Throne and Altar

Christian tradition enjoins us to recall often that we are each fated to die. Cicero and Montaigne consider it the point of philosophy “to learn how to die”. During Advent, I have devoted my daily prayer and meditation to considerations of my own death.

It’s often said that a person radically reconsiders his priorities in light of the thought that his end is immanent. (The assumption being that he then orders them more rightly.) Supposedly, the thought of death is supposed to turn our minds from work and duty to frivolities like “bucket lists”, but that is certainly not the case for me. On my deathbed, I probably won’t care about missing that promotion, but I certainly won’t care about missing that vacation.

Like Pascal, I am exasperated by those who claim not to be interested in a life after this one. On my deathbed, it will certainly matter a great deal to me if I am headed for some altered existence or to complete oblivion. Here is one place where my intuition supports Christianity–in the face of personal extinction, I realize how fake is all this talk of “living on” in other peoples’ memories (I want my family to remember me, but his is certainly not the same as continued existence) or rejoining some great web of life or impersonal universal consciousness. Death reveals to us like nothing else the irreplaceable value of each individual. Each human soul is an entire world in itself. Any consolation that obscures this insight is morally suspect.

Another intuition that supports Christianity is that how we die, the final state of our allegiances, is all-important. From a secular, worldly point of view, this doesn’t make sense. A consistent secularist would, I think, find a life well-lived ending in a brief fit of despair and resentment preferable to a wasted life ending in last-minute repentance. Why should this one moment outweigh all others simple for its being last? Yet we all sense it to be true, a sort of intuition of a final judgment.

Tradition puts great stress on a good death as something we should pray for and prepare for. The Catholic schoolboy in my wonders why this should be so difficult. As long as I go to Confession between my final mortal sin and death, I should be set, right? And what sorts of mortal sins is a bedridden dying man likely to commit? In fact, I now think the spiritual danger in this last hour of testing is immense.

I’ve pointed out some intuitions of death that support Christianity, but others oppose it. In particular, the terror we feel of death, the self-preservation instinct, does not match the assurances of faith. Atheists sometimes say that people believe in an afterlife because of wishful thinking. This may be true, but hope is not the only emotion that guides belief; there is also a tendency to believe what we fear or whatever most vividly captures the imagination. A vivid sense of one’s own death can disturb one’s taken-for-granted confidence in life after death; so it was for Saint Therese of Lisieux and for me.

I can easily imagine a person horrified by his immanent death rationalizing his instinctive fear by deciding that death is extinction and from this that religion itself is a lie. Worse, he realizes how frightfully alone he is in this ultimate calamity, that his death will be the annihilation of his world but of his alone, and he comes to resent and even hate those whom he sees will so callously continue existing after him. This temptation to loneliness and resentment can be seen in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and we all see in today’s culture how naturally self-pity leads to resentment and hatred. Yes, there is a real danger that a dying man might reject the faith and die cursing those people and things he valued in life. One could say that no man has any incentive to make such an ugly end. However, resentment never makes hedonic sense. Similar to what I’ve said about sexual fantasies, resentment is a sin which brings the sinner no pleasure or advantage, and yet we all indulge in it sometimes.

Those who don’t doubt the bare existence of life after death may still be tempted to despair. It’s said that the dying may be tormented by memories of their sins, may doubt God’s forgiveness and cast away any hope of it. The logical response would be to appeal all the more fervently to God’s mercy, but again we know how little force bare logic has at the moment of crisis.

To die a good death, trusting God and blessing those we leave behind, one calls upon the resources of a prior lifetime of spiritual preparation. I ask myself what thoughts or memories could carry me through this horrifying ordeal, an ordeal that is coming and will happen. I find that the two thoughts “I shall cease to exist” and “I am alone” are coupled to each other in my mind, the connection being intuitive rather than logical. (Belief in an afterlife seems natural to humanity, and I suspect the ability to question it arose historically along with a growing sense of interior world of subjectivity being separate, “cut off from”, the outer world of objects.) And yet I am not alone. While my subjective existence is not fully communicable to other creatures (so what would “live on” in them would be not me, my inner being, but certain effects and impressions of me), God Himself is fully present there, now and up to the moment of my death. Saint Paul insists that Christ has “gone before us”, mostly to assure us that we can share in His death, but also that He is with us in ours. If I truly believe that He is with me, inside me, I find it natural to trust that He will not allow me or whatever good He has done in me to be completely destroyed. Such trust is a divine grace, but its operation is necessarily not totally opaque to us. One might sense it building over a lifetime of prayer. One might draw confidence by looking back upon earlier moments of grace, moments of spiritual consolation or moral clarity when God’s presence had seemed clear and almost tangible. Remembering how He guided me thus far, I might trust that He remains with me and will not abandon me in my last moment.

