victims, women, children, and civilians—and even then was not willing to attack the weak in a face to face match, but only attacking by surprise and ambush, without warning or parley, at targets chosen only for propaganda value, not military value.

To add Orwellian dishonesty to dishonor, the enemy refers to their gruesome henchmen, who violate their own religious law by committing suicide, as ‘martyrs’ — a word that among sane people means someone who is the victim of violence, dying at the hands of oppressors rather than repudiate his faith; the word does not mean an oppressor, driven mad by hate to the point where he destroys himself merely to mar a non-military target and wound the innocent.

Having been soundly and deeply bored and annoyed by the super-hyperbolic over-exaggerated accusations of the Moderns that an utterly imaginary boogieman Theocracy was hounding and persecuting them, I confess I was curious (once 9/11 brought the Jihad sharply into the public view) at how the Moderns were to react to an utterly real and undeniably present Theocracy, one which both announced and carried out acts of terror in order to hound and persecute them.

Conservatives are accused of oppressing women on the grounds that we don’t want women to murder babies in the womb. Some Conservatives are even so bold as to dare suggest that both sexes are happier when each side fulfills their traditional roles, roles which are based on rational and practical, if not biological and psychological, considerations of the strengths and weakness of each. Some conservatives argue that a society that encourages pornography and fornication and no-fault divorce ends up exploiting and demeaning women by demoting them from wives and mothers into Heffnerian sex-bunnies. Such is the extent of conservative oppression.

One would think that the modern fascist Mohammedans, who actually do oppress women, not only by opposition to prenatal infanticide, but also by dressing them in head-to-toe trashbag-looking garments, by beating them, by mutilating female genitalia in order to deprive their daughters of the possibility of sexual pleasure, by stoning adulteresses, by murdering rape victims, by murdering victims of scandal, by murdering wives and daughters for any other reasons, or by dismembering women them for wearing nail polish, by killing women for reading books or visiting soccer games, and so on and so on, would be subjected to excoriation of all those same feminists who excoriate the Conservatives. The modern fascist-style Mohammedans actually do what Christians are accused of doing, and do many other barbarisms and brutal acts against women no Christian man ever contemplates.

I awaited the outpouring of outrage from the perennially outraged.

Instead I heard crickets chirruping.

Instead I heard handwringing over whether or not it was right to fly the American flag, and I heard self-righteous condemnation of flying the American flag, as such signs of patriotism in wartime were divisive and provocative. Instead I heard that George Bush and other world leaders rushed to Mosques on 9/12, to assure the world that they admired and respected Islam, and all of the (alleged) contributions to world peace and world progress that savage religion boasted. Instead I heard that the head of NASA had a new job; instead of shooting rockets into outer space, his mission was to build up the self-esteem of Muslims by pretending the Middle East had made contributions to the aerospace sciences. To fly the flag or to fail to pretend Muslims deserved praise for utterly imaginary accomplishments would be to create more terrorists and may provoke violence.

Instead I was regaled by the oft repeated tale that the Coalition forces marching against the terror masters in the Middle East were merely stirring up more enemies, creating the problem. I was warned that opposing the enemy may provoke violence.

Instead I heard that the Danish Cartoon riots inspired book publishers and television producers to accept the de facto Islamic censorship of images, words, and programs, rather than stir up trouble. Opposing the censorship may provoke violence.

Instead I heard the Michael Savage, radio talk show host, is not allowed to travel into Great Britain, for the same reason that Geert Wilders, Dutch PM, is not allowed. To speak honestly about Islam is “too controversial” and may provoke violence.

Instead I heard that the Spain was pulling out of the Coalition, because her trainlines had been bombed; the that British government was busily cautioning Her Majesty’s loyal subjects to pull down statues of Florentine Boars in Derby, and to cease flying the Union Jack, not to do and not to do whatever else the hair-trigger sensitivity of Muslim madness might demand.  It may provoke violence.

Instead I heard that to fight the war was to provoke the enemy, ergo our only safety lay in immediate surrender, indeed, preemptive surrender. (The fact that surrender was to be proffered to a foe who has publicly and repeatedly announced he does not want our surrender was unworthy of notice. The reality-based community was unwilling or unable to notice that the Jihadists are not the Danes. They do not want the danegeld. They are not fighting us to get something out of us. They are fighting us to kill us.)

I listened for the outrage of the eternally outraged to condemn, when it happened in reality, at Muslim hands, what these eternally outraged eternally but baselessly claimed to fear from Christian hands. The Boy Who Cried Wolf had cried wolf so often, that when I real wolf appeared, I expected to hear the Boy cry even louder.

Instead I heard that the Beltway Snipers were angry white males, not Jihadists. Instead I heard that the Fort Hood shootings were prompted by pre-post traumatic stress disorder, and that to blame Major Hasan’s religious leanings for the act of Jihad will only create more victims and may provoke violence. Instead I heard that the failed attempts by the crotchbomber and the Time Square truck bomber were no doubt perpetrated by Tea Party Members, angry white males, and not Jihadists.

I was more than utterly aghast to hear this endless litany of utter unreality coming again and again from the pens and lips of the Left. This is not the Far Left, either, not the ultra-Marxist extremists: these entirely psychotic yet delusional ravings come from the leadership of the Democrat party, men of sober and responsible character. They were constitutionally and perennially unable and unwilling to recognize their avowed enemies.

When confronted by the enemy, the only enemy they perceived or could perceive included George W. Bush, the sinister Republican Party, the even more sinister Tea Party movement, and the most sinister Theocracy.

How could anyone one innocently mistake the enemy, not once, not twice, but forever and aye, so that no matter what the Jihadists do or say, the only enemy the Modern mind sees is the angry white male?

What in the world could make a sober and sane man utter such utter inanity, insanity, asininity, bosh, blather, tripe, twiddle, twaddle, piffle, puke, prate, jabberwocky, fiddlefaddle and flapdoodle?

The phenomenon of utter disconnection from reality is complex, and has many causes, some psychological, some political, but one of them, the primary one, is merely craven and loathsome cowardice.

The punks are afraid.

These Left-leaning so-called self-congratulatory “warriors bold” of liberty who are always willing to insult Bush or shout out a swearword in order to stick it to the Man and to encourage the cause of Freedom of Speech and Liberty of Conscience, are, in the final analysis, lard-assed pushovers, wimps, and sissies.

In the most powerful nation on Earth, protected by the most deadly and efficient and destructive military in world history—indeed, the most deadly military imaginable, since the US arsenal includes sufficient nuclear and biochemical weapons to render the biosphere uninhabitable—the cowards are afraid.

They are too afraid even to name the name of the enemy.

Even when confronting acts which are merely symbolic, and form no real threat, such as, for example, the insolent insult of building a Mosque at Ground Zero—the Mohammedans always erect Mosques at the site of their victorious battles—the Modern man cannot summon the intestinal fortitude, the patriotism, the cultural confidence, the balls, the brass, the grit, the gumption to meet the smirking perpetrator of the insult with a calm and curt “No.”

“No, you should not dare to desecrate the memory of our honored dead; no, you should not dare to spit on our flag or trample the crucifix; no, we will not forget that you seek to hand the enemy a propaganda victory in war — especially in this war, a terror war, which by its nature consists of no military victories, but only of propaganda victories.”

How hard is that to say? For a coward, infinitely hard.

In case you think I am slandering them, let us read the words of TIME Magazine on this very issue: “… a national political fight conducted on [these] terms … will lead to a chain reaction at home and abroad that will have one winner — the very extreme and violent jihadists we all can claim as our true enemy.”

In other words, the enemy, if denied a propaganda victory, will be provoked.

It does not seem to occur to these enlightened pacifists that the enemy is already sufficiently provoked to commit acts of terror-murder worldwide. To those who actually hear what the enemy publicly announces, the provocation has nothing whatsoever to do with this generation or any of its doings: the enemy is provoked due to military losses in Andalusia in 1492, before the New World was even discovered. The enemy is provoked by Moses. The enemy is provoked by Christ.

And what do we hear instead of a calm and curt “No” to the foe? The self-righteous have decided that to oppose the Ground Zero Mosque is bigotry. (These are the same people who said that to enforce boarder security in Arizona is bigotry, to amend the Constitution of California to define marriage as marriage is bigotry, to join the Tea Party and object to government overspending is bigotry, and to demand government regulation of semi-governmental banks and lenders such as Freddie and Fannie is bigotry.) Ad hominem ad nauseam.

The argument that fighting a war might provoke the enemy was often disguised as the argument that, even as Athens was driven to ruin by overreach when she assaulted Syracuse while engaged in a war with Sparta, so also America while engaged in a war with the Taliban dared not provoke allegedly moderate Muslims.

