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Sunday, November 12, 2006
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Prophets, Jesters, And Destroyers
It's not often that I come to the end of my week with a heavy heart, or with too much to think about. As a professional thinker, it's my job to notice important occurrences and trends, to ponder them within the widest applicable context, to analyze them for import, and to speculate on what might develop from them. Because my personal circumstances are good, my family is secure, and my country is strong, I've grown to be optimistic about it all most of the time. That optimism has served to deflect most of the arrows chance has loosed at me and the people and things I love. But every now and then, a shaft manages to pierce my armor.
Today I'm coping with three such shafts.
On Punditry Mount, Mark Steyn occupies the pinnacle. No one -- at least, no one who writes in English for a general audience -- comes near him in insight, foresight, or expressive power. As Thomas Sowell has said, he's the gold standard to which the rest of us aspire.
Steyn's biweekly column in National Review is titled "Happy Warrior." It's a fitting title for one as gifted at clever phrasing and amusing wordplay as he. But in recent months, the tone of his writing has darkened appreciably, as has the enveloping outlook expressed by his columns there and elsewhere.
The theme that has darkened Steyn's outlook is expressed unambiguously in the opening sentences of this landmark article at the New Criterion:
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands -- probably -- just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.
Talk about giving it to us right between the eyes, eh? Steyn elaborates on his thesis, with copious supporting facts and arguments, in his new book America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. Despite its many pleasures, it is a sobering volume indeed.
Anyone interested in the survival and advancement of Mankind should read this book. Steyn's extensive ponderings and his writer's gifts make it a blend of laughter and tears, astonishment and terror. You'll be profoundly grateful for the experience of reading it, while at the same time you'll be straining to disbelieve nearly everything it says.
In outline, his case is that demographic trends that are already starkly apparent, coupled to the disappearance of both individual self-reliance and civilizational confidence from most of the western world, have put the survival of western civilization in terrible danger. In his estimate, Europe and Russia are already moribund; they've self-enervated to a degree that has left them unable to resist Islamicization. America is better off, but given the relentlessness of the multiculturalists and the reflexive apologists forever willing to blame America for the sins of its enemies, it's not a guaranteed-permanent state of grace.
His argument appears irrefutable. There's nary a shred of opinion anywhere in it; just the extrapolation of birth rates and a sober assessment of obvious cultural trends. I don't want to believe it either, especially since the most likely outcome, things remaining as they are, is that America really would have to stand alone against an otherwise totalitarianized planet:
There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:
- Submit to Islam,
- Destroy Islam,
- Reform Islam.
Because most of us don't take number 1 as a serious possibility, we're equally unserious about being forced to choose between two and three. But submission to Islam is very possible, and to many it will still seem ridiculous even as it happens; like John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, we'll be spluttering that we can't believe we're losing to these idiots. But we can lose (as I've always believed) and (as I've come to believe) we might lose more easily than even the gloomiest of us thought.
By "we might lose" I mean "the good guys" -- and I define that term expansively. There are plenty of good guys in Australia and Poland and Iraq and even Pakistan. And I'm a little unnerved at the number of readers who seem to think that the rest of the world can go hang but America will endure as a lonely candle of liberty in the new Dark Ages. Think that one through: a totalitarian China, a crumbling Russia, a disease-ridden Africa, a civil war-torn Eurabia -- and a country that can't even enforce its borders against two relatively benign states will somehow be able to hold the entire planet at bay? Dream on, "realists."
No, don't dream. Think.
Most of the kings of medieval Europe employed "court jesters" to keep them amused, and to remind them that theirs was not a divine entitlement. Such jesters were usually dwarves. They wore harlequinade, including floppy belled headpieces intended to parody the royal crown, and carried a stick jangling with bells to parody the scepter of state:
At intervals, the jester would leap toward the king and shake his bells in the monarch's face. It was supposed to defuse the tensions that came with power. Perhaps it did, but even if not, it did help to keep the king mindful that ultimately, his robes, crown, and scepter would come to no more than the jester's accoutrements. Neither of them would "get out of here alive." Indeed, the jester was likely to outlive his king, though perhaps not for long.
