Plugging in "facts" to fit the narrative . . .

One can hardly be more disgusted than I am by the crimes of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests, but it is passing strange when the politically correct press overlooks the most salient feature of that abuse, ignoring both its predominantly homosexual nature and the high percentage of the abuse being that of teenage boys. But these realities complicate the narrative, as does the fact that the present pope has done more to rectify the situation that gave rise to the abuse than any other person alive.

But that's just the beginning of the irony. William Kilpatrick has an article on the curious (or is it predictable) asymmetry of the pompom media's boiler-plate clergy sexual abuse narrative.

In the war against jihad it might seem that President Obama’s plan to remove all discussion of Islam and jihad from our national security document would rank higher as a threat to Western security than recent attempts to link the pope to 40 year-old sex crimes in Milwaukee. But the perfect storm that has hit the Catholic Church may turn out to be of greater consequence for the West’s survival. For that reason it’s important to sort out how much of the current indignation toward Rome represents justified anger, and how much of it represents a larger anti-Christian agenda. . . .

There is much to suggest that media criticism of the Church is fueled less by outrage over pedophilia, and more by another agenda.  There wasn’t much outrage over Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13 year-old girl a number of years ago.  When attempts were made last year to bring Polanski back to the U.S. to serve his sentence, many of the same cultural elites who are now condemning the Church, leapt to his defense.  Likewise, there has never been much media outrage over the apparent crimes of celebrated sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.  The media continued to lionize Kinsey long after it was revealed that he had collaborated with pedophiles in order to gather data.  “What did Kinsey know and when did he know it?” has never been a pressing question for CNN or The New York Times. ...

Though sexual abuse remains a problem in the Catholic Church, enormous strides have been made in rooting it out, due in large part to a crackdown that originated with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001.  So, the venomous attacks on him and the church he represents, suggest that something else is afoot.  When a major Canadian newspaper features a piece claiming that the pope’s “whole career has the stench of evil,” it’s time to reach for the decoding machine.  That particular quote comes from Christopher Hitchens, who has made a career in recent years of questioning the legitimacy, not just of Catholicism, but of Christianity, itself.  Hitchens aside, there is plenty of other evidence that Catholics are not the only ones being targeted for de-legitimization.  In Canada and in Europe, Christian pastors have been fined or jailed for expressing their beliefs from the pulpit.  In Birmingham, England, Christian evangelists were warned by police that distributing gospel leaflets in a Muslim section would be considered a hate crime.  A survey of history textbooks for American schoolchildren reveals that they present Christianity as a purveyor of bigotry and violence.  On college campuses, Christian clubs are routinely banned.  Meanwhile, Christianity is often the butt of vulgar comedy routines, and of crude cartoons that make the infamous Muhammad cartoon look benign by comparison.

There is, of course, a major exemption from media condemnation of child abuse.  It appears that the abuse of children is much more acceptable to the opinion-makers when it is protected by the shield of multiculturalism.  The media has been much less willing to criticize the widespread child abuse that occurs in Islamic cultures, or to note that, in the case of Islam, the abuse is religiously sanctioned.  For example, although one can find plenty of criticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s political views, rarely does one see a condemnation of his views on sex.  The one-time spiritual leader of Iran not only endorsed sex with children in his writings, but he also took to himself a 13 year-old bride.

Here we come to the world-historical turning point of which the frenzied assaults on the Catholic Church are only a part.  The drive to undermine the Church’s moral authority, and the threat posed by Islam are linked in an ironic way.  For many centuries the Catholic faith was the main bulwark against the Islamization of Europe.  Now that Christianity is in decline in Europe, Islam is on the move again.  And with the growing presence of Islam has come an increase in child abuse—or what the West considers as child abuse.  The sexual exploitation of children is considered a far less serious offense in Islamic societies, and is often protected by the force of sharia law.  Muhammad, who consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine years-old, is considered by all Muslim authorities to have provided a “beautiful pattern of conduct.”  That’s why, whenever a Muslim country tries to ban child marriages (as recently happened in Yemen), you can be sure that the imams will rise up to insist on their right to marry minors.

