Overnight the tweet stream is full of various things about the US shutdown, my favourite being that veterans are “trespassing” on their own memorial. The entire thing, from this side of the Pacific, looks petty.
It reminds me of the period of negotiation that occurs after most elections here, where the two major parties need a minor party to govern and that party can choose. It once took six weeks to negotiate a coalition agreement. And life went on. People went about their daily business. A good government is a blessing, and a bad one a curse, but the government is not the daily life of the people. Something the Italians and French have always known.
But today’s passage is different. It is Christ, talking about how the way of the Christian is to take the hard challenges, and leave ease behind. It is about discipline, pain, sweat, blood, tears.
It is not ease, it is not prosperity, and it is generally against the flow of society and causes suspicion.
13“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. 14For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
15“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? 17In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20Thus you will know them by their fruits.
21“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
Ann Barnhardt is back, and I’m rejoicing that this most crunchy of Catholics is at her blunt best. I have no ideas as to if Francis is a good pope or not. As a geek, I liked Ratzinger, because he declared generally sound doctrine. I am no Papist ans as a reformed person I request and require truth not fashion from the pulpit. But the reason I am quoting her is that the is absolutely correct about democracy.
Democracy is a terrible system that rapidly devolves into the tyranny of the mob who then, without fail, install a tyrant. The founders of the now-dead American republic were quite open about this. Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Yup. And the American republic didn’t even survive 240 years. The best system of government is a meritorious aristocracy that elects a monarch. Think about it. Shouldn’t the good, moral, intelligent people be elevated to positions of power irrespective of their family ties? And then, shouldn’t those people elect from among their ranks a “chief executive” who serves as a final authority when needed? Because as we all know, SOMEONE has got to be in charge; the buck has to stop with someone or else utter chaos ensues. Remember the term “subsidiarity”?
Bergoglio and his Jesuit-hippy milieu reject this truth. They gin up popular support by declaring that the “poor” are intrinsically morally superior to the “rich”, and that the “poor” should call the shots and the “rich” should be suppressed. The problem with that is that a healthy society does tend to stratify in terms of economics, academics and administration along intellectual and/or moral lines – note I said a HEALTHY society, which our modern society clearly is not. Today in the West imbeciles and psychopaths prosper in business and government while intelligent people of morality are marginalized if not destroyed, and genuine academia is destroyed while a faux-academe becomes a propaganda arm of the state.
I’d add that America has never been a democracy, but is a republic, and New Zealand, Australia and Canada are not democracies, but like the UK, constitutional monarchies, which are republics with a king or queen instead of a president. The Hanoverian revolution (the Glorious Revolution) and the Whig parliamentarians of the Late Regency were quite clear about this, and these thinkers influenced Mr Adams and his coterie of rebels when they rejected his Majesty George III. The republic did not come out of the ether but from a fairly bloody discourse about the rights of people, parliament and crown that dated back to the Stuarts and Cromwell, if not to the Anglo Saxon ancient rights of men.
Back to the passage for a second. When I was a kid, the standard exegesis of this passage is that if you are serious about Christ you will stand out and people will not like this. You will have criticism. We were generally talking about preaching to co workers or avoiding gambling, booze and girls. It was a more innocent age.
Today, being of Christ gets you criticized and shunned. Attending church is not something that one can talk about openly, but is mentioned in code. Not keeping up with he current fashionable sin, from usury through sodomy to islamo-philia, means that you are seen as hateful, intolerant, and unfit for society.
You will be cast out.
The cost of following truth and beauty and being a true academic is that you will not get those big grants or promotions unless you disguise what you are doing in the discourse of fashion. This process has corrupted most if not all the arts — there was a huge fight over an interview a lovely academic did about how he loves novelists such as Tolstoy and Roth and how women novelists don’t resonate with him — which led to him being called ignorant and sexist. I am informed that this is now impacting the scientific disciplines — that people are using public health to preach socialism — as if you need to be of the right politics or in complete agreement to do good, or compassion is something the left have a monopoly of.
Now, if you say that those who criticize, who shut down discourse, who run the current intellectual fashion are going to perdition while you do the post modern version of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin you will not continue in employment or in society.
But it is true. And we use the blogosphere as the modern samizdat. To whisper the truth, for the lies are shouted, But these times are not innocent. If we live the truth, it shows in our lives, and the broad base of society will hate us, for we are seeking truth not tweaking, beauty not debasement, and honour not doublethink.
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