The argument, if true, assumes that there is a group of moderate Muslims willing to attack us or aid our attackers if our firemen fly the American flag or if the British park service maintains an ancient statue of a boar in Darby, who are unwilling to attack us or aid our attackers if we avoid such provocations, but instead flatter the nonexistent Muslim aerospace accomplishments and praise the nonexistent Muslim contributions to the writing of the US Constitution, and have our Christian presidents go to pray to Mosques, and have the Muslim call to prayer ring out over the burnt and bloodstained bits of bone left in the ground at Ground Zero from a nearby Mosque.

Obviously, the peace and goodwill of creatures willing to attack us if we fly the flag yet willing to live in peace with us if we trumpet their god’s call to prayer over the innocent dead murdered in the name of their god is peace and goodwill only a craven coward would seek, by  repeated displays of weakness, to purchase.

I can only speculate as to the ultimate causes of nationwide and eon-long lack of fortitude.

Perhaps it is that with no belief in an afterlife, and no loyalty to anything grander or larger than their sexual organs, the Modern secularists live in utmost terror of death. Spoiled brats, they live in anxious fear that their lives might include the discomforts, privation, terror, pain, not to mention the selflessness and sacrifice of war.

But since the Jihadists actually threaten them with death, I cannot explain why the Modern is and continues to be possessed of hair-pulling, voice-hoarsening, eye-rolling, convulsions of fear and terror of the Theocracy of the Judaeo-Christians, and not only unafraid of the Jihadists, but willing to spill national security secrets to help them, willing to send over human shields to guard their bomb-sites, willing to work tirelessly and without pay for the eventual victory of the world Caliphate and the imposition of Muslim law, including laws abolishing abortion, sodomy, adultery, and intoxication, including laws abolishing all the civil rights and privileges the Moderns allege they defend.

Ayn Rand offers a very simple and clear explanation: they want to die.

The useful idiots of the political and social Left are eagerly seeking a way to destroy civilization, the economy, their freedoms and yours, because they seek death due to an un-admitted, subliminal and secret death-wish.

While this indeed does fit all the facts — (there are still Liberals today who defend the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, agents of a Communist Empire devoted resolution to the death of all Liberals worldwide; there are countless Liberals whose loyalties are as self-destructive and self-defeating as those of a German Jew fiercely loyal to the Nazi Party) — I dismiss the Randian explanation as both facile and non-disprovable. I do not think it is merely death, bodily death, that the Modern Minds seeks. They fight too bravely in the cause of the enemy for that. I speculate that the Moderns want the destruction of their very existence, their souls, their essential selfhood.

I suspect, quite simply, that the Modern man wants to have no center, no heart, no mind, no soul.

The Modern man is not even as dignified as a hedonist or an epicurean: those philosophers at least recognized that short-term, vain and destructive pleasures must be eschewed in order to seek pleasures rightly understood, which are moderate, long-term and self-sustaining pleasures. No, the Modern is a sub-epicurean: the pleasures he seeks are the short and self-destructive ones, precisely because self-destruction is the goal.

I part company from Ayn Rand only in that I think the self-destruction craved is spiritual, not physical, which is a category Ayn Rand’s philosophy does not recognize.

Haunted by guilt and shame, these Moderns are uneasy around anything that exposes them for the bullies and cowards that they are. Haunted by the knowledge that they are foolish and ignorant, they are filled with discontent and helpless fury when anything and anyone who acts like an educated, intelligent, or responsible adult in the public eye.

Hypnotized, drugged, and enamored by airy visions of ecologically safe gender-neutral socialist Utopia on Earth, days when all men shall be as long-lived as the inhabitants of Shangri-La, and as stuffed with wealth and ease as inhabitants of Cockaigne, and as peaceful and pure and blessed as the inhabitants of Eden, the Modern man is repelled by any talk of reality, of necessary evil, particularly that horrifically real and necessary evil called war. Modern man is hence addicted to visions.

When one is addicted to unreality, one is allergic to reality: even a small whiff of reality will set off the weeping and sneezing fits of mindless rage and content-free sarcasm which passes for ratiocination among intellectuals. The fit lasts until everyone in range is called a bigot, and then it subsides until next time. Like all allergies, ever smaller whiffs of the pollen or cat hair trigger the rash.

The cowards do not want to be brave, do not want to have fortitude nor stoicism nor dignity nor forbearance. They want to be cowards. They want to be afraid.

Philosophy, neither the studies of Aristotle, nor the hortatory of Epictetus, nor the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, has anything to say to those who do not believe that the subject matter of their studies, exhortations, nor meditations exist. These ancient philosophers believe that there is such a thing as the virtue called fortitude, and that it was both served the duty of man and served the happiness of man to find and practice fortitude. The idea that cowards want to be cowards, and would be encouraged and lauded and applauded for this defect, was one never in the contemplation of any of these noble pagan sages.

Why do moderns want to be cowards? It is because they want to be victims; they think victimhood grants them moral superiority without the effort or practice of virtue. You cannot tell a coward that bravery will increase his long term chances of survival and happiness if he despises happiness and seeks not to survive. His unhappiness gives him the right to complain, as if from the stance of moral superiority, about his people more moral than himself. That is his true goal: to assume the high ground of moral superiority in order to quell the whisper of the conscience.

Cowardice is a vice, an ingrained habit of the passions, not something that a man can be talked out of. It is not a matter of a wrong conclusion, but rather a matter of wrong habituation.  It requires not just years, but accumulated centuries of custom, law, peer pressure, not to mention the sanction of religion and the respect for the heroic dead, to ingrain into the selfish heart men naturally have that selflessness called courage: and it requires a more than ordinary strength of character to maintain that quiet and longsuffering form of courage known as fortitude.

A society that despises its saints and heroes and admires its sinners and villains cannot teach its young the art of courage.

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Part XVI —Ugly

I had always, even from earliest youth, known that something had gone terribly wrong with the world at about the time of the industrial revolution. Up until about the time of the Victorians, and lingering in ever-dwindling spots and spasms up until the Great War, music still displayed harmony and melody, poetry still spoke like music, paintings looked like what they represented, novels contained matter to delight the senses, inspire the soul, and educate the mind.

Then something happened; Something horrible.

If a primordial monstrosity from a novel by H.P. Lovecraft had risen from the deep and driven all mankind instantly into screaming paroxysms of insanity, the magnitude of what happened could not have been greater.

Something horrible happened. Beauty died.

The first thing a traveler brought forth from the past would notice, if escorted by the Ghost of Christmas Past or the time machine of H.G. Wells into a modern industrial center or modern museum of the fine arts, is the overwhelming ugliness of the age.

If the illustrators of science fiction magazines are to be believed, the happy inhabitants of eons yet to come will dress in toga, cape and tunic, with an eye toward splendor and elegance of dress, just as our Medieval and Ancient ancestors did. Only the modern age is drab and smoggy.

To be fair, the workingmen and slaves of the ancient world dressed in rags, and there is nothing particularly fine to the eye about a hut or wigwam: and yet the particular genius of the modern day is not the accidental ugliness which comes from a lack of craft or absence of fine materials, but the snidely insolent and deliberate ugliness when pursued for its own sake.

There has never been anything like it in history. It is masochism.

Yes, it is deliberate. Instead of Phideas or Michaelangelo we have this: “A fiberglass sculpture of several conjoined girls, some with anuses for mouths and semierect penises for noses, all naked except for sneakers on their feet” Also “flayed corpses, sliced animals in formalin, a close-up photograph of a gunshot wound to the scalp, and … a scaled-down but hyperrealistic model in silicone and acrylic of a naked corpse.” (These are from a 1998 exhibition of modern British art at the Royal Academy of Art in London. http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_urbanities-trash.html)

As for music, merely turn on your radio, where you can, among the mindless banging noises that pass for rhythm, hear tuneless voices chanting or shouting rather than singing, and, if you can make out the words, you are likely to encounter words in praise of cop-killing and whore-slapping.

As far dance, it is formless and unromantic: mere spastic jerking. Who, these days, performs the waltz? Poetry is as formless and incomprehensible. Modern painting has passed beyond absurdity and visual gibberish into the realm of deliberate self-parody: rows of Campbell soup cans.

In novels, as far as I can tell, the only place real art is being attempted is in genre fiction, particularly in science fiction. Mainstream novels are concentrating on formless stream-of-consciousness depictions of adultery, suicide, dipsomania, and human degradation and perversion so central to the nihilist core of nonbeing that forms the formless heart of heartless modernism.

