Conservative and Christian as Crybully
A reader with the majestic yet Gaelic name of KingMcDee writes:
I read an article from last year, in the Atlantic, where some liberal or other […] accused a section of the “religious right” (those who look to Orban and Putin as possible examples of how to use the public power for the sake of a conservative society) of essentially throwing a tantrum because they were losing the culture war.
I admit this criticism affected me, because I have been at least somewhat sympathetic to such ideas myself. He essentially called them babies who gave up on liberal democracy once it stopped doing what they wanted, accused them of wanting to use the state to oppose the will of the people instead of arguing their position, etc.
… I feel the sting of being called an authoritarian who asks for tolerance when he is weak and imposes his will when he is strong. I don’t know what to say, to be honest.
However, to take one of the examples used by the man himself, while he might mock the idea of Alabama banning an episode of Arthur that shows a gay “marriage”, I doubt he would object to the state banning an episode that showed characters in, say, blackface.
I have not read the article. I have a few questions, and many comments:
1. Does the article make a difference between legitimate and illegitimate use of the power of the magistrate to enforce the law?
For example, a law forbidding Caucasians from killing Negroes is the use of force rather than the use of sweet reason to compel behavior. On the other hand, a law requiring Caucasians to kill Negroes is also the use of force rather than persuasion.
Is it true that using the law to compel rather than forbid murder are equally uses of the law? Likewise, is it true that using the law to compel rather than forbid perverted sexual acts are equally uses of the law?
There are obvious differences in form and content here. Did the article address this?
2. Does the article say how “throwing a tantrum” differs from “opposing with manly firmness”?
In my personal experience, the first time I was accused in an online discussion of “having a meltdown” was when I had made a dispassionate argument with far less high-flown rhetoric than was my wont, merely a recital of facts and a logical conclusion.
Suppose a man “throws a tantrum” when he finds he is losing an argument with those who say twice two is five, or sodomites can marry. He insists twice two is four and marriage is marriage. It is typical of the Left to respond by questioning his motives and by accusing him of arguing in bad faith. In a hot temper, with much rhetorical ado, he repeats his argument. Can his argument be legitimately dismissed as illogical on the grounds of the tone and demeanor of the person giving it?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote passionate rhetorical sermons, articles and speeches against Hitler and the National Socialists of Germany when the Left of that generation successfully overthrew a thousand years of Christian civilization. Was Bonhoeffer “throwing a temper tantrum”?
Next question:
The wording used here uses the phrase “religious right” to refer to those who “look to Orban and Putin as possible examples of how to use the public power for the sake of a conservative society.”
This raises more questions than I can ask. I will confine myself to a few.
3. What does “conservative” mean?
I suggest a “conservative” in the abstract means one who holds that the laws and customs of a nation or people should not be altered for light or transient reasons, nor in response to a sudden inflammation of popular opinion, but only slowly, organically, perhaps improving upon but never radically overturning the continuity of the traditions of one’s ancestors, carefully never to mar the legacy due one’s remote descendants.
Please note that this is a purely formal definition of the term, referring to no actual person with actual political opinions. A traditionalist in China is a Confucian, and in Tibet, a Buddhist, and in England, an Anglican, unless he is even more conservative, and hence is a Christian. In the young federation called America, our shared political tradition reaches no further back than the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
On the other hand, “conservative” in the particular do not with to conserve the traditions of peoples alien to us, nor follow ideological theories to their radical and logical extremes. The first is multiculturalism and the second is libertarianism.
American conservatives want to preserve, protect, and pass along the heritage of the Christian religion, Western civilization, European music and literature, arts and sciences, Anglo-American Common Law, Free Market economics and the English language.
This includes civilized standards of courtesy, Christian standards of chivalry and chastity, and universal human standards of rationality, decency, and sanity. This is often called by the unfortunately elliptical phrase “family values.”
Hence there is no logical flaw nor self-contradiction for a conservative fervidly to favor the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment and equality under the law — such liberties have medieval and classical roots — but also to oppose legalizing pornography.