How can one know a source is trustworthy? One could do it by independently confirming everything the source says, but if I can do that and am willing to do that, then the trustworthy source is useless. Thus the argument that one cannot base one’s knowledge on external authority. However, it proves too much, because in fact we often identify trustworthy sources. When Christians affirm the inerrancy of the Bible, and Catholics and Orthodox the infallibility of the Church, this is not illogical or arbitrary. Identifying a trustworthy source does go beyond strict logical demonstration to invoke what Newman called the “illative sense”–the intuition that multiple lines of evidence converge on a conclusion.

Consider a related question–have you ever met someone who was smarter than you? I certainly have. How did you know? If another person’s reasoning skills exceed your own, how do you know he’s not just BSing? There are several marks we recognize when in the presence of a mind superior to our own.

• He is reliable in those cases we can independently check–right for the right reason.
• In particular, he turns out to be reliable in cases where the truth was initially unclear to us, but in which later and with much effort we realize that he was right for the right reason. Chesterton emphasized how impressive it is for a source to be right when nearly everyone else (including initially ourselves) is wrong.
• He is able in some cases to clarify what was confusing to our own unaided intellects, so that we see after he has explained it that he grasped the essence of the thing, which we could only do after it was pointed out to us.
• In other cases, his reasoning is beyond our ability to understand. Reasoning beyond our power is distinguishable from gibberish. We can grasp bits of it with difficulty and recognize its profundity. We find that when we grant the conclusion of an argument we can’t follow, that many other truths come together in a compelling and beautiful way.

I titled this post “How do I know the Catholic Church is infallible?” rather than “How can one know that the Catholic Church is infallible?” or “How can it be demonstrated that the Catholic Church is infallible?” because how I know it will be different from how you could know it. Rather like how we can each know that the mass media is a giant conspiracy to deceive the public, but my proof will be different from yours, because we each have different private certainties with which to contest the media’s monopoly on public truth. In both cases, the truth of the matter is objective–I do not mean to imply that the Church is infallible only “for me”, i.e. as a statement not about the Church but about some personal existential decision. The Church is infallible, but I can only give you some of the signs of that infallibility that are compelling to me.

The Catholic Church is infallible because Protestantism is true! What could be more intuitive than that men’s good and bad acts are the fruit of his own free will, and that the role of a just God is to reward the good and punish the wicked? Yet Christianity insists that it is God’s grace that gives man his love for God and his desire and strength of will to do good. None can boast, for if I “earn” salvation, this will itself be God’s predestining generosity. This is not something I would have come up with on my own, but its rightness is intuitively striking to me. Should I not be grateful for my avoided sins and my meager virtues? Of course, says my pious instinct, and orthodox theology explains why.

The Catholic Church is infallible because Eastern Orthodoxy is true! What could be more elevated, more “spiritual”, than to assume that God always imparts His grace in a purely spiritual way, directly to the individual soul in its private relation to Him? Yet the apostolic Church insists that God acts sacramentally, through signs by enacting their meanings, through His Church on Earth. For in a religion where only spiritual acts of individual souls count, what purpose could there be for the Incarnation? Signs have the ability to transcend private spiritual acts. By becoming man, the Son could offer himself as a sacrifice in a public, physical and symbolically communicable way; the Eucharist is our sacramental incorporation into this sacrifice, and the Church is the body of believers thus incorporated. Catholicism has retained the most primitive features of religion–the sacred-profane dichotomy, ritual, priesthood, sacrifice–instinctively recognizing that religion needs these primitive elements not only to have force, but also to make sense.

The Catholic Church is infallible because she is incompatible with the modern world! What could be more gratifying to modern man than a religion that affirms him in all his prejudices–freedom! equality! equity! democracy! socialism! free sex! The Catholic Church is absolutely incompatible with all these things, thank God–even and especially her worst enemies will grant her that! She is among us, but not of us. A rare thing indeed, when even scientific professional societies spout political statements for the Leftist Regime, hopping on command like trained monkeys. Indeed, nothing could be more useless to modern man than a religion that affirms him in all his prejudices, and once he is brought by some higher authority to see them from the outside, he sees how utterly contemptible these prejudices are.

