Last Crusade 51: To Confound the Wise
After long delay, my pen resumes the Everestian task of outlining the strategy of the Last Crusade, to retake the soul of the West, and reignite the lamps of civilization.
We turn now to the question of how to redeem the ivory towers and airy salons of the intellectuals from the poisonous spiderwebs of pride and folly that have snared, cocooned, and paralyzed the mental life of Christendom.
The popular culture currently sees Caesar, that is, worldly political power, as the savior for all life’s ills. Nonetheless, the deepest battle of the Last Crusade is not in politics, but in the intellectual world, who have no power but the pen.
This is the battle of ideas.
The reason why I call it the deepest battle is because, like the roots of a tree, the corruption of the intellect serves as a foundation for all the other corruption the Last Crusade must fight, in art, in politics, in economics, and so on. If the roots are infected, no health of branch or bough, flower or fruit will long endure.
I also call it deep, because, like a buried war-bunker, the chambers and salons and ivory towers of the intellectual class are an underworld hidden from the sight of the common man.
It is also an underworld in the sense of being a criminal enterprise, namely, a fraud.
And it is an underworld in a final sense as well: in the center of the chambers of the intellect sits the fallen archangel of pride enthroned, as in the realm of hell.
The fiery contempt of the powerful to the weak, the beautiful to the plain, and the rich to the poor is a weak candle when compared to the blast furnace of the contempt of the learned to the unlettered.
Nothing is worse than to see yourself as wise in your own eyes. I speak from sad experience. I have seen what spiritual ruin intellectual pride has worked on the one soul I know best, and seen from the inside.
I call it deep also because the intellectual world is indeed deep, that is to say, the battlefield is the realm of profound philosophical, theological and abstract ideas most men have neither time, patience, nor training to fight.
The war of ideas is slow and painstaking, a battle like the deadly tunnel fighting between the mines and countermines dugs by sappers to undercut a wall, or break the foundations of a fortification.
In the wrongly-named period called the Dark Ages, the intellectuals of the West were churchmen. They flourished in monasteries, preserved ancient learning, invented what is wrongly named modern science, built, and staffed the universities.
During the Reformation, a desire for peaceful inquiry into areas all denominations had in common resulted in the triumph of secularism over scholasticism. Theology was dethroned from her position, and her altars crowbarred to rubble. Metaphysics, once the queen of sciences, was strangled and left for dead. Philosophy was abandoned to monkeys, and flinging excrement replaced reasoned discourse.
Reason itself was idolized as the goddess meant to replace God — most obviously during the French Revolution — and then was abandoned and trampled underfoot in a twofold attack. Kant proposed that reality and reason are divorced, Nietzsche denounced reason as unrealistic, and Wittgenstein denounced reality as unreasonable. Then, with postmodernism, reason is abandoned altogether, not merely as unreliable, but as unjust, a source of oppression.
In the Pre-Modern Ages, the common man, and common sense, upheld the same basic worldview as the loftiest scholar or archbishop. The foremost philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, was not a Satanist but a saint. He worshiped the same God as his gardener.
The clerks — a word that means both a man of the cloth and a man of the pen — were loyal to the world they served.
The same cannot be said, for example, of scholars like Darwin, Freud, Marx, nor for cranks posing as scholars, such as Jared Diamond, Margaret Mead, Peter Singer, Rachel Carson, and, more to the point, such as Saul Alinsky, who famously dedicated his book to Lucifer.
In the Postmodern Ages, common sense is the enemy of the intellectual class, and the common man is seen by the intellectual as something between a mass of marching morons to be subjected to be interred into reeducation camps, and a mass of raw material for social engineers to sculpt through eugenics, genocide, torture, and mass mind control into the happy hard-working insects of gender-free Utopia.
If only the bourgeoisie cavemen could relinquish their gonads, guns and biblebooks, they could be evolved into the promised superman of Nietzsche, denizens of the realm beyond Good and Evil.
The common man, even though he has generations of experience to show why he should not to a frightening degree, still trusts the moral authority of experts, and is impressed with the blood-drinking doppelgangers who slew the living traditions of scholarship, donned the mortarboards of the deans and leaders of the commonwealth of letters, and assumed their roles and privileges, while mocking, draining, inverting, and slaying all for which the men of the mind once stood.
The phrase used in France to explain this is trahison des clercs. The treason of the intellectuals. The men we entrusted with our book-learning, the guardians of the deep foundations of the strongholds and towers of civilization, the brain-trust meant to protect and expand the intellectual heritage of the West, have deeply and entirely betrayed their trust.
They are the mediocre secular substitute for the magisterium and priesthood of modernity. Even though the academic world is their nesting ground and mating ground, we are not speaking here about the corruption of the once-noble profession higher learning. Even though the novelists and actors who infect modern entertainment with a poisonous plague of politically correct piety, we are not talking about the corruption of the once-glorious calling of poets and artists.