Likewise, a staunch defender of freedom of speech can legitimately favor laws punishing, libel, slander, incitement of a mob, insider trading, false advertising, copyright violation, trademark infringement, flag desecration, or other abuses of the power of speech which renders speech less trustworthy and useful to the human race, deters the production of useful arts or literature, or aids in crime.
An rigorously pure libertarian might, indeed, vex himself by being unwilling or unable to distinguish between Google censorship of political speech and government censorship of kiddie porn. Please note that it is that very unwillingness on the part of the libertarian to draw such crucial and common-sense distinctions between two things abstract theory calls alike, but practical experience says are nothing alike, which parts libertarian from conservative.
The boast of conservatives is that they are not ideological. When abstract theory jars against hard-won experiential wisdom, the conservative sentiment is to follow the long established and customary use — even in cases where no abstract theory can be clearly enunciated to justify it.
The conservative tears down no fence before he knows for what reason it was put up, because a reason that has been forgotten might still indeed apply. Likewise, if he takes on faith that all Sons of Adam toil under the curse of original sin, and learns from experience that power corrupts, but has no abstract intellectual formulation to explain this truth to an pinheaded waggy-tongued professor in a classroom, the Conservative is in keeping with the non-ideological boast of conservatism.
5. What does “religious right” mean?
In the wake of the shipwreck of Christianity during the Reformation, and the Civil War of Christendom, a body of intellectuals with the rather pompous name “Enlightenment” sought a truce between the warring factions, a cease-fire, by the attempt, culminating in the American experiment, of privatizing religious convictions, so that a man taken as a single individual might be Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic, but a kingdom or a republic, in her official capacity, could not.
This is called by the infelicitous expression of “separation of church and state” more accurately called “Disestablishmentarianism.”
Disestablishmentarian thinking requires that public policy be based, not on religious convictions, but on worldly considerations.
By such thinking, polygamy or contraception, for example, cannot be outlawed on the grounds that it offends God, but solely on the grounds that it harm the body politic, or offends the worldly principles on which the nation is constituted, or offends the established usage and customs of time immemorial. The moment contraception is found by a court of law not to harm the body politic, nor offend the founding principles (or the alleged emanations and penumbras issuing therefrom), by this way of thinking, an activist judge can veto the will and deliberative judgement of the people and their representatives on the grounds that one man’s wisdom gained during three years of law school and ten or fifteen years on the bench equips him to judge of the greater good of society better than the unwashed masses comprising that society, and so no deliberation is needed nor allowed.
Now many a man is dissatisfied with merely worldly thinking and worldly principles, rules of thumb and practical compromise. The human heart craves God, and if he has no faith in Heaven, he will place his faith in something else appearing to be equally pure, absolute, and ideal. Such a mental artifact is called an Ideology. It is a substitute religion. It is like an ideal, except that an Ideology is inherently expansionist: if one’s ideology does not control every aspect and nook of life and thought in one’s generation, it will by the next.
For this reason, private opinions on climate science, or the morality of sodomy, or the biological basis of the differences between the two sexes, or artistic appreciation for GONE WITH THE WIND are now all political questions — because modern politics is ideological, and so modern partisans form what in reality are denominations of ersatz churches even if they are called political parties.
So there are three steps of degeneration from the high civilization of Christendom: Christians go from being idealists, to being worldly men living under a “cease-fire” of secular controversy, that is, pragmatists, to being ideologues seeking in politics the idealism church-life once provided.
The ideologues generate various secular forms of Christian heresy, most Gnostic, calling for communal sharing of property like the early Apostles, or or calling for stern military devotion to discipline like a Teutonic Knight or a Roman lictor carrying a fasces, or proclaiming that the world is corrupt, and civilization must be destroyed before a return to the purity of the Garden of Eden is discovered, which is, ultimately, a Gnostic belief: hence the modern age starts with Hegalianism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Socialism, Nazism, Fascism, and ends with Political Correctness, Progressivism, Abortionism, and Non-heteronormativity.
