The Theology of Invective

         I can see no other way.

         We must learn once more to confront nonsense in all its forms and to call things by their real names.  We must learn that euphemisms are lies and that patience and gentleness sometimes do no good.  Worse still, they often do injury.  Count on it, when you treat a fool with nothing but kindness, he remains a fool.  If you pat him on the back and stroke his ego, he does what any fool does:  he mistakenly concludes that everything is alright with him, rather than realizing that you are simply being kind to ignorance the way you are kind to all other forms of poverty.

         We must revive the ancient and honorable art of invective, which is to language what justice is to law -- a means of giving people what they deserve.  What some of them deserve is a good kick in the pants.  This article, therefore, is dedicated to telling the fools to bend over and grab their ankles.  The beatings will now commence.

The New Testament

         If, like me, you are a Christian, you often encounter brothers and sisters in the faith who are, to put it plainly, well-intentioned but mush-minded invertebrates.  They seem unwilling and unable to grasp with clarity or conviction that some things are wrong and some are wicked.  Even if they could grasp that fundamental truth about the world, they lack the courage to call evil and error by their real names.  They do not understand that, if you fail to call evil evil, then you are treating it no differently than you treat goodness, which you do not call evil either.  The only thing they seem able to oppose publicly is that small collection of Christians who speak forthrightly, Christians who are less afraid of giving offense to the offensive than they are of aiding and abetting wickedness and error with sloppy and unjustifiably lenient language.

         This will never do.

         We Christians rightly recognize Christ as the very embodiment of love.  But Christ was no bleeding heart, and He was no invertebrate.  The "gentle Jesus meek and mild" never existed.  He is a nineteenth and twentieth century fiction.   The historical Jesus was another matter altogether.  At various times, and when the situation demanded, the real Jesus publicly denounced sinners as snakes, dogs, foxes, hypocrites, fouled tombs and dirty dishes.  He actually referred publicly to one of his chief disciples as Satan.  So that his hearers would not miss his point, He sometimes referred to the objects of his most intense ridicule both by name and by position, and often face to face. 

         No doubt His doing so made the invertebrates around him begin to squirm because they realized how offensive this tactic would be to outsiders.  Nevertheless, Jesus persisted.  He did so because He knew better than his jellyfish camp followers that alluding to heinous acts, and to those who continue to practice them, in only the most innocuous and clinical language does no one, least of all the offenders themselves, any good.  I cannot say it forcefully enough:  Christ did not affirm sinners; He affirmed the repentant.  Others He often addressed with the most withering invective.  God incarnate did not avoid using words and tactics that his listeners found deeply offensive.  He well understood that sometimes it is wrong to be nice.  I deny that we can improve upon the rhetorical strategy of Him who was Himself the Word, and who spoke the world into existence.

         The objection raised by the invertebrates that Jesus spoke aggressively only to self-righteous Pharisees simply misses the point.  Any sinner who rejects repentance, or any sinner who holds repentance at bay because he somehow believes it is not for him, is self-righteous.

         Paul talked the same way. 

         Although his invertebrate comrades probably considered it offensive and indelicate of him to do so, Paul did not hesitate to suggest to several churches -- publicly, plainly, and in writing -- that his many detractors ought simply to emasculate themselves (Gal. 5: 12).  If you believe that circumcision makes you right with God, he argued, why not go the whole way and really get right with God?  If Lorena Bobbitt was reading the Bible on the night that made her famous, this was the verse she read.

         Furthermore, in the same letter, (in fact, in the space of but three verses) Paul twice refers to his Galatian readers, the very people he is trying to convince, as fools (Gal. 3: 1, 3).  Subsequent events indicate that his shocking words, though clearly offensive, were not ineffective.  The Galatians chose to follow Paul rather than the Judaizers, whose tactic was, in Paul's words, to "win the approval of men," the very tactic urged upon us so indefatigably by the invertebrates -- though never in gender specific language.

         In short, if the religion and practice of the New Testament offend them, the invertebrates need to argue with Jesus and Paul, not me.

Christian Literature

         Furthermore, like Christ and his chief apostle, the greatest Christian writers of the Western world also refused to subscribe to the principle that language deeply offensive to one's readers or listeners ought always to be shunned.  Neither the greatest writers of Western tradition (such as Dante, Erasmus, Milton, and Swift) nor the best of the present day permit their language to be censored or vetoed by the hyperactive sensitivities of the spineless.  Great writers select one word over all other words because that word, and that word only, most fully conveys their meaning, and because that word, and that word only, can best be expected to produce the author’s intended effect.  That meaning and that effect are occasionally, and sometimes intentionally, offensive.

The Rules 

         Verbal precision, not inoffensiveness, is the traditional hallmark of the West's best writing and the West’s best books, some of which were deeply and intentionally offensive to great numbers of those who first read them.  Dante's Inferno consigns a number of Catholic notables -- including popes -- to Hell.  Erasmus's Praise of Folly excoriates monks and theologians as a shameless and squalid mob.  His Julius Excluded locks Pope Julius out of Heaven because he was an adulterous, blood-thirsty, syphilis-ridden, mammon hound.  Some of Milton's political pamphlets and poetry are, among other things, timeless handbooks of insult and invective.  Great portions of the works of Jonathan Swift constitute a veritable scatologist's Bible.  These works and many like them would never have been written or published had the modern preoccupation with inoffensiveness been then the controlling consideration.  Because that preoccupation now prevails, these books and many like them are being harried out of the literary canon.  In other words, the guidelines according to which the invertebrates want us to write are guidelines that not only would have radically recast many of our culture’s great books had they been followed, but would have prevented some of them from ever being written at all.  Had modern guidelines been previously in effect, they would have banished many of our civilization’s most important and memorable texts far more effectively and extensively than has the politically correct curriculum at Stanford, Harvard or Oberlin.

