Bruce Charlton on Pagan Missionaries Revisited
I posted a link here to this article by Bruce Charlton, advocating sending out pagan missionaries to bring the modern world to the point of the pre-Christians.
Some of the comments lead me to be believe Mr Charlton’s apothegmic style is too acute and sly to reach some readers, so at the risk of belaboring the obvious, permit me to belabor it:
I sometimes think we need pagan missionaries, almost as much as we need Christian missionaries. Indeed they could be the same people – adjusting their strategy.
Christian missionaries are very good at converting pagans, but nobody seems able to convert modern secular hedonists.
The jump between secular hedonism is too great – between believing whatever you like to believing a complex set of interlocking propositions (which perhaps don’t make any better sense than secular hedonism unless they are all present and correct).
But maybe, simple paganism could be restored – and later on the person might be amenable to Christianity?
I suspect Mr Charlton is indulging in a bit of a joke, or irony. He is pointing out, as GK Chesterton and others have pointed out before him, that modernity is more primitive and vicious and benighted EVEN than the pagans, who, sickened by the unnatural practices, superstitious excess, fatalism, hopelessness, and joyless frivolity of paganism, turned with gratitude to the waters of baptism: conversions that were (with exceptions so few as to be prodigies) peaceful and voluntary, rapid and nigh-universal in the Roman Commonwealth and surrounding tribes, nations, and peoples.
In other words, Mr Charlton is not seriously suggesting we send out missionaries to preach the gospel of Jove or Isis, Odin or the Great God Pan. He is pointing out that these hopeless and fatalistic and joylessly frivolous pagans were MORE highly enlightened than the hopeless fatalism of the Darwinist who considers himself an Augmented Ape, or the idiotic materialist who considers himself the meat-puppet of a Selfish Gene. The pagan at least tried to cover his joylessness, not spread it. Achilles bemoaned that it were better to be the slave of a dirt farmer than to be a shade in the underworld: the modern nihilist considers that value judgment subjective therefore void. Heraclitus the philosopher pondered, and considered all matter in motion to be chaos, without consistency or form. The modern philosopher considers pondering an act of void chaos, and avoids it.
Mr Charlton’s point is not to praise paganism. His point is that pagans, real pagans, had advanced to the step of being able to understand the Christian message. Their twilight fairy tales gave them enough of a taste of truth that when the true sun rose, they were able to recognize and rejoice in its light. The modern man is blind, and for him, days and night alike is ever-during dark.
Christianity is a cure for sin and death. The Modern world, unique in all of time, rejects the universal testimony of history, and firmly asserts that death is final and incurable. (This, even though, statistically, more people have seen ghosts than have witnessed murders.)
Sin the modern world seeks to cure sin by defining deviancy down: if you eliminate the guilt, so goes the reasoning of unreason, the act is no longer blameworthy, indeed, no longer even exists, no more than exists a fading cloud of dream. Reality is simply wished away by a sustained effort of squinting make-believe.
This is why the first, last, and only line of defense of Political Correctness is vicious personal attack, sneers, counter-attacks, bullying, screaming, scoffing, one-liners, cruel jokes, half-wit witticisms, et ad nauseam.This is because to argue, or even to question, to use the intellect at all, snaps one immediately out of the suspension of disbelief.
The whole point of a communal make-believe is that it only works if everyone in the group plays along.
No one, not even the most devout fanboy, erects a rational or objective defense to a beloved make-believe. We all know STAR WARS is not real, it is merely fun made for nothing deeper than fun. There is no real galaxy long, long ago and far, far away, any more than there is a Never-neverland inhabited by pirates and cannibals and savage Red Indians, fairies and lost children. But Political Correctness rests on the prime directive of Nihilism: the conceit that nothing is ‘really’ real, that all is a social construct, an narrative, the ideological superstructure of class interests, or the epiphenomenon of brain atom motions caused by the mechanical action of selfish genes. The PC know their world is fake. The foes they fight, Nazis and White Supremacists and conspiratorial Theocrats, are all as make-believe as Emmanuel Goldstein. (This can be seen by the reaction of abetting infatuation the Political Correctionists have when real theocrats, e.g. Islamic Shariaists, step into the stage of history.) And the core of the falsehood of their pasteboard world is a steadfast denial of the reality of moral law, or of sin, its violation, or of death, its consequence. The first two they say do not exist; death they distract themselves to ignore, and none of their philosophers speak of it, or how to deal with it, except when they promote euthanasia, whereupon death becomes an adjust or accessory of personal sovereignty and personal dignity, a civic right like the right to vote.
By no coincidence, those vices in which they most deeply indulge (intolerance, suppression of freedom of expression, the belief in a fantasy world, the unwillingness to face facts, the inability to think rationally) are the very ones which form the core of accusations they make against Christians. They, who by their own design know nothing of human nature or human happiness or how to achieve it (how is that endless orgy of the Sexual Revolution working out for you, Baby?), accuse us of being blind to facts. Meanwhile, they believe in global cooling, or global warming, or whatever the fashionable hysteria for this season might be. (Emmanuel Goldstein is now conspiring to ruin the weather of Oceania!)
The modern world mired in make believe will never understand the Christian message. They cannot even understand the message of Marcus Aurelius, or Socrates, or Zoroaster, or Lao Tzu, or even understand what ills these sages and philosophers and visionaries were attempting to address or cure. Political Correctness silences all debate by defining logic, evidence, experience and reason as out of bounds, oppressive, sinister, old-fashioned, irrational.
The mind without reason is a void of chaos, and the modern world fills the chaos with noise, distraction, clowns, gossip, scandal, pornography, raucous noise, outrageous noise, shrill noise, and screaming noise, depending on the several entertainments of rock music, rap music, political riot, and torture-porn flicks.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