It seems reasonable enough at first, that if the Christians can no longer tolerate to be in one church, to quell the dispute between the churches by severing church from state, and ruling religion to be a question of private opinion. But such a society cannot, as a society, base its unity on anything but a worldly principle.
The state either becomes a mere social contract, an agreement with no force beyond the will of the signatories, or becomes an ersatz goddess, anointed by cosmic history to evolve man out of sin and back into Eden, where he becomes superhuman.
Thus, communism, nazism, fascism, evolved out of the Enlightenment compromises which they seek to abolish, and in turn give rise to materialism, vulgarity, hatred, infanticide, pride, adultery, and every form of sexual perversion hell can imagine.
The Enlightenment figures bow to their inner light of Reason as if to a goddess, but all too soon she flees, and they find themselves bowing to Mammon, Momus, Dis, Moloch, Lucifer, Lilith, and Ganymede. The grandchildren of the enlightenment figures that liberated Paris in the name of the goddess reason, seeking to overthrow the chains of monarchy and superstition, are burning and looting cities in the name of anarchist tyranny.
One can hardly call it Progressive any more. Once the movement is upending statues of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, it is not an anti-racist party; once it quells free speech, it is no longer Liberal; once it allows transvestites to rob female athletes of their hope of prizes and awards, it is no longer feminist; it combines tribalism and globalism, and therefore is neither; it combines anarchy and tyranny, and therefore is neither; since it silently stands aside as Mohammedans execute homosexuals, and also screams that silence is violence, and silence is consent, by its own logic it consents to the butchery of sodomites, and so it cannot be called LGBT&c; and since it is funded by the richest billionaires in the world, no one can really call it Proletarian or Marxist, except in a metaphorical sense.
They are not even consistently vulgarians; for every time they put out an add showcasing six year old girls uttering the f-bomb, they savage a conservative for failing to use the most delicate and Victorian of euphemisms in referring to matters of race or of sexual deviance.
As of now, this movement is not anything but an anti-church devoted to principles of the Antichrist.
In America, there are three basic forms of opposition to the anarchist tyranny currently going under the banner of Leftism, Liberalism, Progressivism, Radicalism. While there is considerable variation in the breed, there are large numbers who group themselves around certain identifiable banners.
First is Christian Conservative, which holds certain ideals, such as that all Sons of Adam are Sons of God, hence their lives are all equally sacred in His eyes. These are idealists in the sense that they hold certain absolutes as being beyond negotiation: for them, sodomy is a sin, gay marriage is a contradiction in terms, and all human life, born and unborn, is sacred.
The Christian Conservative believes what he believes because God said so. He may or may not allow you to burn a flag, but objects if you a trample a cross.
Second is Old-School Conservative, which holds that the laws and customs of the nation should protect the individual rights of man, especially property rights, and that industries should be deregulated and taxes minimized, as the free market’s natural operation will bring happiness and wealth to all parties involved, insofar as possible. There are pragmatic men, open to compromise, and willing to engage in the give and take and horsetrading of politics. Their boast is that they have no ideology. They are, by and large, either not religious, or hold it to be unseemly to introduce religion into political discussions. The Capitalist wants to sell his goods to Catholic and Heretic, Schismatic, Pagan, and Atheist alike.
His religion is the ‘civic deism’ of Judeochristianity, as written on our money, or celebrated by Army chaplains, Boy Scouts, or public servants on Thanksgiving Day. It is a cultural artifact rather than religious per se. Their true religious fervor comes to the fore when discussing the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
The Old-School Conservative believes what he believes because long usage and custom have sanctified it. But because customs change over time, he is willing to change. He has no principles in the area of politics, aside from the very basic Constitutional principle that all men are created equal — which he either forgets is a religious principle, or which he treats as if it were a pragmatic rule of thumb. Everything else that a Christian Conservative would decide by an ideal, such as barring service women from combat duty, the Old-School decides by a rule of thumb which changes and erodes almost continually over time.