The first time I saw a reproduction of a Picasso drawing in the home of a friend, I assumed it was a drawing done in kindergarten by my friend’s little sister, hung up on the wall by an adoring parent. My friend had much ado to convince me otherwise.

Likewise, when an even closer friend showed me a crude and dun-colored plate, I assumed it was an art project done by a fifth grade child, someone unable to spin clay on a potter’s wheel, or unable to select or apply colors. But no, the plate was the handicraft of some allegedly famous artiste, and the lopsided unroundness and the sewage-hued drab of the tint were allegedly not only deliberate, but allegedly sublime. The friend was reduced to tears, because, before I found out it was allegedly a work of art, I recoiled from the ghastly thing with a laugh and gave an honest opinion.

Modern courtesy, like modern art, is a mechanism for deterring honest opinions. If no one can tell the difference between fair and foul, and if pompously ungainly or horridly crude waste-pieces are extolled as the most precious artistic treasures of collectors unduly sensitive to criticism, the only polite thing a modern man can do to avoid giving offense is make no judgment whatever between fair and foul.

But who would deliberately put himself in such a position, and for what reason? Sane people like pretty things. Who wants to jar his eyes by exposing those delicate orbs, as if to a spray of vinegar, to deliberately unsightly rubbish?

It was, of all people, the vituperative and vehement Ayn Rand who uttered a theory of aesthetics to explain this otherwise inexplicable adoration of ugliness for the sake of ugliness.

Her theory is that art expresses on a concrete level the artist’s sense of life, the same thing that a philosopher expresses on an abstract level. The music and dance and decoration and painting, the plays and songs and stories of a culture display exemplify what that culture values.

The ancient Greek carved and polished statues of men in the heroic mold because the Greek had a heroic view of life, where the purpose of life was arete, virtue, godlike virtue, and the heroes of old were sons of the gods; whereas the ancient Aztec erected monstrous statues of vampirishly bloodthirsty gods with their staring eyes and protruding tongues because their view of life and man’s role in life was monstrous. Art is the representation of the highest values on a sensory level.

What does modern art represent? It represents modern values, which Ayn Rand (in my judgment, correctly) identifies as: vulgarity, madness, malformation, meaninglessness, mindlessness, morbidity.

This horror that has overwhelmed the arts is not an accident, nor an attempt to carry out some bold new theory of aesthetics. It is a consequence of the same rules of aesthetics that have always obtained, merely, now that the moderns have lost sanity and conscience, their love of goodness and their sense of humanity, the moderns can only portray the vomit and dung sticking to the floor of the dungeons of hell.

Some small traces of goodness and beauty remain among popular art, in genre novels, in movies: the closest thing we have to a symphony are the musical scores of John Williams, for example. The best drawings of the human figure I have seen recently were in a comic book, not in a museum of modern art. The work Maxfield Parrish for magazine covers and commercial advertisements are superior in technique and genius than a entire body of work by Picasso.

Modern art is excrement.

Literally.  Modern art includes a painting that consist of canvass with daubs of elephant poop stuck on, or a crucifix in a jar of urine.

Philosophy cannot cure this: the whole of modern aesthetic theory consists of the simple slogan, empty yet endlessly repeated, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is as much to say, beauty does not exist.

The sentiment is not an attempt to explain the nature of  beauty, but to explain it away. It is the asseveration that beauty has no nature. Like the polylogists saying logic is arbitrary, or the Political Correctors saying words are arbitrary, or relativists saying ethics are arbitrary, the claim here is that what is found beautiful is merely arbitrary. I have dwelt on these errors and insanities in other paragraphs, and need say no more here except to mention that the beautiful symmetry is repeated.

The sentiment that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is not only false, it is a sentiment all find ugly, including those sick souls attracted to ugliness find it so (albeit they rejoice rather than vomit at its practice, because their passions and hence their tastes are objectively disordered). Therefore even if this ugly sentiment were true, it could be condemned on the ground alone that is it ugly.

In the same way that education in the passions was once meant to train the unruly passions from their crude and natural and to more noble dispositions, education in music and poetry was meant to train the tastes, so that students would learn to love the fair and fine and abhor the foul or vulgar.

In the modern day, the goal and ergo the methods of training the taste is the opposite: our culture seeks to condition the young to admire the foul and flee the fair. This will give the young in later life the ability more easily to tolerate and pursue ugliness on the moral plane, which is called vice, perversion, abomination, and the ability to tolerate and accept asymmetry on the intellectual plane, which is called unreason, doublethink, hypocrisy.

Those of you who have read C.S. Lewis’ THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH will recall a scene in the ‘objectification room’ where the main character was introduced to an environment where everything was subtly or grossly wrong-sighted, arbitrary, meaningless, asymmetrical, or grotesque. That image is the image of a modern museum of fine art.

I expect never to see any return to the good and the beautiful in the fine arts while Western Civilization endures: there are some things, once broken, that no human power can put right.

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Part XVII—Foolish

The one aspect of philosophy which stands as a shining exception to the criminal neglect of philosophy of the modern age is the study of the natural world, the discipline called natural philosophy or physics.

Here, it is not the ignorance or neglect of philosophy which is the error; the error is the over-emphasis, the exaggeration, the idolatry of science which leads to a perversion and hence, ultimately, to a neglect of science.

A basic and repeated folly of Modernism springs from a single cause: with the well-merited success and progress brought about by the scientific and industrial revolution in the West, the intelligentsia of three and four generations sought to idolize the physical sciences, and apply empirical methods to the study of Man.

So when the Moderns thought to turn the telescopes and microscopes of the physical sciences, they thought that economics could be placed on a scientific basis by drawing up lots of charts and graphs of Keynesian complexity with no particular meaning, that history could be placed on a scientific basis by treating history as a subset of evolutionary biology, that the study of the mind and soul of man could be placed on a scientific basis by making up unproved and unprovable myths about such hidden and occult entities as Id, Ego, and Superego, each conveniently not open to empirical observation.

Above all, it was thought that the other disciplines, theology, metaphysics, logic, mathematics, epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, ethics and politics would either be banished forever as mere verbal vapor, or would be placed on a firm empirical foundation, as soon as something having anything to do with said subjects produced material phenomena which could be placed before a material telescope or material microscope. On that glorious day, all aspects of philosophy would be as certain and sure and actionable as the theories of science, and the endless quibbles and disputes of the schoolmen silenced forever!

Now, even a schoolboy could see at the outset what the two difficulties are.

The first difficulty any schoolboy can see is that you cannot use scientific methods, that is, empirical and contingent reasoning confirmed  by empirical observation, on non-scientific subject matter, such as the meaning of the life of man and his place in Creation, which is based on necessary deductions from categorical or metaphysical axioms.

Scientific knowledge deals with contingent facts, that is, with things that happen to be true, not that necessarily are true.

The various non-empirical disciplines, such as ethics and economics and mathematics and metaphysics, so on, deal with things that are eternal because (in the case of ethics and politics) the nature of man throughout human history does not change or because (in the case of logic, mathematics, economics, metaphysics) the nature of the eternal order of being cannot change. Eternal things have no particular place or time where they manifest empirical events. A geometer studying triangles in the Fifth Century BC in Greece is studying the same triangle as any mathematician anywhere in the universe, at any point in time—and, if there are mathematicians among the choirs of angels or in the court of the Demon-Sultan Azathoth, the triangle is likewise same as any outside the universe and beyond time.

The conclusions of the non-empirical disciplines are necessarily true. “A is A” because it is true by definition, not because it is seen to be so. They are not, as scientific theories are, true under some conditions dependent on the surrounding cosmos. On the other hand, Newton’s Second Law of Motion is true because it is seen to be so, not by definition.

Hence the method of empirical observation, which deals and can deal only with contingent facts, cannot deal with non-empirical and logically necessary truths. You cannot prove nor disprove that syllogisms with an undistributed middle clause do not follow; nor that ghosts are real; nor that justice is not merely the will of the stronger; nor that bad money drives out good; nor that a bicameral legislature is less prone to factional enthusiasm; nor any other non-empirical proposition by using a microscope or telescope. It is outside the range of empirical investigation.

Now, the way a revolution in the physical science is done, among other things, is to look at the data with fresh eyes, ignoring the models and methods that have come before, and to fit the old data into the new model to see if the new model has the explanatory power and clarity equal to or better than the old.

Once the scientific advances of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and similar figures had utterly revolutionized and overthrown the previous models of the way the physical world worked, no one studied the Ptolemaic model or the motions of the epicycles, read the atomic theory of Democritus or Lucretius, nor pondered the five elements of Aristotle except as exercises in history or literature. No one studying chemistry studied the writings of alchemists like Paracelsus or John Dee. The scientific scholarship of the ancients was without scientific value.

