Three essays this week, so far, from THE CATHOLIC THING, touching on general truths that need to be said aloud and in public today, over and over, in order to counteract the tsunami of blatant untruth and outright lies peddled endlessly by the virtue-signalling, uber-vociferous, media-overhyped enemies of Truth today, whether they call themselves antifa, Black Lives Matter, Democrats, or never-Trumpers.
Life in a 'post-totalitarian' world
by Randall Smith
June 17, 2020
Signs of “woke” culture are popping up everywhere in
a society increasingly dominated by white people falling all over themselves to show how much more “woke” they are than everyone else and how much less tolerant of anything they consider “unwoke” and “unclean.”
It’s the contemporary equivalent of the Victorian attempt to show how much more “cultured” they were than others with their grandiose demonstrations of righteous indignation at any example of behavior that appeared to them insufficiently “cultured.”
In such circumstances, Saul Alinsky’s
Rules for Radicals has become the textbook for political involvement rather than the Constitution or the Framers. But Vaclav Havel’s
The Power of the Powerless should become required reading for all those who wish to defend, against seemingly insurmountable forces, what is increasingly America’s most threatening counter-cultural movement: creedal Christianity.
Havel described life in 1970s Communist Eastern Europe as “post-totalitarian,” not because the system was not totalitarian, but because the way the totalitarianism was exercised in society was radically different from the totalitarianism of dictators like Hitler or Mao. Havel’s biographer, John Keane, described Havel’s definition of a post-totalitarian world thus:
Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state’s governing instruments. . .themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a “secularized religion”. . . .It is therefore necessary to see, argued Havel, that power relations. . .are best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful.
Havel’s most famous example was the greengrocer who displays in his shop window the sign “Workers of the world, unite!” – not because he is especially interested in the workers of the world, but because failure to do so would signal an impermissible disobedience from the ruling ideology of the society.
Those who would enforce obedience upon him, refusing to tolerate any failure to display the required sign of submission, are no more concerned for the “workers of the world” than the greengrocer. But they will report him and see him punished to show that they remain faithful adherents of the ruling ideology, even though the greengrocer is himself one of those workers for whom they claim concern.
The greengrocer would be embarrassed to put up a sign saying, “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
Displaying the required “Workers of the world, unite!” sign allows the greengrocer to hide his cowardice behind a façade of disinterested concern. “But the workers of the world are being oppressed,” he can say. And that is undoubtedly true. But that is not why he posted the sign. The sign is a sign of his submission, not of his personal conviction.
avel writes:
“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something supra-personal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. . . .
It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class.”
It is a “world of appearances,” says Havel, “trying to pass for reality.”
“The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies:
- government by bureaucracy is called popular government;
- the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation;
- depriving people of information is called making it available;
- the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code;
- the repression of culture is called its development;
- the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed;
- the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom;
- farcical elections become the highest form of democracy;
- banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views.”
Havel argued that the restoration of a free society could only be achieved by refusing to lend power to empty slogans and meaningless rituals – by refusing to become part of the lie that oppresses others without liberating anyone. Havel described this as “living in truth.” And this, he argued, was the most important power left to the powerless.
And yet “truth” by itself is rarely enough. “Truth” must be defended by courage and the willingness to serve others and sacrifice oneself. The greengrocer will almost certainly lose his shop if he refuses to display the sign. What then? Will others rise to his defense? Will they help support him, perhaps hire him? Or will they stay silent so the harsh glare of suspicion is not cast upon them?
Those who speak “truth to power” must have the credibility that comes from serving others in truth. When people cannot deny that you care for workers, it makes it harder for them to tear down your store. They still will. But when they do, it reveals the system for what it is: a thin tissue of lies. The choice is ours: To care for others in truth, or to put up signs of our submission to the narratives that oppress without liberating.
Today is not that Day
by Robert Royal
June 15, 2020
Somewhere in his vast corpus (thanks in advance to any reader who will remind us all precisely where), Chesterton says, in effect: i
t takes three to fight. Two to disagree and one to try to make peace between them.
He didn’t try to tackle the even greater difficulty when two are already fighting, bitterly, and another, seeking to bring peace, only opens up a third front, vilified by both.
So in full knowledge that I’m ignoring my own best judgment, I offer what follows.
