The Lamps Go Out
St Elijah’s monastery stood on the outskirts of Mosul for 1,400 years, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq.
It was been razed to the ground by the Islamic State:
“Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of gray-white dust. They destroyed it completely,” [Stephen Wood] said from his Colorado offices.
On the other side of the world, in his office in exile, in Erbil, Iraq, Catholic priest Rev. Paul Thabit Habib, 39, stared in disbelief at the before- and after- images.
“Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled,” he said in Arabic
Let us not forget who the enemy is: one philosophy and one alone in the West has made us unable to recognize an enemy when he strikes us, made us unwilling to fight in self defense or defense of the innocent, and made us eager to cover up a decade of rapes rather than accuse a Muslim ring of crime, made witnesses unwilling to report suspicious activity by gunmen or high-jackers for fear of being seen as racist, and, in a word, made the entire West yearn for suicide, and not a painless suicide either.
I called it a philosophy. It is in truth a psychopathology, an insane inability to look truth in the face. It is the revolt against reason, the rebellion against reality, the desecration of beauty and the mutiny against God.
It is secular humanism.
Why did the Leftwing press not report this story? Why is the genocide of Christians in the Middle East unmentioned, unexamined, unspoken? Or the gang rapes in Germany?
Once in this space I gathered an exhaustive list of each and every time a murderous rampage by a Muslim or by an insane Leftist was at first blamed by the breathless press on old, white, angry men, who retracted their comments reluctantly, or not at all.
No rational person could read that list, and, after checking the line items to confirm the truth of the matter, deny the obvious truth that the Press defends and applauds Islam, and yearns, as do the Jihadists, for the humiliation and destruction of the West.
Another time I gathered a list of Leftwing celebrities and pundits who applauded the Islamic attacks on 9/11, and acted as apologists for them thereafter.
Again, no rational person could read that list, and, after checking the items and confirming the quotes were accurate, and had not been repudiated or given another explanation by those who uttered them, and fail to reach the conclusion that such quotes reflected the consensus opinion of Leftwing opinion-makers, which consensus was unambiguously pro-Jihad.
Likewise, I gathered a list of the reasons why the United State engaged in the war against Saddam’s Iraq under George Bush, for which, to this day, he (Bush, not Saddam) is still regarded with horror and detestation by the Left.
Again, once each line item was checked, the cumulative effect is overwhelmingly clear that it would have been negligence akin to treason not to go to war with the enemy at that time and under those circumstances.
And anyone reading the war news of the last eight years should be able to see that the current administration is guilty of at least such negligence if not treason, depending on the degree of deliberation involved in Mr. Obama’s actions against the national interest.
And I am hardly the sole voice, or the clearest, or the loudest, or the first to point these things out.
So why are there any Leftists still abroad in the nation?
How do they retain their seats of power, their claim on the respect and admiration of the general public?
Where is the opposition to the juggernaut of self destruction running our nation, and all Western Civilization, over the brink of the sulfur cliffs of damnation into the abyss? Where are the impeachments? Where are the drumhead courts? Where are the lynch mobs?
The answer is simple and sad. The revolt against reason is a resounding success. Educated men no longer know how to think, to examine evidence, to reach independent conclusions, and to carry out the moral duties those conclusions disclose to the well formed conscience.
The Left are motivated by a vision that has the strength and force of the supernatural.
The vision is this: In a world without reason, there is no judgment, and where there is no judgement, there is no criticism, no disagreement, no private property, no preference of cultures, no clash of religion, no differences of opinion on matters of economics, politics, or fact.
In a world with no judgment, there is no condemnation, no hurt feelings, no injustice, and no war. All live in peace and sloth and leisure forever, seeking ever greater thrills with ever more depraved appetites to stave off ever more painful ennui.
It is the world described in John Lennon’s execrable ballad ‘Imagine’. The lyrics propose a world where everything worth fighting for is taken away by taking away everything worth living for. Allegedly this will cause peace.
That is the vision of heaven offered by the cult of Leftism. The hell is thermonuclear Ragnarok, mass riots triggered by mass starvation triggered by overpopulation, environmental Armageddon, and the various police-state dystopias that preoccupy feverish Leftist imaginings.
In order to let reason reign and rule, individualism is essential. An individualist protects the rights even of his adversaries or competitors, knowing that keeping the rights of all sacred is the best way, perhaps the sole way, of securing his own rights. The individualist cares not what group a man is born into and cannot escape, but only what his merit is, his guilt or innocence.
