How Conservatism Cucked Itself

Conservatism is both a wonderful word (due to its variety) and a dirty word. Conservatism as a political force has demonstrated itself ineffective, or in those odd moments when it has been met with success, unable to sustain that success in the long-term since the Enlightenment, which seems to be a recurring theme in the history of the decline of the West. Reflections blog brands itself with the "revolutionary conservative" label, a movement begun by German intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, embodied in the works of the likes of Spengler, Schmitt, and Jünger—a movement fundamentally at odds with both liberalism and communism, the defining forces of its age. The age we live in is not unlike the Weimar Republic in terms of its moral decadence, and the liberal wing politics forcing concessions out of the right-wing in order to appease the perceived strength of the radical left—though of course, this Republic seems to have taken over the entire Western world. The result is the utter consumption of conservatism by liberalism, leaving the revolutionary conservative label, amongst others, one of the few political terms which remains completely free from the ideological stain of liberalism. Yet, the reasons behind the failure of the former "consumed conservatism", which we shall now call "mainstream conservatism" demand further exploration.

The problem with conservatism lies in two places: 1.) its intellectual attitude, which is perhaps the root of its doom, and 2.) it's obsession with "pragmatism" which, pragmatically and ironically, equates to concession and obfuscation. Modern conservatism has, throughout its circa 300-year history, failed to realise that it does not know what precisely it is. Edmund Burke, the so-called "father of conservatism" began life as a political liberal and death-do-part child of the Enlightenment. Burke bought wholeheartedly into the concept of political liberty in the civil and extra-authoritative vein of the likes of Kant and even Rousseau. Whilst the French Revolution proved to Burke that the Enlightenment in reality pushed the civil society he loved beyond the limits of goodwill and respect for the Divine, his reaction against the values he previously sympathised with were still marred by the legacy of Enlightenment. His defence of tradition, particularly of religious values and the nation as family, is still rooted in Enlightenment concepts such as the "social contract"—an idea completely non-existent within the traditional Christian conception of government by Divine Rights. For Burke, the ideas and institutions which Enlightenment liberalism attacked embodied a kind of perennial wisdom which would otherwise be lost. He was right, but he declined to elaborate further upon that wisdom, and few conservatives have built upon his work meaningfully, leading ultimately the shunning and ridiculing of conservatism as a school of thought in the academies of Europe.

There were of course exceptions to the prevailing liberal trend after the Enlightenment. Maistre and fellow writers of the so-called "Counter-Enlightenment" got closer to the truth by completely rejecting the Enlightenment's conception of reason, and developing new methods for themselves based on the classical schools of education (such as the trivium and quadrivium). Hegel's dialectic was groundbreaking in the study of non-linear history, and the predominant school of early 19th century thought on the continent was a highly reactionary form of conservatism. However, even the most reactionary of reactionaries such as Klemens von Metternich professed belief in gradual reform, and eventually the Conservative Order he helped to establish was unable to prevent the wave of liberal revolutions of the 1840s. With the rise of aggressive liberalism, the idea that Christianity was necessary for the existence of Western civilisation diminished. Traditional conservative thinkers continue to challenge this to this day, but their work (like their predecessors) is mainly ignored, or if not ignored then unfairly ridiculed and attacked, pariahs of the political right as they are (the likes of Enoch Powell, Roger Scruton, and Paul Gottfried spring to mind). 

Meanwhile the ideological expressions of the conservative mindset sold themselves down the river of liberalism still further. Many modern conservatives in America follow an ideology which more resembles classical liberalism than it does conservatism, and the reasons behind this are partly due to the Burkean attitude of "stop and beyond this point, no further" attitude of traditionalists, which naturally leads to concession due to its lack of movement, and partly due to the partisan nature of political conservatism. This is seen most starkly in Britain, where the self-designated Conservative Party has made its obviously liberal predilections subservient to the false mantle of "conservative" politics. The only vaguely conservative principle that British "Tories" can offer is a neoliberal opposition to socialism, a platform which is demonstrably no longer effective, as indicated by the increasing resonance of the left's anti-capitalist positions with the commonfolk of that country. Read up on modern conservatism, one will find the likes of Henry Sidgwick and John Stuart Mill cited, despite both being lifelong utilitarians and supporters of the Liberal Party, the latter also being known for embracing socialism in later life, and making the infamous comment: "stupid people are generally Conservative." 

Those few outwardly quirky conservatives, who dare to deviate somewhat from liberal orthodoxy, remain only LARPers in conservative clothing. There has been a lot of interest recently in Jacob Rees-Mogg in Britain, for example, a plummy accented, Latin quoting Roman Catholic who has become the darling of the traditionalist right, despite being known for wholeheartedly lending his support to incumbent liberal Prime Ministers, and oddly declaring that whilst he considers abortion to be a sin in all circumstances, he would not "enforce" his opinion on anyone else. Here manifest is an example of the concessions that modern conservatism, even of the supposedly traditional kind, habitually makes. It may be counter-cultural to say Vox Populi, Vox Dei in front of the cameras, but teaching Latin in schools and chanting traditional mantras means nothing without the context in which these old disciplines were once used. Modern trad cons are merely libertarians in an authoritarian cloak—at heart, seemingly without knowing it, they have become thoroughly cucked.