Kilpatrick's whole article is here.

For those still holding out hope for the UN

Here's the latest. From Anne Bayefsky at Fox News:

The United Nations Economic and Social Council yesterday elected Iran to serve a four-year term -- beginning in 2011 -- on the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The U.N. calls the Commission “the principal global policy-making body” on women’s rights and claims it is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women.” Yet Iran was elected by acclamation. It was one of only two candidates for two slots allocated to the Asian regional bloc – in other words, a fixed slate and a done deal.

Among other Iranian qualifications to serve in a leadership role in advancing the rights of women, is the country’s criminal code, which includes punishments like burying women from the waist down and stoning them to death for adultery.

Great Weblog Title

Following up on the earlier post below, here's a great blog post title by Matthew Archbold at Creative Minority Report:

ULTRASOUNDS ARE THE ROSA PARKS OF ABORTION

Op-Ed Journalism at Its Best

The following is one of the finest pieces of op-ed journalism I have read in a long time. I have copied it in its entirety from The American Spectator posting, here.

Jon Stewart Flunks His Spartacus Test

by Jeffrey Lord
April 27, 2010 -- The American Spectator

"I am Spartacus."

It is one of the iconic lines from an iconic film.

Remember Spartacus? The 1960 Stanley Kubrick film based on a Howard Fast novel about a slave rebellion back in the glory days of Rome? Kirk Douglas -- father of Michael -- played the heroic slave leader Spartacus, his good friend Antonius played by Tony Curtis. In the signal moment from the film (said to be a slap at McCarthyism by the film's blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo), re-captured slaves, back in chains, are offered leniency. They will not face crucifixion if they will but give up Spartacus, who sits in their midst unrecognizable to the Romans. Waiting for the answer is Spartacus's foe, the Roman General Crassus, played by Laurence Olivier. After a moment of silence, as Spartacus is about to give himself up to be crucified, one by one the slaves stand and announce "I am Spartacus!" -- signaling their willingness to share their compatriot's fate. The scene epitomizes courage, a willingness to take a stand when the all-too-easy thing to do would be to simply say nothing and get off the hook.

One of the grim facts of war is that one never knows where and when these moments will present themselves. The question always is: when presented with this moment, what would you do?

Most probably, you will never know until the moment arrives.

The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 were presented with just such a moment on the opening day of this war. One minute they were average Americans flying peacefully from Newark to San Francisco on a beautiful late summer day. The next they found themselves shockingly confronted with their Spartacus moment. Four hijackers had taken over their plane during what the Americans quickly learned from family cell phone calls was an all out attack on their country. The World Trade Center towers were in flames, soon to collapse. The Pentagon had just had a jet ram into it. The plane they were on -- United 93 -- was clearly headed back East to Washington -- on target to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

The fact that the story is history now doesn't make it any easier to recall. The passengers, doubtless scared witless, decided to rebel. They would not be passive participants in the destruction of their country. One by one they stood up and said, in effect, "I am Spartacus." Or, in the words of passenger Todd Beamer, "Let's roll." A horrific struggle raged, the plane went down in a farmer's field in Pennsylvania. Every single passenger and hijacker died. The White House and the United States Capitol, not to mention an unimagined number of lives on the ground, were spared.

"I am Spartacus," these people were saying to the rest of us. "I am Spartacus."

Comes now the tale of South Park, the irreverent, edgy and sometime (sometime??) offensive cartoon created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The show is a staple of Comedy Central, where it regularly spends its air time, in the words of the New York Post, ridiculing "every sacred convention in the book, from major religions and celebrities to gays and the physically disabled." Which is to say, making full use of the First Amendment right to free expression.

As all of America now knows, Parker and Stone decided to do their thing with Islam and Mohammed, having their characters trying to decide how to portray Mohammed without, well, actually showing him. Which, of course, is forbidden in Islam. This being a comedy show, The Prophet finally shows up in a bear costume.