The Catholic Church is infallible because her teaching doesn’t make sense to me! An authority that truly transcends me should have some teachings I don’t understand, and a worthy obedience should include assent to propositions beyond my independent judgment. I do not understand the reasons for the Church’s condemnation of usury, for example, despite Zippy’s patient attempts to explain them. However, looking at the world around us, effectively controlled by a parasitic financial class whose members are outstanding in the wickedness of their beliefs and behavior, the truth of the Church’s teaching is amply demonstrated. That individuals and societies which embrace usury fall into such manifest depravity proves that the thing itself is spiritually corrupting, whether one understands how it is or not. The perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary is not something I would have believed on my own; why should the one woman without sin have neglected her marital duty? Yet holy men throughout the centuries have been passionately convinced of this doctrine, and since their spiritual sensibility is far superior to mine, it is clear that the Church is right and I am wrong. The doctrines of the Ascension of Jesus and the Assumption of Mary make no sense to me–where are their bodies supposed to have gone? But wiser men than I have seen no difficulty here, so I conclude that I once again am wrong, and I just need to think more until I identify my hidden, flawed assumption, and the doctrines make sense. No doubt I still hold many false beliefs about the world and am grateful that the Church continues to “scandalize” me into shaking them off.

The Catholic Church is infallible because she says she is! Just as C. S. Lewis pointed out that it makes no sense to accept Jesus as a wise teacher and holy man who falsely and blasphemously asserted divinity, it would not do to accept the Church as a generally reliable guide but deny her emphatically-stated claim to authority. She is not content to be one advising voice, and when I consider the many errors from which she has already saved me, my own intellectual deficiencies, and the perversity of all other influences, I cannot but be grateful for her authoritarianism. Furthermore, there is the social dimension to consider. By denying the Church’s authority, I would be separating myself from a community and indeed joining its enemies. Such considerations may seem orthogonal to the consideration of truth, but this is so only if reasoning is an individual and not a social activity. If my reasoning depends on a living community and its traditions, then the search for truth must take on a social and political aspect, a concern to maintain the preconditions of my thinking that manifests itself in the call to obedience.

Some say that the conservative veneration of authority is mere nostalgia, an outdated model of society, or even anti-Christian. I strenuously disagree-authority is a core category of the social world, and its moral quality cannot be understood without it. However, it must be properly understood. In particular, it must be clear in what sort of social analysis one is engaged when one speaks of authority.

Each society has what Marxists call an ideology, a set of officially-sanctioned concepts and beliefs that the society uses to articulate its explicit understanding of itself. The Marxists are correct to note that these ideological categories can be self-serving nonsense, and in our society they assuredly are. Consider our labeling of the most despised segments of society as “privileged” or the fiction of the public-private distinction according to which the major media, large corporations, and universities are not part of the government in some meaningful sense.

These pretensions can often be debunked by engaging in an amoral, “view from outside”, sociological analysis of how decisions are actually made and where power (including psychological influence) is actually held. When done honestly, analysis of this sort must be agnostic about all claims of right or justice, considering them only by the effect of such claims on power dynamics. This sociological-power perspective abstracts away much of the all-important “surface” of social life and is thus seriously incomplete, but it is perfectly valid in its own methodological domain. These are, then, two modes of understanding the social order: the ideological and the sociological.

The conservative analysis of authority belongs to neither of these, but to a third mode of analysis which I will call the analysis of moral experience. Like sociological analysis, this third mode abstracts from the narratives the society uses to explain itself; the truth or falsity of these is put to the side, and they are relevant only to the extent that they affect the moral “facts on the ground”. Unlike the sociological mode, analysis of moral experience includes all dimensions of man’s existential situation as a sexual, social, rational animal who finds himself already in a net of dependencies on those for whom he is responsible and those to whom he owes gratitude, who can only become an integrated moral being by having a rational ordering of the goods making claim upon his loyalty. It infers that, given basic biological and moral facts, not only men but also institutions have essential natures, that their functions and responsibilities are not entirely a matter of human choice. (One might call this the “Confucian principle”.) For example, one can imagine a government formed by social contract entirely for the protection of property. However, once an organization has aggregated to itself such power, it would be unjustifiable not to use it to protect life and to interest itself in basic aspects of the common good as well. In short, it must assume all the essential functions of government.

The duty to obey certain people precedes any legitimating narrative. You might object that this is logically impossible, that a sense of duty cannot precede its ideological justification, except that we have all experienced this. Government existed for millennia before anyone invented the theory of social contract; the theory of the divine right of kings is scarcely older; nor have commoners probably ever interested themselves much in rules of succession. I am aware of no extended arguments for the authority of parents; such a thing is obvious, a premise rather than a conclusion of political philosophy. When analyzing moral experience, we are not attempting to invent stories to justify these feelings of obligation. Nor do we attempt to debunk them–they are prima facie legitimate simply by virtue of existing. We just want to understand them.