So what evidence do we have for the liberalisation of conservatism practically speaking—this new ideology which many on the New Right/Identitarian movements have taken to calling "cuckservatism"? Well, Americans need look no further than this drivel. Mr Knowles' very statement that the Alt Right is more akin to the left demonstrates a moronic level of misunderstanding and misinformation. causam requiescit. In the UK, the Conservative Party has become a full participatory element of the progressive dialectic. It was the "Conservative" Prime Minister, David Cameron, who introduced same-sex "marriage" in 2013, and the present UK Conservative Government is marked by its full support of political correctness, pandering to minorities, and unfulfilled promises to reduce immigration and introduce traditions banned by the liberals who care more for foxes than they do their own people. If the Conservative Party was truly conservative, it would care about conserving the people and nation of Great Britain. But it is not concerned by any of these things, instead having bought fully into the doctrines of multiculturalism and cultural Marxism. Their present role is beyond liberalism, it is merely offering a pseudo-conservative, more cautious Marxist alternative to the more outwardly unashamed progressivism of the likes of Jeremy Corbyn. Thoroughly cucked.

Many on the right have turned away from the conservative movement as a result of all of this. Indeed, it is difficult to offer a real response to the failures of conservatism without proper tools. Criticism of modernity is much-needed, but few self-described "conservative" voices are really offering such a critique. As mentioned above, conservatism is the philosophy of the status quo, but it is doomed to fail because of that. Politics must always be moving: either forward, or backwards, or perhaps a bit of both—but it cannot remain static as conservatives wish it to. If they do try (sometimes valiantly) to maintain the few traditions they have left, it always seems to end in tears: in concession, or defeat. The alternatives to conservatism at present are little-known and unpopular, but this is no reason to doubt their truth. Reflections presents the solution of Christian theonomy and reactionary traditionalism. These principles will be developed in due course. For now, however, it is meet and right to shun the cuckservative. His ideology has failed him long ago, and there is no hope for him. Conservatism will not provide the salvation which the disillusioned seek.

There is but one salvation to be had. Religious traditionalists know what that is: for it lies ultimately with the societies we once had many hundreds of years ago. We have shunned natural law, natural truth, and our natural selves as a result. Unfortunately, a path towards a reactionary future seems hard—but it is the only way. There are only two options: succeed, or valiantly say at the end "no one can say we did not try." To those who read this who seek something more—have faith, for God, He who is just, will ultimately provide the righteous with their reward if this Earthly world fails us. 

The Problem with Philosophy

The Lenten period is a time for many things, but for the religious intellectual, as much as for anyone, one of these important tasks is that of reflection, which is accompanied by earnest prayer. Thanks be to God, the past few weeks of reflection has caused the author to reflect upon his years spent at university, and this essay is the result of an extended mental critique of both the sort of topics taught at universities and the methods by which they are taught. The author himself spent three years studying for the degree of Baccalaureus Artium in Philosophy and Theology, followed by a Magister Philosophiae in Theology and Philosophy of Religion. He decided against completing a doctorate. 

Contemporary philosophical study in the Anglo-Saxon world is dominated by the analytic school. This would not be such a bad thing were it not for the fact that it seems to not only have stifled creativity in philosophy, but its influence appears to have infected most other branches of academic learning as well. The analytic school is remarkable for its desire to approach philosophy as though it were a science: with a slavish devotion to Bertrand Russell's "first order logic", rather than traditional forms of classical logic such as Aristotle's Organon, as well as a deference to science and mathematics rather than literature or the arts. Natural science has its place, but in the modern Western university, academia seems to have come to epitomise the Enlightened clique rather than the hub of practical discussion and preparation for what used to be the Western world's most respected end—the study of Divinity, or theology; and by theology we do not mean the contemporary academic discipline marred by the same analytic sterility of other fields.

Even in the United States, where it is still possible to take a degree in the "liberal arts", the traditional liberal arts are barely to be seen. The students of European academies of the middle ages, academies governed by the glorious synthesis of Christian theology and ancient Greek learning, were required to study seven liberal arts: the trivium, defined by the tripartite understanding of 1.) the natural reasoning of classical logic, more often than not, Aristotle's form described above (see also the Summa of Duns Scotus); 2.) the workings of grammar, which aided the student not only in understanding the syntax and semantics of their own language, but also the very real intellectual exercise of understanding the complexities of Greek and Latin; and 3.) the art of rhetoric, the essential means for crafting persuasive arguments. With these three skills together, the student was ready to essay his way into the more complex quadrivium, which was composed of 1.) arithmetic, itself a logical extension of the study of classical logic, operating by axiomatic rules and providing the groundwork necessary to complement 2.) geometry, which in simple terms equated to the measurement of both natural and speculative phenomena; 3.) music may seem like an odd addition, but its purpose is just as important as the study of music is today. In the medieval period, the study of music involved the understanding of musical rhythm, tone, harmony, poetics, and as such related to both the logical and aesthetic studies necessary for philosophical enquiry; stage 4.) astronomy involved the application of principles from the 1st and 2nd parts of the quadrivium to observance of the heavens, the separation of stars from planets etc. etc. Once both of these viae had been studied, the graduate bachelor was considered ready to engage in philosophical and theological studies of his own, a successful first year or two in which could grant him the status of teacher at his academy, a title which has since been translated into modern Masters' degrees, the Magister.