Freedom and Virtue

         Invertebrates cannot comprehend that despicable conditions inevitably arise in a fallen world.  Those despicable conditions sometimes require us to employ the language of shock and of confrontation in our unflagging efforts to push back the frontiers of evil and error.  But the spineless do not like it when we do.  They want to police the way we speak.  They want, literally, to erase words from our language.  I have been told by one Christian professor, whom I like and whom I respect, that there was never a time when shock language was right.  Such language, I am asked to believe, ought to be eliminated.  But though others delete it, I shall not.  The fewer words you have at your disposal, the fewer thoughts you are able to think or to articulate with full precision, and the fewer points you are able to make with your desired effect.  When the range of words is small, the range of thought is small and the power of speech is diminished.  In that sense, word police are thought police.  The invertebrates want to put you under arrest. 

         Resist.

         Language, like liberty, is not normally lost all at once.  It slips through our hands a little at a time, almost imperceptibly.  Don't let it happen.

         Slang words and shock words have their legitimate use.  Sometimes the right word is a slang word or a shock word because no other word conveys your meaning as fully or as accurately, and because no other word elicits the response you desire.  Sometimes the right language is language that falls beyond the pale of polite discourse –- but not of virtue. 

The Right Word (2)

         Here and there in The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis seems to long wistfully for that future moment when all names return to their rightful owners.

         To call things by their rightful names is the privilege (and the distinguishing mark) of wisdom.  Lamentably, ours is not an age of wisdom, and that is nowhere more obvious than in the fact that we call the slow-motion barbarization, which is the main focus of our schools, “education.”  It is anything but.

         To understand that fact is not something you’d likely learn in most schools, at whatever level, from the pre-kindergarten to the post-graduate, because our schools themselves are the foremost advocates of barbarism in our entire culture, except perhaps Hollywood.

         To the degree that sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible, our verbal confusions engender confusions of countless sorts and results, none of which is exemplary.  Nearly all labels, normally useful things, are frayed at the edges and, for that reason, serve as impediments to wisdom, not as its support.  This degeneration of language is not accidental, not at all.

         It is the intentional purpose of leftist word warriors who would rather master others by means of language than simply to master language itself.  That’s why they want to police your speech.  They know that when the power of words is small, the power of thought is small.  So they set about outlawing your language.  That way you will have fewer words by which to conceive, articulate, or defend your ideas and worldview, which they hope to make, literally, impossible.

         So here’s the upshot:  Clarify your words as soon as possible, and thereby enable yourself to clarify your thoughts.  For clarity of thought there is no suitable mental substitute.  Do it or else suffer the burdens of foolishness and verbal tyranny.  That is the choice reality gives you.  Ideas have consequences.  Bad ideas have bad ones.  It’s that straight forward.

         But our culture wouldn’t recognize a bad idea even if it jumped up and bit us in the eye.  After all, we elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – twice.  Both made the country noticeably worse and got rewarded for doing so with a second term.  You do know, don’t you, that idiots elect idiots?  Both in the delivery room and at the polling place, we reproduce after our own kind.

The Chronicle of an Undeception

The Chronicle of an Undeception    

            "The central myth of the sixties was that [its] wretched excess was really a serious quest for new values."

                                                                                                George Will

 

I.  The Tragic Vision of Life

            I confess to believing at one time or another nearly all the pervasive and persistent fantasies of the sixties.  In the words of Joni Mitchell's anthem for the Woodstock nation, I thought all I had to do was "get back to the land to set my soul free."  I thought that flowers had power, that love could be free, and that the system was to blame.  By 1968, I had the whole world figured out.  I knew the cause of every evil -- America -- and I knew the solution to every problem -- freedom and tolerance.

            If truth be told, of course, I knew nothing, at least nothing worth knowing.  I knew how to posture, but not how to stand.  I knew how to protest, but not how to protect.  I knew how to work up an impressive case of moral outrage, but I didn't know morality.  I knew about peace, but I didn't know enough to fight for it.  I knew about self-indulgence, self-preservation, self-esteem, and self-expression, but I didn't know about self-sacrifice and self-control. 

            Worse still, I didn't even know myself.  I didn't know what Socrates knew about me -- that I entered this world in a state of total and seamless ignorance, and that my ignorance could never be breached as long I remained blissfully unaware of it.  I didn't know what St. Augustine knew about me -- that the well of my soul was poisoned, and that whatever was down in the well would come up in the bucket.  St. Augustine also knew this about my soul:  No matter how hard it tried, no matter where it looked, it could never find its rest anywhere but in God.  I didn't know what Edmund Burke knew about me -- that no government could fix what ailed me, either by the things it did or by the things it did not.  The most any state could do was to help protect me from myself and from others.  Most importantly, however, I didn't know that I was Everyman.  When I learned that, I stopped being a liberal.     