When we observe authoritative relations, here are some things we find.

There are authorities but no absolute sovereign (unless we are analyzing in the sociological-power mode, e.g. Schmitt). That is, there are multiple Earthly authorities, all deriving their mandate directly from God, rather than one of them holding a plenitude of authority and delegating to the others. The government is one authority, but so are parents, priests, professional societies, and even humble homeowners (when you’re in his house, you follow his rules). The defining act of tyranny is overriding other authorities in their rightful claims over their subjects, rather than overriding some personal freedom.

To be a relation of authority, it must be ordered to a common good and a commonly recognized moral order, not merely transactional. It may take careful thought to determine if, in a given society, the relation of employers to employees is one of authority or merely one of exchange. Obedience becomes vexing when the holder of authority personally rejects aspects of the moral order. However, the holder of authority is to be distinguished from the operation of authority; as long as the latter is unaffected by the holder’s immoral beliefs, its prerogatives remain.

All authority derives from God, and is therefore a mode of His presence to us in the world and is therefore in a sense sacred and entitled not only to our obedience but also to our honor. The paradigmatic case of authority is, of course, fatherhood, and to the extent that an authority participates in the Form of fatherhood, it is entitled to a share in the reverence of filial piety.

An authority we are obliged to obey only when we agree with its orders is no authority at all. Usually, we are obliged to obey even orders that we think foolish and counterproductive. We should, of course, refuse to obey immoral orders. This restriction is broader than a requirement that we abstain from the positive commission of intrinsically evil acts. One should not, for example, obey an order that a man should not be fed even when there is sufficient food but rather allowed to starve, or (the spiritual analogue) that no one should teach him the Christian faith. By natural law analysis, starving a man is objectively murder just as much as shooting him, regardless of an intention merely to obey orders. Authority may still lawfully command that you refrain from giving him things not needed for his survival or not giving him knowledge not needed for his salvation. Prudence is undoubtedly needed in ascertaining the limits of lawful obedience.

We find that the extent of authority–both of who and what it may command–is quite variable, although there is more uniformity for certain “natural” authorities such as those of husbands, parents, and government, for which universal social Forms come into play. What is or is not theoretically authorized by the reigning political ideology is irrelevant per se to the moral facts on the ground.

Authority lays claim to obedience, not belief. We must obey our rulers, but we are under no obligation to consider their rules wise. Authorities may offer reasons to sway our belief, but they cannot command belief. We trust our parents (at least when we are young), but that is a separate matter from their authority. (An example of the latter would be helping your brother pick up his mess because your mother told you so, even though you still think it’s not fair.) The Church can rightly command our belief, but that is because she is infallible, which is a separate competence from her authority.

Saint Paul and Jesus Himself affirm that all authority on Earth comes from God. Satan remains the Prince of this world, not that he has any rightful authority over us–God forbid!–but that he remains the preeminent power. (You’ll have noticed that wars are almost always won by the more-evil side and how events always seem to conspire to advance the Left.) One might say that his princedom applies to the sociological-power analysis mode (imagining, if you will, a non-positivist, spiritually-aware power analysis) rather than to the mode of moral experience.

Obedience to authority is not a necessary evil, a regrettable consequence of the Fall. Nor is it a mark of spiritual childishness, something we are ideally destined to outgrow. It is an intrinsic good, a key way whereby men can experience their social world as rational, as integrated to the moral order and its Author.

What does it mean that Satan is the prince of this world? I take it to mean that the world is fundamentally hostile, that holiness is “moving uphill” and sin is “moving downhill”. In particular, impersonal forces alway oppose Christianity and support the Left. Changes in technology, in economic structures, in cultural fads–in summary, everything that we think of as a cause of changes in society that are not direct human choices, always and everywhere tend to erode Christian belief and morals and to support personal hedonism and secular tyranny. Atheist materialism just happens; the good must be consciously chosen. Natural and economic disasters favor the Left, but so do the general social drifts in times of comfort and prosperity. Furthermore, chance nearly always favors the Enemy. Chance plays a great role in war, and you will have noticed that the overall-more-evil side usually wins wars, that fortune nearly always frowns on the defenders of Christendom. The last war whose outcome I’m entirely satisfied with is the Spanish Civil War, and I take it that in that war, the good guys won only because General Franco was a much more competent leader than anyone on Satan’s side, and this was able to overcome the natural advantage of evil.