An understanding of God and his universe involved the study of the tools He has given us which we may use to understand His revelations. The traditional course of study in these academies allowed for both this very real intellectual challenge and graduation to the heights of respect and academic study. In answer to the objections of those who will use the moot counter-argument that "medieval philosophy, natural or otherwise, was mostly flawed", or even better "blinded by religious dogma" this is actually rather fallacious. It is to be expected that a civilisation at such a stage of development as was the case for Europe in the middle ages, without the technological capabilities of modern science, would make the odd blunder. There is no historical fact which would suggest that rational scientific understanding of the natural world would not have improved had the Enlightenment not reversed the prevailing academic tide of its age. In fact, science may even have been in a better state than it is today—since the empirical discoveries of "natural philosophy" were not seen as evidence against the Divine, but rather, further proof of His reality. Many medieval philosophers, such as Aquinas and Scotus, remain of great interest to contemporary thinkers, even if they are taught in an exceedingly dry and boring way. Yet still, the Enlightenment came, with its secular morality and logic which did not need God to exist, nay, it required the human mind alone! With that, the Academy of God and its disciplines were killed with a heavy death-blow, leaving the Church which had sustained it for so long with a deep-set anxiety about its truth-value, and its future. 

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which are already upon us. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been among us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.” 

—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 263

The liberalism which grew out of the Academy of Enlightenment, which replaced God, is identified here by Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, as the instigator of our own moral dark age. With the rise of the bourgeois intellectual, the sinful obsession with individual autonomy began to become the first and only aim of any kind of philosophical justification. Even philosophers such as Kant, who was manifestly a genius, became so troubled with the problem of having to justify moral behaviour within the tides of secularism that at times he appeared to compromise his own professed belief in the Christian God. Even in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, the works of theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (see esp. his famous dialogue Weihnachtsfier, "Christmas Eve") demonstrate that for the developing middle class man, scepticism about the existence of God was not merely commonplace, but fashionable as a demonstration of one's social development. Whilst the failings of mainstream conservatism as an ideology is a story for another time, its failure begins to manifest here: conservatives such as Burke and his Victorian successors paid lip service to traditional values, and identified many problems with the Enlightenment, but defended traditionalist positions using the methods and rhetoric of the Enlightenment itself, rather than defending pre-Enlightenment dogma. Only de Maistre arguably came closest to success in the latter, but even he occasionally fell foul of social contracts and quasi-republican language in his description of government and religion.

When the Romantics began their quest for something beyond the self, they looked not for God, but for abstraction. The infamous school of German idealism, embodied by Hegel and his terrifying dialectical style, did not place God as the ultimate source of perfection, but the elusive concept of the Absolute. To this day no one quite knows what it is. Whilst Hegel's political philosophy bore some good fruit in the form of the Hegelian Right's early reactions to liberalism in the first half of the 1800s, the ambiguity of Romantic transcendentalism inevitably gave birth to Marxism, and the materialist worldview which accompanied it. From Marx was born a whole new culture of continental thought, and ultimately remains the source of many of the modern West's cultural, social, political, moral—cumulatively, civilisational crises. 

To this day, one either sides with analytic philosophers, most of whom are left-leaning centrist liberals, or with continental philosophers, almost all of whom are Marxists or left-Hegelians of some description. As many have pointed out, we have reached a stage where liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism are in fact two sides of the same coin:

“The historian, novelist, and Fabian socialist H. G. Wells explained the kinship between Big Business and Communism in 1920. Wells described himself not as a Marxist or as a Communist but as a Collectivist...Wells comments on the situation [in Bolshevik Russia] he would like to see developing with Collectivist capitalism propping up Collectivist communism"

—Dr. Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above (Arktos Media, 2011), pp. 16-17

Other philosophers, such as Julius Evola, state the reality more starkly, correctly identifying the materialism of both capitalism and communism. What is perhaps most tragic about all of this is that it has led to the politicisation of the academy. If you are not a good way left-of-centre, wave goodbye to your happiness at university, if not your career. It is not even worth picking a side. If you do not study the technical sciences, which unlike the arts, focus on the nature of the world and how we might harness it, rather than its telos, then you enter a world where academic exegesis and critical analysis is applied only for the shoring-up of preconceived biases and quasi-religious dogmatic ideologies. Liberalism, feminism, Marxism, queer studies, you name it—their purpose in the modern academy is not to examine history, mankind, or any real questions of existence and purpose, it is rather to warp, or indeed malleate the truths of history into soft, amenable falsehoods which can be used to justify the modern left's agenda: complete moral and social destruction. 