            Like almost all dissidents of my generation, I was a protestor without a plan and a visionary without a vision.  I had not yet learned that you see only what you are able to see, and I was able to see only the egalitarian, relativistic, self-gratifying, superstitions of the secular, wayward, left.  Please do not think that this was simply a case of prelapsarian innocence.  It was not.  It was ignorance and it was evil, although I would have denied it at the time. 

            Only slowly did I come to understand that my fellow dissidents and I had taken for ourselves the easiest and least productive of all tasks, that of denigrator.  And only slowly did I come to understand that to destroy is easy, that to build is hard, and that to preserve is hardest of all. 

            But it was worse even than that, because my fellow dissidents and I were blind to the most obvious truths, especially to what Russell Kirk and others have called the tragic vision of life -- the profound realization that evil is not something “out there,” it is something “in here.”  The tragic vision of life arises from the fact that we are flawed -- deeply, desperately, tragically flawed -- and we cannot be trusted.  We are broken at the heart; our defect is life wide and soul deep.  Though we are capable of reason, because of our selfish passions and our moral weaknesses we are rarely reasonable.  We ourselves are what is chiefly wrong with the world.  We are this planet’s most malignant and enduring ailment.  We have our dignity, to be sure, but we have our horror as well.  I can tell you this:  I did not wake up until I met the enemy face to face.  I met him in the mirror.  We all do. 

            I had to learn to stare squarely into that face in the mirror, into the face of hard, fallen reality, and not to flinch.  I did not, in fact I could not, comprehend the tragic vision of life until I learned that the problem of the human heart is at the heart of the human problem.  Once I examined with care and honesty the habits of my own heart and those of my dissident friends, I learned that C. S. Lewis was right:  to be one of the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve is both glory enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to lower the head of the highest king.  I am a human being.  That is my wealth; that is my poverty. 

            Before that undeception, I was like all other cultural and political liberals.  I had fallen prey to what Jeane Kirkpatrick identified as the error of misplaced malleability.  I thought that human institutions could be reshaped at will to fit the plans already existing inside my head.  It cannot be done.  Human institutions arise from human action; human action arises from human nature; and human nature is notoriously intractable.  Apart from the grace of God, human nature cannot be fixed, no matter how badly it needs fixing.  I finally learned that my deepest need was not more freedom.  I needed the grace and guidance of God.  Until I understood that, I remained shamelessly superficial.

            I had to put my insipid and airy romanticism where it belonged, on the burgeoning junk pile of the fatally flawed and conclusively overthrown fantasies to which the human mind seems continually to give rise.  Not romanticism but religion, not Byron but the Bible, not poetry but Paul, not Voltaire but virtue, not trends but tradition, not idealism but ideas, not genius but grace, not freedom but faith could cure me.  I had to exchange Wordsworth for the Word and revolution for repentance.  Thus, while some of the things I valued were useful and good, they were not properly fundamental.  I had to put first things first.

            The tragic vision of life humbled me.  From it I learned that it was not my prerogative to invent wisdom and virtue.  That had already been done.  My responsibility was to listen to the One who invented them and to those whom He taught.  Wisdom and virtue, I had to learn, were not born with my generation, or with Rousseau's, or Matthew Arnold's, or even Eugene McCarthy's.  I had to learn in the last half of the twentieth century what was already old news even in the days of Jeremiah, the ancient prophet, who wrote,             

                        Stand at the crossroads, and look,

                        and ask for the ancient paths,

                        where the good way lies;

                        and walk in it, and find rest for your souls (Jer. 6: 16).

Wisdom is found by walking the "ancient paths."  Those "ancient paths" led through the wilderness, through the sea, even through the valley of the shadow of death, and not through Berkeley, not Columbia, not the Village, not Watts, not Haight-Ashbury, not Altamont, and not Woodstock. 

            The tragic vision of life also taught me that order is the most fundamental of all political and social needs.  Because it is, I learned that the police are not pigs.  They never were, and are not now, an occupying army intent upon destroying my freedom.  Quite the opposite; imperfect as they sometimes are, the police are the guardians of freedom and the paid protectors of life and property.  In the line of duty, some of them even died for me, and for you.  The tragic vision of life taught me that you cannot reject authority -- whether civil, familial, cultural or divine -- and yet live in an orderly world.  When you “off the pigs,” (of whatever sort) you give birth to an outlaw culture, not to freedom.  To live outside the rules, to live outside authority, to live without the wisdom of the ages and of God, is to court slavery and death.  Enforceable law and law enforcement are requirements of the first rank.  Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable law, freedom is impossible.  As Dean Clarence Manion observed in the very last line he wrote before his death in 1979, “a society that is not held together by its teaching and observance of the laws of Almighty God is unfit for human habitation and doomed to destroy itself.”  

            When is freedom not enough?  Every time truth and righteousness are at stake.  In a fallen world, that is almost always.  Freedom must be exercised according to the dictates of truth and virtue, never the other way round.  Freedom must be limited by the demands of justice, love and revelation.  The most important consideration regarding any action is not “Is it free?” but “Is it good?”  When I learned that, I stopped being a libertarian.  Freedom, furthermore, is an incomplete concept.  Whenever someone insists upon freedom, you must ask "Freedom to do what?"  You must ask that question because freedom, like tyranny, has its unintended and unforeseen consequences, some of which are colossally vile.  In passing, I name but one -- abortion. 