You may encounter this even in your personal life. When people decide to reform and “get right with God”, I don’t think they do it–even unconsciously–in order to win favor in their worldly affairs, but they do at least unconsciously tend to take good fortune as a mark of divine favor, and it seems fitting to them that becoming a better person should make life better, at least in the emotional sense of more contentment and happiness and better personal relationships. However, because Satan is the prince of this world, then when a person makes a commitment that really puts him on God’s side, he should instead be prepared for a string of bad luck. If he decides to get serious about prayer, he suddenly starts having bad news at school, at work, with his kids’ behavior or his parents’ health. If he starts preparing to be canceled and lose his job for loyalty to the truth, he suddenly finds himself being hit by painfully expensive home repair or family health problems, strokes of bad luck to make it especially difficult to have a break in steady income. If he volunteers to help the Church through catechesis, bible study, the youth group, or whatever, he will have a string of bad weather, broken technology, impossible scheduling problems, and parish indifference. He sees that those who serve the Enemy seem to go from one fortuitous victory to another. “Why are you doing this, God?” he asks, but it’s not God. It’s the other guy.

The Right should abandon hope that impersonal forces serve them as they have so often served the Left, that Leftist programs will collapse on their own without anyone having to stick his or her neck out and disagree with it from a strictly moral perspective, facing down the resulting media/academic/business/government wrath. For example, it is hoped that some Leftist program will prove too expensive, that some egalitarian dogma will collapse under the weight of contrary biological research, that hostile businesses or schools will “go broke”, that the American empire will be defeated in war (or, at least, that such a defeat would benefit us in some way), that high energy prices in Europe or criminal anarchy in American cities will finally break the spell and cause the people to repent their Leftism, and until then we can wait and come out of hiding after this happens. Nothing of the sort will happen; Satan is the prince of this world. Certainly, Leftist programs may sometimes fail to deliver their promised results, but that in itself will not bring mankind one step toward repentance and spiritual renewal. No one “falls” into God’s side. God must, through His grace, inspire free actual acts of faith, hope, and charity. Probably nothing can defeat the Left, but if it could be defeated, it could only be by a large enough group of people openly defying it on fundamental moral principle. We should not do this recklessly. Everything must be thought through, because as soon as we challenge the Left, things will start going wrong, and luck will never be on our side. I’m not even writing this under my legal name, after all. However, there’s no point in hoping that some big global political-economic catastrophe is going to eliminate Satan’s kingdom for us.

• Barfield takes the true nature of things as they are in themselves (as opposed to things as sensed and conceptualized by us) to be what is revealed by physics. The precise nature of this revelation of “the particles”/”the unrepresented” does not matter much for the argument, only that the world thus revealed is quite alien to our ordinary way of thinking and speaking about the world.
• Therefore, phenomenal objects like rainbows and trees are actually a combination of sense data stimulated by the objects themselves and a layer of ordering and interpretation imposed unconsciously by the mind.
• The distinction between this unconscious “figuration” and conscious thought about the resulting phenomena (“alpha thinking”) is crucial. E.g. the experience hearing a dog barking seems to be unitary. I don’t (consciously) first experience sound from acoustic waves stimulating my ear, then think to myself “What is that noise?”, then compare with all the sounds I remember, and conclude that the sound is a dog. All that must be going on in the background, but I don’t consciously think through each step. Therefore, the raw material of all my alpha thinking has already gone through a level of mental processing.
• Unlike Kant, but like Spengler, Barfield thinks these “figurations”/”representations” are not fixed structures of the human mind, but are at least partly social constructs, which have varied among peoples and among times. As will be seen below, he differs from Spengler in that he thinks it possible for people to creatively alter their representations.
• We can also think about how we think. This he calls “beta thinking”. The entire investigation of figuration, alpha thinking, and beta thinking is itself an exercise in beta thinking.
• Primitive peoples don’t do beta thinking, but they are aware of being involved in their figurations in the following indirect sense. They imagine that the phenomena are manifestations of things like themselves, e.g. animist spirits. This identification is said to be at the level of figuration rather than as a conscious (alpha thinking) inference. This outlook is called “original participation”, presumably because we can share the same states/actions as these beings behind the phenomena. “Participation” is a crucial concept in the book, and I think I still don’t really understand all that Barfield means by it.
• We are apt to deeply misunderstand Greek and medieval thought because we impose our own representational world onto them, so that even individual words take on rather different meanings from what they originally had.
• At the current level of spiritual evolution, we can only recognize our role in creating our phenomenal worlds by beta thinking. We also tend to forget our role in this process and think of the representations as being entirely objective. Thus, the “representations” become “idols”. The accusation seems unfair, since people of the scientific revolution and after, when original participation is supposed to have totally died, were obsessed with beta thinking.
• An example of “idolatry” is using our representations to talk about the Earth before the arrival of humans, and other inaccessible regions like the bottom of the sea, the interior of the Earth, and outer space. At most, we should say that if beings with senses like ours and representations like those of 20th-century Europeans were in such places, this is what they would observe. Barfield objects even to this, saying that for such talk about the pre-human past to be meaningful, a “collective unconscious” must have existed even then. I don’t understand this objection at all.
• Today, participation has died more or less completely. Our idols are completely unlike us, and we mistake them for the objective world. This is spiritually unhealthy and dangerous for reasons I didn’t really follow.
• The solution is a new state called “final participation”. I’m not quite sure what this means, but I think it involves people becoming more consciously aware of our representation-forming (and not only when we turn aside from the phenomena to do beta thinking) and even achieving some freedom to alter the process. Some experimentation toward this happened in English and German Romanticism.
• Why is final participation a desirable state? Not being sure what it is, I can’t really say. By and large, the realization that the human senses and mind contribute to phenomenal experience was met by Europeans as bad news, as constituting a sort of barrier between the knower and things as they are “in themselves”, an argument for skepticism and alienation from the world. Wouldn’t final participation be an intensification of this? I suppose one might use one’s freedom over the representations of one’s imagination to make them better resemble objective reality, “the unrepresented”, e.g. quantum fields. However, the reason we don’t do this already is that objective reality as revealed by high-energy physics is not very serviceable for practical life. Alternatively, one might choose to accept the collective representations of one’s people, as past generations have done, but as a free and deliberate act of solidarity. Barfield himself thinks it will give us a better sense of God’s immanence in the world and in particular His likeness to us (since we too would be consciously taking on a sort of co-creator role of our phenomenal worlds).