And in the blink of an eye, a Spartacus moment began to evolve. Again according to the Post, "a New York-based Web site, Revolution Muslim…'warned' Parker and Stone they would end up like Theo Van Gogh -- the Dutch filmmaker killed in 2004 by an Islamic terrorist after he made a film dealing with abuse of Muslim women." 

Threatened now, Parker and Stone refused to back down. They prepared a response, inserted as part of the storyline in their next South Park episode. Kyle, the one Jewish kid in the mix (and modeled after co-creator Stone), was to have delivered a 35-second speech at show's end warning of "fear and intimidation." There was to be no mention of Mohammed.

And Comedy Central -- Cowardly Central as the Post promptly dubbed the network -- bleeped Kyle's little talk out completely. Parker and Stone have a statement on their website, found here.

Which brings us to Jon Stewart.

He the Braveheart who has dared to battle -- yes! Can you believe it!!!??? -- Fox News! Stewart is so daring, don't you know, so gutsy, so edgy he actually uses -- OMG! -- the F-bomb on the air! Wow! What a guy! How 1969! The New York Times, unsurprisingly quick to adore this kind of faux courage, responded with an adoring profile, calling this David of the Liberal Media "relentless" as he swings away at the Goliath Fox. Ooooooooo…look! He took on…Bernard Goldberg! Sarah Palin! What a guy! Dust off the next Profile in Courage Award, Caroline!

Then, out of the blue, Jon Stewart found himself in a situation that demanded not the faux courage to take on Fox News. This time, not unlike the passengers of United Flight 93, Stewart suddenly found himself staring his own Spartacus moment in the face. The real thing.
His response?

"It's their right," he said of Comedy Central in a verbal shrug of indifference. "We all serve at their pleasure." In a monologue punctuated by yuks, he defended the network by saying, "The censorship was a decision Comedy Central made, I think as a way to protect our employees from what they believe was any harmful repercussions to them….but again they sign the checks."

They sign the checks.

Now there's a Spartacus moment. "Hey, Spartacus babe, we luv ya, big guy. What a ride that revolt thing, huh? Listen, Sparky, I can't hang up on some cross somewhere. I'm doing the lion-in-the-arena thing next Friday. They tell me the place is sold out. So, well, you're sweet. Really. But General Crassus over there signs the checks, capiche? And, hey, we gotta protect our guys, right? Ahhh, General Crassus? Spartacus is the guy with the dimple-in-the-chin thing going. Front row center."

This Stewart response -- not to mention the response from the Comedy Central suits themselves -- is an unintentional snapshot into the mind of American liberalism. What to do about people who have committed mass murder in places like New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Madrid, London, Bali, Baghdad, Mumbai, and Kabul -- and that only for starters while they figure out how to get their hands on a nuclear bomb or biological and chemical weapons?

Just look sternly into the camera, wring your hands, and say to these misguided people what Jon Stewart said to Revolution Muslim: "Your type of hatred and intolerance -- that's the enemy."

Take that Al Qaeda!

This is really quite remarkable, if in its own way quite predictable. Jon Stewart is by all accounts a nice guy, a talented guy, a smart guy. He has used The Daily Show to successfully carve out a niche as what his occasional Fox sparring partner Bill O'Reilly calls "a cornerstone of the liberal media in America." God bless America and Stewart's freedom.

Yet precisely because Stewart is viewed as the Lion of the Liberal Media, his wimpy response to an actual threat from a group presenting itself as just one more face of Islamic terror serves as a reminder of exactly why so many millions of Americans have come to mistrust President Obama or in fact any liberal when it comes to responding to America's enemies. After all the touchy-feely Obama outreach to Iran -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just continues to build his nuclear bombs anyway. Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry travel to Syria to make nice -- but long range Scud missiles will go to Hezbollah anyway. And so on. Electing Obama was presented as the change that would make precisely this kind of threat to South Park go away. Oops.

There is nothing new here, really. Same thin soup, different bowl. Neville Chamberlain hosts The Daily Show.

The problem is that instead of American national security or that of the West, we are talking about a slightly different issue yet one still vitally connected to the larger whole.