            From the tragic vision of life I learned that you have to do what is right whether it suits you or not.  In the sixties, we hardly did anything that did not suit us.  I also learned that the enemy is not the CIA, not the FBI, and not the GOP; it's the NEA, NOW, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, DNC, WCC and NPR, indeed the entire grab bag of alphabetized, leftist, subverters of culture, of tradition, and of revelation.  I learned that those who deprive themselves of the wisdom of western tradition are no more free than a baby left alone by its parents to do as it pleases.  I learned that politics is not about equality, but justice; that personal action is not about freedom, but righteousness; and that sex is not about pleasure, but love and privilege and posterity. 

            Those things and more I learned from the tragic vision of life.  I commend them to you.  They taught me that in many ways the sixties were twisted and misshapen.

            The sixties are over, and it's a good thing.  The sixties were a bad idea, if for no other reason than because the sixties had no ideas, only selfish desires hiding behind the shallow slogans and freelance nihilism emblazoned on psychedelic bumper stickers, slogans like “I dissent, therefore I am.”  The only things about which we were intellectually modest in the sixties were the claims of objective truth.  We seemed unable to wrap our minds around even the most obvious ideas.  We seemed unable to realize, for example, that you cannot raise your consciousness until you have one.  The sixties were perhaps the most unconscious decade in centuries.  It was a time of suffocating intellectual mediocrity, from which our nation has not yet recovered. 

II.  Sixties Redivivus  

            I can imagine a student reading these remarks and wondering, "This all might be well and good, but what does it have to do with me?  I wasn't even alive in the sixties."

            My answer is simply this:  While the sixties are over, they are not dead, not by a long shot.  They live, indeed they thrive, not only in the White House juvenocracy (which is tragic enough), but in the faculty lounges and endowed chairs of nearly every college and university in the United States.  Tenured faculty members everywhere have traded their tie-dyed T-shirts and their bell bottom jeans for a cap and gown, if not a cap and bells.  Those faculty members are the entrenched purveyors of an unexamined and indefensible hand-me-down Marxism, and of what Allan Bloom called nihilism with a happy ending.  They have become paid agents of the very colleges and universities they once tried to burn to the ground, and not because they gave up on the dreams of the sixties.  What they failed to do as protesters they have succeeded in doing as professors.  Quite possibly they have done it to you, because the entire teaching profession, from the pre-kindergarten level to the post-graduate, has become a political captive of the cultural left.  Like roving street gangs prowling the halls of academe, power hungry bands of leftist professors everywhere have instigated countless institutional turf wars, most of which they won.  They succeeded in burying the accumulated wisdom of the ages in the name of learning; in overthrowing academic freedom in the name of tolerance; in stifling debate in the name of openness; in exalting egalitarianism above all other ideas in the name of equality; and in segregating and tribalizing the university, the nation, and the culture by gender, by age, by religion, by race, and by sexual preference, all in the name of unity.  The schools and colleges that hire and then tenure them commit academic treason.  I simply remind you that any intellectual community that is unwilling or unable to identify its enemies cannot defend itself.  David Horowitz was exactly right:  Those who cherish free institutions, and the culture of wisdom and virtue that sustains them, must stand up boldly against the barbarians already inside the gates.

            Because the sixties live, this decade has become irrational, ignorant, and morally illiterate.  If the sixties were majestically self-indulgent, this decade is perhaps the most self-congratulatory decade our nation has ever seen, and not because we have succeeded where all other generations have failed, but in spite of the fact that we have failed where all other American generations have succeeded -- in learning to learn, in learning to work, in learning to listen, and in learning to worship.  This is a decade determined to ignore, if not belittle and malign, beauty, truth and goodness, three things most moderns foolishly believe are in the eye of the beholder.  Our decade is the sworn enemy of revelation and of righteousness.  If the threefold mantra of the sixties was "tune in, turn on and drop out," that of today is comprised of that earlier mantra’s four silly children, four sentences that no thinking man ever permits himself or herself to utter in the face of a moral challenge, sentences like: "Everything is relative," “There is no right or wrong," "There are no absolutes," and “Who's to say?" 

            If you cannot now figure out why belief in those four sentences is the death of learning and of virtue, then perhaps for that very reason you can understand why I spend nearly all my time and energy as a professor and as a writer defending the ancient liturgy of the enlightened mind -- that right and wrong are matters of fact, not matters of feeling; that without God there is no good; that justice is not equality; that new is not necessarily better; and that relativism, secularism, and pragmatism are not the friends of truth and goodness.  The denizens of modernity probably do not realize and probably do not care that they are the befuddled and bedeviled lackeys of designer truth, of made-to-order reality, and of ad hoc morals making.  If you follow them, you walk into the night without a light and into the woods without a compass.  I want to tell you as plainly as I can that their vision of academic tolerance lacks intellectual virtue.   It dilutes the high cultural inheritance of the past with the petty and insupportable leftisms of the present.

            A moment ago, I imagined a student that might be wondering about the relevance of my semi-autobiographical musings.  I also can imagine someone thinking that all I’ve done since the sixties is simply to change sides in the culture war that rages around us.  To think so, however, is to assume that flower power and Christianity are morally equivalent and that hippies rank equally with saints, two false assumptions that, if you make them, show just how much a child of the sixties you really are.  

            I have often wondered why today feels like a sixties renaissance.  I discovered the answer to that question in a college cafeteria and in conversations with some of my students’ parents. 