I’m not sure that the main ideas are the main point of the book, which contains many wonderful digressions on the history of Western thought. The proposal that I (and many others) have been systematically misreading ancient and medieval thinkers is intriguing and quite plausible.

The arguments that slavery per se is immoral are very weak, something one doesn’t notice only because no one is allowed to challenge them. They usually either prove too much and would condemn any authority or social organization (e.g. complaints about one person’s will being allowed to override another’s) or they object only to potential abuses of a slaveholder’s power, which were in fact illegal in many slave societies, and in any case are insufficient to demonstrate the immorality of the institution itself. Some arguments confuse the morality of holding slaves with that of enslaving free persons without cause (as if there is no moral distinction between stealing someone’s property and that person being poor). The most popular one simply asserts that slaveowners don’t “recognize the full humanity” of their slaves, whatever that means. It might be more convincing if the abolitionists could show us where slaveowning societies (Roman, Arab, South American, whatever) explicitly claimed that their slaves were not human, but some other nonsentient species.

Of all these arguments, the argument from abuse carries the most weight with me, even though logically it cannot be used to condemn slavery per se. It does put together a good case that slavery is morally hazardous and so other arrangements of social organization are usually to be preferred.

You could say that my skepticism makes me a moral monster, but in fact no one really believes slavery is always immoral. Consider that it has been practiced in most times in most places. Africans have held Africans as slaves. Arabs have held Africans and Whites as slaves. Whites have held Whites and Africans as slaves. (Jared Taylor has a nice post on the permutations.) And yet no one–not one of our most fervid abolitionists–ever, ever, ever objects in the slightest way to any of these except the White-African one. Thus, people’s objection is clearly not to slavery per se, but to Whites holding Blacks as slaves in particular. (Even Blacks selling Blacks to Whites is only immoral at the buyer’s end.) Whites are not held to be morally inferior to Blacks because of American slavery; rather, American slavery is objected to because of the logically prior moral inferiority of Whites to Blacks! Consider a comparison. When Pope Gregory the Great forbid Jews from owning Christian slaves, was that an anti-slavery measure, or an anti-Jewish measure?

So, really, when I say that the arguments that slavery is intrinsically immoral are weak, I’m not challenging a position everybody else believes; I’m attacking a position nobody else believes.

Political reactionaries and orthodox Catholics are often accused of engaging in nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The accusation is peculiar, for similar reasons as the accusation that American conservatives are nostalgic for the 1950s. Insofar as the Catholic prefers the Middle Ages for its religion, or the monarchist and neofeudalist prefer it for its social organization, or the European (French, English, etc) nationalist honors it for giving birth to his country, such a person is not indulging in nostalgia, but acting on loyalty to a universal principle or a living people. What’s more, genuine nostalgia for the Middle Ages, just like nostalgia for the 1950’s, is quite widespread, and not only among Catholics or on the Right. This manifests itself in popular culture as a fascination with fantasy and fairy tales, of knights, castles, witches, wizards, fire-breathing dragons, palace intrigue, beautiful princesses in distress, jolly friars, peasant simplicity, King Arthur, Merlin, Robin Hood, Rapunzel, and Briar Rose. Of course, such reveries are hardly a faithful picture of the Middle Ages, but they are imagined in at least vaguely medieval settings. It is this medieval nostalgia, that of popular fantasy, and not the principled approval of Catholic monarchists, that I wish to consider.