Those who enter academia in good faith, with genuine hopes of advancing humanity's understanding, are only useful idiots. All branches of philosophy—from philosophy proper, to divinity, to natural science—have been taken over by those who care little for truth and understanding. All but one of the author's many supervisors during his time studying theology at university were atheists. Yet, we are expected to believe that such people have a genuine interest in understanding the nature of the Divine? If a philosopher worth his salt wants to contribute to the intellectual world, his best bet is to leave the modern academy, and with his own pen, create new ones. 

We could do with a revival of the traditional liberal arts and genuinely rigorous preparation for academic study. The contemporary notion that university is a prerequisite for admission to the workplace is only a perverse extension of the Marxist idea that the people must be trained in leftist philosophy before they can be allowed out into the world to put any kind of left-wing philosophy into praxis. Most of the hordes of BA students who leave university today have no idea about the legacy of the institutions they proudly walk out of, and the offering of Bachelor's degrees in Photography certainly won't go far to revive that legacy. It will take some effort to revive the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) and two higher disciplines (philosophy and theology) which European civilisation once thrived on, but it is possible, if dedicated teachers can find dedicated students willing to face some proper educational rigour, and explore in detail the true nature of this world which God has entrusted to us. 

Holy John Damascene, pray for us!

Holy Augustine, pray for us!

Of Catholicity

The author sits writing this with the recent words of his priest's sermon fresh in his mind. This Sunday was clearly a providential one, since whilst the sermon given is always insightful, this one prompted proper reflexion. The sermon itself was about Catholicity, a words which most Christians should be familiar with, not only because it is the noun form of one of the Four Marks of the Church, but because it has come to define the Christian faith itself, not merely the section of it which is frequently referred to as 'Catholic'. As attempts to define Catholicity, both in traditional and Novus Ordo terms, creep into the canons of everyday preaching, it seems more important now more than ever to have a meaningful discussion of Catholicity—first and foremost therefore, credit be where it is due, with that priest in question, for making this discussion possible. 

The article linked here has been circulating in liberal media about a woman fired from her job as a teacher for being "not the right kind of Catholic", i.e. homosexual, or to paint a more accurate (and this difference is significant) picture of the situation, fired from her job for having a same-sex wedding. Of course, as far as liberals are concerned, this is an outrage, and only goes to prove the inherent prejudice and intolerance of the Catholic faithful, indeed, how dare they discriminate against this lady for marrying "the love of her life", how callous! how ungodly! But, as ever, there is more to the narrative than meets the eye. Putting aside natural arguments, such as that a Catholic school would obviously not want its children, to whom it has a duty of care, to hear all about their female teacher's false "wife", let us consider instead the theology of the situation.  

When discussing Catholicity, the priest did so in the context of the reading, which was taken from Matthew 25, the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. Something was therefore made abundantly clear in the course of this reading. Catholicity is about who we are, and in being Catholic—in Greek, καθολικός, "whole, universal"—we are united to the Church of Christ wheresoever we go. We are Catholic within our church's four walls, and we are Catholic when sitting at home enjoying a cup of hot tea. But there are some who are not Catholic, as the parable in question teaches us. What does Christ say?

“Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'” (Mtt:25:41-43)

So there is a separation between sinners and the saved. So, there is another prerequisite for Catholicity, submission to Christ. We must consciously choose to cast our own needs aside, shun sin, and strive only for the sake of God—as Christ expresses it, to feed him, clothe him and visit him wherever we can. Now of course, it is impossible for us to not sin at all, being humans, we are sinful by our fallen nature, and even the most blessed monastics fail to escape the taints of sin. It is for this reason that the sacraments exist. The Eucharist itself is an expression of God's forgiveness of sins, but perhaps most importantly, the sacrament of confession is the purest expression of our need for forgiveness—it is also one of the most widely-abused of all the sacraments. 

The Church teaches that there are certain grave sins. We can confess white lies and casual errors as they happen, these are the most common fallen sins, but some sins arise from the deliberate choice to indulge in behaviours harmful to godliness. One of those is homosexual practices, but there are of course others. Now, it does not befit us to judge, but it does befit us to defend our Church. In that vein, it is a sinless thing to declare that Catholicity is not something to be bent and changed to the will of what society considers right this day, or that. Yet this is what we see in the case of the homosexual teacher who got "married". It is not a case of being "the wrong kind of Catholic" but of frustration with the fact that "Catholicism doesn't bend to my individual identity". Yet this is not how sin works, least of all grave sin. 