            First, the parents:  I have often noticed my students saying and thinking the same sorts of things their parents say and think when I speak with them.  Such things happen because the acorn seldom falls far from the oak tree.  That fact is more than a little significant because the parents of today’s college students were probably the young men and women of the sixties.  Many of the responses my students learned to give to life are responses they learned from their parents.  More often than not, those responses are the stock responses of the sixties.  In one way, of course, that is good; I want my students to learn all the truth they can from their parents.  But insofar as my students’ responses mimic the responses of the sixties, they too must learn the lessons I had to learn.  They must come to understand, with all the clarity and courage they can muster, the truth of the tragic vision of life:  We are, every one of us, morally defective, ethically twisted, and spiritually broken.  If my students fail to come to that realization and to act upon it, both they and their world shall suffer. 

            Second, the cafeteria:  I often notice my students echoing some of the things they hear their teachers say.  When talking with students in the cafeteria, for example, I sometimes have the eerie feeling that I’m not in the cafeteria at all; I’m in a faculty meeting.  I say so because I frequently hear the clear and unmistakable intonations of my colleagues’ voices, but coming from other people.  Sometimes I even hear my own voice.  Again, that’s good; I want college students to learn all the truth they can from their professors.  But here’s the rub:  Like me, many of their teachers were children of the sixties; and like me, many of those professors have made only an incomplete break with the mistakes of that era.  From their other professors and from me, my students have gotten many of their ideas.  Like my students themselves, their ideas have parents.  Worldviews and attitudes, just like the people who have them, show marked family resemblances.  For that very reason, I often want to ask my students this question:  From where do you imagine your rampant relativism and your not-very-carefully-hidden contempt for authority arise?  In most cases, when I consider asking such a question, I already know the answer -- from the sixties and from the people (like me) who reached their emotional and intellectual maturity at that time.

III.  Undeception Redivivus? 

            Here’s my point:  If you believe in the sixties, or if you believe in today, you believe a lie.  As I did, you need an undeception.  In order to get it, you need to go back well beyond the sixties, back to a wisdom that is older than time.  You need to go back to God and to the wisdom that spoke this universe into existence.  You need to go back to the God who made you and redeemed you.  Real answers are found nowhere else.

            It should not surprise you when I tell you that, if you do what I suggest, you shall meet energetic and determined opposition, sometimes even from those who call themselves the friends of God and of tradition.  As Socrates observed long centuries ago, most men do not take kindly to the preacher of moral reform, to the pursuer of the good.  There is no telling, he said in the Gorgias, what might happen to such a man.  But do not let that stop you.  Do it anyway.  Do it because you need it; do it because it is right; and do it because it ought to be done.  Your task will be difficult.  It's always easy to be a modernist; it's always easy to go with the spirit of the age.  But in the face of the world's downward slide you must be vigilant, strong, perceptive, and courageous.  The world needs people like that, people unafraid to turn around and walk back into the light.  Our world needs people like that more now than perhaps it ever has because everywhere you look the adversary culture of the sixties has become the dominant culture of today. 

            Our cultural patrimony is being embezzled from under our very noses.  If you think of yourself as a Christian, or as a conservative, or as both, the view from here is haunting:  We don’t own the public square; we don’t own the media; we don’t own the arts; we don’t own the sciences; we don’t own the arena; we don’t own the marketplace; we don’t own the academy; we don’t own anything.  We don't even own the Church.  It’s all owned by the sixties.

            Therefore, if, as I did, you find yourself an unwilling or unwitting child of the sixties, I invite you, I exhort you, to turn with an open mind and an open heart to the prophets and apostles in Scripture and to the great poets and sages outside Scripture.  They are your only liberation from modernist thralldom and from slavery to your own fallen desires.  (Did you know that you can be a slave to your own will?)  Put yourself on a quest for eternal truth, and never give up until you find Him.  

            While you are on this quest, you must always remember that most of the powers that be are of no help to you.  Those who loved the sixties own today.  The left still hates America, and it still hates what made America possible:  faith in God, the sacredness and inviolability of the family and of life, individual responsibility, local and limited government, and traditional morality.  The leftists of today are the enemies of heartland values.  They want you to keep quiet.  They want you to sit meekly in the corner of the room, hands folded and mouth shut.  They want you to be nice.  They want the friends of beauty, truth, and goodness to speak only when spoken to and, when they do speak, to speak only those things that offend no one.  That they have offended you seems not to matter.  They want you to stick to the script.  They want you to keep your views to yourself and to act as if your views were not true, indeed as if there were no truth.  That's what political correctness -- Or should I say political cleansing? -- is all about. 

            Consider it for just a moment:  What kind of man or woman would you be if you let yourself be controlled by the empty criticisms of the rootless left, and what kind of world would you be creating for those who came after you if you neglected to restore realism to human thought and turned your back on the only thing that can make you content even in dungeons, even in slums, even in the face of death?

            My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion, that you make yourself a devotee and guardian of the wisdom of the ages, that you become the sworn enemy of nonsense in all its forms, and, most importantly, that you become the faithful and ardent friend of God.  Then, and only then, can you be free. 