We are here talking about the intellectuals in their home ground of salons and bistros, garret rooms and opium dens where bookish men gather to discuss the groundwork of the great ideas of the Western Canon, from Aristotle to Aquinas to Dante to Einstein, from Areopagitica to the Federalist Papers to Animal Farm.
In times past, the intellectuals discussed how to discover, clarify, and expound the Great Ideas of the West. In these times, they discuss how to denigrate, desecrate, and expunge.
Intellectuals of the second rank, their journeyman and apprentices, form a chattering class of pundits and essayists, men who explain the complex abstractions in simple terms to the common man. In the modern day, the role of pundits and professors is indoctrination and intimidation.
Rare is the scholar or expert whose name is placed on postmodern work. The battleflag under which he marches is hidden, and the idol to which he bows the knee is buried, or otherwise his effectiveness is lost.
The postmodern intellectual is a spy and a saboteur for the enemy. His mission is to use what little prestige and stature prior generations of scholars earned, and, by assuming a voice of authority, discourage and silence what few honest and rational voices there are who remain among them. Their mission is to plough tradition under the soil and bury it alive.
For this reason, the postmodern intellectual operates in the dark, without glory. Perhaps someone more well versed than I in these matters can say who first popularized the idea that diversity of races, sexes and sexual perversion was a desirable good in and of itself, while popularizing the idea that any political speech you hate is hate speech, and therefore unworthy of legal protection. Or who popularized the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; or the idea that the difference races, professions, factions or even the sexes of mankind can neither understand each other, portray each other in stories or plays, act as elected representatives in politics, or borrow ideas, hairstyles, accents, artforms, or food recipes from each other.
Few, if anyone, can name the name who first invented or spread the idea that diversity is strength; that hate speech is thoughtcrime; that homosexuality is a sexual orientation rather than a sexual perversion; that art is whatever an art critic claims it is; that reason is unreasonable; that victimhood grants the moral authority of martyrdom; that the only truth is that there is no truth.
And yet these are the unspoken assumptions underpinning nearly every newspaper editorial, public lecture, commercial advertisement, film, show, stageplay, song or story broadcast or publicized by the cultural establishment of the Western World.
And yet many a learned man will know, or should, the names associated with the ideas that a man should be judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character; that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech; that neither homosexuals, nor sodomites shall inherit the kingdom of God; that truth is beauty and beauty is truth; that the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason; that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; that Christ is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
For the record, the names are Martin Luther King; James Madison; St. Paul; John Keats; Thomas Paine; Tertullian; and St. John.
All of these evil ideas promoted by the modern and postmodern intellectuals spring from a single source: Antichrist. If there is no God, there is no truth, and reasoning is arbitrary. If so, neither is their beauty in the senses nor virtue in the conscience. All is mere opinion. If there is no law above human law, all talk of justice is gas, and the only law is the law of the jungle, red in tooth and claw.
In such a world, there is no right nor wrong. Words mean only what those in power say they mean, the speaker’s intentions or the truth of heaven be damned. If God is dead, all sin is lawful.
More to the point, anyone auto-mesmerized or self-lobotomized into believing this querulous worldview, or pretending to believe it, now has free license to advocate and seek the retaliation for his sense of injured merit and high distain.
Like Lucifer, such men ever seek revenge against everything normal, decent, happy, and healthy, because the mere existence of happiness offends them, who so hate themselves, and, it must be said, so justifiably hate themselves. Like Gollum, they crave the light and despise it.
Intellectuals afflicted with this deep moral corruption can exercise their cunning, and their gift of eloquence, by erecting elaborate justifications and coining solemn-sounding Latinate neologisms to make decency seem perverse, and perversion seem decent. Heteropatriachy, cisgendered, sexual orientation, and even the once-useful and once-innocent word “gay” are examples of the word-fetishes propounded by the corrupt. As are terms like “wage slavery” and “white privilege” and on and on.
There is no way, on their own terms, to debate or discuss anything with those who daily call down the curse of the confusion of tongues of the tower of Babel on themselves.
For there is a thought that stops thought, a philosophy that murders philosophy, and idea which, if tolerated, is intolerable. That is the thought that reason is too partisan or too misled by passion, or too limited by race or sex or class or faction or life-experience to be a reliable guide to truth. That is the word that says no words have meaning.
Nihilism is the one philosophy philosophers are allowed to reject without further discussion: because the proposition that there is no truth, if true, is false. The proposition that all debate is vain need not be debated, for it cannot be. The conclusion that no reason can be trusted in not a reasonable conclusion.
And if a man actually believed and lived his life by such blithering jabberwocky, then by definition, he could say nothing to support such a postulate, nor would any conclusion follow from it.