It is often hard to choose to cast aside grave sins. We are faced with grave temptation regularly—and it is not supposed to be easy. There is a challenge in rejecting sin, overcoming our own nature, and living for God. But God will not change his rules if we sin. If we confess, and make a conscious effort to not sin again, we are absolved. If we sin again and again and simply use sacraments such as confession as a get-out clause, praising God for his "oh so goodness", and claiming that an all-loving God forgives all without genuine repentance is a grave sin in itself, based on an equally grave misunderstanding of Church theology. 

Catholicity is about finding ourselves, indeed so, but finding ourselves does not manifest itself in this strange, liberal idea of hyper-individualism and sinful identity. Finding ourselves means overcoming our own nature via a spiritual journey with Christ, overcoming by sheer will the pain which charges us and demands that we choose the easier, but more sinful option. There is no such thing as a "wrong kind of Catholic", there are only Catholics and not-Catholics, and these vague and 'tolerant' attempts to redefine what it means to be united to Christ in his Universal Church can only be symptoms of the sick world in which we live. The indignation shown to those who attempt to defend the traditional doctrines of the Church only serves to prove our point about the agenda against our Church all the more cogently. 

A Method of Madness

No philosopher worth his salt will be able to give you a proper answer to the question 'what is logic?' If he were to hazard a guess, he might say something along the lines of "a linear system of reasoning based on valid inference." A meta-logician will try to work out what sort of rules logic ought to have, what makes x 'valid' et cetera, but logic itself is a method by which we can deduce truths. All of us, not merely philosophers, will use logic a great deal to create premises, build arguments, and hopefully, prove our point. One popular variation upon this in the academic world is the "dialectical method," where an individual, or usually more than one, offers arguments from two or more different perspective, and by evaluating the value of both sides, comes to a reasoned judgement about what solution is preferable. Hegel famously employed the dialectic to a great extent, and broke with the prevailing method of his time in doing so - which was classical logic. Marx took this further, but now the world is faced with something quite petrifying: the rational choice between modern dialectical materialism, traditional dialectic, or classical logic. None of these alone are sufficient without the study of Divinity.

Jordan Peterson, as a self-described "classic British liberal", is naturally rather fond of his classical logic, and since he has been the subject of a great deal of fuss in recent weeks, he seems a good dialectical focus for this essay. The Marxist left, and by extension, the liberal left which has been influenced by Marxism in recent years, has always strongly favoured dialectic in the style of their own great intellectual giant, Karl Marx himself. As a recent article for Jacobin magazine was all too keen to point out:

“Any attempt to confront Peterson’s worldview must deploy the legacy of reason within Marxism’s own commitments to dialectical logic and human freedom.”

Indeed, the left believes that its own method of 'truth-finding' can trump the classical liberal mantra of 'freedom and reason', for precisely the reason that Marxism seeks the exact same. This, indeed, is the problem that classical liberalism, or right-libertarianism has found itself within in recent years. In the Thatcher/Reagan era, when Soviet communism was a very real threat, someone on the conservative right could legitimately say that they believed in "freedom", and not compromise on legitimately right-wing principles all that much. At the end of the day, if you opposed communism, it was pretty obvious that you supported people's right not to be enslaved by oppressive ideologues. Today, however, with the Soviet Union and its satellites having collapsed, it is hard to say "I believe in freedom for x" because the left, as the above article demonstrates, will merely state that they want the exact same thing.

Liberalism has sold itself to the Marxist dialectic, in fact it has sold itself down the road of false reason so far that it has no idea what reason is—which is precisely why it is often so easy to defeat the left on many issues it holds dear in reasonable debate. We have the liberal forces of Enlightenment to thank for the rejection of religious revelation, and indeed, it is precisely because of this that many texts which provided a firm moral method, such as the Bible, have been rejected by mainstream society. A right-thinking Christian, even when forced to subject the Bible to the harshest criteria of literary exegesis, should still come out of the experience realising just how inspired a piece of writing the Christian scriptures are. Indeed, there is a reason why many contemporary moralists refer to their treatises as "Methods" in a quasi-scientific way (cf. H. Sidgwick, Method of Ethics)—it is simply because moral systems contained in the Bible were indeed just that: systematic, precise, at least as far as their interpretations were concerned. Questioning the moral positions of the Church was for a long time an intellectual waste, since most of its positions were considered to be self-evident. Enlightenment thought denied us this strong civilisational framework.

Even if it is not expedient to outlaw questioning of scripture, it is certainly useful for traditionalists to uphold the authority of traditional scriptural interpretation above all else. If Marx's Capital is the Bible of the left, then the Bible is our Capital. A fundamentally human text, the Bible is not merely a catalogue of moral laws and their development (cf. Wellhausen's History of Israel) but also a touching story of how people interact with each other, both on an individual and epic, trans-national scale. The Pentateuch forms the national epos of the Hebrews, and the life of Jesus the necessary bookend to that epos, as well as the full explanation of the nature of the new order that he established. We have law and poem, art and authority, mixed into a single document. The Bible is a real treasure, and it is comforting to read it in this age of intellectual madness.

