I talked about endgame yesterday, and today the texts move on and one sees that society degenerates as evil continues. This can occur in church and without church. And it is unhealthy: we know this instinctively.
After you’ve worked in a GP (family physician) for a while and accumulated a group of steady patients, people relax with you and like to talk about more personal details. Women love to complain about their husbands, however, the most frequently complaint I get is the one Augustina articulated. I rarely get complaints about all the other stuff. Sure, some complain about their husbands bad habits, snoring or excessive weight but what they most complain about is him “acting lie [sic] a child”. What’s become more worrying though, as time has passed, it’s not just the married women that are complaining about their husbands but increasingly, girlfriends are complaining of this type of dissatisfaction of their boyfriends as well.
What Slumlord (who is being cited by Simon Grey) does not say is that the boyfriendz is the new husbandz. Marriage, for many, is not going to happen: the laws are now based around civil partnerships, with ill-defined boundaries.
A de facto relationship is a relationship between two people (whether a woman and a man, or a woman and a woman, or a man and a man) who are both over 18 and who live together as a couple, but who are not married to one another.
In deciding whether two people live together as a couple, the Court will consider all the relevant circumstances, including: How long the relationship has lasted; The extent to which the couple share a home; Whether they have a sexual relationship; Their financial and property arrangements and interdependence; Their ownership, use and acquisition of property; Their degree of mutual commitment to a shared life; Their care and support of children; Who does the housework and other household duties; The reputation and public aspects of the relationship (e.g. whether the partners are known to family and friends as “a couple”). These factors are only a guide. The presence or absence of any one of them will not necessarily determine whether there is a de facto relationship. The Court decides how important any one given factor is in each particular case.
Now, there are consequences to this diffusion of responsibility and boundaries. One of which is that men have become less dominant, less directive, more passive. At the same time, while strongly arguing that (as women) they should be strong, independent, and totally equal, the popular literature of this time (for women) is about dominant men, be they Vampires or Simon Grey. And, we are generally unhappy.
But back to the texts, for today they contrast: the first is about why there was a flood: we bought it on because our wickedness offended God to the point where he thought it was time to remove all humans. But, unlike Greenpeace, he relented.
1When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. 3Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” 4The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
5The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7So the LORD said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created — people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD.
12Take care, brothers and sisters, that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. 13But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14For we have become partners of Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end. 15As it is said,
“Today, if you hear his voice,do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
16Now who were they who heard and yet were rebellious? Was it not all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? 17But with whom was he angry forty years? Was it not those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? 18And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, if not to those who were disobedient? 19So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
Paul (who I think wrote Hebrews) says the correct way out of this decline is to obey God. Simple enough, but not.
For we have moved from courage and fidelity and honour to irony. People do not know what is going on, and the hipster is the effete end of Western man (and woman). He has a methodology, and it is worthwhile noting it.
Shoreditch is a formula, a brand. It’s as much a part of mainstream consumer culture as iPhones and Sky TV and as global as Starbucks. So, let’s look at how an area gets Shoreditched.
You find a previously unnoticed urban neighbourhood, ideally one that’s a bit down on its luck. Pioneer hipsters move in and coolhunters ensure it starts trending on Twitter. A year later, the mainstream media notices and, for the next 12 months, the neighbourhood is byword for urban cool. Soon property prices soar pushing the original residents out, the bankers (always a trailing indicator) begin to move in and a Foxtons opens. Finally, the New York Times runs a piece in which it “discovers” the area and the cycle is complete. The last hipsters move on and find a new neighbourhood to play with.
This is where poor Shoreditch finds itself now. Its alternative crown was lost years ago to Dalston which, in turn, had it snatched by Peckham. If you head to Shoreditch on a Saturday evening these days it really is as “bridge and tunnel” as its detractors (and one-time champions) claim. A roiling, boiling mass of fight-ready designer-labelled out-of-towners smashed on sugary cocktails and bad cocaine, a cold-climate Ayia Napa. Notting Hill doesn’t know how lucky it is to have merely become a ghetto for bankers.
Yep, Bankers beat Pyjama Boy, even though I don’t like bankers.
Now, the reason that the hipsters are canaries is that they are themselves warning of a decline. It is the next stage after allowing perversions of all sorts to be protected: the effeminate do make useful canaries in the economic mineshaft because of their tendency to end up in high end jobs trading luxuries (wedding planner, butler, hairdresser, personal trainer) and when times get tough those things are cut from people’s budgets.
But there are consequences.
This is the reaction of a straight woman to the ur-hipster, Woody Allen.
He’s successful, but think about what he’s like. He has that whiny voice, the slight, feminine build, he’s self-obsessed and has the extreme pursuit of his own pleasure that Brendan says marks straight faggotry, and appears to have no sense of masculine virtue. He has always made my skin crawl, and I have never, ever understood the appeal of his movies beyond the fact that he’s had some interesting leading ladies.
Now, within the church we have made wimps and hipsters. The wimps… well that is the number of men who consider women as more spiritual than they are (because their erotic material has words, not pictures, and because women are more verbal than men and sound so spiritual with their Churchian jargon). They give up on leading their families, and they give up on church.
It becomes women’s work: un-spayed men leave. The now feminized church cannot deal with anger, or confrontation, or any form of correction: it is about feelings, not correct thought. And that leads to a spineless, unattractive spirituality.
This leads to a test for the church: if your young men look like they are fey, you are doing something wrong. Moreover, if you don’t have any men after the age when they kick of the maternal apron strings, you are really, truly doing something wrong. For the hipsters are lost, and thus they are a warning.
He knows that he hates his society, but he has been conditioned that he cannot conceive of another method. He shows his rebellion by only taking part in things that society has discarded or by altering what society does in a manner not of its choosing. The fedora was abandoned by society, society is bad, so fedora is good. Extrapolate this outward and they are wearing a man’s costume but cannot be men. The women learn all the domestic arts and take part in submission, but in a twisted way, so that they are not wives.
Hipsters are the Lost Boys and Girls who want to be man and woman, husband and wife, but have no idea how it works. Can you think of a thing more sad?
Within the church, the solution is fairly easy to state but hard to do.
- Ignore the law. Seriously. The law, now, along with the family courts and violence against women, is evil. I am stating this on a day when there was a murder-suicide.
- Preach the law of God. Yes, practice hate speech: and preach all of it. That includes women submitting to their husbands and fathers. That includes physical discipline. That includes letting men raise their sons.
- Keep young men and women apart (most of the time). Organize single sex schools, so the boys do not get distracted, and so that they can learn without being shamed. Move to a more masculine set of books — and do not let the feminists get in and subvert the reading list (Hunger Games should not be a set text at any school, because it is poorly written, but particularly not at a boys school. Kipling, however, should be). Have young men in fraternities of phratries: have them learn from older men. And have younger women at home or in the women’s country, learning from older women.
- Marry young, and for life. It is far more efficient to home school the younger children and raise your own vegetables and go crunchy. But it requires commitment. In a tight community that is being persecuted, you may end up sharing tools, but not wives: you need to have that trust and integrity. There is a reason that divorcing a wife used to be a court-martial offence: if you cannot keep your word to your woman, how will you keep it to your country.
- Cads and cowards need to be shamed. Honour has a cost: people will break. But society needs to have this. And we do have the means of church discipline to allow for penitence and forgiveness.
We don’t have to be Spartans, and leave the women for breeding only, But we do need some of their laconicism and stoicism, for Irony does not win any battles.
The hipster and fey tell us that we, in the west and in the church, have become weak. We need to return to the law of God, all of us. We need to repent.
