Hard Hearts and Soft Heads
A friend of mine reports that after viewing STAR TREK: PICARD, he comes closer to understanding two quotes from CS Lewis
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
And
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
I would emphasis the line: By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.
It is my belief that artists are always guided by a theory, or a view of the universe, that define what they think art is and what they think their job is. Back in the day, when an artist believed Aristotle, that art was the mirror of nature, or believed Aquinas, that art was the mirror held up to God, even an artist who never read a word of these philosophers, just so long as he picked up the attitude from his surroundings, would do glorious work: he would create beauty based on natural and supernatural forms because that is what he thought his job was.
Now, an artist who has never read a word of Marx or Gramsci or Nietzsche picks up from his environment that his job is to aid the attempt to engineer society to break the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie, enlighten them to atheism, and prepare them to be receptive to the yoke of the scientific elite, their betters, who will lead them fettered into the wonders of utopia. Except that utopia, existing only as a shadowy daydream in nowhere, has no form, no substance, nothing to awe nor inspire. Utopia is merely another word for envy.
And envy is ugly. So that artists guided by progressive theory can only produce ugliness.
Is this deliberate? Is bad art made bad in order to render the public more pliant to the propagandist and his cheap and lurid appeals to envy and pity and hate? Or is this merely a happy side effect?
That question is hard to answer when dealing with men whose decisions are emotional, never rational.
Their evil and ugly art is not deliberate in the sense that they neither have a reason for what they do, nor can articulate any account. It is deliberate in the sense that the policy clearly aims toward a given end, which, if these trends continue unaltered, they stand a good chance to achieve.
Their art serves the propagandist because, on an emotional level, even if the progressive artist cannot put into words what his worldview is, the artist and the propagandist share the same worldview.
By this I mean, they both react with the same passions and stock emotional responses to the same stock situations.
When either sees a happily married couple, this triggers hate. When either sees sodomy or pederasty, this trigger a feeling of smug glee, akin to the satisfaction of revenge.
When either sees signs of motherhood or virginity, hate. But seeing whores and infanticides glorified, a smug sense of superiority overcomes them.
When seeing signs of virtue, courage, manliness, justice, fatherhood, either feels blinding hatred akin to madness. But contemplating vice, degradation, drag queens, social justice, infertility, rebellion, decay, and garbage, again the sense of heckling smugness inflates their pride, and they feel vengeance is theirs.
Vengeance against whom? Against you, dear reader, and everything decent and wholesome and sane and normal and proportionate in life.
You surely do not think a single Socialist gives a hoot about economics, do you? A schoolboy with a week’s training in Econ 101 can rattle off the answers as to why socialism won’t and can’t work, and, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, it is unlikely, perhaps impossible, for any educated person not to know these things.
Socialism fails because it is designed to fail. Read Marx. Read Nietzsche. Revealed in their writings, with those with eyes to see, is the hatred and contempt Marx and Nietzsche have toward Christianity, toward Western Civilization, toward businessmen, shopkeepers, tradesmen, who are the men Marx called Capitalists and Bourgeoisie, and toward all the men of common decency who merely want happy lives, who are the men Nietzsche called “The Last Men.”
They want retaliation against you because you are happy and they are not. At the root, this is a religious issue. Even those not nominally Christian, if raised in Christian society and accepting the basic ideas of Christian virtues and values, will seek peace over war, gradual improvement over bloody revolution, chastity over perversion, chivalry over expedience.
(Expedience is the maxim that victory outweighs sportsmanship, or, in other words, that the ends justify the means).
Antichrist says that creativity and glory spring only from violence and bloodshed, so those in his spirit prefer war to peace.
Antichrist says patience is for suckers, and compromise is treason, therefore bloody revolution is the sole option.
Antichrist says the sole motive for chastity, for justice, for keeping one’s word to one’s best beloved spouse, is cowardice and a lack of elan, of imagination, therefore pederasts and sodomites and sexually disturbed individuals are not only profiles in courage,but gain the solemn moral authority only martyrs command.
Antichrist says that men are beasts, or less than beasts, therefore regarding the unborn, the elderly, or women, as full human beings made in the image of God is impossible. They are to be killed and raped as and when convenient, and the weak shall serve the pleasure of the strong … and all this in the name of equality and diversity and social justice, and other buzzwords which the propagandist and the other beasts who speak for Antichrist, mean about as much as socialist millionaires mean it when they praise the literacy programs of socialist dictators in communist hellhole countries.
Even Conservative who should know better are remarkably naive when they take anything said by the Mouth of Sauron at face value.
For example, there are no ‘literacy programs’ in socialist nations. The children are taken to re-education to be brainwashing and programming into informing on their parents if disloyalty to the Glorious Leader is detected. The numbers claimed as to how many children can read are as fake as the number of women killed during back alley abortions.
It is like hearing naive Conservatives saying that having the trains run on time is no great benefit, if they are carrying prisoners to the gulag. A witty enough reply, but it grants what one should never grant: that a socialist nation can get a train to run on time.
Where are you going to get the statistics on how many trains run late? From the state-controlled train company? From the state-controlled newspapers? From the state bureau managing the trains?
Better to listen to CS Lewis. Even when writing a children’s fairy tale, wisdom leaks out in his words.
In one scene the White Witch promises an English schoolboy that she will make him a prince in Narnia if he betrays his family; the Green Witch in another book makes the same promise to an amnesiac if he agrees to lead an invasion.
The boy, by being a son of Adam, is already a prince in Narnia, however, and the amnesiac is the missing son of the king, hence also a prince. The witches offer the princes nothing they do not already possess.
Likewise, when the Devil tempts Our Lord in the desert, he promises Him the kingdoms of the world, and all their glory.
The socialist who says that if you hand over your freedom, and become his slave, he will only tax and torture his other slaves, not you, and will make your trains run on time, make college tuition free, and make insurance cheap, is not promising you anything you, or one of your fellow citizens, does not already own.
A slave gets free meals and free health care, the same way livestock does. No hog fattened for slaughter pays for his feed, and no sick plowhorse gets a veterinarian bill.
Unless there is already a train line that runs on time, the dictator cannot promise you, dear voter, in return for your surrender of your liberty, to see to it that this train runs.
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.