I doubt many of the fanboys of Jordan Peterson value the theological method. You might well hear many of them proclaiming that logic has the power to disprove the existence of God, or equating belief in God with belief in leftist utopia, or some such uninspired pseudo-scientific bawling. We must of course remember that classical logic does no such thing as 'disprove God'. Logic is a tool for building natural arguments, but it cannot do very much with arguments which arise from supernatural phenomena, such as the Divine. We might use logic to prove that something does not stand to reason linguistically or methodologically, but we cannot disprove a concept like God with it. Thus, we have a word of advise for those who follow the new darlings of the liberal right like Jordan Peterson: the left's intellectual methods are indeed crazy, but you would do well to think of what your ancestors used, those saints and theologians of past years, who combined so perfectly Divine authority with the tools of human reason gifted to Man from above.

Reject that authority, and you swiftly find yourself rejecting the foundations of civilisation, as the Marxists have done. This time our admonition is gentle: be careful what you wish for, because if Jordan Peterson and line upon line of classical liberal logicians are just looking to attack the Marxist left, then leave us all to live up the Enlightenment in perfect freedom, then we might all end up in the same state as we started in: dialectical dreams and electric memes. Not a strong throne and altar government with the salvation of all in mind. 

Dancing Round the Prickly Pear

After some deliberation, it has been decided that Reflections will become a place for poetry as well as the prose essay. The brief justification is that the author has experimented with poetry for a long time, and sometimes it is simply more meaningful to express truth through the medium of aesthetic art. If the reader is familiar with any of the Romantics, Imagists, and in particular T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, then these works may be of some interest to them. 

Revelation 6:12-17

Wandering, wandering, wandering. 

Who are these faceless men

The ones who clutch forth at my flesh?

The mountains keep us, catacombs, all the more

Safe, at least so the mountains, catacombs tell us. 

Who are these faceless men who do not speak?

Wandering, wandering, wandering

And still no escape from they who cower. 

What is this heap of rock and wood

Which all the faithless flock beneath, unknowing

And unwilling to see beyond what they know?

A broken image there looks out—
The face of one already broken,
No one recognises the already broken man
But he does not blame them.
For you, broken face, have seen
The endless chasms which open now before us
And seeking now to prove a point
We forget to ask you what they are like
Underfoot.

Wandering, wandering, wandering,
Is there no end?
Wandering,
To this tunnel?
A shaft of light annuls the question,
The faceless men don't venture there.
Climbing, climbing, climbing, 
Nothing so arduous as walking away
From all the comforting torments of the rocky heap.
Climbing, blinding, nearly there
Until there, the shaft of light becomes
Blood, for no light exists beneath 
A moon without blessing or proper care. 

The faceless men don't venture here—

Screaming, fleeing, helpless sorrow

Hidden beneath the hope of safety

"Freedom in Death!" rises the cry of some

Vain fool. 

Many rocks here, but none safe to hide beneath,

Only hiding from them is the care of these men.

Cities twist within each other and the sky

Booms and cracks asunder, as though

The very Heaven itself was struck and cracked,

It seemed as though a thousand pieces of Earth

Did fall.

Like a scroll He rolled up the plains and rivers,

Closing the book at last. 

Chapters end. Books end.

The last line is read.

Dancing round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning

Was the only dance they knew,

But the Lord of the Dance

When He asked what they knew

He did not know the way of the prickly pear.

All the faceless looked at one another

They asked "How could he not know?"

But no one knew, for no one knew each other,

So how could anyone know?

They still teach the dance to children now,

All other songs and dances are not right—

They don't give them a proper education, such things,

All proper, don't you know, all just, all good.

But when the children come above the surface

The prickly pear will nourish not one soul,

But will instead make bleed the wounds still freshly

Of those who had to see the world-book closed. 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang or a whimper

But applause.

"Like a scroll He rolled up the plains and rivers,
Closing the book at last."

The Shape of Things to Come

The Shape of Water: a Review

Part I: The Plot Synopsis They Didn't Show You

Our protagonist is a mute, Hispanic woman with a sexual fetish for eggs oppressed by the ableist, patriarchal and white supremacist society of 1960s America, who by nature of necessity works in a secret US Government research centre. Her only friends are an equally oppressed dysphoric homosexual and African-America co-worker, who is in fact so oppressed that she works as a cleaner despite being arguably the most empathetic woman in the whole country at the time. Soon enough, before any of our oppressed friends can say "patriarchy", chief bad guy, Colonel White Supremacy brings an amphibian humanoid swamp-lurker into the centre against its will, and places it in captivity, much to the swamp-lurker's despair. At this point the audience realises how important it is to go vegan. 

In between Colonel Supremacy's sadistic cattle-prodding of the lurker, solely because he's that mean, our mute protagonist starts feeding eggs to the lurker, and soon it becomes clear what sort of bond the two are developing. The more that Colonel Supremacy tortures the lurker, the more the protagonist's relationship with the non-human creature, which initially could have been no more serious than a human feeding their pet goldfish, becomes a tale of romantic development. 

