I was born in the South, a slave, and I love the South. … We are not foreigners nor aliens. You understand us and we understand you…. We went into slavery pagans; we came out of slavery with the Bible and Sunday-school literature in our hands. … Some days ago I was in the city of Richmond, and I heard a story concerning an old black man there. He was living in the same home where his mistress lived during slavery, and she had planted with her own hands a rose-bush in the yard. A new tenant took possession, and the new mistress said to this old colored man, “Dig up that rose-bush.” The old man hesitated, and with a tear in his eye, shook his head and went behind the house. Again the lady came out and said, “Dig up that rose-bush,” and he came up to her, touched his hat and made a polite bow and said, “Miss, I likes you, I want to obey you, but, Missus, you don’t understand; these old hands can’t dig up that rose-bush; that rose-bush was planted fifty years ago by my old Missus, and these hands can’t dig it up; you must excuse me, Missus.” The feeling of sympathy, the feeling of friendship between the black people and the white people in the Southland was planted here years ago by our forefathers. We who are following in their footsteps, black men and white men, must not dig up that old rose-bush. We must nurture it with our tears and with our love and with our sympathy, and as we do it we will have the blessing of Almighty God.
Booker T. Washington, “The Religious Development of the Negro”
[L]iberalism, socialism, communism, scientism, progressivism, identity politics, globalism, and all the rest—this Hydra’s head of modernist projects, however ostensibly secular, is united by … features that are irreducibly theological… [M]odernity is also an Oedipal phenomenon…. [T]he Gnostic lives in what Voegelin calls a “dream world.” … Nothing that happens is taken to falsify his beliefs, because any bad effects are interpreted as merely further manifestations of the evil forces, rather than reflecting any defect in the Gnostic’s belief system. … [T]he Gnostic posits a final victory of the “pure” over the evil forces that govern everyday reality.… As Voegelin famously put it, modern forms of Gnosticism “immanentize the eschaton”—that is to say, they relocate the final victory of the righteous in this world rather than the next, and look forward to a heaven on earth. … [C]onsider Marxism from the point of view of Voegelin’s analysis. Here the all-pervasive and near omnipotent evil that the Gnostic sees in the world becomes capitalism and the bourgeois power that it sustains. This power is taken to permeate every aspect of life…. Everyday moral assumptions are mere ideologies that mask the interests of bourgeois power, religion is a mere opiate to reconcile the oppressed to that power, and so on. … Critical Race Theory (CRT) is in exactly the same mold. … For CRT, the all-pervasive and near omnipotent source of evil in the world is the “racist power” of “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and indeed “whiteness” itself. This racism is “systemic” in a Foucauldian sense—it percolates down, in capillary fashion, into every nook and cranny of society and the unconscious assumptions of every citizen. It is especially manifest in all “inequities,” which result from the “implicit biases” lurking even in people who think of themselves as free of racism. And it is to be found even in the most seemingly innocuous of offenses, which are in reality “micro-aggressions.” Even self-consciously “anti-racist” CRT adepts themselves are not free of racism, but must constantly engage in a Maoist-style self-critical struggle to root out and confess ever deeper and unexamined racist assumptions. … Other forms of woke Gnosticism have their own bogeymen—”patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” etc.—which, like “whiteness,” are abstractions spoken of as if they were concrete demonic powers. … The gnosis that purportedly reveals all of this suffocating oppression is to be found in the writings of gurus like Kendi and DiAngelo, whose main difference from the likes of Marcion and Mani is the size of their royalty checks. … It is no accident that CRT adepts think of themselves as “woke.” For it is not rational argumentation that compels them but a kind of conversion experience, and Kendi, DiAngelo, et al. are essentially Gnostic preachers rather than philosophers or social scientists. … With wokeness suddenly flooding universities, high schools, the medical profession, the military, business, and seemingly everywhere else, we are seeing something comparable to the Arian crisis of the 4th century or the Albigensian crisis of the 13th century—the alarmingly rapid spread of a toxic religious cult that threatens the general sociopolitical order no less than it does the Church. As in these earlier crises, there are many Christians, already heterodox anyway, who are happy to cave in to the madness.