The scientific revolution is in once sense ultimately democratic: no one’s conclusions are taken on authority. It is observation and experimentation, not the consensus of opinion, which determines the scientific truth. A patent clerk like Einstein has as much right as the head of the Royal Treasury like Newton to revolutionize the field. The scientific revolution in another sense is ultimately un-democratic. Nature is sovereign. Data are data and facts are facts, and you do not get a vote, nor is there any appeal.

This democratic nature allows the scientist to throw out the model of an authority like Ptolemy if the model of Copernicus explains the motions of the planets better. Science is no respecter of authority. But on the other hand, the observations, the data, of Tycho Brahe are undemocratically sacrosanct, and not to be thrown out. Science does not throw out non-erroneous data, and no valid theory can ignore the data sought to be explained. Outside of the halls of East Anglia University, scientists cannot vote on what data to observe and what data to ignore.

So when intellectuals sought to overthrow all of non-empirical philosophy and thought, they took the first step of the scientist, and doubted the authorities.

But since non-empirical disciplines have no empirical data, there was no next step to take.

Having doubted the authorities, and having no scientific method of making and non-empirical observations or drawing non-contingent conclusions about such matters as free will and determinism, the nature of the one and the many, the nature of history and man’s role in it, the nature of morality and justice and human laws or divine laws, the modern intellectuals either fell back in the most primitive imaginable conceptions, stone-age style thinking, about these high matters, or they pretended to draw no conclusions at all, and dismissed all philosophy as meaningless.

Metaphysics had been demoted to something not studied. Ethics was now simply the endless and illogical whining of victim groups that White Male Christians were oppressing them. Politics was now the unmoored delirium of bloodthirsty utopia-seekers. Aesthetics was forgotten. Ontology and epistemology were redefined to be either meaningless word-games or a branch of abnormal psychology. Attempts to put logic on a non-Aristotelian or non-logical base devolved into meaningless word-games. The investigation of non-Euclidean geometry led the modern intellectual to conclude that even mathematics was a meaningless and arbitrary dances of symbols having no relation to physical reality.

Therefore far, far from grounding philosophy onto a firmer and more certain foundation, all that was done was to treat the conclusions of reason, both contingent and certain, as if they were unproved and unprovable.

The second difficulty any schoolboy could see is this: if you hold up Man to be investigation as if he were a beast, or a machine, then you cannot account for by what means you, the investigator, a man, perform the act of investigation.

The act of investigation is an act of thought; a deliberate act; and, if the investigation is honest rather than dishonest, it is an ethical act.

Modern writers, like Hegel and Nietzsche and Marx, tore the Darwinian idea of evolution out of its context, where it made sense, attempted to apply it to the deliberation and ethical nature of man, where is makes no sense.

Hegel proposed that all philosophical inquiry was merely the unfolding or evolution of thoughts inherent in a timeless and universal Absolute thought; Marx reversed this idea, and held that thoughts are mechanical by-products of the material course of the evolution of various economic struggles, a material dialectic leading inevitably to socialist utopia; Nietzsche proposed that in the same way the morals ideals of man have no meaning for apes, so too the moral ideas of the superman will have no meaning for man. Hitler interpreted Nietzsche to mean that modern man had license to ignore all laws of civilization and Christian decency, and to commit any and every act of barbaric bloodshed and horror, so long as it served the Darwinian and eugenic purpose of improving the self-anointed master race.

And other writers, an endless fusillade of them, proposed that since man evolved from beast, man was beast, and had no purpose on Earth except to survive and to propagate the species: therefore any evil done in the name of self-propagation was not only justified, it was modern and scientific and the latest fashionable divertissement of the smart set.

The human-shaped vermin called Peter Singer is the latest and most famous, at the moment, of these bestialists: he waxes poetic about the rights of dumb animals, and prays us neither to enslave nor murder them, and then urges that we should slaughter any children under two years old found displeasing or boring to their parents. This is not a resurrection of the ancient Roman right that father had to kill sons who had dishonored the family, or the Spartan custom of tossing babies deemed weak into the pit at Apothetae: because Singer and the Moderns do not have even the excuse of the ancients, that the murders were done for honor, or the help the city maintain her stock of fit fighting men. The modern infanticides are done for the sake of convenience, or for no reason at all.

But if man is a beast, why not breed him like cattle, as the Nazis wished, or exterminate lesser breeds, as Margaret Sanger wished, or cull the weak and inconvenient, as Peter Singer wishes?

But to treat man as beast was not the depth of degradation. Another allegedly scientific investigation of man was undertaken by Freud, who perpetrated what is essentially a tremendous fraud upon a tremendously gullible generation. Freud proposed the theory that the mind operated by hidden or subconscious mechanisms, and that these true motivations were always base and ignoble, usually involved sexual deviancy, such as Oedipal incest, and they could be applied to explain and explain away everything.

Pavlov and B.F. Skinner took the fraud to a deeper level by announcing that the consciousness of man did not exist, or was mere epiphenomenon, and that the consciousness was nothing more than the side-effect of material changes to brain-matter, which in turn were nothing more than associations of stimulus and response.

No one seemed to notice that, if these theories were true, then they were true as well of Freud, and Pavlov and Skinner, in which case the words seeming to come from their pens as they described their theories were merely the upwelling of buried and irrational mechanical forces, and ergo no more meaningful than the wordless clanking of the gears of a steam engine.

The image of the Modern idolater of science is of an earnest fool seated on a treebranch, busily sawing through the segment between his buttocks and the main trunk.

The same mistake is endlessly repeated in modern philosophy and modern thought, and it is a mistake a schoolboy can spot in five minutes: if the investigation of man portrays him as merely an unintelligent, materialistic, beastlike mechanism of nature is correct, then there is no room in the universe for the investigator of man. If there is no investigator, there is no investigation, and ergo the conclusions of the investigation cannot be true.

If all thoughts, including yours, are merely the thoughtless and unintentional by-product of blind natural forces or meaningless brain spasms, then no conclusion, including this one, is either true nor false, but merely nothing.

The scratches made by a chicken in the yard are not the letters in a language with a message for you; since not done with the purpose of conveying a message, they can hold no message. If the motions of brain atoms are no more purposeful than the scratches of chickens, they likewise can hold no message. That means that they can hold no messages at all. That means the message “all motions of brain atoms are no more purposeful than the scratches of chickens” must likewise be a non-message, that is, meaningless.

It is a self-refuting statement.  All modern philosophy consists of little more than tottering superstructures built atop self-refuting statements.

The idolater of science seeks to find empirical and non-rational causes to explain the non-empirical and rational causes of that rational animal, man.

By the very nature of such a study, the real causes of human action, non-empirical and rational, will not and cannot be considered; and by the very nature of the study, those things that cannot possibly cause any actions in the consciousness of a rational and living non-machine, i.e. empirical and mechanical causes, they and only they will be considered.

The results, as one might expect, will be pure gibberish and nonsense: Freud saying all human acts are provoked by a buried desire aiming at parricide and incest; Marx saying all human acts are provoked by economic classes conditioned by material objects such as hand-looms and factories that just so happen to exist in the environment; Skinner saying humans are machines built by no mechanic and programmed by no programmer; Sanger saying humans should be bred like dogs; Singer saying humans should be slaughtered like rats.

This passes for science?

Real scientists, men who study real facts and perform real experiments, and who question and defend their theories, would point out that self-contradictory speculations founded in nothing, explaining nothing, proved by nothing are not “science” but are instead the absence or antithesis of science.

If the investigator applies to himself the very conclusions he applies to the objects of his study, then the possibility of the investigation is contradicted. An unthinking machine cannot think about why it is an unthinking machine.

However, a wide field of evil becomes imaginable and permissible once men are regarded as nothing but livestock or manikins: the meddling social engineer and all his anarchy is loosed upon the world like a savage dog that slips his leash, and the blood he spills is no more to be regretted than the oil spilled from defective machines being repaired. The vision of man as a brainless beast or as a lifeless machine contradicts the vision of man as a moral actor, a creature of rights and dignity, a created being granted inalienable rights by his Creator.

Such is the damage done by the modern theory that man is not man.

Freud committed even greater damage by proposing the theory that the way to cure the subconscious mind of neurosis was to give full reign to the passions and appetites, especially illegal or harmful or unnatural appetites. Only in this way could true honesty and true psychological health be achieved. Self-command and self-control were relabeled as repressions and hang-ups: and with this relabeling, and with no further research, thought, or investigation than that, the Western world repudiated all the warnings and teaching of pagan sages and Christian saints, and determined that selfishness and self-centeredness were good, but that self-indulgence without restraint or thought was best of all.  Virtue became vice and vice became virtue.