Many would say that America, the land where every man is a king, is well supplied with jesters. After all, quite a large fraction of our entertainment is aimed at making us laugh. Some of it even works. Many of our entertainers specialize in lampooning our political figures, and do fairly well at it. Even so, we appear to have a deficit in our humor account lately; serious things all seem a bit too serious. We'd rather immerse ourselves in anything else than think seriously about the future of freedom, of our families, of our nation, and of Mankind. We lament the need ever to emerge from our cocoon of diversions. Reality strikes us as a damned imposition on our valuable time.
The future strikes us as grim because we've largely surrendered our interest in it and our influence on it. We've abandoned many of the undertakings by which we once invested in the future: childbearing and child-rearing; the accumulation of savings; commitment to worthy enterprises larger than ourselves; the transmission of knowledge and wholesome character vertically through the generations. As Nature abhors a vacuum, forces other than good ones have rushed into the void.
I'm going to use a dirty word here. At least, the word has been treated as dirty by a substantial number of persons in recent years. It's the bedrock upon which any forward-looking culture must rest, so quite naturally, those who desire that we live solely for our own present pleasure have sought to demean and destroy it. The word is faith.
Normally, when I write about faith on a Sunday, I'm specifically speaking of religious faith: the willingness to believe a proposition that can neither be proved nor disproved, but which can inspire devotion and personal commitment to a set of associated ideals. I have that in mind today, but not exclusively. Faith is also a requisite for nearly all forward-looking undertakings: it's the attitude that says, "Yes, I know things might not work out as planned -- that my efforts might not be sufficient, that my enemies might prove too strong or too numerous, that unforeseeable developments might wreck it all -- but I shall proceed even so. I shall do my best to build the future I desire, a queendom for my wife and a patrimony for our sons, and leave the outcome in God's hands."
That sort of faith flies in the face of everything we know from human history. At the best of times, under the best of circumstances, the majority of human undertakings eventuate in failure. Those are not gambler's odds; they're a gauntlet to be run where the prize at the end is as likely to be dragon's teeth as a victor's cup. It takes faith and will to shoulder one's lance and charge into that maw.
Without faith, we seek sinecures, niches that will require little to nothing from us, and we hide in them. We reach only for the low-hanging fruit; if it's overripe, or infested with worms, we remind ourselves of the hazards of climbing higher. We settle for easily obtained, prepackaged mediocrity in our public services, our corporations, our schools, our entertainment, even in our food. We shrug, say "What's the difference? You can't change anything", and settle for what we're given. We "make do."
But "making do" destroys all incentives to maintain even a low standard. Matters sink still further. We settle at ever lower levels, until we find ourselves in threadbare robes and a rusted crown, holding a broken scepter, living in a palace filled with filth, our court suffused by corruption and inanition. We become desperate for distractions and comforting lies.
One of the consequences of this downward spiral is a concomitant decline in our jesters. Instead of giving us mirth, they shower us with derision. Their "jokes" become genuinely cruel, often even defamatory. The underlying message ceases to be "Laugh along with me at the absurdities of life's carnival," and becomes, "You are ugly, base, tasteless and depraved. In showing you yourselves thus and forcing you to laugh, I exploit your embarrassment to raise myself above you."
The sole consolation is that if the palace should collapse, the jesters will die along with the rest of us.
Americans are not yet devoid of faith in themselves and their country. Much of our secular faith derives from our religious faith: in the usual case, our Christianity. At the last tally, approximately 74% of Americans self-identified as Christians. The term might not mean exactly the same thing to all of us, but the core of the thing -- the teachings of Christ, most particularly the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus and the two Great Commandments that underpin them -- is common to us all.