It has long seemed abundantly clear to me that I was born into a dying, if not already dead, civilisation, whose literature was part of the general decomposition; a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny Eng.Lit. vultures, and echoing with the hyena cries of Freudians looking for their Marx and Marxists looking for their Freud. This, despite Adam’s apples quivering over winged collars to extol it, and money, money, money, printed off and stuffed into briefcases to finance it. At the beginning of a civilisation, the role of the artist is priestly; at the end, harlequinade. From St Augustine to St Ezra Pound, from Plainsong to the Rolling Stones, from El Greco to Picasso, from Chartres to the Empire State Building, from Benvenuto Cellini to Henry Miller, from Pascal’s Pensées to Robinson’s Honest to God. A Gadarene descent down which we all must slide, finishing up in the same slough.
Joseph took his betrothed Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem (2.5). Bethlehem was his home town (v. 3) and, in accordance with the patrilocal marital customs of the day, it must also have been the place where they finalized their matrimonial arrangements by bringing her into his home. As a newly married man … he and his bride could stay in a marital chamber attached to the house until they could get a place of their own. They stayed there for some time until she came to full term (v. 6), and she gave birth to Jesus in the main room of the house rather than in her marital apartment because it was too small, and she laid the newborn in one of those mangers (v. 7) common to the main room of an ancient farmhouse. After staying at least another forty days in Bethlehem (v. 22; cf. Lev 12.2–8), Joseph and Mary eventually moved to Nazareth to make their home together in her family’s town (v. 39; cf. 1.26–27).
To be sure, this scenario as presupposed in Luke’s infancy account diverges greatly from the conventional Christmas story. There is no inn, no innkeeper, and no stable. But it is grounded in a careful exegesis of the text. The term κατάλυμα has a broad sense of a ‘place to stay’ and the final clause of Luke 2.7 should be translated as ‘because they had no space in their place to stay’.
It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving time have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change. And as for permanence—consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.
CS Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism
And even if Clown World survives materially, it certainly will not survive spiritually. Of course, it thinks it will, and prides itself on its inevitability—on being on the “right side of history”:
The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever. The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)
But already, before our eyes, it is wasting away. As it must, for it is suicidal:
Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism—the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future—falls into place.
James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism
Not that Clown World will ever admit to as much:
[T]he ideology of modern liberalism must be understood as itself one of the expressions of the Western contraction and decline; a kind of epiphenomenon or haze accompanying the march of history; a swan song, a spiritual solace of the same order as the murmuring of a mother to a child who is gravely ill. … It is as if a man, struck with a mortal disease, were able to say and to believe, as the flush of the fever spread over his face, “Ah, the glow of health returning!”; as his flesh wasted away, “At least I am able to trim down that paunch the doctor always warned me about!”; as a finger dropped off with gangrene or leprosy, “Now I won’t have that bothersome job of trimming those nails every week!” Liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution; and this function its formulas will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way: for even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished or altogether collapses, we or our children will be able to see that ending, by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as the transition to a new and higher order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions and discriminations of the past.
Now, however (and ironically), the masks are off. There is no Kumbaya, no Revolution, no “social justice,” no universal civilization, just an insecure neoliberal Establishment on its last legs.
Clown World will not last forever. Its fake government, fake money, fake food, fake art, fake genders, fake sex, fake outrage, fake justice, and of course fake news will not last forever. The only question is when they will die—and what will come next.
Hopefully things will get better. They may yet get worse. Be not afraid! Eat meat, HODL Bitcoin, read old books, lift, and pray.
So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows, those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on, when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements. All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the face of your mother.
Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.
1 Peter 2.17
But what if the king is illegitimate? Well, what if? Arguably Rome’s emperors were illegitimate—Caesar illegally wrested power from the Senate, and the founders of the Roman Republic would have been appalled at what the Empire became.
Biden illegally stole the election (among other things), Obama illegally spied on Trump (among other things), Lincoln illegally suspended habeas corpus (among other things), etc., etc., and even if they had not, the very Founders of the United States of America (who themselves would have been appalled at what the American Empire has become) illegally wrested power from Britain when they illegally declared independence—and of course George III was only ever king because William of Orange illegally wrested power from the Stuarts, and so on, perhaps, all the way down the road to Cain’s murder of Abel.
Pray for a peaceful restoration (and work peacefully towards a peaceful restoration) and for an end to the madness which threatens to drown us all. But also: “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Timothy 2.1-2).
Yes, the king is illegitimate. What then? Fear God. Honour the king. Pray for Biden.
Brave Ole World 