American and Western culture -- the good, the bad and the ugly of it over a few thousand centuries, from Plato to Parker and Shakespeare to Stone -- can thrive only in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. That freedom, as has been made abundantly clear since 9/11, is under full scale assault.

Whether it's planes being rammed into buildings in the heart of the world's financial center or the latest move in Somalia to ban music, intellectual freedom is under attack. The attackers may be organized, they may be unorganized. They may have billions at their disposal, they may have a box cutter. But make no mistake, they are obsessed with the same thing -- achieving victory over the West and all it represents whatever the cost and however long it takes.

They do not care about the safety and security of Trey Parker and Matt Stone or Jon Stewart or Comedy Central or Fox or MSNBC or the best Jewish deli in Manhattan or the next cover girl for Sports Illustrated or any other production of Western culture. The objective is to kill the target of the moment -- and oh by the way, wipe out the rest of us too. No tactic is too small, no weapon big enough.

Which is why the fact that someone as smart as Jon Stewart closes his eyes hoping his sudden Spartacus moment will just somehow go away is disturbing.

This isn't going away. This is real. It has appeared countless times in human history, and it has reared its head once more. This time at Comedy Central, as unlikely as it might seem.
Where the response was exactly the timelessly wrong answer.

The right answer is never to pretend that if you somehow were transported back in time, say to a house in Amsterdam in August of 1944 and the German Grüne Polizei were pounding at your door, you could get away with saying: "Hi. Fox News can %$#@@ themselves. You guys sign the checks. Seig Heil. Ann Frank is upstairs, third door to the right, the room behind the bookcase."

The right answer would be, the right answer is always: I am Ann Frank.

I am Spartacus.

I am Trey Parker. I am Matt Stone.

I am Jon Stewart. And I quit.

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.

A Picture is worth a Thousand Words

Oklahoma Governor's Abortion Veto Overridden

This was the photo and accompanying headline on this morning's CNN website. I know from recent experience -- both my daughter and daughter-in-law are pregnant and have treasured photos of their new babies' ultrasound photos -- that not only is science on the side of the pro-life position, but so is ultrasound technology. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this CNN photo tells us an important part of the story about the shift in public opinion toward a pro-life ethic. 

"democracy" to end all Democracy.

Welcome to the Chicago way.

Tolerance Vigilantes again . . .

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes

It is with great joy that I learned today that Hadley Arkes has been received into the Catholic Church. All the more memorable is this blessed event inasmuch as it occurred in the beautiful chapel of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC, where I lectured during the Emmaus Road Initiative series. I can think of no more appropriate place for this courageous and life-loving man to be received into the Mother Church, surrounded as he was by many of those with whom he has worked so tireless for so long in the pro-life movement.

Let down your nets into the internet.

Put out into the deep, and let down your nets for a catch.
Facing the Reality of an Inter-faced World

"Without fear we must set sail on the digital sea facing into the deep with the same passion that has governed the ship of the Church for two thousand years. Rather than for, albeit necessary, technical resources, we want to qualify ourselves by living in the digital world with a believer’s heart, helping to give a soul to the Internet’s incessant flow of communication".

A Reckless Wreck . . .

For which our childrens' children will be picking up the tab . . .



All this and tax-payer funding of abortion as well.

Nothing short of repeal will repair the damage.

The New Yorker . . .

Carl Olson at Ignatius Insight has an entry in the contest for "... sentence of the month. Nay, year." He's bound to win.

From an April 26, 2010, New Yorker piece, "A Canterbury Tale"—with the subtitle, "The battle within the Church of England to allow women to be bishops"— penned by Jane Kramer (who has emoted for the magazine for nearly fifty years), this gut-splitting bit of rhetorical sputtering:

Rowan Williams, a theologian of huge distinction and, perhaps because of this, almost paralytic reticence, has been trying to broker a peace between his warring priests while Pope Benedict XVI, in Rome, a theologian of less distinction but far steelier entitlement, has seized the chance to publicly invite Anglican clergymen, single and married, and their parishes into the sheltering misogyny of the magisterium.

Be still, and know that she is venting...