            What has been given you as a heritage you must now accept as your quest.  If you wish to be wise, you must learn to learn from your ancestors.  You must learn to make peace with the wisdom of the ages and with those who gave it, regardless of their sex, their race, or their ethnic background. You must do so because wisdom and truth are not gender based, race based, or nation based. They are thought based, and thinking is very hard work.  Knowledge is not parochial.  It is not the private property of any race, any gender, any era, or any ethnic group.  It belongs to those determined to get it, to those who seek it resolutely and who will not be denied, no matter how difficult the circumstances arrayed against them.

            In that light, I invite you today to make one of the most important choices of your entire life:  Which will you have, truth or rest? 

            You cannot have both.  

           

Doubling Down on Ignorance and Failure

         You can no more break the laws of economics than you can break the law of gravity.  Try if you must, but the outcome is certain:  Rather than break such laws, you break yourself against them.  And if, against all sense, you try it again, the result will be the same.  Doubling down on ignorance and failure means more ignorance and more failure, not success.

         By re-electing Barack Obama, the American voters have doubled down on ignorance and failure.  They obviously think the boneheaded policies that led to:

(1) higher unemployment,

(2) lower household income,

(3) more jobs going overseas,

(4) the greatest one-term growth in national debt in history,

(5) expanded intergenerational dependency on the state,

(6) trillions of dollars of fiat money flooding the market place, and

(7) millions more persons living in poverty and on food stamps

will magically lead to something completely different in the future.

         It’s not going to happen.

         If you still think that the most partisan president is really the post-partisan president, then don’t be surprised if partisanship flourishes even more in the next term than it did in the last, when the Republicans were literally locked out of health care reform discussions and debates, and when every budget passed by the Republican-led House was killed in the Democrat-led Senate – every one.  If that’s what you think about partisanship, you are not thinking at all.  You are not even paying attention. 

         If you think that the Democrats, who failed to pass even one budget in four years will suddenly start passing them now, much less governing according to those budgets, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

         If you think that the politically motivated failure to protect our own land and personnel overseas against terrorist attacks on the anniversary of 9/11, despite repeated and desperate pleas for help coming from the victims themselves, and that the Obama administration’s craven lies and misdirection that for weeks followed the slaughter will make for a safer America or a safer world, you are the Jihadist’s dream come true.

         If you think that a culture that slaughters its babies for convenience or for money won’t slaughter its elderly for the same reasons, then please don’t be surprised when you, your friends, or your family are eventually disposed of by the very bureaucracy charged, ironically, with national health care.  Your capital offense, the thing that lowers the death sentence upon you:  Getting older and getting expensive.  When the choice is between you and money, and when the government has no money, you die.  Please notice:  the government has no money.    

         If you think that Barack Obama failed so miserably in his first term because he inherited a mess, then how can you expect anything but proportionally greater failure from him when he tries to fix the even greater mess he inherited from himself?

         Or, if you want it in an epigram:  “If you fail to learn the easy way, then you are doomed to learn the hard way, if you learn at all.”

Lolo Jones vs. Fast Women

              According to the self-appointed track and field geniuses and athletic performance gurus in the MSM, American hurdler Lolo Jones, the American record holder in her event, an athlete who missed a gold medal by just a quarter second, would have run faster, and maybe have gotten an Olympic medal, if she hadn’t been so virginal.  Her critics apparently think that, if you sleep around a lot, you hurdle more quickly

As a former decathlete, I disagree.  While sleeping around might make one a fast woman, it doesn’t make one faster. 

Why Statistical Disparity does not Equal Discrimination

         Because no two human beings are exactly alike, no two groups of human beings are exactly alike either.  That’s the consequence of what some call “the snowflake principle” of human life:  While we all are alike in some ways, no two of us are quite the same.  We have different talents, backgrounds, attitudes, habits, goals, inclinations, beliefs, and friends.  Because we do, we experience different outcomes and results, which in turn yield differing socio-economic statistics about us.

         That’s another way of saying that statistical disparity does not equal discrimination, the way that so many on the left frequently assert.  Differing outcomes can imply many things, discrimination is just one of them.   Let me give you four examples:

         (1) Let’s say that a major American city has a population that is 80% black.  Let’s say as well that its police force is 80% white.  (The numbers here are purposely exaggerated in order to underscore the point.  No major American city and its police force are so disproportionate).  One could not, from those data, conclude that the police force discriminates against minorities in its hiring or promotion practices.   If, in urban black culture, the police force is held in low regard, then black youths, whether male or female, will be less likely to want to grow up to be police officers.  They will choose other options, however wise or unwise.  If, at the same time, in white urban culture, the police force is held in much higher regard, then, predictably, far more white youths will aspire to that career than do their black counterparts.  The difference in outcome here is rooted in cultural values, not discrimination.  That would be the case even though minority applicants to the police force, and minority applications for promotion within it, actually receive preferential treatment such that a test score for them yields better results than the same score does for whites.  Statistical disparity, even radical statistical disparity, does not mean discrimination.  It might actually indicate preference. 

         (2) If, as studies show, educational expectations within the Asian–American subculture tend to emphasize mathematics and the hard sciences, and if, in the African-American subculture, those preferences tend toward the social sciences; and if the hard sciences pay more money than do the social sciences, then it is not a matter either of hiring or payroll discrimination that Asian-Americans with graduate degrees in mathematics and the hard sciences make noticeably more money per year than African-Americans with graduate degrees in the social sciences.  Their two cultures’ differing values and expectations dictate the outcome, not discrimination.