For the collectivist, there is always an out-group, always a hated enemy and scapegoat on whom all the sins of the community is placed.
For the Leftist National Socialists of the German Workers’ Party, colloquially called the Nazis, the scapegoat was Jews.
For the Communists, the scapegoat was the Free Market, and the Church.
For the Socialists, the scapegoat (ironically) were their fellow Leftists, the Nazis.
For the race-hustlers, the scapegoat is the Caucasian. For the Third-Wave feminist, the scapegoat is the Patriarchy. For various pervertarians and neoprogressives, the scapegoat is the nuclear family in general, but fatherhood in particular. The scapegoat is anyone who is normal, decent, chaste, unperverted, the so called ‘straight’.
All of these have been gathered together into the rubric of the modern Social Justice Warrior, whose various branches each agree savagely to attack the scapegoats of the other, particularly scapegoat groups to which each partisan of Social Justice himself belongs.
This adoption of victimization, or crying crocodile tears, rewards one with the alleged moral superiority to dismiss all reasoning, ignore all facts, end all debate, gag all free speech, and demand any concession that a fervid fancy can invent. In sum, wailing over imaginary wrongs grants one a license to torment the helpless, trample the weak, be a loathsome loudmouth self-important jackass, and play the bully.
The crybully is the final end product or final stage of the degenerative disease of collectivist unreason.
The crybaby is a posthuman a creature who can only exist by fattening on the flesh of willing victims, and who has lost the gifts of speech and reason. In the science fiction field, we called such crybullies ‘Morlocks’ after the cannibal troglodytes destined to rise once true humanity departs.
You see, the crybully need only identify an arbitrary mascot-group as the victim not of a real but only of a hypothetical grievance (such as hearing the word niggardly, or seeing someone dressed as a Red Indian at Halloween, or encountering a reference to ‘rule of thumb’) which does not afflict a real victim, to begin his bullying campaign.
No real harm nor offense need be proved, nor need any real member of the mascot group be found to voice a complaint.
Any opponent need only be identified as a member of one of these scapegoat groups, or, better yet, all of them, and, in the voodoo magic of the postrational Morlock mind, that ends all investigation and all debate.
Facts no longer matter. Facts be damned. The question is now only one question: whether you will remain loyal to the the collective, which sums all forms of good, or betray it and side with the scapegoat, which bears all sins and sums all forms of evil.
Even so small as thing as a few science fiction authors weary of boring, badly-written, and unimaginative agit-prop message fic from the same few incestuous insiders being granted the most flattering publicity and receiving the most prestigious awards standing up and wishing for a return of broad popular standards or deep artistic merit, or both, were answered not by a single rational statement, but by the crybully’s only cry:
The writers, myself included, were libeled in every forum controlled by the crybullies as racist misogynist homophobic Nazis, that is, we were identified as members of the scapegoat groups identified as the ritual enemies of the race-hustlers, the third-wave feminists, the pervertarians and the communists.
(Our group actually had more women and minorities in our membership, in our nominations, and in positions of leadership than our opponents of the Left. Hypocrisy much?)
The Gamergaters before us were treated the same way and exposed to the same ritual list or litany of accusations. There is only one list, and it is used when it is not appropriate or make no sense because it is the only list the Morlocks have: racist, sexist, homophobe, Nazi. The way a crybully bullies is by dehumanizing his foe, that is, by placing him outside the collective, making his a scapegoat.
He of course is never guilty of the sins of which he is accused. A scapegoat is only useful as a scapegoat if you project your sins onto him. A guilty man won’t do. That is why the Leftist accusations are not only false, they are outrageously, stupidly, howlingly barking-mad moonbatshitecrazy false. Not just lies, but lies no one could believe if he wanted to.
(The accusation that science fiction writer Brad Togersen was a racist for wanting to see nonboring science fiction, for example. He is married to a black woman whom he dearly loves and has a mulatto child. The accusation that Theodore Beale, who is a member of a Red Indian tribe is a White Supremacist is a second example. The idea that Kate Paulk or Sarah Hoyt are misogynists is a third. The idea that Larry Correia, because and only because he offers gun safety training courses to women for self defense, is therefore a rape apologist, is a fourth. The list could go on and on.)
However, real racists, such as Islamics who, obeying the Koran, hate Jews; and real misogynists, such as Islamics who, obeying the Koran, reduce women to a lesser and despised status in law and society; and real homophobes whose opposition to perversion manifests itself in homicidal brutality rather than prayers offered to a particularly disgusting sexual sin, such as Islamics who, obeying the Koran, execute sodomites; all these are protected and applauded by the Left.