But pride justifies all its misshapen children. No idea is too twisted, too stupid, and too self-contradictory that a man proud of himself and proud of his intellect cannot find flattering words to justify it.
If God is dead, thou art God. This is the pride of Satan in one word.
And that is why the nonsense spreads. Only the humble flee from flattery. To everyone else, discovering that no one and nothing looks down on you, no man is your master, nobody’s opinion is better than yours comes as a pleasant surprise and a great relief, and the lie of pride is as welcome as a drunken orgy, where all things are free. Who can be against freedom? Who wants to spoil the happy party? Not those in whom the pride of Lucifer is enthroned.
Even as the fetters of sin close around his neck and wrists like the chains woven in life by Marley the moneylender in Dickens, the fool who says in his heart that there is no God, feels as if his bondage is liberating him.
The misery that follows upon enslavement to sin, the suffering of the addict, he merely blames on the intolerance of society, and so he seeks revenge for the fact that his unwholesome and distorted desires were thwarted. His mission thereafter is not the pursuit of pleasure, but retaliation against anyone who would shed light into the darkness hiding his sin.
Let it be noted that all these ideas are foolishness of the most sickening folly, for they are promoted by fools, who neither know what will come of their ideas being put into practice, or, if they know, do not care. Either they do not mean what they say, or they do not know that what they say is meaningless. God alone knows what is in their hearts: such hearts are too dark for innocent and honest men to imagine what evil lurks there.
Let it also be noted that such men are not stupid, despite that they say stupid things. They are not wicked, despite that they advocate wickedness. They are self-deceived by a type of self-deception so seductive, that only a saint would not be tempted.
For their airs of education and erudition grants them, in their own minds, the anointing oil of sublime enlightenment, and the privilege otherwise reserved to Caesars and Pharaohs to look down their noses at other men. Again, I speak this as confession, not as accusation, for I am one of the intellectuals I condemn.
What they are is fools. What they lack is truth in their hearts. Wits in their brains, they have in plenty.
How is this monstrous treason of our intellectual class to be opposed?
The first step is to recognize that the corrupt philosophers are enemies not to be tolerated. Neither are the craven and stealthy intellectuals and pundits who spread their poison.
Hence the first step is to take a vow not to adopt their terms.
Gay means happy and brave. The fornication of male with male is called sodomy. Homophobia is the pathological fear of being alone. There is no Year One of the Common Era, nor Before Common Era. The pronoun used in English when the sex of the person is unknown or unestablished is “he. ” When the person is or must be female, use “she.” The idea that this somehow diminishes or demeans the fair sex is not merely absurd, it is monstrous: it makes language itself an alleged instrument of oppression, and turns grammarians into witch-hunters.
Do not grant their assumptions. Do not accept, unsaid, unproved, the idea that celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day insults the Irish or appropriates their culture, or that eating a taco, wearing a moccasin, saluting a flag, or playing jazz somehow expropriates, demeans, excludes, or insults any man.
The second is to organize. The enemy took the time and care to craft organizations to solicit government, and Hollywood moguls, and magazines and book publishers to spread their corrupt ideas and smother civilized ideas. We must do the same.
The main part of the organizational operation is to identify and sever their ties of support from any other institutional ally, particularly the fiscal support from allegedly philanthropic institutions, donations from the wealthy, laws and regulations favorable to their causes, free advertisement and free propagation of their ideas by the news, the media, the entertainment industries, Hollywood, and the New York publishers.
They fund think tanks and advocacy groups and lobbyists not merely in the Halls of Power, but
The third is to recognize that they operate by stealth and slow erosion in the salons of the bookish just as in every other institution they infect. We must disinfect. They must be identified, expelled, and ostracized. Politically Correct speech must be met with hostility, and forced into silence. It is no more to be permitted than screaming blasphemy at a Nun.
This is a particularly difficult operation, since the few honest intellectuals alive in the modern day delight in debate, investigation, and discussion of all ideas of all kinds, including the most abhorrent.
But the fourth and most difficult is to substitute in the minds of the common man a diet of common sense to replace steady stream of flattery and filth, self-loathing and cruel propaganda fed to them.
The enemy subverted our culture by a slow and patient rot; we can reverse the process by being no less subtle. But we are not subverting, which is undermining from below. We are uplifting from above. We are superversive.
We must replace the narrative of victimhood with the narrative of that typically American heroic ideal, namely, the self-made man.
We must stand ready to explain the reason for the hope we have within us. Those of us with talent and patience to study, rediscover, explain and clarify the intellectual roots of Christendom must write and speak and teach all the traditions of the Western World which the enemies of God and Man seek ever more vehemently to destroy.
This means, among other things, we must stand ready to explain why we place no hope in princes, expect no manmade paradise. We must explain why the Utopia of Thomas More was a satire, and why Nineteen Eighty-Four of Orwell was a cautionary tale, not a training manual. We must stand ready to point out the obvious to the oblivious.