Regardless of how anyone feels about it, America is a Christian nation. Its laws, both wise and otherwise, are heavily infused with Christian thought. The Founders were aware of this. Several of them, most notably Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, hoped to see Christian belief and practice flourish without limit; they regarded Christianity as indispensable to the preservation of freedom.
There can be no disputing that men with evil agendas have occasionally co-opted Christianity to their service. There can be no disputing that not every man who calls himself a Christian lives as one. Indeed, no man who calls himself a Christian is perfectly so, for we are imperfect by nature. Creatures that live in time can never be perfect; it's the nature of temporal existence. For mortal men, there can only be improvement; there can never be finality, except for the finality of the grave.
There has been one perfect Man; there will never be another. He gave us one perfect Truth; in its fullness and luminosity it eclipses all others. What remains is for us lesser ones to absorb the lesson and use it to make our world the best we can, in the hope that our efforts, however awkward and inept, will be appreciated by Him who made us.
But it is also in the nature of things that the Man and His Truth should be assailed by the forces of darkness. There are many such, and no need to enumerate them all. But the ones that are most obvious are also, in the spiritual sense, the least dangerous. They're the blades we see coming. If not bound or paralyzed, we can evade them easily. The most dangerous thrusts are the ones disguised as benefices, in the hands of those who seek to "liberate" or "enlighten" us.
I've been acquainting myself with the works of one such destroyer: a gentleman named Sam Harris, author of The End Of Faith and Letter To A Christian Nation. Harris has made it his life's mission to destroy religious faith: not faith in any particular creed, but faith as a category of human mentation. In The End Of Faith, he expends 237 pages (paperback edition) arguing for the position that religious faith is:
- Foolish;
- Destructive;
- Unnecessary.
Though he never states it quite this concisely, Harris's foolishness contention expands into the following syllogism:
- Every religion propounds a supernatural thesis which can never be proved.
- Theses that can never be proved are foolish.
- Therefore, religious faith, as a category of human attachment, is foolish.
His destructiveness contention elaborates thus:
- Religious attachment divides Mankind into Us and Them;
- Men will self-righteously arrogate the privilege of coercing or killing any members of Them who don't willingly become one of Us;
- Therefore, deeds done in the name of some religion are black marks against the religion itself, regardless of what it actually teaches.
His not-necessary contention is essentially a claim that any positive thing one can get from a religious faith can be obtained some other way. In the final pages of the book, he holds forth on Eastern philosophy, neuroscience, meditation, and other approaches to "mysticism" that he claims are perfectly adequate substitutes for faith.
I'm at work on a comprehensive refutation of each of these claims. It might take a few weeks longer, as I can barely endure Harris's writing. Every sentence drips with supercilious arrogance and self-righteousness. Its overall character is one that popular thought would think more likely to be found in the work of a religious fundamentalist. In point of fact, Harris is a religious fundamentalist: a "militant atheist" whose faith is that there is no God and don't you dare suggest otherwise. But his method is rationalistic, though flawed. He's smart enough, articulate enough, and good enough at posing false equivalences and mounting diversionary attacks that it takes a powerful mind to penetrate to his errors. One cannot expect everyone to grapple with such a thing on his own.
The principal danger posed by Sam Harris is that he's both powerfully motivated and enough brighter than the common run of Mankind to lure large numbers of persons, impatient with the restrictions that arise from religious moral codes and ardent for someone to tell them that they're unnecessary, to their doom...and ours.
The great, yawning trap here is that a part of Harris's "unnecessary" thesis is correct. The laws of nature, particularly those of human nature, are the source of all moral truth. But it takes a very powerful mind to reason one's way to them from nothing but the metaphysically given elements of reality. The transmission of acceptable moral codes vertically through the generations is achieved mainly by religious attachment. The parent who attempts to instill firm moral standards in his children in any other way has bet their futures against very long odds. But quite a number of people are arrogant enough to try it, though both they and their children are under-equipped for the task.