Rowan Williams, his extraordinary inability to resist the glamorous appeal of the spirit of the age notwithstanding, has been and probably in many ways still is a respectable theologian. (It's his ecclesiology that is deficient.) But the idea that he is Joseph Ratzinger's theological superior is absurd, but probably no more absurd than the other howlers in Jane Kramer's sentence.

Congratulations to Carl; the prize is his, or does he have to share it with Ms. Kramer?

P.S. to Ontario story below

A quick follow-up on the post below, from LifeSiteNews:

After intense criticism in recent days, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced this afternoon that he has decided to delay implementing the government's controversial and explicit new elementary sex ed curriculum.

Congratulations to those who voiced "intense criticism."

As for the continuing assault by the state on the responsibility of the mother and father for the moral education of their child. Here's a typically complex but richly insightful passage from Philip Rieff:

We are in the age of pseudo-sensibility, not least because our moral revolutionaries are bound, according to their own implicit theories, only to amoral forms. Pseudo-sensibility is easily comprehended; it is the modern talent for acting out the condition of being deeply touched -- hurt and/or healed -- when in fact nothing can touch the actor deeply; he is continually retraining his sensibility from the outside in, for every moral form is a form of inwardness. The pseudo-sensibility of the modern moral revolutionary, based as it must be on amoral forms, constitutes what used to be called "hypocrisy," raised to the status of a science of self and other.

Moral revolutionaries in a transgressive mode: All the drama of a moral struggle in service to the principle that all moral codes subserve individual "choice" and must not constrain it in any way.  Moral posturing in the service of an amoral -- which is to say, doomed -- social order. Push-back in Ontario is most welcome.

Patriotism ... a sign of decency and gratitude

In G. K. Chesterton's day, Catholics in England were suspected of being beholden to foreign influence and inadequately patriotic. Chesterton was himself quite patriotic, which he defended as a natural virtue which was -- he insisted -- not a denial of universal Christian brotherhood -- but rather its natural analogue.

[The Christian] religious culture does indeed encourage [the Christian] to fight to the last for his country, as for his family. But that is because the religious culture is generous and imaginative and humane and knows that men must have intimate and individual ties. But those secondary loyalties are secondary in time and logic to the law of universal morality which justifies them.

Note: Chesterton appeals -- not to universal fellow-feeling (which simply does not exist, any more than a mother or father can credibly claim to love other children as passionately as their own). Rather Chesterton appeals to universal morality, which -- until postmodern relativism came along -- did exist and continues to exist in reality, if not in the sentimentalized imaginations of contemporary "citizens of the world."

As for the virtue of patriotism, Chesterton writes "I have always done my best to defend it, though I have sometimes become suspect by sympathizing with other people's patriotism besides my own."

But I cannot see how it can be defended except as part of a larger morality; and the Catholic morality happens to be one of the very few large moralities now ready to defend it.

Again, what Chesterton calls the "human unity anterior to all these healthy and natural divisions" is rooted in a moral truth, not in some seamlessly uniform affection for "humanity." Eliminate that moral truth by, for instance, refusing to acknowledge the existence of human nature deserving of inalienable dignity, and all the solemn and pious invocations of devotion to "humanity" or, God save us, "the planet," etc. will lead further and further into an abyss of lovelessness masquerading as lofty principle.

Capturing the essence of what Philip Rieff calls the transgressive nature of contemporary cultural life and its deleterious effects on comity and a sense of shared principles, Chesterton offers this:

Religion is of the heart, not of the head; and as long as all our hearts are full of hatred for everything that our fathers loved, we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever about what there is to be hated.

What'll it be? Math or Masturbation?

Well, "we live in a culture that is saturated with sexual imagery," so the obvious answer is: masturbation. After all, we have calculators that will do the math.

Our schools fail to teach our children reliable history or literature, math, science, or the basics of English grammar and usage, but our educational mandarins are tireless in their determination to teach the (very) young, not only about the "birds and the bees," but about masturbation and "oral and anal sex." Canada isn't far ahead of us, and, with "Safe-School Czars" like Kevin Jennings they won't be ahead for long. But here's a glimpse of where most of the country is headed and where much of California and Massachusetts and other states are already.