In one fell swoop, the heart was pulled out of Western thought, and nothing was left except the prolonged and absurd death throes of an irredeemably and irrecoverably spoilt generation of brats and whiners.

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Part XVIII—More Folly—The Role of Science

Oddly enough, this is the only aspect of the rot of the modern world which I think could be solved by a diligent application of philosophical learning. If students and scientists were trained, not only in science, but in the philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings logically necessary for science, and if scientists publicly and frequently repeated the rule and hence the limitations of the scientific method, then those things which claim to be science but which are patently absurd unscience and antiscience, such as socialism, materialism, eugenics, social engineering, would be etiolated of their usurpative and abusive claim to be science or scientific.

All that would be needed is for famous scientists and partisans of science—including science fiction writers—to admit that (1) science as the study of nature form no theories and draws no conclusions about the supernatural, not even to say whether it exists or not; (2) science does not and cannot apply any theories to those aspects of human nature or human existence which are non-empirical, i.e., the only part of human life open to scientific study is biology; (3) science does study neuropsychology, which is the study of the physical substrate of human thought; psychology aside from neuropsychology is not science; (4) science does not and cannot apply its methods and theories to metaphysical or philosophical speculation, such as the nature of cause and effect, the existence and nature of free will, and so on; modern theories of physics that deny the existence of cause and effect a fine level are metaphysical speculations, by their nature unsupported by experiment and innately undisproveable; (5) science does not and cannot apply its methods and theories to economics nor politics. Socialism is not more ‘scientific’ than Capitalism; (6) science does not and cannot apply its methods and theories to speculations about the conditions before the Big Bang, outside the cosmos, beyond the edge of reality, not even to say whether or not such things exist. The claim that nature is ‘all that exists’ is a metaphysical claim, neither confirmed nor denied by any possible empirical observation, and therefore is not science; (7) science can neither confirm nor deny any ethical nor normative statement of any kind whatsoever, since such things are not open to empirical confirmation or refutation. Scientists have no moral authority to hold forth on any issues of the public weal, except in cases where expert testimony is needed to clarify disputes of fact. In other words, the role of honest scientists is to abolish junk science, ecological scaremongering, and so on, not to support it.

Since the modern error here is merely an exaggeration and idolatry of science in a fashion any honest scientist would find repugnant, the honest study of science would soon soberly and utterly defeat the claims of the various pseudo-sciences and leeches attempting to impersonate the prestige of science.

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Part XIX—Confused

The main thing dismissed by modern writers as being, since not open to empirical confirmation, ergo either mere opinion or mere myth, is that reality which forms the basis of ethical, political and aesthetic philosophy: the idea moderns forget is the idea that there is something that the mind of man can grasp which is not invented arbitrarily by the mind of man, including norms and imperatives of thought, passion, and feeling.

That reality is called Natural Law or Right Reason.

It was not until quite late in my life—after I was married, in fact—that I realized how thoroughly and entirely the Modern Age had repudiated the idea of Natural Law and Right Reason. Two anecdotes spring to mind.

Losing the Lottery

I remember hearing a chilling account of some modern students. According to this account, the short story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, that short, sharp yet grisly paean against conformity, which culminates in an innocent old lady being brutally stoned to death for the sake of a forgotten harvest time tradition, was being discussed by modern students, and their teacher with a growing sense of horror realized that none of the students understood the horror of the story.  The modern students (so the teacher reported) saw nothing wrong with stoning old ladies to death. Not that they would do it themselves, oh no; it was merely that the rules and customs of that imaginary village were the special culturally-relative customs of that time and place, and we are in no position to judge them or their ways.

The sheer unnaturalness of treating an old lady to a brutal and brutally pointless death by slow and painful blows was, it seemed, entirely lost on the modern young.

They were moral retards.

They have lost even the most basic ability to tell right from wrong, much less perform a complex moral calculation involving the compromise with necessary evils and the awareness of the weaknesses of human nature which form such an integral part of the American Constitution and, indeed, our entire way of life. Children who cannot see the wrongness in stoning innocent old women to death are not fit to inherit the nation our parents left to us.

Desecrating Sex

I remember speaking with modern Christians (whom one would think to be more uniform in their conclusions on this matter, considering that Church teachings of all denominations through all ages are unambiguous) who supported both gay marriage and sex outside of marriage. One young Christian man earnestly told me that the sex act was merely recreation, a pastime like mixed doubles tennis which just so happened to require both sexes to participate. One young Christian lady said that sex outside of marriage was morally acceptable provided only that the couple truly loved each other.

The idea that the sexual passions should be housebroken and schooled only to seek those particular partners without whom one has shown by unbreakable vow that one is willing to raise any offspring the reproductive act might produce was an idea too prudent for these modern minds to take seriously.

(This was while I was still firmly in the atheist camp and absolutely loyal to its strictures. I was an advocate of self control in the sexual arena, of chastity and monogamy, for purely secular and logical and prudential reasons. The destructive effect of unchastity on society, especially among the poor, can be audited by reading the accounts of Theodore Dalrymple, for example (another atheist). It merely added a delicious irony to reflect that I, the atheist, saw the logic in the Christian idea about the role of marriage in civilized life, and that they, the Christians, who were allegedly supposed to believe and follow Christ by faith whether they saw the logic in His teachings or not, repudiated the Christian idea about marriage. Christians were arguing in favor of sodomy and fornication, and I was arguing in favor of purity and chastity.)

The traditional idea is the idea that merely being in love is not sufficient to justify itself: it is the idea that unlawful or  imprudent love, no matter how heartfelt, is wrong. Only love that is in the right circumstances and directed toward the right partner is right. It is the idea that you, who are sovereign of your own soul, do not get a vote about the nature of love. No human word, law, or custom can change the objective facts, and the wrongness of unnatural or illicit love is a fact, not an opinion; not something humans created, not something humans can destroy.

The Objectivity of Reality

The idea that there are rules that humans found but did not make is (for some reason) accepted without demur in the realm of the physical sciences. No one thinks the British Parliament has a right to revoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics despite the obvious benefits to Her Majesty’s loyal subjects.

But when applied to other questions equally objective, obviously objective, such as laws of economics, of morality, of logic, of human nature, of biology or psychology or cause and effect: why, all these things are merely bigotry and benighted prejudice! Parliament can revoke the rule of economics that no one can borrow his way out of debt, with the same ease it can revoke the rule of cause and effect that say one cannot consume what one has not produced, or the rule of human nature that says marriage is not sodomy, or the rule of biology that says that unborn offspring are members of their parent’s species, and must therefore of necessity enjoy whatever innate rights their parents enjoy.

Where does it come from, this modern nonsense that says all things are manmade, including things men obviously did not make and cannot change? It is the idea that there is no such thing as Natural Law and no such thing as Right Reason by which we perceive that law.

The ancient (and correct) conclusion was that some pleasures were true and yielded the satisfaction they promised, whereas other pleasures were false, and that to pursue them was vain, self-defeating, and self-destructive.

This idea is so entirely self-evident that it is futile to defend it. One does not argue with a skeptic at noon that daylight differs from night; if he cannot see the sun, he is not going to see your merely human finger pointing at the sun.

Likewise, the ancient (and correct) conclusion was that some passions were correctly ordered and correctly oriented and aimed at their proper and fit objects, whereas some passions were disordered, aimed wrongly, or misaligned.

It was on this basis that all education (except only that in the Modern Age) was formed. The idea was that youth should be trained to feel shame for what was shameful, proud of what merited pride, to love what was lovely, and hate what was hateful. The natural passions of cowardice, greed, love of excess, lust, hatred, fawning, and selfishness were to be replaced with more mature and useful passions of courage, love of honor, moderation, temperance, respect for elders and teachers and leaders, pious loyalty to family and city, hatred of lies, respect for woman and motherhood, and love of justice.

This idea is so entirely and thoroughly dismissed in the Modern Age, that it is utterly forgotten. Indeed, so forgotten is it that even the vocabulary used to define and discuss these things — Stoics call it “action in accordance with nature” — is incomprehensible to the Modern. The Moderns merely stare at you with bovine incomprehension if you attempt to define the terms; their imaginations are so stunted they cannot even hold a discussion on the matter even as a hypothetical.

If a scientist cannot measure and dissect justice or civic loyalty in a laboratory, then to the Modern, such things do not exist, except as meaningless words or meaningless figments.