I will not try to solve America’s – and the world’s – race problems today. Many are already hard at work on what will necessarily be that long-term task. Others merely agitate. Anyway, emotions are too raw at the moment.
On some calmer day, I may write another column in which I’ll try to define terms like systemic racism, privilege, violence, crime, justice, so that maybe we can start to understand what we’re arguing over. Such words fly past us all, as if they were merely rocks you pick up to throw in a street fight, not things needing to be carefully considered.
But today is not that day.
Readers may recognize the phrase, Aragorn urging the troops into battle in Tolkien’s
Return of the King:
Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of Men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand! Men of the West!
Every day on Earth is a day of battle for women and men of true spirit against various evils – for Christians, that includes the evils lurking in our own hearts.
But not every day on Earth is a day for outward engagement, even to remedy historic injustices or to defend law and order. There are days of inner battle and silence as well, that may even be more important and more challenging than an outward clash.
Now, more than ever in recent times, is a moment for reflection. Public clashes are raucous – and on some days refreshing and invigorating for that very reason. Today is not that day.
Most of the world’s bandwidth is currently being taken up with lobbing charges at each other of wimpy “wokeness” or unconscious “racism.”
I’ve been splattered myself in this pointless mudfight – in my case in the context of calling on Washington’s archbishop to be a voice of reconciliation and unity and, even worse, in writing about righteous anger vs. mere rage – which drove one reader to say I should be ashamed of writing and the newspaper for publishing such a thing.
So I may be a little oversensitive about it. But to me it’s clear that it would be insanity to continue further in the way we have been going – like some lost tourist, hoping that, by shouting louder, you can make someone who does not speak your language understand you.
Calm is sometimes complicity, but not always. Quiet is sometimes cowardice or despair, but not always. Silence, pace the current nostrum, is never automatically violence.
Silence, as Cardinal Robert Sarah has reminded us, and the contemplation it can engender may be a way to resist the temptation to be drawn into an all-consuming swirl of worldliness in which everything is judged by political partisanship.
And that’s why some of us, at least, would do well to pause and reflect, for our own sake as well as that of others.
It may be Christian self-delusion or hubris, but there must be a different way than the mutual anathemas and anonymous name-calling that social media have made the default way of public speaking now. It’s as if we are afraid that if we don’t add fuel to the hysteria, we have nothing worth anyone’s attention. And we love attention.
There’s always plenty to get agitated about in the world. Besides the turmoil all over America, my wife noticed that there have been 608 Nigerian Christians martyred by their Muslim fellow Nigerians since the beginning of 2020. Courtesy of Fr. Antonio Spadaro (a close advisor to the pope), we’ve learned that a dozen Africans (presumably black since he tagged the story #blacklivesmatter), including children, just drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach Italy.
And there’s news from Atlanta that another young black man is dead in messy circumstances. New protests have erupted, though this case is far from the brutality of George Floyd’s murder. The city’s police chief has resigned.
But getting agitated is not the same as getting motivated. Anyone motivated to deal with these and numberless other problems has to begin the hard work of thinking through what is to be done. As we saw during the Covid-19 outbreak, even scientific experts, dealing with scientific matters, simply cannot always know with certainty what’s happening as it unfolds. It takes patience and unremitting effort. And people who just hurl insults at one another as we try to sort things out may be the least helpful of all.
I’m going to end with the words of Aristotle, a pagan, a wise pagan. I’ve quoted him before and been told he sets standards impossible to meet. Maybe so, but it’s always worth hearing the truth:
“Anyone can get angry – that is easy. . . but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble.”
Words, perhaps, if not for this day then for another.
The ebbing of truth
by Hadley Arkes
June 16, 2020
St. John Paul II famously warned against the tendency to reduce “conscience” to the level of feelings passionately held.
Conscience, rightly understood, takes its guide from a body of objective moral truths. Detached from that understanding, he warned, “the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself’, so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.”
Long before Benedict XVI spoke of the “dictatorship of relativism,” we were already aware of “dogmatic relativism.” Students who blithely say that “there is no truth” had not the slightest doubt of the truth of their own epiphany. But the incoherence never cast up any barriers to the swift surge of these convictions, and we find it, in our current crises, taking now an even more dramatic form.
The people who insist that their sexual definition, as males or females, depends most decisively on their own feelings about themselves, have nevertheless turned with raging contempt against those who would not accept the truth of their claim.
