Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

On the Slippery Slope of Classical Liberalism

This post about slippery slope arguments subsequends three priors: JM Smith’s post, Bill Vallicella’s critique thereof, and JM Smith’s response thereto. Readers might want to run through them, before essaying what here follows.

The slippery slope argument is to be sure, and strictly speaking, a logical fallacy, as Vallicella notices. But then, it is not intended first as a logical argument; so that it is mistaken to take it first as such. It is rather intended as an empirical and pragmatic argument – or even, rather, a simple observation, from which we might begin to adduce logical arguments.

Kill Them All, & Let God Sort Them Out

This is how social deliquescence appears concretely. One faction or another – or, all factions – throw up their hands, give up negotiations, and resort to civil war. As soon as the percentage of those in the nation ready to take such a step surpasses about 3%, war is on, no matter what, sooner or later, and despite the wishes of all the other nationals. On such occasions, a Fort Sumter event is inbound. It shall soon or late happen. Then, all bets are off.

This is where we now find ourselves. Far more than 3% of Americans – perhaps it is as much as 5%, or even 7% – have decided that all Americans who are remotely such as we of the Orthosphere ought to be, and so are to be, deleted. So, the war is on.

The shooting has not yet begun, but the imprisonments have. The American gulag has already begun.

What is more, the plan is already out in the open. The elite have by the offices of the FBI declared war upon Traditional Catholics, such as I. Good heavens, and forsooth: I sang the Hassler Missa Secunda at Mass this last Sunday, in Latin; probably that makes me an enemy of the state.

Pray the Jesus Prayer, & Be Done With All the Rest

Hunting as I do daily over the links provided by our valuable and indefatigable allies at Synlogos, I am struck again, as I have of late been more and more often, with the bootlessness of it all.

Our struggle looks doomed. As usual.

What mundane prince might save us? None, at the last. For, we are all doomed to die. We are doomed to lose all that to which we have devoted our lives, including our progeny and their heirs, all of whom shall like us, and like the grass, wither away. That shall all happen, no matter the outcome of the midterm elections, or the war in Ukraine, or … of anything else whatever.

Mundane princes then are in the final analysis neither here nor there. While it behooves us as a matter of plain duty to attend to their motions, still in the end they amount to nothing. All that matters to us in our private persons is our ultimate reconciliation – each of us – with ultimate reality.

Pray then with me the Jesus Prayer, as often as you can remember to do so:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.

Nothing could be more lethal to our worldly adversary, and to his designs.

God Save the Queen! Long Live the Queen!

May the Queen live forever! Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, Amen! Alleluia, Amen.

O Lord, succor now thy servant Elizabeth. May thine angels carry her unto thine everlasting rest. May she live forever with thee, in peace and tranquility – aye, and in grand adventure, that thrills her heart even as it comforts her, and quiets, and lo, ever more dignifies.

Thanks be to God for Elizabeth II. Grant now O Lord fit successors to her throne. Long and ever may it increase in power, might, justice, and majesty.

May God save Great Britain. May God save the West.

Amen, Amen; Alleluia, Amen.

And, now, of course: God Save the King! Long Live the King! May the King Live Forever! Amen, Amen.

 

Bend the Knee to an Unjust King

A guest post from our dedicated commenter Scoot and his colleague and interlocutor Hambone:

The virtue everyone loves to hate is obedience. Obedience is easy when it is easy, but there’s a common misconception that having a bad authority exempts us from the duty of obedience. As the late great Zippy Catholic used to say, it is a fallacy of modernity to confuse the question of which authority is just with the question of whether authority in general is just. There’s a fundamental truth hiding behind this misconception that we as fallen humans are often afraid of: That all authority comes from God. Not just good authority – all authority.

If democracy has every man as a king, then the collapse of spiritual authority that snowballed out of the Reformation has every man a Pope. This endlessly fractures the Body of Christ and allows wounds and heresies to fester and spread. “Bad” Popes, Bishops and Priests have been accounted for since the beginning, like their predecessors in the Temple of Jerusalem who did not live up to their offices. How many more such rotten priests might we expect, when every man is a priest untrammelled? The same goes then for political authority: the usurpation of the royal office by the demos is just as unjust as the usurpation of the demotic or familiar offices by the tyrant.

There are three reasons we ought to humble ourselves and bend the knee to unjust men.