Only what is physical is real. Such is the modern slogan.

(The slogan is uttered by those who do not notice that the statement “only what is physical is real” since it is a principle of ontology, is itself not physical, hence is not real. It is a self-disproving statement.)

Is there no Natural Law? Is there no such thing as Human Nature?

The Objectivity of Human Nature

Are not certain passions and appetites right, suited, fit, apt and good when directed to certain objects or goals, whereas those same appetites and passions become wrong, ill-suited, unfit, inappropriate and evil when directed at other objects and goals?

The men of the Modern day, for the moment, hold it to be reprehensible that a man should feel toward an underage daughter the sexual attraction he feels toward his wife. (How long the moment is to last is uncertain, since there is no convincing argument, based on the premise of modern morality, i.e. self-destructive narcissistic hedonism, that concludes practitioners of incest and pederasty should practice the self-control no other sexual deviant might or ought or, by modern theory, can practice.)

A less ambiguous example is race-hatred: even the Moderns condemn this emotion as wrong even when it is not acted upon. The point nonetheless is that most of us grasp, if only in a dim way, that there are certain passions and appetites that are innately, because of their nature, bad.

To the modern mind, there is no distinction between appetites and passions. Whatever it is that one now wants, for whatever the reason of the wanting, that urge is sacrosanct. All passions and appetites, high and low, elevated and profane, natural and unnatural, base and noble, are exactly the same in dignity and worth. The modern mind embraces a thoroughgoing agnosticism on all questions of virtue and value, and holds all judgments preferring one desire over another to be meaningless and arbitrary, if not pernicious.

I want what I want when I want it:  nothing else can be said. So runs the modern refrain.

The Moderns make one exception to this rule that all desires are created equal: namely, any desire springing from hasty or ignorant judgment, a bias, a bigotry, a prejudice, is condemned as adverse to the pubic weal.

The Moderns also recognize that actions that directly harm others are and should be unlawful, unless the victim is an adult who gives free and informed consent.

The Moderns also argue that free and informed consent is impossible except between men of the same level of wealth, so that the laws which protect the public from trespass and invasion do not apply to the rich, or any whom we might envy for some other reason, ergo their property can be plundered in order to assure the equality of outcome which is a necessary precondition for the existence of informed consent.

The Moderns also argue that the West was erected on the backs of bleeding and cowering slaves and conquered colonial serfs, so that bigotry against Whites is acceptable, and bias against Christians not only acceptable but is required: the laws are expected to judge a man not by the contents of his character, but by the color of this skin, unless he is a Black Baptist preacher or a black who votes Republican, in which case, he is a Sambo, and Oreo, a race-traitor and an Uncle Tom.

I could list more exceptions, but why bother?

After combing through all the exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions, we are left with the idea that the only thing really and actually under discussion in the libertarian all-free all-liberal Utopian future envisioned by the intellectuals is that incest, polygamy, no-fault divorce and various unnatural sexual acts will be not only tolerated, but celebrated, praised, promoted, and held up for emulation; that intoxication by drugs and alcohol (but, for some reason, not cigarettes) is praiseworthy ; and that in general selfishness, sloth, laziness, and hoggish avarice for public money is laudable and to be encouraged, but selflessness, industry, hard work, application, and a zeal for earning private money is detestable and to be deterred.

If you can see no sense to this, allow me to direct your attention to what is missing. The modern theory of ethics admits of no qualifications and no gradations of appetites and passions.

To the modern mind, there is no standard, no such thing as a wrongly-directed passion, no such thing as an unnatural appetite.

If you want to commit suicide rather than to live, that is not only your right, but, under socialized medical schemes, your duty.

If you want to kill you baby in your womb rather than shower her with motherly love and affection, that is not only your right, but, under socialist schemes of population control, your duty.

If you want to leave your wife and get a younger and more nubile wife to slake your sexual lusts, that is your right, even your wife has been perfectly loyal and self-sacrificing for years, and in the name of self-actualization and self-finding, may also be your duty; for her part, if she wishes to reward your love and loyalty with betrayal and divorce, not only is it her right, but you can be stuck with the paternity bills, and jailed if you fall shy the due amount.

If you just so happen not to have any love for your country or the home that reared you, it is your sanctimonious right, your freedom of speech, to revile and betray her: treason is, after all, the highest form of patriotism, or something like that.

You have no more reason to care for your children or your aging parents than you have to care for a goldfish you are tired of feeding: the all-powerful and all-intrusive nanny-state will pay, and will provide them with the love and self-esteem you did not care to give them.

This list could be lengthened endlessly.

The point is that the apt, sane and natural passions and loyalties and duties have all been repudiated by a modern substitute for philosophy. Instead of a philosophy to guide our lives, we have an inarticulate mental eructation of rubbish, a vague stirring of the loins, and a wordless anxiety or rage or other feeling in the guts — those useful organs which serve the modern intellectual as the seat of ratiocination in the place of his intellect.

About the only recognized duty or loyalty thought to be worthy of social peer-pressure and legal enforcement to uphold is some vague duty to the keep the environment green and happy: but even this tends to be a matter either of meaningless ritual habits, like recycling plastic bottles, or a matter of government discouragement of industry, such as the fashionable enviro-crusades against petrol refineries, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric dams. Some duties owed toward the state seem to be preserved in Modern political philosophy, but strangely they are never the ones that tend toward the preservation of law and order. Other duties are out the window. Everything else in life is a matter of what floats your boat.

With no judgment of praiseworthy and blameworthy passions, the modern mind is left with nothing but to allow the passions each for itself to propose itself as the highest good.

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Part XX—More Confusion—Seven Deadly Sins

And what happens when each passion is left to advocate its own justification?

Lust is sanctified and disguised as a rebellion against a mean-spirited and antiquated if not pernicious monogamy. I direct your attention to the list I mentioned above of the intellectuals who kept mistresses. Unnatural lust is sanctified as a Civil Right. Sexual excesses and sexual deviation is the new Black, and laws and customs which coerce conformity to chastity are the new Jim Crow, which the zealots of progress seek to abolish.

Envy is sanctified and disguised as concern for the children, or compassion for the poor, or for the conservation of the environment. The desire to punish the allegedly rich doctor and allegedly rich medical insurers for the sin of being rich is never far from the minds of the so-called reformers seeking to destroy the American Health Care industry.

Avarice for public money is sanctified as an appeal to fairness: each constituency demands, rather than asks, for largess from the public coffers as a matter of right. The absurdity of demanding rights in a world which, according to the intellectuals, contains neither right nor wrong, neither rights nor duties, needs no emphasis.

Wrath is sanctified and disguised as self-righteousness, that pompous and overbearing habit of the modern mind to substitute either loud screaming or a whispered set of sneering discourtesies for reasoned discourse. It is the prime and default condition of modern philosophy, particularly on the Left. Note the difference between the anger, the gushing anger, of a crooked figure like Nietzsche or Marx compared to the solemnity of Aristotle or the humility of Socrates, who did not even curse the city that poisoned him.

Gluttony is upheld by modern men both of the leftwing and the rightwing as the proper attitude toward accumulated worldly goods. The one exception is that socialists from time to time trot out a condemnation of gluttony in order to dispraise Capitalism; but since the doctrinaire socialist goes on to claim that socialism is more efficient and will more abundantly create and more widely distribute more and finer worldly  goods, the hypocrisy of the claim is pellucid. (Ironically, with the abundant death, poverty and general misery created by socialist schemes, one hears that claim of the superior economic efficiently of socialism more and more rarely unfurled these days—but since socialist claims are still being made, even the pretense that socialism is a theory of economics rather than a cultic belief in an atheist form of Calvinism is incrementally being dropped.) Nonetheless, the Left have more cause to boast than the Right on this one point: environmentalism, health concerns, the romance of living simply and closer to nature and vaguer spiritual concerns are often uttered by the Left as chides against gluttony. In the same way Wrath is the leitmotif of the Left, Gluttony is the leitmotif of the Right.

Sloth is sanctified and disguised as self-discovery and spontaneity. Just do it. The Moderns excuse and even condone when mothers walk away from husband and children to seek their own personal form of happiness and satisfaction. The routine drudgery of office and field work likewise is despised by modern males, to whom only recreation and preferably drunken recreation offers reward. The Puritan idea of sanctification through hard work is antithetical to the modern apotheosis of the passions. Hard work is inauthentic.

Pride is sanctified as self-esteem, which I discussed above. The absurdity of raising children to play games where there can be no winners and no losers, or the folly of lowering standards to admit women into the military or onto squads of firefighters when such women have not demonstrated the physical capacity to perform the task, or again the folly of replacing a system that rewards race or minority status rather than rewarding merit and hard work, all are manifestations of the passions of self-aggrandizement called pride.