         (3) If black drug offenders go to jail more often than white drug offenders and serve more time when they do, that statistical difference does not prove discrimination.  To prove discrimination, one must ask and answer many other previous questions before deciding the issue.  For example, one must take into account things like mandatory sentences and recidivism.  If drug usage or drug arrests are less frequent in predominantly white jurisdictions than in black ones, and if judges in those predominantly black jurisdictions are more inclined to render stricter sentences as a result, it does not mean the judge is racially prejudiced.  It might mean the judge is quite concerned for public safety and the rule of law, even if, in a nearby jurisdiction, judicial discretion is exercised more leniently.  Or if a judge works within a jurisdiction that has mandatory sentencing requirements in such cases, and if the mandatory sentences are harsher than those in other, non-mandatory, jurisdictions just over the state line, and if the offenders here are predominately black, it does not prove racial discrimination.  Or if whites are less inclined to be repeat drug offenders (and therefore are more likely to get lighter sentences as a result), it does not prove racial discrimination if their average sentence is lighter than the average sentence of their black counterparts.  Racial discrimination is but one of many possible explanations.  Statistics alone cannot establish the fact.  Things like recidivism need to be considered in the mix.  In a system like ours, with multiple jurisdictions, all of which work on varying bases, differences in sentencing inevitably emerge.  To label them discrimination is reckless and goes beyond the evidence.

         (4) Or, simply because the average salary of women is 60-70% of the average salary of men in the same field (The exact percentage is always changing.), it does not mean that sexual discrimination is the reason.  On average, women work fewer hours per day and fewer days per year.  They also work fewer total years and take more time off during those years than do men.  As a result, they make fewer dollars per hour, week, and year than do men.  But when those differences are erased, when women have the same education as their male counterparts, and when they have the same work experience and work record, they actually make 102% of what men make, and have done so for nearly 30 years.  Statistical disparity is not proof of discrimination.

         Discrimination is easy to assert.  Our leftist friends do it all the time.  But it is notoriously difficult to prove, and invoking mere statistical disparity does not prove it.   

         I am not saying something so silly as that there exists no discrimination in America.  It does exist, and you might be surprised where to find it.

             

C. S. Lewis vs. T. S. Eliot: Why the Eliotolatry Ought to Stop (1)

Here begins the first in a series of installments meant to lay out C. S. Lewis’ voluminous and multi-faceted case against T. S. Eliot and the malignant Eliotolatry let loose by, of all folks, American conservatives who, ostensibly at least, contend for the worthy and permanent things in Western culture and who ought to know better.

This excerpt comes from a letter by Lewis to Paul Elmer More dated May 23, 1935 from Oxford.  The text is drawn from Walter Hooper’s magisterial edition of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (vol. 2, pp. 163-4.)  I follow it with a few explanatory notes and a synopsis of Lewis’ complaints, keyed to citations I have enclosed in brackets in the text. 

“There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it.  On p. 154 of the article on Joyce [1] you yourself refer to him as a ‘great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’.  To me the great genius is not apparent:  The other thing is.  Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil.  He is the very spearhead of that attack on peras [i. e. proper limitations] which you deplore. [2] His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be a ‘classicist’ [3] may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous.  The plea that his poems of distinction are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. [4] So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron, excuse their pornography:  so Eliot himself excuses Joyce.  His intention only God knows.  I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos.

The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry.  The Inferno is not infernal poetry:  the Waste Land is.  His criticism tells the same tale.  He says he is a classicist, but this sympathy with depraved poets, (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent:  but he shows no real love of any disciplined, and magnanimous writer save Dante.  Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine, he has nothing to say. [5] Assuredly he is one of the enemy:  and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. [6]

And this offence is aggravated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance.  And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishmen by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalized Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.”

[1] About a month earlier, More had sent Lewis a copy of an article from the American Review that More had written on James Joyce.

[2] By breaking down the standards of art while at the same time professing to uphold them, Eliot, one of “the literary traitors,” was undermining the permanent things in literature.  For example, Eliot’s own poetry simply and intentionally defied understanding, as Lewis argued in “De Descriptione Temporum,” his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, wherein he points out that Eliot’s little poem “Cooking Egg,” had, at that time, been before the world for more than thirty years and no one, not even the experts, had the slightest idea what it meant.  Eliot’s poetry was not just new, Lewis said then, but “new in a new way.”  Unlike earlier new styles of poetry (poetry by Donne or Wordsworth, for example, poetry that could be understood if you knew the basis on which the poet wrote it), Eliot’s new poetry fully mocked decoding.  It was not simply about disintegration; it was disintegrated and disintegrative, as Lewis says below.  Contra MacLeish, to Lewis a poem must not simply be but mean.  And meaning here with Eliot was quite shut out, and not by accident.

[3] In his praise for Dryden at the expense of Shelley, Eliot claimed that Dryden was a classical poet, to which Lewis replied in “Shelley, Dryden and Mr Eliot” that “The days are or ought to be long past in which any well-informed critic could take the couplet poets of our ‘Augustan’ school at their own valuation as ‘classical’ writers.”  After explaining a bit about the Augustans, Lewis writes, “Of the school in general, then, we may say that it’s a good unclassical school. But when we turn to Dryden, we must, I think, say a good deal more than this” (italics added).   That Eliot could make such a gross mistake regarding either the Augustans or classicism struck Lewis as evidence that Eliot was not a well-informed critic, was no classicist, and was probably a poser.  About this I shall say more in future installments.