Ms. J.K. Rowling made herself beloved in the world with her authorship of the Harry Potter stories, but suddenly she found herself the target of an orchestrated outrage because she dared to express reservations about transgenderism. She had commented archly on a document that referred to “people who menstruate.” She remarked that we used to have a familiar term for them (whisper: women). She had also written in support of a woman, Maya Forstater, who had lost her job because of what were called “transphobic tweets.”
But the tribunal hearing her case refused to agree that she had been fired wrongly for what Rowlings described as “a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology.” First, of course, Ms. Forstater’s moral objection was reduced to a mental illness, a “phobia.” But then she herself, or the tribunal, reduced her claim to a mere “belief.” The dispute was detached even further from that anchoring, objective truth that should have supplied the ground of the judgment.
Ryan Anderson, drawing on the full range of texts in biology, has condensed the truth of the matter in this way:
Sex, in terms of male or female, is identified by the organization of the organism for sexually reproductive acts. . . .The fundamental conceptual distinction between a male and a female is the organism’s organization for sexual reproduction.
Those obvious anatomical differences mark the
telos, the purpose, of why there are men and women: to beget more of our kind. - The hard news, then, to some people is that the males who become females will still not be part of those “people who menstruate.”
- The news even harder to bear is that the conservative judges dealing with these cases seem quite reluctant to move beyond the mechanics of procedure and make that appeal to the objective truth of the matter.
- But a jurisprudence that cannot touch that ground will be condemned to be a morally incoherent jurisprudence.
Juliana Pilon reminds us in
The Utopian Conceit, that
totalitarian regimes rested upon lies, and every day they needed to enjoin their populace to affirm those lies anew. And now, even without a prodding coming from our own government, we are being scolded by the surging crowds – and by some of our leading corporations – to join the affirmation of the lies in Black Lives Matter.
The former governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, had the temerity to respond that “all lives matter,” and he was quickly brought to heel. He was made to abase himself in apologizing, along now with the professional athletes who have expressed their own reservations.
“Black Lives Matter” is inescapably right as a principle, [I disagree because 'all lives matter and every life matters', not just 'black lives'] but what is inescapably clear is that the principle is so deeply disrespected by the people who have reduced this principle to a slogan.
As we have come to know by now,
the number of unarmed black people killed by the police in shootings – nine in 2019 – was but one-tenth of a percent of the African Americans killed in homicides in 2019, mostly at the hands of young black males.
And those deaths at the hands of black people, are dwarfed by the numbers of black abortions exceeding live births at times in New York and Chicago. In New York, between 2012 and 2016 black mothers “terminated”136,426 pregnancies and gave birth to 118,127 babies. But these are not the Black Lives that count in the moral reckoning of Black Lives Matter.
That is the incoherence, the lie, that some of our most prestigious colleges and churches are willing to broadcast to the world as their own as they hoist the banner of Black Lives Matters over their buildings and websites. Amazon now affirms BLM, and Starbucks is willing to put the slogan on tee shirts worn by their employees. They are willing to stamp now these phrases as one of their own new orthodoxies, their own reigning half-truths.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this in our country in my own lifetime, approaching fourscore years. It is tempting to say that we are witnessing a “war on truth,” but the metaphor is overdone. It would be more accurate to say that, for a scarily large portion of our people, there has been a simple ebbing of that ancient conviction that truth matters.
A commentary on the appalling hypocrisy of corporate America whenever push comes to shove...
Corporate America’s strategy of appeasement
will destroy it, just as it always has
by Christopher Bedford
June 17, 2020
Twenty-six years ago, Morgan Stanley hired Marilyn Booker as their first diversity director, charged with overseeing corporate efforts from the firm’s New York City headquarters, a 685-foot, glass, Times Square skyscraper. Ten years ago, Booker left that post to work in their financial wealth management division. Seven months ago, Booker was fired.
But that was before video aired of George Floyd’s death, and spreading, national protests escalated into riots, violence, church burning, monument defacing, and occupations. How quickly things change.
Now Booker is leading a group of black women in suing the company that employed her for a quarter-century, charging that the firm systematically discriminates against black employees.
The suit comes after a notably active week for the investment bank’s activism. Since Black Lives Matter blasted back into our Alzheimer’s-addled news cycle, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, committed $25 million to a new internal “diversity” effort, sent $5 million to the NAACP, promoted two black women, and sent an email about it all to staff. For his efforts, he was personally named in Booker’s lawsuit.