A culture in which a seemingly tiny minority -- only a hair more than 2% -- eschew adherence to the moral law is a culture that will soon have no social cohesion whatsoever. The United States stands perilously close to that threshold today.
This morning, as I arrived at Mass, there was a crowd clustered around the doors of the church. Overnight, someone had painted large red swastikas on the doors and walls of the building. The congregation was aghast. The pastor, Father Charles Papa, was bewildered. He couldn't imagine why anyone would do such a thing.
"Do you suppose they got the wrong place?" Father Charlie asked me, half joking. I shook my head, remembering the multitude of slanders that were once raised against the Catholic Papacy, that Pope Pius XII had been in league with Hitler's Third Reich.
Only one thing is certain about that ugly deed: they who committed it hold to no standard of morality that a Christian would recognize. We are commanded by our Redeemer to forgive them, and to pray for them. We can do nothing else. But what of them? Would you imagine them to hold to any faith? If pressed to respond to Harris's theses, do you suppose they would agree with him, or with me?
They are probably young; vandalism of that sort is usually the province of teenagers. How many are there like them, who would do nothing but giggle over their escapade? Unless some ill chance removes them, they and others who share their "code" -- nihilism? solipsism? mindless hatred of whatever they can't seize and consume? -- will have some part of the defense of America against a large, confident, highly militant faith that seeks to impose itself on the entire world by force. How do you suppose they'll perform?
And so I write with a heavy heart, and wonder for the first time in many years whether freedom is doomed to die for lack of defenders, whether our youngest citizens and their progeny will collaborate in its destruction, and whether we old ones who love this country and cherish its ideals and its virtues can do anything at all to stem the tide.
May God bless and keep you all.
Comments
Islam has proven again and again that a very small group of dedicated individuals with the ability to put their life behind the survival of their creed can change the world. I have learned that lesson. I know others who have as well. We will not be ovverrun. Not without huge casualties. And those of us who feel this way know a little more about doing damage than the primitives setting IED’s by the roadside. Envision Mecca glowing green. Imagine all the mosques in North America going at the same time. The technology and the skill is widespread and available. And in the hands of people who are tasting the bile at the backs of their throats.
Posted by og on 11/12/2006 at 02:49 PMPardon me my tendency to skim before reading anything in totality nowadays.
When I got to your last segment, all I can say is I am not surprised. I wouldn’t so quickly write this off a merely a juve prank since the educational system you lamented a few days ago in largely instigating such behavior by other than overt means now. But—as in pre-Nazi Germany—in some places more than others such activity is invariably edging toward a mandatory class assignment.
Postmodernism has been defined as suspicious of or outright rejecting truth, objectivity, and progress; and is characteristically anti-science, anti-capitalist.
Just looking at that, will you fail to agree that adding anti-human to the list is a redundancy?
The postmodernist inclination of our “intelligentsia” (the type who lauded Prof. Eric Pianka) is fomenting hatred of the Judeo-Christian creed. Some Jews still believe that there is a God that will provide for all in this world, and some Christians that still believe that God did provide His own Lamb to atone for sin and for entry into the next. But the numbers of the faithful are dwindling in large part because nobody seems to disagree with the paradigm shift that the postmodernist age has asserted—IN A WORLD OF DWINDLING RESOURCES, ANYBODY WHO FAILS TO REMAIN PRODUCTIVE IS GUILTY OF STEALING LIFE FROM THE PRODUCTIVE.
I know you have an idea what the God of the bible will have to say to those who won’t fight this, who will fail to illuminate what is taking place. “I don’t know you.” is a damned certainty. Nobody can lay claim to being faithful and continue to ignore this. Hell, I don’t see how the otherwise decent but not of the faithful can still claim decency.
The Postmodernists are—in your own words—militant atheists; in Kevin Baker’s words, antitheists; in my words, megalomaniacs.