It's Ontario's new sex-education curriculum:

The revised curriculum, which will be implemented in Ontario schools beginning in the fall, will see Grade 3 students being taught about gender identity and sexual orientation. This is the first time this topic has been specified in the sex education curriculum.

Students in Grade 6 will learn about masturbation and wet dreams while those in Grade 7 will be taught about oral and anal sex.

I am trying to resist the impulse to plunge ever more fully into a synthesis of René Girard, Philip Rieff, and others, but stories like this don't help. Rieff's complex understanding of the fundamentally transgressive nature of our cooingly therapeutic -- that is, anti-credal* -- culture cries out for greater explication in light of lunacies such as we see today: the state assuming the role of parent and teaching -- not a moral discipline upon which a meaningful and genuinely expansive life depends -- but the transgressive imperatives bequeathed to us by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and their countless reflexive and small-minded epigones now running the state's educational establishment.  *(Rieff's terms italicized)

The public, and especially parents, one hopes are finally growing weary of the attempt to pass off this indoctrination as enlightened science or preventative medicine. How perfunctory and hollow those familiar trope are today.

Alex McKay with the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada said although the teachings seem controversial, the move only puts Ontario in line with sex education curricula from other provinces.

"It is developmentally appropriate for students in Grade 3 to have an awareness that not all people are heterosexual," he said. Before any type of education takes place in the schools, many kids are going to be walking through the doors with that awareness anyway. The curriculum is appropriate and knowledge is preferable to ignorance."

Mr. McKay said this new outline for teachers is based on "sound scientific education methods."

"The issue is that we live in a culture that is saturated with sexual imagery and that it is more important than ever that young people have a solid foundation of basic knowledge about human development and sexuality, and that this curriculum helps to deliver that," he said. "It would be compromising the health and well-being of our youth if we shy away from providing this important information and skill set."

Think about that: "compromising the health and well-being of our youth." The statistics on the pathologies and dangers of a homosexual lifestyle are staggering and irrefutable, but we justify the mainstreaming that lifestyle as the promotion of "health and well-being."

Many in the educational establishment have begun to downplay the old refrain about parents getting involved in the process, but the time for that involvement is now.

The video I posted earlier bears viewing in this light. As I said, if this issue gets traction, it will make the Tea Party movement seem like a sleeper.


 

Wafa Sultan Clashes with Muslim Cleric

Speaking Truth to Power . . .

Wafa Sultan Clashes with Muslim Cleric | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

Thanks to my friend Susan Dane for the tip.

That didn't take long . . .

The response was swift and effective. The headline in The New York Times story:

‘South Park’ Episode Is Altered After Muslim Group’s Warning

 

On Thursday afternoon, Trey Parker and Matt Stone released the following statement:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn’t mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we’ll see what happens to it.

If this were a decision based on the principle of treating all religious traditions with equal respect, it would be less contemptible, despite the asymmetrical evidence that one religious tradition is currently lending legitimacy to violence in every corner of the world. But no one in his right mind imagines that this decision is based on any such principle. Very obviously it is based on intimidation. One religious tradition is being given protections that the others -- most notably the tradition that gave birth to religious tolerance and religious freedom in the first place -- are not.

Tariq Ramadan, call your office . . .

The Religion of Peace.
By their works you will know them.

Afghanistan: Girls inhale 'poison' at Kunduz school

Kabul, 21 April (AKI) - At least 12 female students were hospitalised in Afghanistan on Wednesday after inhaling a poisonous substance sprayed at a school in northern Afghanistan.

The 12 students of the Fatima Zahra Girl School, and a teacher and an assistant were mysteriously poisoned, Hamayon Khamush, director of the hospital in Kunduz city, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

The Taliban's strict form of fundamentalist Islam prohibits girls from attending school.

To defend their ideology, Taliban militants have attacked girl students with gas and acid.

In May last year 90 girls were hospitalised in Kapisa province, north-east of the capital, after someone sprayed toxic chemicals in the classroom.