The Islamics are guilty, entirely and unambiguously, of the very things which allegedly make one a member of the scapegoat outgroup. Why are Islamics favored and protected and called innocent?
The answer is strange and simple: because they are guilty, they cannot serve as a scapegoat. Only false accusations are leveled by the Left. And since they are not in the outside group, they are treated as members of the inside group, the collective. Because Islamics want to kill Leftists, Leftists love Islamics with an almost erotic fervor. Because Republicans want to protect Leftists from Islamics, Leftist hate Republicans with an insane, frothing, foam-at-the-mouth hatred, a hatred beyond reason, beyond discussion.
Reason is the tool the Creator made in man to allow him to live on earth, be free, and rule nature. The Left wishes desperately to abdicate that rule, reject that freedom, and to reject the tools of survival.
Once reason is entirely exiled from human discourse, there is nothing left aside from this insane collectivist self-suicide.
Collectivism is unjust by its nature, inevitably and essentially, because all collectives require a scapegoat group to blame for the communal sins and to act as a scarecrow to promote group unity and group harmony in the face of an imaginary enemy.
The scapegoats must be demonized, that is, be portrayed as having not a single sympathetic or human characteristic: Wagner, once denounced as a racist, for example, cannot be admitted to be a good composer of music, because that talent might provoke a sense of fellowship and humanity. A foe with a human face, an honorable foe, cannot serve as a tool to herd the collectivist group into unity, because humanized foes produce a conflict of loyalties.
And so the innocent, if they are scapegoat group, are punished for imaginary sins, whereas the guilty, if they are in the collective group, are rewarded for imaginary virtues, and their real crimes covered up and ignored.
Punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty is not an accident, nor an oversight, nor a side effect. It is the goal. Injustice, raw, rank, insolent, smirking, smarmy injustice, injustice for the sake of injustice, that is the goal.
That is the nature and the point of collectivism: it is an attempt to escape from the burning eye of one’s own reason, one’s one conscience. It uses the collective, the mob, the group, the rabbit-warren, as an ersatz conscience, but one under human control, not divine control.
Real enemies cannot serve this purpose: instead, they are welcomed in with open arms, so that the suicide can proceed apace.
What to do?
A society that does not believe in an objective reality, an objective standard to judge good and evil social orders, an objective moral law, and an objective standard of logic and of fact, of true and false, will always slide back into collectivism and institutional injustice.
While it is possible for a rational atheist to believe in an objective standard of truth, virtue, and beauty, he cannot believe in any enforcement mechanism aside from manmade institutions or natural consequences: and the mind of man can concoct how to blind, evade, or elude such mechanisms.
On the other hand, a rational man examining the question must come eventually at least to a Deist belief in a benevolent and omnipotent Creator. Worldviews lacking this are inadequate, incomplete, and illogical, satisfying neither the needs of reason nor the yearnings of the soul nor the sense of fitness and proportion of the taste. A rational man looking over the historical evidence will soon convince himself that the historical claims of the Christian Church that Christ lived and died and rose again as stated, and was what He said He was are accurate, correct, and offer the only explanation that does not veer into conspiracy theory paranoia.
Modern philosophy the gropes along headlessly without theology as its brain is thereby reduced to being merely boring or absurd, reduced to word-games with Wittgenstein, or gibberish with Hegel, or psychosis with Nietzsche.
With a belief in at least a Deist God, the belief in an objective moral code, in objective facts, in objective aesthetic standards, all follow automatically. Without such a belief, the conclusion that truth, beauty and virtue are real and objective is difficult to defend and unlikely to convince, but, more to the point, impossible to enforce.
Alas for my rational atheist friends, but the idea of a return to a secular yet rational society is opium pipe smoke. The advocates of unreason have dashed you from the halls of power and the groves of academia. You never ruled there. We did. Those universities were all founded by Christian men on Christian principles, that is, on the principles of self evident moral and logical truths, and so were those forms of government.
Hence, without a belief in an objective God, there is an insufficient foundation in the mind of man for a belief in objective truth, virtue, and beauty, and for a belief in standards governing these things, and for a belief in divine enforcement of these standards, without which they are merely academic, too weak, in the human world, to defend themselves from self interest.
The fate of St. Elijah’s monastery is our fate. We will be ground to powder.
We must return to Christ, or we are irrational. We must return to Christ, or we are damned.
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.