They are militantly certain that there is no God and, so, they must encourage the best and the brightest men to fill the gap. Abraham revolted against the pagan death cults. Those who followed him in that covenant to protect innocent life proved human population could survive and thrive. This is just the opposite goal of the postmodernists. Hence they want to drag us back to the worst things from out of the pagan world—the destruction of innocents. Offering up innocents in various forms to stave off human fears to satiate modern gods craving human blood.
Postmodernists aim in their own way to reinstall that cycle of life and death so that mankind in under the thumb of better men, like themselves. Hubris like that, as Dr. Hanson has written, earns its own nemesis. And so will we all if we don’t stand and FIGHT!
Postmodernists are exhibiting all the troubling signs of persecutors from the past. Snide remarks at first, marginalizations as they gain favor. Inevtiably, with the help of militant Islam, they are determined to destroy all remaining Jews and Christians. Neither postmodernism nor islamofacism tolerates competition.
Go on. Worry about the little things as they come to hit you. It is all in vain.
Claims to faith or not, those who fail to take on this bigger issue are surely damned.
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 11/12/2006 at 03:39 PMFrancis.
Hold onto your faith. Hope. Despair is a sin.You are not “ugly, base, tasteless and depraved”. The jesters see themselves and their brethren. There are less of them than we; the sleeping will awaken.
Vandals have existed through the ages; they are the jesters with spraypaint.
Hasn’t there been periodic culling of the population? Although we’ve pretty well kicked the epidemic business (Avian flu scares notwithstanding), war seems to be a regular alternative.
Those who believe in Truth, Beauty and Good will prevail.
I am not too concerned that I will not be here to see it, rather that when I go, I take with me to see God a few jesters.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 11/12/2006 at 03:53 PMThis may seem tangential, but I recently read a review of Weird Al Yankovic that lauded him as the one true Jester of modern music, not because he lampoons music but because he lampoons the trappings of musical fame while keeping true to himself.
You don’t hear of his “bling” or his “crib” or of his upeenth divorce; you can, in fact, see Weird Al as one of your neighbors. A somewhat zany neighbor, but one you could talk with nonetheless, and not be put off by an entourage.
Moreover, his kind of humor is the gentle kind that is so often eschewed. Weird Al and “vicious” don’t go together. And he’s managed to make a career out of this for nigh-on thirty years without slacking, so obviously there’s a longing for his kind of humor.
And just about anybody knows who he is. Can you say that about many comics?
Gerard Van Der Leun has a great essay up today at americandigest.org about America, and it’s an interesting counterpoint to this. He’s been travelling recently and has examples of that faith of which you write: faith in the future. Go and read; it may cheer you up.
Shame about the vandalism. But paint comes off, thankfully, or can be painted over. My high school had that happen once and the pity was that it was over a mural which then had to be destroyed. Ah, well.
Posted by B. Durbin on 11/12/2006 at 04:10 PMDo not despair. There is always hope for humanity. I expect that if Islam was able to take over the world (which is probably much less likely than you think), God would still reach out to us like he does now.
I heard the author of Letter to a Christian Nation on the radio last week. I thought that he made the same mistake that most athiests make—he lumped all Christians together. His concerns with the destructive nature of fundamentalist Christianity are not all unfounded. We need faith, but we need faith in love and peace that is free from fear and judgement.Posted by isumavunga on 11/12/2006 at 06:56 PMSeems to be the day for gloomy thoughts, Fran.
Posted by JoeCF on 11/12/2006 at 08:44 PM“The laws of nature, particularly those of human nature, are the source of all moral truth. But it takes a very powerful mind to reason one’s way to them from nothing but the metaphysically given elements of reality. “
That’s absolutely correct, both sides of it. Fortunately, reason gives us a very powerful tool to overcome the obstacle: the division of labor. Just as only a person of rare ability could build himself a computer, yet we all have them, so too can a few powerful minds create a body of knowledge that we can all then share without having to recreate the work ourselves from scratch. Understanding, even comprehensive understanding of that which already exists, is far, far easier than original creation.