We are not talking about pride of workmanship nor pride of accomplishment: we are talking about that passion, never far from the surface of the human mind, to claim the rewards due another on the grounds of self-love, to exclude all others from praise and consideration, to absorb the attention and glory and direct it toward one’s own vanity.

And, of course, the same process works in reverse. The Modern mind not only sanctifies the profane, it profanes the sacred.

Humility, the adverse of Pride, is condemned as a psychologically unhealthy and unsightly lack of self-esteem. Moderns are supposed to give each man to himself that same adoration ancient pagans paid to demigods—but of course, freed from the tyranny of cause and effect, the Modern is supposed to praise himself as brave as Achilles, devout as Aeneas, and cunning as Odysseus, but without actually going to the trouble of being brave, devout or cunning.

Zeal, the adverse of sloth, is condemned as being the ghastly mental disease a workaholic, if not a fanatic. (Albeit, only Christian fanaticism is condemned. To condemn Islamic fanaticism is racist bigotry.)

Temperance, the adverse of gluttony, is condemned as being both joyless and a killjoy. What are you, a Puritan?

Patience, the adverse of wrath, is condemned as indifference to whatever imaginary complaint provokes the self-righteousness or panic of the panicky self-righteous. It is treason to defend the witch from the witch-hunter.

(I recall recently being called a “racist” on the grounds that I objected to calling researchers racists during discussions about unpleasant or politically incorrect empirical facts, rather than, say, questioning the facts. Hearing the case laid out by a rational if mistaken opponent on a scientific question is now one and the same as race-hatred. My accuser was careful to qualify his statement by saying that I was unaware or unwilling to admit my race hatred. Of course, my real thoughtcrime was being willing to be patient and non-wrathful with Emmanuel Goldstein during the Two Minute Hate.)

Generosity, the adverse of Avarice, and Love, the adverse of Envy, and Self-control, the adverse of Lust, are likewise dismissed as either treason to the cause, or mere imprudence, or psychological defects of repression, or sinister desires to control and punish and harm others.

Such are the sins and virtues of modernity. The age is an age of confusion.

The loss of the center, soul and sanity of whole culture entails a complete repudiation and reversal of virtue and vice: the moral compass of the modern age points South rather than North, so that the greater a man’s desire for goodness and righteousness, the more swiftly will he be driven into vice and the more firmly planted in it.

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Part XXI—More Confusion—The Role of Incoherence

The sum and substance of all this foregoing is that, for the Moderns, evil is good and good is evil. Virtue is vice. Ugliness is Beauty. Lies are Truth. Men are beasts and beasts are men; men are women; adults are children; chastity is indecent and indecency is decent. Everything is nothing and Nothing is all that there is. A is non-A.

The error here is fundamentally philosophical: the Modern Age is the first age in history with no metaphysical beliefs, aside, perhaps, from a self-contradictory and crude form of materialism.

Without a metaphysics, nothing else in philosophy coheres.

Without a metaphysics, the very basics of human thought, such as the question of whether humans think or not, are clouded by doubt and debate. Things so painfully obvious that they cannot be denied are doubted if not denied outright.

In the meanwhile, things very doubtful indeed, if not disproven and exploded (such as a the theory that language shapes thought, ergo changing vocabulary is  socially useful and morally imperative way to produce harmony and peace; or such as the theory that diversity of nations and races each maintaining defiantly separatist loyalties only to its own members produces social harmony and sustains the common good) are not only noised about as if they are too obvious to discuss, they are enshrined in law, language, cult and custom: pious falsehoods held sacrosanct.

Philosophy cannot cure this. The modern age, lacking any metaphysical framework aside from half-broken and half-insincere pseudo-metaphysics of Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, leavened by  Hegelian misinterpretations of Darwin, lacks the ability to distinguish certain from uncertain, opinion from fact, sound conclusions from airy speculation. This of course includes conclusion about such questions as what is wrong with the world and whether and how it should be fixed. Reason, the only key heaven has provided us to unlock these chains of falsehood and idolatrous idiocy now enmeshing us, is the very key the modern man more vehemently throws as far away from himself as possible.

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Part XXII—Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

If Reason herself, armed like a goddess with the lightning and Medusa-headed hoplon of the chaste Minerva, cannot smite nor deflect nor defeat the hellish indignity, ugliness, insanity and inanity of the modern rebellion against life, liberty, nature, and reason what, then, is to be done?

If, as every Christian man since the First Century has believed, we live in the Last Days, and that mere months or moments separate us from the Second Coming, the only thing to be done is to carry on through the remaining fragment of time with the cheerful stoicism expected of saints and martyrs.

In such a case, the only thing to do is to await in joyful hope for the Deus ex Machina and then the curtain to be lowered on the stage of the tragic drama called Earthly history, so that we may join in the comical cast party held immediately after, shake hands with the Playwright, and gaze in wide-eyed, childlike wonder that the actors playing Hamlet and Laertes are not only not dead, but are the best of friends.

However, the cheerful stoicism with which Christian actors on the stage of the tragedy of Earthly history are expected to carry out our parts also includes that it is not our part to abandon the Earth to the foetid, chthonic and mephitic gargoyles of modernity: our part indeed is to drive them back into their sewers, holes and caves.

Joyous Christian stoicism requires hope and good cheer that gloomy pagan stoicism does not require. When all worldly evidence conspires to announce that the Age of Reason, so brilliantly begun, has ended with the Age of Unreason is upon us; Reason herself, her torch extinguished, sees no hope. But Christians do not limit their hope to worldly things, no more than the conquered peoples in Vichy France or Quisling Norway put their hopes in the Nazi occupier. There is something beyond Reason that supports her, and gives Reason her authority and power.

In my youth, I thought a return of the exiled philosophers would bring light to the darkened world; but I despaired, because if all lamps of thought and learning are smashed, and the Vestal fires of ancient tradition quenched, whence comes the fire to light to candle again?

The despair that in my youth clouded my wit was born of the simple error of cause and effect.

As I mentioned above, to me it seemed as the world had gone insane at around the Victorian Age, deepening in insanity throughout the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the modern intellectuals, as if afflicted with a case of St. Vitus’ Dance, seemed busily engaged in tearing away all the limbs and organs of the mind of man, as if eager to blind and lobotomize the world. At the time I regarded this as a revolt against modernity civilization, a rebellion against rationality.

I submit that my youthful prognosis was wrong and was too optimistic. If it were merely human reason that the modern world rejected, reason could cure it, because unreason is self-defeating and self-destructive, and reason enjoys such obvious advantages over unreason both for human felicity and human potency. Unreason is literally weak and powerless: to sweep it away, all that would be needed (so Ayn Rand might suggest) is a general strike by the rational men, the men of the mind, who could stand nonchalantly to one side, perhaps smoking a cigarette marked with a dollar sign, while the men of unreason destroyed themselves, and could emerge against after the shouting and dying was over to restore civilization on a rational basis.

As I said, too optimistic, if not utterly naïve. For I was an atheist in my youth, and during my bachelorhood and early fatherhood, and so I mistook against what it was that the modern world was rebelling. I dismissed Nietzsche because he was irrational, a polylogist,  a mystic, but I did not dismiss him because he was an atheist. I thought, as most atheists think, that faith in God and loyalty to the principle of logic and reasoning were mutually exclusive. St. Thomas Aquinas, had only I believed what I read in him, would have put me right: Logos, the Greek principle of Logic, as well as the Christian Word of God, is one and the same.

The moderns were not rebellion against reason. What philosopher can rebel against reason? They were rebelling against the thing from which Reason sprang. They were rebelling against the fountainhead, not the stream. It was Faith, the mother of Reason, who was the target of their incoherent ire. They were rebelling again God, and they had to rebel against Reason in order to make their Miltonian rebellion work.

Much as it will pain my atheist friends to hear this, the role of reason in the Western world was invented by the Greek, upheld by the Romans, and when those Romans became Christians, Reason was merged, melted and mated to the Christian religion so that one cannot accept Christ without accepting reason, and cannot accept Reason without accepting Christ.

Reason without Christ, if elevated to the sum and final Good of Man, leads to inhuman anger like Marx or inhuman selfishness like Ayn Rand, or inhuman angry selfishness like Dawkins, or inhuman inhumanity like Peter Singer.

These days, the only context in which the pagan sages and their work is viewed is through the restorations, writings and interpretations of the Christian saints.

