Today’s Reactionary is an Apostate

I recently wrote that “rejection of equality is at the heart of all reactionary thought,” and commenters have since agreed and disagreed.  I stand by the proposition and will here add some remarks on rejection.  To reject is properly to refuse something that is offered, as when a diner rejects a bowl of soup in which he sees floating the body of a drowned fly. Thus a reactionary of the eighteenth century properly rejected the doctrine of equality when, having read one of Rousseau’s works, he threw the nasty book across the room with a cry of execration.

“Rubbish!” he may have cried, or possibly “Rot!”

American Postcards (Hunting for Trousers)

I yesterday visited a Houston shopping mall to purchase a pair of trousers.  It is a large mall in a prosperous district, but it feels empty and past its prime.

Adjacent to the food-court is a large and splendid carrousel or merry-go-round.  When this carnivalesque contraption revolves, recorded calliope music plays.  It is revolving as I pass, and on it revolves one mother and her child.  South Asian by appearance.  The operator and ticket-taker is an old white man.  He slumps, as old men generally slump, in a frugal straight-backed chair.  He wears a paper respiration mask, the fit unsuited to filtration.  I reflect that retirement is for many old white men penurious, boring, lonely, and slightly mad.

Chutzpa on Stilts

“The existence of a nation that is uniquely chosen in the flesh helps Christians avoid the trap of national election, with its tragic consequences in modern history.” 

David P. Goldman, “Christian Nationalism and Israel,” The American Mind (May 2, 2024)

I am not sure I understand what Goldman means by “chosen in the flesh,” but he seems to mean chosen all together, collectively, or as a nation.  I am in no doubt, however, as to the nation that Goldman believes has been chosen in the flesh, since after long and impartial reflection, he has clearly decided, and without reservation, that the chosen nation is his own nation, the Jews.

Lewis Carroll’s Apology for Irreverence, and Mine

“We put our man into a pulpit, and we virtually tell him ‘Now you may stand there and talk to us for half-an-hour.  We won’t interrupt you by as much as a word! And you shall have it all your own way!’  And what does he give us in return?  Shallow twaddle, that, if it were addressed to you over a dinner-table, you would think ‘Does the man take me for a fool?’”

Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889)* 

My readers from time to time chide me for what they perceive as unseemly irreverence, although I must suppose they are my readers because they enjoy my irreverence towards holy cows other than their own.  I do not say this to chide these readers.  It is human nature to be amused until one’s own ox is gored.  I say it to preface some words on the uses and abuses of irreverence.

My epigraph is taken from the first volume of Lewis Carroll’s last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, which unlike his novels about Alice is today very largely forgotten.  The sentiment is expressed by Arthur, the protagonist in one of the novel’s plots, and it is one in a series of strictures on the state of the Anglican Church in Victorian England.

Readers must understand that Carroll was himself a very serious Christian, a fact that is almost always obscured or omitted in secular celebrations of the madcap surrealism of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).  He was born into a family of High-Church Anglicans, and appears to have died very much in the faith.

A Modest Proposal

“The Church once allowed priests to marry, and it can do again . . . . Together with this, there needs to be a new monastic order to soak up the degenerates.  Which was a function of the Church in times past, as much as we don’t want to think about it.” 

Aidan Maclear, “A Few Minor Reforms,” SettingtheRecordStraight.com (Sep. 26, 2018)

While reading the archive of an old neoreaction blog, I was arrested by the very sensible suggestion above.  The first part may be controversial, but it is familiar and I am for it.  There may once have been good reasons for a celibate priesthood, but the discipline is not necessary and now does far more harm than good.  It greatly reduces the number of vocations, and with it the general quality of priests and higher churchmen.  There are exceptions, but the general intellectual quality of Catholic clergy is fairly, sometimes egregiously, low.

You know something is seriously wrong when your deacon is more knowledgeable and articulate than your priest!

Step Right Up! Come One and All!

“‘It sends this really strong message to everyone in America that they can come to this program, they can bring their authentic self, they can be who they are and they will be welcome here.”  (Jamie Stengle, “Boy Scouts of America Changing Name to More Inclusive Scouting America After Years of Woe,” Associated Press (May 7, 2024))

“‘Perhaps you’ll tell me then,’ Tommy went on, ‘why you wormed your way into this camp under false pretenses.  You’re not a Boy Scout at all!’”  (G. Harvey Ralphson, Boy Scouts on Old Superior (1913)”

The Three Powers

Blooms come, they say, from April showers,
All else comes of the three powers,
Which I can name in a short list:
The purse, the pen, the pounding fist.

The Secret Badges that we Wear

“She bound the scarlet line in the window.”

  Joshua 2:21

A shibboleth is a special kind of password, which is to say a key or badge that opens a social door and grants admission to a social group.  As everyone versed in scripture knowledge knows, shibboleth was at first a word that the lisping Ephramites could not pronounce, and that the Sons of Giliad therefore used to identify the survivors of a shattered Ephramite army.  When a bloodied and bedraggled warrior staggered down to the ford of the Jordan, he was challenged to pronounce the word “shibboleth,” and thereby show his secret badge. Those who pronounced it “sibboleth” were immediately slain.

Those 260 Chapters Make all the Difference

 “We need to be stronger.  We need to fight back. It’s in the Bible.  If someone hits you, you hit them back, twice as hard, 10 times as hard.” 

Jason Burke, “Israelis Voice Sadness and Defiance over Gaza Protests on U.S. Campuses,” The Guardian.com (May 3, 2024).

This titbit of scripture knowledge is from Joseph Avi Cohen, a retired bank manager in Israel, who was recently asked for his man-on-the-street opinion of the American student protests.  I don’t suppose The Guardian is regular reading among Christian Zionists, but if it were they might be puzzled by Mr. Cohen’s words.  I suspect most Christian Zionists believe the book they call the Bible instructs God’s children to forebear, forgive, and, when all else fails, to hit back with tears and not even half as hard.

Every Man Must Answer Pilate’s Question: Which Jesus do You Choose?

“Whom will ye, then, that I release to you?
Jesus Barabbas, called the Son of Shame,
Or Jesus, Son of Joseph, called the Christ?”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,  The Divine Tragedy (1871)*

Longfellow here draws on Origen’s remark, in his Commentary on Matthew, that “in many manuscripts it is not contained that Barabbas was also called Jesus, and perhaps rightly so that the name Jesus would not belong to any sinner.”  From this it is supposed that the circumcision name of the brigand known as Jesus Bar Abbas was suppressed in later copies of Matthew’s gospel, because pious Christians thought it sacrilegious for the Son of God to share his circumcision name with an infamous criminal.