He believes what he believes because he has an unromantic view of men, and especially of man’s willingness and ability to resist the temptation to abuse unchecked power. He mistrusts radicalism not as an abstract principle, but as a practical consideration upon seeing the hypocrisy, inhumanity, chaos, and death issuing from totalitarian nations. He does not raise objections to trampling the cross, but is offended by burning the flag.
Third is the Libertarian. These are ideologues and intellectuals who take certain rules of thumb of the Old-School and treat them as intellectual principles, from which they deduce an theoretical scheme or map of the world, and use this scheme as the basis for moral decisions, real world evidence be damned. They are basically anti-Marxists no less detached from practical experience than Marx: radicals for Capitalism. Their proposed scheme, like that of Marx, has never failed because it has never been tried. The perfect man needed to serve in their scheme — let us for the sake of argument name him John Galt — is, by his own admission, a prelapsarian, that is, a man who rejects the notion of original sin. He is cosmopolitan and globalist, seeing nations as little more than hotels with an associated crime prevention service like so many night watchmen. He would allow both for trampling the cross or burning the flag, provided you did it on your own property. Public ownership of the streets, however, offends him.
The Libertarian believes what be believes because it follows logically from his axiom that morality consists of action in according with reason in service to survival, ergo all aggression is immoral except when in due and proportionate retaliation against aggression, here defined as force or fraud, assault, battery, theft, murder, trespass, vandalism. All victimless crimes are allowed, up to and including mortal duels or suicide, provided all parties can and do give legally adequate consent.
As one wag put it, the liberal is a conservative before he is mugged, and the libertarian is a conservative before he has children. After having a child mugged by a transvestite gigolo needing money for heroin, stop and frisk style “broken window” policing seems reasonable, as do vice laws.
Which is a long way to say that the only “religious right” in this nation are conservatives who see the link between religious ideals (all men are sons of God) and the worldly principles on which the US Constitution is based (all men are created equal, and therefore have equal natural rights), and who are not so enamored of capitalism or of worldly wealth as to overlook the dangers inherent in the free market.
A libertarian is one who seeks the market in plumbers as governed by the same moral rules as the market in pornography or prostitution. A Christian conservative put the free market in its proper place, subject to moral considerations it may not overstep, including a due concern for public decency, and a due concern for the poor.
An Antichristian is one who has an ideology in his heart in the place love of God should be, and who uses one part, aspect, or branch of the Christian worldview, such as love for the poor, to batter, bruise, override, and undermine another part, such as the sanctity of life. Antichristians with equal dexterity destroy liberty in the name of equality and destroy equality in the name of liberty, and destroy both in the name of compassion. See, for example, hate speech laws on campus which allow one to promulgate communism, but not to read Biblical passages condemning homosex.
6. What is a Crybully?
A term was invented to describe the recent innovation of having a man who is at once a crybaby and a bully. In prior days, a bully was a big, tough, macho thug who picked on the weak and defenseless, a sadist to whom strength was the only justice, and the only justice was strength. A crybaby was one who was weak and helpless, and would not hurt a fly.
The modern generation produced a creature whose main motivation is to live in a hysterical panic of fear, as if any disagreement on any political or philosophical issue will put him in immediate threat of personal danger to life and limb.
The theory is that invisible armies of damned ghosts, vampire lords and various evil-doers from ages past, Klansman and Nazis, are standing by at all times, armed to the teeth, so that if, let us say, a conservative guest speaker on a college campus says men are men and women are women, this army will overhear, take heart, and emerge from the dark places of the world to butcher and kill without remorse any man seen wearing a dress or practicing ballet.
Likewise, if you say “All lives matter” the army of the damned will torture and kill blacks and mulattoes.
The theory is that the only way to stave off the invisible army is to gag anyone who might be unwisely tempted to say the words — for only those wishing to summon the army and to maim and butcher the innocent transvestites and African Americans will say the accursed words of the summoning spell.
Quoting the Constitution in the shadow of Mount Rushmore apparently has a similar effect. There is no protection from the Army of the Damned except to control all speech so exactly as to never say the magic words that summon them from the thin air. Fortunately, a cadre of self anointed censors will tell us what not to say, lest we accidentally erase whole sectors of the population from existence.