A similar gas attack reportedly took place on Tuesday in Shina, a suburb of Kabul, where over a dozen girl students had to be sent to hospital after exhibiting symptoms of poisoning.

The (not so) Dismal Science

The dismal science needn't be so dismal. For those who have neglected it, here's a refresher. Once again, Hillsdale College behaves the way the university should. Agree or disagree, this lecture may be long, but it is not only informative, but it is entertaining. Here's Professor Burton W. Folson, Jr. Enjoy.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Turkish Delight
The European Welfare State

The estimable Theodore Dalrymple has an article in the New English Review very much worth reading. It is his reflections on his recent extended visit to two decaying steel towns in Britain. As we have come to expect, in both he found signs aplenty -- not only of economic collapse -- but of profound moral and cultural decay. I link to his article because I think what he saw represents the future for the aging and culturally exhausted remnants of Western Civilization -- very much eventually including the American outpost of that civilization -- if we follow the present European path which has led to precisely what Dalrymple found in Northern England and Wales.

The ex-steel town in Northern England had been selected by the government, or by some department thereof, as a place of settlement for asylum-seeking refugees, mainly Kurds from Iran and Iraq. These young men – they were overwhelmingly young men – had made their way across dangerous and hostile territory, often by very chancy means, to reach Britain. I know from experience of talking to them that it is not easy to arrive at an estimate of their true motives for coming: but whatever those motives might be, their initiative and willingness to take risks can scarcely be doubted. If allowed to be, they could be an asset to the country that received them.

Instead of which the official policy was to turn them as quickly as possible into welfare dependants. Unable either to prevent them from coming or to deport them once they have arrived, British officialdom in its wisdom has decided to prohibit them from working, and to enforce this prohibition it has selected places like this ex-steel town, where unemployment is near-universal, as their enforced place of residence. So there they congregate, quickly turned from adventurous and eager young men into dispirited idlers, mere habitues of billiard halls and consumers of pornography on the public library’s computers (or as near to pornography as library’s system would permit): that is, when the most enterprising among them they did not become traffickers in something or other.

In both towns, the only economic activity is the administration of poverty and the recycling of government subventions, usually through supermarkets and charity (thrift) shops. Even the charity shops are in effect governmental because most of the larger charities in Britain have been nationalised, their most important donors now being the government. I enter these shops – the Germans have a saying that never fails to come to mind as I do so, namely ‘It smells of poor people here’ – because they always have a few books for resale, overwhelmingly the trashiest of trashy novels, but usually (and unaccountably) with an academic tome among them at a knockdown price, for example Herbert S Klein’s African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

If anyone doubts the existence or reality of a dependency culture, he should visit one of these two towns. They are East European communist towns with a bit more consumer choice, but not much the better for that, and in some respects worse, in so far as there is less intellectual ferment in them.

The people do not walk so much as trudge, plastic bags hanging from them like heavy fruit. They are grey-faced, bowed-down, prematurely aged, arthritic before their time. An astonishing proportion of them need (or at any rate use) walking sticks from their thirties onwards. Many of them are enormously fat, and one can imagine them completely immobile by the age of sixty. The small children – overwhelmingly illegitimate, of course, for more than half of children born in Britain are now illegitimate, and the poorer the area (except for Indian and Pakistani immigrants) the higher the proportion – are devoid of the sweetness of young childhood, instead having a fixed look of malice on their faces by the age of three. Ferret-faced young men, attired in international ghetto costume, often with a hood, stand around talking to one another, at least a third of their words being ‘fuck’ or one of its cognates. The young women are all highly sexualised without being in the least alluring. Their fate is to have children by more than one of the ferret-faced young men.

Hopelessness, indifference, apathy is everywhere, omnipresent like the gases of the atmosphere. No Indian or African slum has ever affected men in the same way: this is far, far worse. Energy is dissipated before it is expended, as if by some kind of magnetism. The people are not starving – if anything, the problem is the reverse – nor are they living in physically intolerable housing conditions, though their houses are depressingly ugly. That so many are festooned with satellite dishes is a bad sign: where satellite dishes are many and prominent, the people are bored and listless. Litter lies everywhere and many people do not clear it even from their own front yards, preferring to wade their way through it to their front doors. . . .