If the two were not linked, the Moderns would embrace Reason and reject Christ: and to be sure there are Deists and Objectivists who do. But their relative obscurity implies the position is a balancing act, difficult to maintain, almost ad hoc. The position of a Deist or an Objectivist, someone who worships the God of the Philosophers or who vows to live life for no other man, this is not a position leading to a sufficiently robust theory of ethics, politics, aesthetics and norms to serve real human beings as sufficient guides to duty and happiness in real life. No one in a sick bed calls for a Deist preacher to fly to his side, so that he might recite the Watchmaker Argument one last time.

The role of reason as an objective and authoritative instrument for determining true from false, certain from uncertain, makes sense and serves practical use in life in the context of Christian metaphysics.

In Christian metaphysics, we believe in an objective and rational creation created by an objective and rational Creator, who both designed Man and granted him the power of reason to deduce the unchanging moral and physical laws of creation; and designed the creation with moral and physical laws vulnerable to the mind and reason of man.

What other metaphysical system supports reason? Confucius is a pragmatic rather than abstract thinker, and speaks dismissively of metaphysics. He comes to the same pragmatic conclusions as a Machiavelli or a Hobbes, and deduces that the best way to rule the commoners is by iron law; Lao Tzu is mystical and will not even speak of the Way, since the Way that is spoken is not the Way; Buddha rejects the world as Maya, illusion, and seeks the answer to the world’s pain in the renunciation of the world, the retreat into the stillness of non-thought; al-Ghazali put paid to Avicenna’s thought or Averroes’ that cause and effect, or the objects of the created world, had their own unchanging and rational nature, but instead proposed a world as arbitrary as the Maya of the Buddhists, except it was the will of the incomprehensible Allah; and the various neopagans who pretend to follow the lore and wisdom on the classical thinkers are merely persons who adopt a Christian worldview but leave out Christ, or add a belief in reincarnation, or want a universe where magic is licit, or sexual deviance, but above all one where they are never criticized, judged, or condemned—the thoughts and writings of Aristotle and Plato, much less Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, will not be found among the neopagans, but will be found among the Christians.

Modern metaphysics, to the degree that such a ragged collection of junk can be said to have one, speaks fondly of reason, when and only when it is a useful stick to beat the cur of Christianity, but then goes on to say:

(draw a deep breath)

…. the universe is incomprehensible or irrational or lacks cause and effect because science proves the universe exists in a noumenal realm of which we have no knowledge; man is incomprehensible or irrational because he is but a machine or a beast or an evolved creature who is merely occupying a waystation to the next step of evolution, the superman, the Morlock, whose moral code we have no way to comprehend and no right to judge … Science has disproved free will, and hence neither man nor superman actually has a moral code and sexual perversions are determined by genetic defects, therefore to condemn or judge any person on a moral and ethical ground is immoral and unethical and an abuse of your free will according to the non-laws of the non-universe … Meanwhile, reality is subjective and words have no innate or stable meaning, therefore reality is what the Party says it is, and words mean what the misinterpreter wants them to mean, not what the speaker means them to mean. Women are men and children are men and dogs and cats are men and everyone is a man except for men, who should act more loving soft, and girlish … Except that girls are men, so to use the word girlish to describe a feminine trait is an insult … Except that all cultures are relative, all words mean nothing, so that there is no standard of chivalry or decency or courtesy we enlightened must uphold; except that political correctness trumps factual correctness, so that there are very strict and very ruthlessly enforced and utterly arbitrary standards of courtesy that we define according to real or imaginary offenses that victimized hence morally superior victim-groups can define; and we, the enlightened, not members of those groups, get to define what offends them on their behalf, whether they agree or know or not … And your brain is merely a collection of meaningless atoms thrown together by selfish genes, and your feelings of unselfishness are chemical influences distorting your thought, therefore proper moral conduct consists of abiding by altruistic and unselfish impulses, on the grounds that the self genes created them in order to propagate the species; and the first, highest, and only principle of human conduct is to screw as many partners of either sex as frequently and vehemently as possible, using birth control to ensure sterility, killing your children in the womb whenever convenience, angry boyfriends, or whim so dictates, and killing inconvenient old people as soon as they are either brain dead or might be an inconvenience to maintain. Such are the absolute yet relative moral commandments deduced and not deduced from the scientific principle of reproduction of the fittest, to be unselfishly and selfishly followed…

(whew) Need I go on? There is no role for reason in a nonsense world.

With no supernatural and no natural laws, there is nothing for reason to reason about: no cause and effect and no free will, no human dignity, neither properties in the philosophical sense nor property in the legal sense, nothing but the endless whining of the endlessly selfish self-indulgent slaves of vice. If the world is meaningless, then everything in the world—life, logic, truth, justice, fairness, freedom, honesty, love, romance, dreams, ambitions, hopes, as well as ideas and ideals and science and the chaste goddess Reason herself—likewise is meaningless.

Now, to be sure, there are, in the West, still some Aristotelian philosophers who take no notice of Christianity: but in that case their view of the role of reason and their explanation of why it works tends to follow the Aristotelian, that is, the Christian view. Those moderns are not rebellion against reason, but are its advocates (albeit in a strictly limited way, since such will not admit the role of reasoning, say, in theological matters).

If the moderns are abandoning reason, but not in rebellion against reason, what do they rebel against? It may seem as if they are rebelling against life.

Ayn Rand was right that the followers of collectivism and communism are being driven to death, and that only a massive structure of lies could deceive the people into embrace a system that promises wealth and delivers misery. What she mistook was the source: no sane person actually wants to kill himself. The Progressives are not seeking suicide. The evil spirit that leads the Progressives, however, is trying to kill them. The Father of Lies was a murderer from the beginning.

We Christian men, and whatever allies we can find among men of good will in other faiths, or among atheists who adore the foundational concepts of liberty and law on which this nation is based, we are not fighting an alliance of Progressive fascists and Islamic fascists.

We are engaged in spiritual warfare with that same Dark Lord who has deceived the all the unwary sons of Eve, and now deceives all the addicts addicted to falsehood and envy and perversion and corruption.

We struggle against principalities and powers of this world.

The pagans and agnostic and Christ-bashers and intellectuals and screaming goofballs and sneering know-nothings are not our enemy, no more than a madman is the enemy of the doctor. The disease is the enemy. Darkness is the enemy, not those who are blind in the dark because they have thrown their lamps away.

Philosophy is the rational approach to life, but it is not life itself. Philosophy is the reflection on worldly and divine things, but it is not itself divine. Philosophy is the handmaiden of religion, but cannot (despite the comical attempts of the French Revolution to the contrary) be elevated to the status of religion itself. The attempts to make a philosophical principle the soul and center of life always end either in obscurity, as in Deism or Stoicism, or in horror, as in Communism.

When the American sense of life is found again, and placed on a correct footing, the Western philosophy will return to sanity.

Where is the tree of life? Where is life to be found?

Can anything bring life to a dead culture? When Egypt fell, she never rose again, and no new pyramids were reared, and no new hieroglyphs deciphered. Likewise Babylon, and the Empire of the Hittites. The Medes are no more found. Is there anyone, save for scholars, who speaks their languages or worships their gods? And of the Persians, how many Zoroastrians still light the sacred fires?

Ah, but there in the fires of the Magi we have a hint of light. Zoroastrians still read their ancient texts and worship the Wise Lord. That is the element of the ancient world that survives.

Judging from history, there is one and only one world civilization that fell into destruction and was resurrected without loss of its identity: and that is the Roman Empire, which shattered, suffered attack from Paynim and Norsemen and Nomad, collapsed to barbarism, but revived in the form of a renaissant Christendom, and rose the greatness unsurpassed in the history of the world.

The thing that revived Christendom was Christ.

The America has uniquely, several times in history, drawn back from the brink of destruction and returned to her foundational principles. She has shed the blood of tyrants and patriots, or led revivals of Christianity to astound Christendom and to appall the kingdom of Antichrist. Such could easily be in our future: the Progressive have already successfully aborted their children to the point where the demographics favors the followers of the faith of Abraham.

The cure of the world is not a return to philosophy. Philosophy will return once we return to Theology.

Even those who disbelieve, or despise the Church will in times to come realize that they have no palatable options but to support her, unless they want to support the yawning void of nihilism, the mindless love of violence and vice and self-indulgent self-destruction which is rapidly becoming the only other option. The void of nihilism is the gate to Hell.

That void is all that is left once the soul and once the philosophy of a civilization has been lost. It is a void of infinite darkness. Only an infinite Light can fill and vanquish it. And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

Cliche Came Out of its Cage
By C.S. Lewis

1

You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

About

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.

March 6, 2019 @ 7:00 pm
Reasonings