Disobedience to the self-anointed censors is tantamount to assault, battery, and attempting murder, therefore any act of intimidation, threat, or even violence, no matter how disproportionate, is always fair and necessary.
But the same panicking crybabies who weep and scream like Tom O’Bedlam at the thought of guest speaker explaining conservative philosophy, and roll in pools of their own vomit weeping in terror, as soon as any friendly authority gives them permission to riot, and immunity from reprisal, will burn, break, loot, rape, and murder like frantic demons; and their every word is a lie and an insult and a challenge to fight. They will shout down, boycott, smother, and silence any speaker, burn books, outlaw words and expressions, and forbid the use of images and trademarks not in keeping with political correctness. Not the slightly hint of mercy, due protocol, or allowing the accused to answer is ever allowed. All apologies are treated as confessions inviting further accusation.
They browbeat and heckle and savage and worry and accuse, and accuse and accuse without pity or let, and if some teen girl commits suicide under their remonstrations, they rejoice. The mob seeks to break people. The mob seeks blood.
Only in the modern day can this Jekyll and Hyde combination of perfect, gormless, blubbering cowardice be one and the same as the roaring, blood-drinking viking of barking mad hostility, bold as a berserker of old.
The postmodern Left cries for blood and screams in pretended terror at the same time. The reasons for this are various and perhaps spiritual, but one main reason is that the plutocrats running the news and the internet social media companies have found it convenient to encourage hatred for plutocracy.
The Leftwing establishment controls all social institutions from the Ivory Towers of Academia, to Wall Street, to Hollywood, to Silicon Valley, to Foggy Bottom, to K Street, from the Federal Reserve to the Supreme Court. And yet the single message they promote is that the social institutions which they themselves control are racist and wicked, and the police forces in cities under generations-long Democrat party rule are systematically and institutionally racist.
This, in a nation with so little real racism, that hate crimes need to be manufactured.
7. Is it Hypocrisy to have Standards?
With all this in mind, let us return to the question.The article will point at the symmetry, when the leftist bans an episode showing blackface, as when a conservative bans an episode promoting sodomy, and call the conservative a hypocrite for calling for tolerance when he is weak, but being intolerance when strong.
Except this is a lie.
The Christian conservative condemns homosex because he holds the ideal of marriage to be sacrosanct, and insists that chastity is a virtue. He does not ask for homosex to be tolerated when he is weak and demand it be not tolerated when he is strong. He is consistently against homosex. The Leftist condemns blackface only when convenient, and ignores the issue when inconvenient — see the treatment of Ralph Northam, for example as opposed to Megyn Kelly.
The Christian does not approve of hatred and contempt displayed to the Negro, who is his brother in Christ — except that dressing in blackface is not a sign of hatred and contempt.
The article is trying to pretend that the degree of toleration for ideal and ideological matters changes hypocritically, for conservatives and satanists alike.
Except it is not true.
The Christian conservative is against consistently against pride, lust, hatred, sin, and all forms of degeneration, degradation, and perversion. He also defends the freedom of speech of all civilized men, leaving aside those things which tradition never treated as honest speech, namely, libel, pornography, vulgarity, fraud.
The Antichristian favors freedom of speech only when he can spread vulgarity, hatred, dissent, in effect, demanding his calls for despotism be protected by the First Amendment, and his filthy stories mocking Christians and applauding selfishness be sacrosanct, but is eager to quell free speech once he has the power to do so.
The simple fact is that Christian conservatives have not and do not change their stance even as thousands of years pass, whether weak or strong. No Russian orthodox priest or Roman Catholic bishop being hunted like dogs during the Russian or French Revolution held sodomy to be licit, and condemned it only when King of Czar protected and elevated the Church.
In law, we have a saying: when the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When the law is on your said, argue the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.
This means that only once you have lost the case on the merits of the case, does one raise procedural objections, and say that the case might be rightly decided, but it violated a formal nicety.