The situation is this: the people, for the most part, are not well-educated and they have no skills. The next generation will not be well-educated either, because the state educational system steadfastly refuses to teach. But unskilled labour in factories is unavailable and will never be available again, at least not without protectionism that would wreck the world economy as a whole.

Thanks to the subventions they receive, and no doubt to the loss of the work ethic or habit, their labour is unlikely ever to be worth as much to an employer as he would have to pay them to make it worthwhile for them to go to work. After all, as things stand, their rent is paid, their local taxes are paid, their schooling and health care are paid, they have to make no contribution to ensure they will get a pension, and their bus fares are paid. Their one responsibility is to stretch out the cash-subvention that they receive in such a way that they can eat, smoke, drink and watch television.

The culture of dependency, the White Witch's latest offer.

Hat Tip to my friend Jill Fallon at Business of Life

The "Sacred" . . .

In an earlier post, here, I made reference to Philip Rieff's use of the word "sacred," pointing out that it was not exactly what René Girard usually means by that word. Not exactly, but there are interconnections. Here is further elucidation.

Rieff performs a massive interpretive exploration of the work of the German sociologist Max Weber. He sometimes makes the reader work to keep up with his extraordinary insights, but it is worth the effort. The passage below contains references to ideas central to Rieff's larger project. I will not try to contextualize them here; I think -- and hope -- that the overall sense comes through despite the complexity. His reference to the university bears the hallmarks of the student unrest of the latter quarter of the 20th century during which Rieff was a university professor, making his remarks slightly -- only slightly -- anachronistic.  I have other minor quibbles with the quotation below, in general it is so bold and brilliant that I don't feel the need to let them interfere at this point.

Some will be put off by Rieff's apocalyptic tone, as some have been by René Girard's. By quoting it, I may be tarred with that brush. I take refuge in Girard's insistence that "The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope." That, at least, is my reason for calling your attention to Rieff's jeremiad.

Rieff's point of departure in what follows is Weber's brilliant definition of the sacred, one which illustrates its cultural significance, namely that: "The sacred is the uniquely unalterable." Returning to his analysis of the indispensability of cultural norms, Rieff elaborates on the Weber's lapidary formula:

Here is the crux of the anti-political meaning of charisma: the interdicts must be uniquely unalterable -- i.e. sacred. Political charisma is patently anti-interdictory, a form of desacralization -- in short, transgressive, which is so utterly opposed to the "uniquely unalterable" that transgressives treat their acts, rightly, as the ultimate alternative to the sacred. In a culture without sacramental action, indeed, transgressive motifs have displaced interdictory as the most demanding. We scarcely remember what the sacred is -- and are horrified by what we have forgotten. Anything that is uniquely unalterable horrifies us even to imagine, because we are living, acting transgressions. We are the horror. To us, nothing is sacred . . .

Rieff would later say: "Anyone knowledgeable enough about himself as an organization man knows that evil angels have all but seized control of the world; everything is explained by my deeply felt theory of transgressions except the way out."

There is, I think, no doubt about the explanatory power of Rieff's theory of transgressions -- though it is really a theory of historical desacralization which will bear its greatest fruit when integrated with Girard's work on that subject -- there is a hint at least of "the way out" it seems to me. It is found in his fascinating and brilliant observation Rieff makes that the culture he sees succumbing to the transgressive imperatives once kept in check by sacred interdictions is "a culture without sacramental action."

Therein lies the hidden -- carefully hidden -- hope for those with eyes to see. The alternative -- ultimately the only alternative -- to the sacred is the sacramental. The only thing that can replace the implacable unalterability of the old sacred system that was dismantled on Golgotha is the covenantal unalterability of the sacramental, as in, "I will be with you until the end of the age," inasmuch as you "do this in remembrance of me."

"The world will pass away, but my words will not pass away."