First it occurred to me to post this as a comment on JM Smith’s latest, but then it struck me that it was too tangential. I’m posting it therefore as a separate entry. For everyone’s amusement (and certainly — everyone has a list). —
“I’ve got a Little List” (W. S. Gilbert, from The Mikado, Act I)
Electronic maps are great. Their route planning vis-à-vis current traffic conditions is terrifically handy. But I am sure I am not alone in finding that reliance upon electronic guidance for direction to destinations impairs my ability to build my own internal maps of new territory – to know where I am and find my way.
I’m pretty good at orienteering. It’s an occupational requirement for professional outdoorsmen. I know where North is almost always, and without thinking about it; and I can often find my way to a new place by the seat of my pants. I’ve trekked in the wilderness for weeks with no better map than what I could draw on the back of an envelope, and never got lost. To be fair, I’ve also found myself totally bewildered in company with three other experienced outdoorsmen equipped with good topo maps and compasses under clear skies. Too many cooks in the kitchen, perhaps.
But when I rely upon electronic guidance to get to a new destination – rather than map reading, memory, and dead reckoning – I find that *I can’t find my way there the next time without that same electronic help.* Why? Because, knowing that as I travel I can rely upon the electronic guidance to support me in my first foray, I relax my conscious attention to my environment versus my map, and turn it instead to my own thoughts of this or that. I arrive at my destination, but without a vivid memory of how I got there. It’s almost like driving a route you’ve known for years; you do it automatically, thinking of other things, and arrive with no vivid recollection of the trip. The difference of course is that when I get someplace new in that semiconscious way, *I have no clear idea where I am.* I am disoriented. I literally don’t know where East is, and must examine the shadows to calculate it.
That state of disoriented befuddlement is a fitting analogy for what is overtaking us in many departments of modern life.
My heart is of course broken at the disaster inflicted yesterday upon Notre Dame de Paris. All that must be said about the cultural and religious meaning of this catastrophe has already been well said by many commentators of the Right, so I shall not here repeat them. Everyone knows that this was an attack of the Enemy upon the Body of Christ, and upon Christendom, such as she still is. The chorus of the Right has now, rightly, begun to ask why this obvious fact may not be mentioned. And everyone knows the answer to that question, too: Islam, modernism and Liberalism are all bound and determined to destroy Christianity, and Christendom.
One thing only, of the obvious, necessary things that must be said, have I not yet seen anywhere said: Saint Denis, Our Lady, and all the saints, pray for France, for the West, and for her Church.
There is a yet deeper question: why is it, exactly, that Liberalism, modernism, Islam, et alia, are so determined to destroy Christianity?
When there is more than one cult competing for the credence and loyalty of the people, their chthonic cult is by that contest relevated to their conscious attention as an item for consideration that is disparate from their immediate confrontation with the world of their concrete experience. The abstraction of religion from mundane life that necessarily results has the effect of profaning that life; for, on that abstraction, it is not at all any more essentially and prerationally bound by the metaphysics, the ontology, and the deontology of the chthonic cult – or therefore by the normal and customary constraints of its praxis, mores, customs, and ukases – as from time immemorial it had been. It is on the contrary rather something quite other than and independent of what the cult supposes it to be, and about which the cult might be quite wrong. The deliverances of empirical experience are not then called into question; but their traditional cultic interpretations and settlements certainly are. So mundane life is then radically liberated from the cult that had theretofore informed it. It is cut loose; it is adrift; it is in danger. So then likewise are the men who have been set free of any masterful supervision, to make their own way in the world, each to devise his own cult as he sees fit, unconstrained by tradition or mastery or hard won knowledge.
At the first sign of heterodoxy in a culture, then, things have already begun to fall apart radically (for, the cult is the root of the culture). Heterodoxy is the outward schismatic manifestation of the fact that men are already thinking about religion abstractly. They would not be doing so if they apprehended no problems with the orthodox cult. But religion considered consciously as disparate from mere life is by nature vitiated, merely intellectual, sound and fury signifying almost nothing. Its abstraction in thought renders it then malleable; alternatives occur to the questing mind, and by virtue only of that occurrence take on life and probity. The alternatives multiply, and soon their own variations are discovered.
The basic problem with freedom of speech and of religion is that in principle, and then inevitably in practice, it opens the agora to the discussion of the pros and cons of every alternative cult. No topic is prohibited. So, no sort of doctrine or rite is forbidden within the pale. There ensues a proliferation and interpenetration and confusion of heresies and petty foreign cults. The cult of Moloch is then sooner or later bound to enter the lists. Where there is freedom of speech and of religion, no one will be able to prevent that entry legally.