But Morgan Stanley is not uniquely stupid for empowering an activist whose sole job was to call them racists. For decades, corporate America has launched similar efforts in the vain hope that money, press releases, and choice divestments could virtue-signal them out of the mob’s cross-hairs and even hurt their competitors. None of it saves them. On the contrary, moves to embrace the mob have placed corporations more clearly in their sights than they were before.
At root is the reality that corporations are cowardly, and there’s a reason for that. While conservative consumers are adept at patronizing companies that support their worldview, a la Chick-fil-A, they rarely target private industry for blatant Democratic partisanship.
Liberal consumers and their media enablers, on the other hand, will boycott a company for the slightest connection to the slightest transgression. Over the past 30 years, this has taught corporations like Nike that attacking conservatives has no consequence, while pushing left-wing values has no detriment. Until now.
We’ve seen this sort of suicidal partnership before — and recently — with the secret alliance between environmental radicals and energy companies. First, the energy companies went after their competition in the coal industry, with firms like Chesapeake Natural Gas sending more than $25 million to the Sierra Club. Now this is the model, and at the moment, major oil companies like Exxon are funding a Republican-staffed carbon tax effort that would disproportionately hurt their smaller competitors.
The list goes on, but one thing remains constant: Soon enough, as company after company and job after job are forced to climb to the guillotine, the corporations paying the bills get closer and closer to the front of the line.
The left employs this tactic because it works. And part of why it works is that Wall Street capitalists and corporate leaders think its better to pay homage to the mob, feeding it employees, executives, and competitors and hoping this will satisfy the demands. It doesn’t, of course, and won’t ever.
Now the mob is both inside the door and at it, its supporters running H.R. departments and manning diversity posts while boycotting, threatening and suing from outside. While they could once count on their friends in the GOP to help them out, they no longer have any real friends in the party. If executives don’t stand up for themselves now, no one will. And the scaffold is calling.
The Federalist is in the headlines this week because MSNBC and a UK accomplice instigated Google to penalize the website, perhaps even block it completely, because of politically incorrect comments to some of its articles. This has provoked an outcry against the increasingly high-handed moves by the BIG TECH companies now controlling Internet platforms - the most powerful media enterprises ever, since the era of mass media began - to censor the publication of views that are not in line with their far-left liberal views...
June 20, 2020
P.S. Let me add another CATHOLIC THING essay having to do with the current culture war in the USA - perhaps the worst ever since the 1968 global Cultural Revolution that ushered in the Me generations of sex-drugs-rocknroll-and-anarchy (a Revolution that simply happened overnight without the other side ever having had a chance to react until it happened), that has to do with another absurd and ungrammatical neologism from the fast-becoming mainstream culture in the West, 'woke'.
On being “woke”
by P.J. O’Rourke
June 17, 2020
Real humor depends upon irking the dour, the censorious and the po-faced. Lemon-sucking puritans were sadly scarce for most of the last century. And so we were living in a mirth-deprived world.
But the long prudery drought is over.
T
hanks to a New Piety — ‘wokeness’ as it’s called — we have many more bluenoses, calamity howlers and vinegar-pusses to upset.
- Japes at Tartuffian cant can begin anew.
- 21st-century thought-leaders have returned to a straitlaced piousness, not only in opinion but even in grammar.
- The
woke are claiming offense at such terms as ‘mankind’ and grappling with English as if the language were a professional wrestling villain attempting to pin ‘womynkind’ to the mat. (Rematch to be announced. ‘Womyn’ is considered trans-exclusionary by gender activists.)
To be woke is to maintain a state of mind where you are constantly and acutely alert to social injustice and permanently on the lookout for more social injustice to be alert to. Or what I would call a good reason to take a nap.
Which you’d think would be acceptable since being
woke doesn’t actually entail doing anything. But, thankfully for the jester, hypocrisy never sleeps.
- If you’re
woke you must stay ‘conscious’, in order to continually ‘communicate’ how vigilant you are about toxic masculinity, how mindful you’re becoming about cultural appropriation and so forth ad infinitum.
- Being
woke is a parody of being Born Again: instead of your accepting Jesus, people like Jesus (‘privileged’, famously well- connected fathers) have to accept you.
“Puritanism is back . . . and welcome to it.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 20/06/2020 19:54]