Here, the article looks at the formal niceties surrounding public debate, that is, at the form, seeing whether the argument is in the minority or majority position, regardless of the subject matter, that is, regardless of the merits of the case.
The article then accuses conservatives of pressing their case when in the majority which they would not press were they in the minority on an unrelated case, but the merits of neither are even mentioned.
The article, in effect, is proposing an informal logical fallacy one might call argumentum ad vir: whoever is stronger is wrong. And then the article called conservatives hypocrites for violating the law: “you did not welcome homosex on television when your side had the upper hand in the culture war, therefore you cannot object when our side prohibits everything rational, patriotic, and sane anywhere on the Internet, now that we are strong.”
It is a lie. We did not forbid homosex because we are strong. We forbade it because divine revelation and human reason alike show homosex is disordered, and promoting or practicing it is a grave moral error.
It is a lie. A barbarian who escapes being thrown to the lions might, if he gain the victory over an evil tyrant, throw him to the lions in turn. For him, strength is virtue, and might makes right. No Christian believes this or anything like this.
We cannot be called hypocrites for failing to adhere to a standard we repudiate. The accusation is insane.
It is not the strength or weakness of the proposition that informs our conclusion. It is the merit or demerit of the case.
If sodomy is wrong, by conservative logic, it is wrong whether or not sodomites are in the minority or the majority, politically strong or politically weak. Facts do not care about your feelings, and this includes biological facts related to human sexuality, and moral facts related to rational behavior.
If wearing blackface violates the sumptuary laws, it is a law applied only to whites, and only because whites are the majority, the strong, the oppressor class. Blacks, one assumes, can wear whiteface, or mimic crusty old Jews for laughs — see Eddie Murphy in COMING TO AMERICA. By antichrist logic, there is no principle and no ideal involved, all that is being expressed is hatred of Whitey, because Leftist hate whitey. One assumes that if the white man were a homosexual, or a Mohammedan, or a member of some higher winning score in Victimology Bingo, or is convenient to the party, his dressing in blackface is no crime.
The conclusion to be drawn is that, when properly defined, the ideals of an idealist are not the same as the ideology of an ideologue, and not served in the same way, and do not serve the same purpose. The crybully seeks to say whatever he might to damage the enemy, for he regards the virtue of his cause to outweigh any considerations of fairmindedness or justice. Such reckless hate is ruthless, and will say anything.
Here, when the merit of the case in question (namely, the example was banning blackface rather than banning homosex) is not considered (namely, one case is a real moral principle, and the other treats an innocent clown-makeup as a deadly and racist insult), the article can only point to a procedural violation, namely, that one is not allowed to promote a viewpoint when in a position of strength against the minority, when and if one were not willing to let the honorable opposition promote a an opposite viewpoint when in a position of weakness.
As I say, this is a procedural objection: it is like saying one should not cast a vote when one will not abide by the outcome of a vote. But it is offered with no clarity of what make the procedure fair.
For example, if I say you may argue in favor of lower taxes provided the audience gives equal time to someone arguing in favor of higher taxes, there is nothing unfair in allowing both speaker to have their say.
Here, the conservative wishes to use the state to promote those virtues without which free men cannot maintain their liberty, such as chastity, decency and sanity. On the other hand, the antichristians wish to use the state to control every thought, word, and deed, and to force men to utter known and humiliating untruths in order to destroy the social order. The two are not the same.
Calling on a comedian not to make jokes about Blacks, on the grounds that Blacks are girlish, weak, and overly sensitive, and will be killed by an invisible army of the damned is an appeal to one’s sense of courtesy and charity, but is absurd and no one takes it seriously. Calling on a pervert to stay away from my children is much more fundamental case, and speaks to the nature of reality, to fundamental morals known to all races in all generations, and no one who is not a sociopath can dismiss the topic as not serious.
Likewise, arguing that the flag should not be burned is protected free speech, and no one can justly be called racist for so saying. But the man who burned the flag in the name of free speech is asking the very thing he burns to protect him. It is an act of white blackmail, in addition to being a perfect example of illogic.
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.