Where it is legal to advocate and to practice Molochism, it will sooner or later be advocated and practiced, by at least some few.
If as nominalism supposes there are no objective universals, then there are no objective truths. Then there is no objective reality. There being no objective reality, there can then be no way that one man might understand or speak of reality more truthfully than another. So there can be no such thing as authority. Authority then is ipso facto null, and wherever asserted, is false and unjust. If authority is unjust per se, then justice might be possible only under conditions of anarchy, wherein each man rules his own life absolutely, and is free to make up his mind and shape his acts in whatever way he pleases.
Nominalism carried into practice then is liberalism: the thoroughgoing rejection of authority.
There are many sorts of liberalism: political, economic, grammatical, theological, liturgical, legal, sexual, aesthetic, gastronomical, cultural, architectural, academic, and so forth. All of them are subjects of discussion here, and at other orthospherean sites. All of them have in common the rejection of all authority other than the authority that imposes upon all men the requirement that they reject authority.
The project of authoritatively imposing the rejection of authority is of course incoherent. That doesn’t stop liberals from propagating liberalism. But it does stop liberalism from ever working.
Cult effects culture. A people cannot efficiently coordinate their activities except insofar as they share a common understanding of the way things are, and of the proper way to deal with them. At the very least, they must agree about what is real, what reality is like, what it is for, and so forth; they must agree about First Things, and indeed Most Things. This they generally do, without ever even noticing all their myriad agreements; men rather tend to notice only their irksome disagreements, however petty.
Thus to cohere, a culture must recur to its common cult, and must rehearse it together. So is there always an established religion.
A people among whom heterodoxy regarding First Things begins to gain a foothold begins ipso facto to become confused in their motions: in their heads, hearts, and acts. Their loyalties are then divided, and so vitiated, at least at the margins.
Heterodoxy is cold civil war. Let it compound long enough, and it will go hot. So healthy societies must control for heterodoxy, especially about First Things.
Reading a book of evangelical theology this afternoon, I realized that there are a few reliable ways we can be sure that an author is a liberal weenie, and that the text he has written is therefore ideologically driven, ergo tendentious (whether witly or not), and probably wrong in its arguments. It is very simple, at least in books of theology. We can be sure that an author is a weenie if:
If furthermore there is ever in a writer about ancient texts anything like environmentalism or feminism, egalitarianism or communism, relativism or nominalism, we can be sure that he has read them anachronistically, and therefore wrongly. We can, in short, be pretty sure that he is a hopeless idiot, and what is worse, not even therefore much useful to his sinister god.
What can we take from this? That we should never, ever, ever in a million years commit any such howlers.
Probably I have missed a few. I welcome correction of any such omissions.
“You’re Fired!”: It is now clear that James Comey was the chief Obama-hangover and Soros-seditionist in the Post-Obama federal government — a mole doing Obama’s bidding (that is to say, Bill Ayre’s bidding and George Soros’ bidding) in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat in November. Trump’s move was not only morally and governance-wise justified; it was symbolically brilliant: Comey received notification of his firing via a hand-delivered message during his speech before an FBI “diversity and recruiting” seminar in California, as I understand it. The best way to drain the swamp is to let the swamp know that it is being drained while it is making a narcissistic swamp-speech in another swamp.
And while Trump was firing Comey, he was conversing in a friendly way with the Russian ambassador!
I am currently reconciled to President Trump. A friend of mine, who voted for Hillary, has come over the the Dark Side and is now in favor of President Trump.
The Alexandrov Song and Dance Ensemble originated under the Stalin regime in Russia , but it transcended that regime. The Ensemble sang soldier-songs, folk-songs, and popular Russian songs. About two-thirds of the Alexandrov Ensemble died last year in an airplane-accident over the Black Sea. I might say that it was a suspicious accident, with suspicion lying in the direction of the Turks or Chechen terrorists. The Sacred War (actually, Voyna Narodnaya or People’s War) is a WWII song. But are we not in a Sacred War? To FunkyProfessor: The rod in narodnaya is the same as the rod in Rodino. Long live the Rodino!
I was present at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in the late 1980s when the Ensemble sang this song by one of the foremost Russian composers —
Here is the last concert of the Alexandrov ensemble —