Now enter General 'Murica from the US Army, who, placing all ends of the American State above basic human decency, orders Colonel Supremacy to kill and dissect the lurker. Undercover Soviet spy Dr. Mole pleads for its life, and is ordered by his paymasters to kill the lurker. Since, as it happens, communist traitors are so much more compassionate and in love with diversity than ordinary Americans of the 1960s, the protagonist frees the lurker from captivity with the help of Dr. Mole, and of course Mr. Dysphoria. The crux of the narrative probably lies here, as each of these different individuals set apart from the power structures of their times - one disabled, one gay, one communist and one plain non-human - rebel against the conformity expected of them and lift the middle finger to the sadism of Colonel White Supremacy and General 'Murica. In a comic yet deeply telling turn of events, Mr. Dysphoria makes a pass at a male pie shop waiter, only to be rebuked by his bigoted homophobic crush and ordered not to return, only for the crime of "being himself."

Colonel White Supremacy returns home to his ideal American family with his gorgeous blonde-haired wife and two young children. "This is America" he mutters, as if a symptom of the febrile seizure which is his life within the power structure of ethnostate USA. The embodiment of the reactionary, stubborn ultraconservative, even Colonel Supremacy's character displays echoes of discontent. Meanwhile, the protagonist smuggles the lurker into her bathroom, before flooding it so she can commit bestiality - er, have misunderstood and passionate lovemaking - with it. 

Eventually, Dr. Mole is betrayed by his own paymasters, and after some blood-curdling dramatic tension, Colonel Supremacy kills off the remaining commies before torturing the poor, empathetic traitor on the floor before him. In a classic example of Hollywood poetic justice, the lurker kills Colonel Supremacy in a final victory for diversity and tolerance, before transforming the protagonist into a lurker herself, so that the two of them can live happily ever after.

Part II: Analysis

There honestly isn't much more to be said after the satire above (and to be clear, it is satire). The media jumped on Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, as the infamous fash bashing director takes the stage once more with this highly allegorical film about tolerance and fear of difference, at least, according to the left. There is, nevertheless, a problem, which is that however much del Toro and the critics may like to present The Shape as an "ode to 'the other'" or a treatise on tolerance, dressing up your 'other' as a non-human creature and including gratuitous scenes of a woman performing sex acts on an amphibian is just that - a woman performing sex acts on an amphibian - and most ordinary people will come out of such an experience disgusted rather than inspired. 

It is interesting that this film has been compared to the 1954 horror movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon, which took quite a different tack, the creature there being explicitly malicious, eventually sent back to its lair at the end of the story under a hail of bullets. A sign of the times, the critics might well tells us, that in the '50s we feared and fought the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and in 2018 we have sex with it. If that is not a sign of cultural and moral degeneracy, then it is hard to tell what is. To be perfectly honest, it is not even as though del Toro has tried to keep the deviancy of the story under wraps: admitting that the bathroom sex scene between Elisa and the fish-man was inspired by his childhood memories of watching Black Lagoon and wishing that the creature would have sex with Julia Adams. Disturbing? Quite so. 

Ultimately, bestiality is still bestiality. It was amusing to read in British media last week about the outrage with which the public met the story of an 80-year-old man being caught engaging in sex acts with a herd of cows. The judge hasn't even passed sentence, and already the papers are crying out about the "perverted pensioner" etc. But is what Elisa does to the fish-man in The Shape of Water much better than what this pensioner did to the cows? In reality, it's rather hard to argue that it is. 

Therefore, The Shape of Water might as well have been a film about a woman fisting cows - and no matter which way you spin that, it's still absolutely abhorrent. 

Wherever an Altar is Found...

“Wherever an altar is found, there one finds civilisation.”

Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Second Dialogue (1821)

Maistre's infamous quotation echoes through most reactionary Catholic spheres like the voice of God through the clouds. Countless philosophers have recognised the importance of Christian worship, and even those who believed that the downfall of Christianity was necessary or inevitable, such as Nietzsche, expressed concern about the downfall of religion in the West. In declaring that Gott ist tot, Western philosophy came to the realisation that so too was the most powerful expression of will that had driven European civilisation for centuries. It was manifestly obvious that the abandonment of the altar would remove that Divine Spark, which, whether you believed in all orthodox Christian doctrines or not, an appreciation of which drove individuals and communities onto great feats of labour, intellectual development, and greatness. 

Kant's solution was to find an alternative way to justify Christian ethics. Modern deontologists indeed now like to pin the root of morality in a plurality of various abstractions: justice, freedom, duty et cetera, concepts known as much to God as to Man. The rational root of order seemed acceptable, but only until other rationalists, such as Bentham and the utilitarians, began to posit that reason could just as easily be used to defend hedonism. Benthamite utilitarianism involves the throwing out of all methods of ethics besides universal happiness, a problematic term in itself. Nietzsche on the other hand tried to carry forward some of the atheistic principles of philosophers such as Schopenhauer, exhorting his readers to not merely overcome their instincts, but their very humanity. This too is problematic - it would be dangerous to claim that mankind has the ability to play God himself, as has been the warning of the Church for centuries, and indeed, to overcome oneself and become the Superman that Nietzsche envisaged, will either lead to delusions of false grandeur, or as in Nietzsche's own tragic but telling case, complete and utter insanity. There is therefore no perfect solution to the problem of moral order outside of the Church, and so we must turn back to Maistre's little gobbet.