There is no shortage of people who regard any positive sentiment toward the Middle Ages as foolishness. The main criticisms of medieval times are that 1) it was an awful time to be alive, a time of violence, poverty, and injustice, and 2) it was a culturally sterile time, making no significant contribution to literature, art, or science. The criticisms are independent, and there are historians who dispute one or both of them. However, even if it were true that the Middle Ages were a millennium of time wasted on violence and superstition, acknowledging this would not dampen their hold on our imagination, which was never drawn to this time by the thought of cultural achievement or admirable economic arrangements to begin with.

Americans in particular can understand the romance of the Middle Ages, because it is like our own romantic attachment to the Wild West. The Middle Ages was the Wild West of Europe, a time of weak central government, in which resulting anarchy great acts of heroism and villainy were possible, and the safety of the innocent might depend on the courage and martial prowess of one man. Nostalgia for the Middle Ages, if that’s what it is, certainly doesn’t idealize the Middle Ages. If anything, it would prefer to exaggerate how violent and chaotic they were, just as Western movies no doubt exaggerate how violent day-to-day life was during the early settlement of western America.

Drama and excitement are part of the appeal of Wild Wests, but there is another part, which is the real reason for hostility to the Middle Ages. Each people particularly cherishes the memory of its own Wild West, far more even than the memory of its own Lost Golden Age. (Does Western Civilization even have a Lost Golden Age? There are ages we admire for their accomplishments or heroism, but is there any time during which we like to imagine all was basically right under heaven?) A people sees the characters of its Wild West as revelations of that people’s character. Americans are still cowboys at heart, underneath the constraints of civilization, or at least so we like to imagine. Medieval kings, princesses, and wizards have a special appeal to Europeans and the European diaspora as revelations of the European spirit, still living underneath our science and ubiquitous social control. The things we are supposed to approve–science, democracy, bureaucracy–are forms that can be adapted by any people; the stories of how we were before we had those forms are stories of us in ourselves.

Thus the hostility to any fond remembrance of the Middle Ages, and the desire to destroy or de-Europeanize fantasy and fairy tales. They are a sign that we Europeans don’t yet entirely hate ourselves.

I oppose reform, not just this or that ill-considered reform, but reform in general. I’ve brought this up before with regard to the Catholic Church, a much reform-ridden entity, but reform is poison for any group.

To understand this, one must be clear about what “reform” is. Not all changes tend to be described as reforms. It would sound strange to hear that Beethoven “reformed” music, or that Einstein “reformed” physics, or that Cooley and Tukey “reformed” the discrete Fourier transform. New styles, innovations, and improvements are usually not considered reforms; I am entirely in favor of creativity in the fine arts, improvement of the practical arts, and advancement of the sciences.

Reform requires moral condemnation of previous practice. It always involves two roles. First, there is the reformer, the prophet (always a prophet), who announces the immorality of past ways, thereby gaining power and status for himself. Second, there is the discredited representative of the old order, who must be held in scorn. It would be absurd to think that the theory of relativity disgraced physicists who had been using Newtonian theory. Music, science, mathematics, and engineering are progressive disciplines; they advance by building upon the past rather than by tearing it down. Thus, they have no use for reform.

One might say that arts and sciences do not need reform because they are amoral. However, friendship and marriage are generally not considered to be progressive, and wounds to friendships and marriages often result from moral lapses of at least one partner. Yet it would sound strange to say that a couple “reformed” their marriage or friendship. This is because no friend would want to assert moral superiority over his friend by playing the role of prophet. Such a thing would be inimical to the spirit of friendship. To “reform” a friendship would be to end it. Marriage also is a form of friendship, and who but a narcissist would want to seize power and status over a spouse in this way? Friendships and marriages are not reformed, but healed, the difference being a spirit of forgiveness.

Suppose the reforming prophet is one who already holds power? Suppose a king decides that the ways of his people are wicked, so that rather than the upholder of their traditions, he makes himself their enemy. See what at once happens. The king suddenly claims a much greater power for himself than a traditionalist king would. The latter was only the servant of an inherited order, not the legislator of a new one. At the same time, the king alienates himself from the existing order, makes his government a revolutionary one, so that any imperfections of his kingdom are blamed on persistence of the old order with which he does not associate. A reforming ruler at once aggrandizes power and abdicates responsibility, regardless of the nature of his reform. And, of course, most reforms are evil even in intent, driven by the Satanic principles of freedom and equality.