A culture devoted to disseminating that understanding, to passing it along to future generations, and to building upon it can benefit from it en masse, even when the powerful minds that have initially created it are only cherished memories.
As an athiest myself, and one who is not merely agnostic, but positively believes in the non existence of any diety, your description of the work of Sam Harris fits exactly with my views on militant atheism. I haven’t read his book, but the evaluation of this kind of atheism as just another variant of faith - and by it’s nature a hypocritical one - rings completely true to my experience.
It sounds like his alternatives are limited to those that are explicitly mystical in themselves, and only those with no normative component. Reason is conspicuously left off the list, and so is anything that proivdes any restraint on behavior, any objective morality, any notion of good and evil, right and wrong, and any basis whatsoever for human beings to live in society at peace. It omits anything that provides any notion of values or how to pursue them, for that is the true nature of what he opposes. Faith, to him and narrowly defined, is only an enemy by proxy.
I call such people antitheists, not atheists. They fail to recognize the Judeo-Christian tradition fully for what it is. They focus only on its flaws, the horrors done in its name, without recognizing that it has been an effort to reconcile faith and reason, and as such is unique in human history.
I do believe that such a reconciliation, in full, is ultimately doomed to fail, and that some of Christianity’s most spectactular deviations from human decency have been manifestations of it’s contradictions. But on the other hand, it has fostered the climate of reason, inquiry, and morality that allowed for the Renaissence and the initial flourishing of America. The greatest culture the Earth has ever seen is one that has been deeply informed by Judeo-Christian thought.
And, I’m sorry to hear about what happened to your church. Decent people do not deserve that kind of ugliness.Posted by Kyle Bennett on 11/12/2006 at 10:22 PMI hold to this one thought: in all things, there is a kernel of Truth. And in the end, that Truth is so powerful, so compelling, that it wins out. Our lives, our children’s lives, may end in immiseration for our foolishness, but eventually humanity will come once more ‘round to Truth. In the end, Truth is not self-evident, but man is a reasoning animal, and will see the beauty through the dross.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 11/13/2006 at 01:38 AMFrancis - so sorry to hear about your church. I read just the other day, after the elections as a matter of fact, that a statue of General George Washington had been “beheaded” and in place of the head was a one dollar bill. The statue was in a church/cathedral, I think, in DC.
Those of an adolescent mindset become vandals when they think the society weak; also when they think some “leaders” in the society encourage them with a wink and a nod; and when they no longer have boundaries of decency.
One could hardly point to many boundaries set by our society today that preaches at its altar, the moral equivalence of cultures.
Posted by Beach Girl on 11/13/2006 at 08:40 PMI found this essay so intriguing that it required a response, which I posted here.
http://www.seablogger.com/?p=6454
Posted by Alan Sullivan on 11/14/2006 at 11:42 AMI’m afraid you’ve misunderstood the main thrust of the essay, Alan. Though I suppose I could have been clearer.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 11/14/2006 at 05:56 PMMisunderstood in what way? I’m curious. I am not trying to pick a quarrel; I admire your writings and your faith, though I do not share it.
Posted by Alan Sullivan on 11/14/2006 at 06:37 PM...and whether we old ones who love this country and cherish its ideals and its virtues can do anything at all to stem the tide.
For the native born of this ilk, not much probably. As much as I’m not very fond of rampant illegal immigration, therein (and legal immigration) is perhaps the basis for the future since the bulk are very traditional Catholics who will frown on such things.
The immigrant demographic is one I believe the left mistakes as a long term ally. When the immigrants eventually see where the left wants to really take them, they will be forced to abandon the left.
Posted by Purple Avenger on 11/16/2006 at 05:10 AM
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