[4] Those who undermine literature often defend themselves on the ground that they are really literature’s friends, and that they are but writing satirically.  That is, when they write chaotically, they say they are simply showing the adverse effects of chaos, not that they have imbibed it.  For them, the medium is the message.  Not to Lewis.  For him, the message is the message.  One could write about the Inferno, as Lewis says below that Dante did, without writing infernal poetry.  You could write about Hell without being hellacious.  In short, Lewis subscribed to the common criticism levied against Eliot that he had the disease he claimed to rail against.

[5] When Eliot did turn to say something about Milton, he got it badly wrong, so much so that Eliot himself had to retract his views.  But even that retraction was shockingly defective and inadequate.  Eliot and his ilk were so badly mistaken about Milton that Lewis devoted an entire chapter of his Preface to Paradise Lost to exposing the incoherence of Eliot’s criticisms and its fatally flawed premises.  The result is a masterful exercise in logic chopping that dismantles Eliot’s self-congratulatory methods stick by stick.  I shall say more about this in future installments.

[6] To Lewis, Eliot posed as a friend of literature and the permanent things, a pose that fooled the uninitiated, the under-informed, and the unwary.  To Lewis, Eliot was a sheep in wolve’s clothing, one to whom the sheep foolishly looked for guidance and protection.  They seemed not no notice the company the wolf keeps -- predators and underminers like Gertrude Stein, a lesbian poet who compared Francisco Franco to George Washington and who said Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace prize; and like Ezra Pound, the anti-Semitic, fascist, anti-American traitor.  To Lewis, if it walks alike a wolf, talks like a wolf, and keeps the company of wolves, it’s a wolf.  The chief difference between Eliot and his wolf pack was that he was more subtle and more adept at insinuating himself into the camp of culture’s great protectors than his friends were.  Just as Karl Barth sounded the alarm in Germany about the churches' complicity with Hitler and colossal evil, Lewis was sounding it in England about Eliot's axis of friends and colleagues.

"The Injustice of Affirmative Action"

If I hire professors for their race, their gender or their ethnic background, and not for their demonstrably superior professional and personal excellence, I devalue my students' tuition dollar.  That I must never do.  To hire professors on a basis other than demonstrable professional excellence is greatly to abuse the students, parents and taxpayers whose money helps pay academic salaries.  To endorse or to practice this financial abuse no academic institution ought ever to consent.

For me knowingly to hire less than the best professors available at the time of hiring and to charge students full tuition to sit under that professor’s tutelage is like the pharmacist who sells his customers an inferior medicine while charging them top-of-the-line prices, or like charging them for 60 pills and delivering only 48.   

I do not want professors who are merely qualified, or merely competent.  I want the very best professors available.  Excellent teachers are identified by their intellectual mastery and pedagogical brilliance, not by genitalia, not by surname, and not by pigmentation.  To provide students with anything less than or other than the very best teacher money can buy is simply to injure the very persons our colleges and universities seek to serve, and for whom they primarily exist -- the students. 

         But affirmative action also deals unjustly with prospective faculty members, not only with students.  Affirmative action is unjust to prospective faculty members because it punishes them for sins and crimes not their own.  It makes them pay for racial bigotry and discrimination they neither perpetrated nor condoned, indeed that their fathers, their mothers, their grandparents and their great-grandparents neither perpetrated nor condoned.  Yet some prospective faculty members are made to pay for these egregious sins and crimes solely because they were born to the wrong group, solely because they are white, or male, or both, which is bigotry, pure and simple.  Perhaps this bigotry is well-intentioned, and perhaps it is legal as well.  But it is not moral.  Justice is getting what you deserve, not being punished for the racial crimes of the distant ancestors of persons you never met. 

         For current women faculty members to insist that women be hired to fill an academy position for which they are not the very best qualified candidate is to do injury to women, namely to the women who are the wives and daughters of the man denied the job he was best qualified to have, indeed would have had, were he not male.  Thus, all the years of sacrifice, hard work, and poverty that those female spouses invested and endured -- the sacrifice, hard work, and poverty that characterize the lives of most graduate students -- get tossed lightly and cruelly aside, solely because Daddy is Daddy, not Mommy.

         To put a different point on it, although slavery was legal, it was never good, never right.  Likewise, although state-approved set asides (and the bigotry they inescapably entail) are now legal, they are not moral.  They are immoral regardless of the intention behind them, immoral regardless of the identity or ancestry of either the intended benefactor or of the intended victim, and immoral regardless of such actions’ legal status.  One’s bigotry is not made moral simply because it has either what the bigot believes is a good intention or else a legal sanction.  Good intentions and legality do not mend the matter at all.  Affirmative action is really bigotry under a more palatable name.  Beware of every euphemism. 

         Affirmative action is immoral in part because it uncritically assumes that ends justify means and that two wrongs now make a right.  They do not.  Robbing banks is wrong, even if you intend to give the money to the poor.  Preferential treatment (a euphemism for bigotry) based upon race, sex, or ethnicity, is wrong, regardless of whether or not it is used for you or against you, and regardless of whether or not the purpose for which you discriminate is one you think highly desirable.  You are not entitled to be a bigot simply because others have been bigots in the past.  Sending people to the back of the bus or to the back of the employment line because they are the wrong gender or the wrong color is evil.

Jim Crow has come back to college.  This time he’s politically correct.