The only benevolent case of reform is the reform of oneself. We do hear that an alcoholic or a gambler took it upon himself to reform his life, which is all to the good, because there is only one subject. The same man who stands condemned by the reform stands vindicated by it.

The Catholic Church is said to be always in need of reform, which is to acknowledge that all the prior centuries of self-recrimination and demoralization have bought us nothing. Indeed, one notices that all the great reforming ages of the Church end in catastrophe–the Gregorian reform in the Great Schism and Reformation, the Tridentine reform in the Enlightenment and Revolution. There seems to be no graceful exit from reforming zeal. Suppose instead of reforming the Church we were to improve her? Catholics will rightly be suspicious of the idea of such “improvement”. It seems to presume a fixity only of ends, with the means entirely unconstrained. The Mass cannot be improved (or–God forbid!–reformed) because it is a treasure in itself, apart from any purely extrinsic consequence of its performance. (The glorification of God is an intrinsic consequence.) Any change to improve some “outcome” could never give more than what it takes away–the great solace of worshipping God with the same forms and words as our ancestors. However, as inadequate as it is, an attitude of improvement is less damaging than one of reform. One can imagine listing the actions of the Church and their desired outcomes–catechesis and retention of our children, evangelization to non-Catholics, care for the poor and suffering–and ask how these could be done more effectively. It would actually be nice if someone were thinking about these things! Instead, they are all ignored or damaged by the constant futile effort to gain status by denouncing our fellow Catholics.

By this I mean a marked increase in statements like “X is not who we are” or “there is no place in this city/state/country/organization for people who believe/practice X”. Such statements are not necessarily bad. For some values of X, such exclusion is appropriate. However, for values of X that impugn a large fraction of the population, or beliefs or practices that until recently were uncontroversial, it is remarkably aggressive.

About the time I was leaving New York, the governor (I think it was) made some statement to the effect that those who disapprove of homosexual sodomy have no place in his state and should leave. As it turns out, I was going anyway, but it was disturbing nonetheless, because there was no acknowledgement of any place in particular where people of my religious and philosophical persuasion do belong.

Compare to an immigration restrictionist who yells at immigrants to “go back where you came from.” Don’t do this, it’s rude, but even this is less menacing than what non-Leftists are hearing. The restrictionist might think that Mexicans don’t belong in the U.S., but he presumably acknowledges that they do belong in Mexico. At least, he doesn’t particularly object to them being there.

Compare, if I were to make a statement like “In an ideal Catholic state, there would be no place for atheists.” Would it not be natural for people to ask me what I proposed to do with atheists? Indeed, the question is much more appropriate for our exclusionary Leftists. My “ideal Catholic state” is the hypothetical musing of a powerless man; an actual Catholic state might differ from the ideal in numerous ways, and how they are to be accommodated will depend on the details of the case. (One might wish to treat atheists who have lived in the area for generations and are not making trouble differently from foreign atheist missionaries, for instance.)

By contrast, exclusion by the Leftist power is happening right now, and the questions are pressing. People who profess Christian sexual ethics and whites who feel toward their own race in the way other races feel toward themselves are not to be allowed to work in this and that profession. What exactly are they going to be allowed to do for a living? If they’re not “who we are”, i.e. not Americans, what are they, and where do they belong?

Sometimes we will hear things like “racism has no place anywhere”, but do those who say it appreciate the genocidal logic of the statement? Apparently, whites who do not hate their own people shall not be allowed to exist.

If we were allowed to speak on our own behalf, we would prefer to have non-white quotas than diversity thought policing at work (including “diversity statements” from applicants and humiliating diversity training of employees). We’d rather the salaries of the diversity and inclusion commissars who torment us went to hiring non-white regular employees instead.

We would rather just have a law removing all statues of whites and names of whites on public buildings than have a racial reckoning. That lady who objected to the Father Damian statue because he was white was being nice. At least she didn’t feel the need to destroy his reputation first, like they have done to the other canceled Catholic saints. I honestly think a law of this sort would reduce racial tensions. If we must lose the public honor of our heroes, at least spare us the lectures on how they are symbols of “hate”.

Similarly, we’d rather have a law against giving any awards to whites than force private organizations to undergo yearly racial reckonings and vilification of their white members. We would enjoy everyone knowing that the awards had thereafter become jokes but no one being allowed to say so.