Most ultraconservatives accept that for them, politics is like religion: it is a matter of dogmatics, not a matter of opinion or speculation. Ultimately, history has proven that dogmatics make for far more acceptable and stable grounds for the furtherance of societal order and progress. A degree of freedom, or as the Church has often called it, economy, may be permitted within the grounds of a dogmatic legal code, but total freedom can only lead to destabilisation, as we are seeing in contemporary Europe and North America. As Europeans turned away from the altar, they lost that which bound them together. If you ask a priest of any major liturgical Church why sacraments such as Mass, Confession, Unction et cetera are so important, he will probably say, amongst other things, that "it brings us [the faithful] together, sharing the one thing that we all have in common." When a Catholic goes to receive communion in the Holy Eucharist, he believes that he is receiving the precious body and blood of Jesus Christ. That is a monumental feat of belief, and the Church ensures that all who believe are properly treated, and receive the proper sacraments. It is the sacraments of the Church which, through this binding instrument of superhuman faith in itself, link each member of the faithful to the next. The philosophers described above were trying to rationalise a mystery. The morality of Christianity may indeed be rational when reflected upon, but its universality depends on the mystery of our human need for God, which we see most perfectly when kneeling at the altar. Walk away from the altar as these philosophers did, and the binding is loosed; no wonder then that moral relativism has become so popular in our time - what is left to hold us together in brotherly embrace?

If one looks at many of the Protestant Churches of the contemporary West, we can see that they have abandoned the altar in its truest form. The Anglican Church, for instance, has always tried to please both the Catholic and mainstream Protestant ('High' and 'Low' Church) factions within its midst. Nowhere within an Anglican Eucharist is a metaphysical transformation stated to be taking place, and upon receiving communion, the congregant is greeted with the ambiguous phrase "May the body and blood of Christ bless you, always." Anglicans also practice open communion - one need not even technically be a Christian to receive the sacraments, or at least, no one will ask, and no one will know. Such lapse respect for the mysteries of God has led to the state that Anglicanism is in now, with relatively few congregants, of whom most are Christians for Sunday morning only, and a primate who believes in "a radical new inclusion" following the Church of England Synod's rejection of the definition of marriage.

When we speak of mysteries, we speak of the unrevealed knowledge which only God can reveal to Man, and which Man as-yet has not been able to understand. God has graced us with enough knowledge to offer Him rightful and pleasing worship, offerings in the form of light (such as from candles) and the communion bread and wine placed upon the altar. It is not the place of the Church to pat the heads of sinners and the faithless who feel as though they are not 'included' and welcome them as though their behaviour is openly encouraged - such a path has led the Christian Churches of the world to all kinds of iniquity (a mystery itself, cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:7), and now, this liberal theology is beginning to work its way into the Catholic Church; Vatican II made this very clear when it concluded:

“[Muslims] adore the one God, living and subsisting in himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to humans. They take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even God's inscrutable decrees.” (Source)

In reality, of course, Muslims do no such thing. For one thing, there is very little if any concept in Islam of God embodying the concept of love, forgiveness is by no means a given, and the Muslim deity certainly does not withhold his judgement upon the unfaithful in order to give them time to repent. Free will is by no means a gift from God according to Islam, and whilst the power of God is very real in both Christianity and Islam, Muslim scholars have tended to fall down in favour of eliminating enquiry into the nature of the Divine, unlike Christianity, which has a rich history of natural theology and apologetics. We do not worship the same God, and yet liberal theologians would have us think so, in order to help bring about this strange, homogenous world where everyone worships a bit of everything in some sort of spoilt broth of multicultural spirituality. Ah yes, and there is one other thing - Islam utilises no altars, no liturgy. Its only binding power comes from the potential wrath of the divinity. 

In short, Catholics cannot afford to lose the altar, by which we also mean the liturgical sacraments which make our faith so special, and set it apart from other religious faiths, even other forms of Christianity. By nature of the fact that we guard the altar against the profane and the lies of those who would harm its sanctity, we also guard our civilisation. The altar binds individual brothers into a community, and it is within these firm communities, united by faith and participation in the rites instituted of the Divine, that civilisation can thrive. The problems of modernity seem to arise ultimately from a lack of binding spirit. My neighbour shares nothing with me - he: atheist, those around him: a mix of all things, Christian, Muslim, and what have you.

So for now, there is no central will, no Divine Spark which all in society may share in any longer in our multicultural, secular world. Thus, there is no civilisation there anymore. 

An altar, why, there civilisation—is!