Romantic Christianity versus Christianity Proper

To my recent post about Finding the True Way to Life, Bruce Charlton commented:

@Kristor – I find your post and comments both surprising and confusing! Your post concedes pretty much all the ground to Romantic Christianity; so that you seem to be advocating the same attitude to churches.

Your comment of July 25, 2022 at 4:49 AM suggests that any particular actual or manifest church (including the RCC) is ultimately ‘merely’ (secondarily) helpful or harmful – but never should be regarded as primary or decisive – precisely the Romantic Christian attitude.

And that the individual person’s intuitive knowledge of the mystical/spiritual/immaterial ‘church’ is all that *really* matters at the bottom line (albeit, I cannot distinguish this concept of ‘church’ from knowledge of deity – of God the Father/Jesus Christ/the Holy Ghost).

Most remarkably, you apparently regard the actual, worldly functioning of the Roman Catholic Church to be a matter of ultimate indifference to you! I.e., whether or not the RCC locks its churches; if it ceases to offer the mass, marriage, funerals; and if most of its bishops and priests focus their teachings on defending and endorsing … whatever policies the global totalitarian Establishment are currently pushing – you say:

I am not too troubled by all of this outward and merely formal ecclesial subjection to the tyrannical civil authority.

I suppose the crux is that you regard this as ‘merely’ formal submission. Yet when formal *and informal* RCC discourse overwhelmingly endorses – and indeed instructs – not just submission, but enthusiastic and active participation, over many years and increasingly … Well, I believe you are in error.

Altogether, I don’t [see] you are putting forward a coherent argument here – which may simply mean that you are in a transitional phase.

Indeed I hope so; because I find your casual, dismissive attitude to the RCC enthusiastic-self-shut-down of 2020 (etc.) to be abhorrent!

Like Archbishop Viganò; I regard 2020 as probably the worst disaster in the history of Christianity, an existential catastrophe, the significance of which can hardly be exaggerated.

These are all important points, and it is important that I respond to them cogently, and forthrightly. The first thing that I would say in response is that this latest travesty of the craven responses of the various church hierarchs to the mandates of the civil authorities in respect to the supposed crisis of covid is not our first rodeo of that sort. Things were much, much worse with the Church during the Black Death, a real pandemic:

Not all High-Profile Churches Slammed their Doors in the Faces of their Flocks

The Romantic Christians say that in the birdemic, church leaders endorsed the Lockdown and shut their doors in the faces of their flocks for months or years on end.

Not all church leaders did this. John MacArthur has been the pastor of Grace Community Church in the Los Angeles area for more than fifty years. He holds to orthodox Protestantism and also vigorously attacks heresies both religious and secular. His church closed for a few weeks, decided it was wrong, reopened, and remained open in the face of many threats from the civil authorities.

And MacArthur has massive influence worldwide.

Politics is an Emotional Subject that Mesmerizes Some and causes Others to Give Up in Disgust and Miss Opportunities to Do Good by Hacking the System

This is my third post on how Christians (and other persons of good will) should view politics. The other posts are here and here.

My theme is that those who call for a boycott of politics are mistaken. The political process can still sometimes do us good but we must have discernment because our Opponent has overall control of the System. Instead of being loyal to the political system (one of the marks of a Good Citizen, according to traditional American thought), we should hack the system. Since the System is generally run so as to do us harm, but our Opponent does not control all details, and since political processes often do us either harm or good, we must wisely use the System to our advantage when possible. Withdrawing entirely from politics, as some advocate, is misguided. It is unilateral surrender.

Our Opponent has overall control, but not total control. Therefore it is still possible on occasion to love your neighbor (in the Christian sense) through politics.

But many people cannot bring themselves to vote unless they believe there is a candidates who is unambiguously a good person or a party which unambiguously does good. (Our opponents, in contrast, define a politician as unambiguously good if he endorses Wokeism, regardless of his character.) Many of our people cannot vote for a candidate who would be a much better officeholder than his opponent but who has serious flaws. Casting such a vote is commonly called “supporting the lesser of two evils,” and is generally condemned by Christians as being “worldly.”

Social Justice in 1940

The phrase “Social Justice” was used by Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979) for his weekly newsletter (1936 – 1942). Distinctly right-wing, Father Coughlin wanted to keep the U.S.A. out of foreign wars. He also wanted to keep the Federal Government out of everyday life. I remember several professors at UCLA in the 1970s who knew of Coughlin and made a point of denouncing him. No one, particularly on the Left, knows of Coughlin nowadays. The irony runs rich.