We must spread the tragic view of life. Caesar cannot save you. Nothing on Earth can save you. Salvation comes from beyond the walls of this world.
The enemy promotes a narrative saying that experts can transfer money from rich to poor to cure poverty. The tragic view of life says that the poor will be with us always. The difference is that the narrative is a pleasing falsehood and the tragic view is a harsh truth.
We must bring forth a new generation of intellectual. They need not be Christian, but they must be orthodox in their attitudes, messages, and views.
Such new voices must spread the oldest views of all: the eternal ones. We must spread the bad news that progress, glorious progress, cannot cure entropy, cannot solve sin, and, indeed, cannot even eliminate the injustices and unhappiness of living in a world where life is hard and resources are scarce.
But neither can be simply abandon the poor unaided to their own devices, as a strict libertarian might suggest.
If we do not have a plan for the hardship, empathy, and sadness of the poorest and most ignorant of the inner-city mobs, then our words are in vain. To them we must give hope, but heavenly hope, not earthly.
We have to show them why freedom, including private charity, is better and more reliable than crippling big government welfare-state nanny-state vote-plantation life.
And they only way to show them is to live the Christian life, openhanded toward the poor, rejecting even the notion that the government should shoulder this chore for you.
The dignity of work had always been a central feature of the American character, alien to the attitudes of inherited privilege of the high classes in Europe. It is alien to the European notions of Socialism and Collectivism that crept like saboteurs into the salons of American intellectuals between the days of the Gold Rush and the days of the Great War, and blossomed after World War Two.
In all things, the new intellectual must follow the eternal truths. Truth is an ally the enemy always fears and yet always underestimates.
Use your words to speak truth to any who will hear, without fear or favoritism, but, above all, with humility. Socrates was a pagan, but only a divine muse could have inspired him to follow the maxim: Know thyself. And when he did, he knew how little he knew.
To clear out the corruption of pride from the hives of the intellectuals, the one species of man with no resistance to the sin of pride, is impossible in the current generation. But we have to lead us a master to whom all things are possible.
It may take decades or centuries. But no one will even be interested in restoring health and sobriety to hearth and home until Christ is the core and center of our personal lives, our neighborhoods and states, and our national debates.
We need a revival and a great awakening. The philosophical materialism and laicism which has dominated the West since the Great War has led to our current posture, which is Nihilism, a love of nothing where life means nothing. Nihilists are tribal barbarians because nihilism cannot maintain civilization. The worldview is exhausted, and it has lost whatever glamor or appeal once it held.
The enemy is wholly intellectually bankrupt. It is time to foreclose.
The iron fetters of sin, which the fools with both hands fixed onto themselves in the false hope that these were the golden wings of freedom, now tighten each link and shackle, and grow too heavy to bear.
The fetters of sexual liberation form merely the most prominent example. Women were told that masculinity was their only path to equality, and a generation or two of that nonsense has increased their unhappiness as measured by divorce rates, suicide rates, addiction rates, and such odd behaviors as self-mutilation. Suicide, addiction, and self-harm likewise issued from the slithering promise made to men that abolishing marriage and normalizing sexual abnormality would usher in a sin-free utopia of the groin, and endless orgy in a worldwide cathouse. It was all a lie, and all in the West now see it, who have eyes to see.
What sexual liberation promised was freedom from the reality of the complementary, erotic, and glorious differences between the sexes, and from the sacramental nature of romance, love, procreation, marriage.
Likewise for the fetters of freedom from the reality of the supernatural promised by secularism; freedom from the reality of economics, the law of supply and demand, as promised by socialism; freedom from the reality of natural rights as promised by collectivism; freedom from the reality of human nature as promised by humanism; freedom from structure and discipline as promised by modern art; freedom from consequences of evil acts and evil thoughts, freedom, indeed, from virtue and truth as promised by moral relativism and subjectivism; freedom from reality itself as promised by nihilism. It was all a lie. It was all a lie from the beginning.
We must stop heeding lies, stop aiding their spread, and stand ready to rebuke them in word and deed, and take back the stolen glory these haters of all things intellectual have taken from the intellectuals of generations gone by, back when scholarship was a discipline, and bookish men read books worth reading.
This plan is simple yet nigh impossible.
The rioters are not rioting for the utopia of the socialists nor the unisex paradise promised by feminists. They merely hate civilization and all for which it stands. Their families and virtues and dreams, if ever they had any, have been shattered, and they want revenge.
The world and the flesh offer them nothing. The devil offers them only hatred, flame, riot, and death.
It is time to offer them a better way.
Our reason is reasonable. It is time to convince those who would rather die than listen to us to hear us.
Shall we reform the salons of the intellectual, and topple the high ivory towers of pride? We must begin with ourselves, in prayer and fasting.
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.
