Judge without ideology [Zech 8]

/ pukeko

The key part of this passage is not the promise, though the promise is true and needed. It is what we are to do.

  • Not fear. The elite want us to fear.
  • Speak truth, not the lies we speak out of fear of the elite.
  • Judge truly, not using a politically correct filter, as demanded by the elite.
  • Make peace.
  • And neither perjure nor betray: keep your oaths and honour your commitments.

There is nothing on this list that is new or dishonourable. But there is a lot there that the elite hate. They follow Machiavelli, who only keep their words on small things.

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Thus says the LORD of hosts: “Let your hands be strong, you who in these days have been hearing these words from the mouth of the prophets who were present on the day that the foundation of the house of the LORD of hosts was laid, that the temple might be built. For before those days there was no wage for man or any wage for beast, neither was there any safety from the foe for him who went out or came in, for I set every man against his neighbor. But now I will not deal with the remnant of this people as in the former days, declares the LORD of hosts. For there shall be a sowing of peace. The vine shall give its fruit, and the ground shall give its produce, and the heavens shall give their dew. And I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all these things. And as you have been a byword of cursing among the nations, O house of Judah and house of Israel, so will I save you, and you shall be a blessing. Fear not, but let your hands be strong.”

For thus says the LORD of hosts: “As I purposed to bring disaster to you when your fathers provoked me to wrath, and I did not relent, says the LORD of hosts, so again have I purposed in these days to bring good to Jerusalem and to the house of Judah; fear not. These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace; do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the LORD.”

(Zechariah 8:9-17 ESV)

 

Now, how does this link into what we are doing? Should we invent a retroculture, living as if it was 1930 or 1950, before the third turning, when the hippies shat on duty, God and country?

I can understand the idea of turning back, but the image is less important than the substance. There were plenty of cads and scoundrels in other generations: their besetting sins and issues may even have been greater than ours: I would rather mock petunias than kill members of the NSDAP before they string me up with the Jews, Catholics and Communists.

To me, the Retroculture idea has always seemed more than a little LARP-y. Will driving old cars, wearing fedoras, and speaking with archaic diction stoke the fires of a powerful new sociopolitical movement? Probably not, but it will get you laughed out of serious conversation.

Lind does not mean it to be quite as superficial as it is presented, however. It just takes more explaining to get to the core of the idea. The picture he paints of a happy, respectable family from the 1940s becomes a ray of light that starkly contrasts against the cold, degenerate reality of modernity. It’s meant to be a vision of what could be if we consciously changed our ways. A common refrain from Lind goes like this: “If you know you’ve gone down the wrong road, what do you do? You don’t keep driving. You turn back.” Retroculture uses the past as a guide and a benchmark. It calls for reshaping our lives to resemble, on a broad scale, the lives our ancestors led.

What we have to do, within the church, is as Zechariah suggests. We have to speak truth. We have to stop signalling virtue, and discuss the truth.

We need to project hope, and certainty, and confidence. We need to purge the corrupt. And the first thing we need to say, over and over again, is that we are sinners redeemed by grace. We try to be like Jesus. We will never get to the point where we achieve it: even those whom we attribute sainthood to sinned.

The academic elite, of course, see this not: and as they degenerate into stupidity (for the evil makes you stupid) then their works judge them. We need do little.

Mencius Moldbug did the conceptual spadework needed to ignite NRx as an Internet discussion, but it was Barack Obama who put the world to the torch under the banshee cry “Neoreaction!” OK, that wasn’t his exact word, but the basic point isn’t seriously controversial. By slapping an explicit Cathedral clownface onto a faculty-lounge leftist superpower policy suite, destined to pan-dimensional failure, he utterly bankrupted mainstream global progressivism. The smug incompetence was insufferable, and — crucially — so complacent that it let the academic-media inner workings show. Even the saddest tools could see the thing now, and while many still supported it ardently, it kind of disgusted them. There was clearly no point at all trying to compromise with these people. “Those neoreactionary types don’t, maybe we should be listening to them?” (Plenty of toxicity comes out of that, but there’s no need to rake over it again right now — it’s something I talk about all the time.)

Victor Davis Hanson is an irredeemable Neocon, but he understands this stuff. His portrait of Obama is almost excruciatingly persuasive. Core point: “Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation.”

I’ve said before that the fourth turning will not be progressive. Progressive politics is in a death spiral. The question is what to do next. Here those of my age have to do their bit: if Timothy Leary told the hippies to turn on, tune in and drop out, we need to say it is time to change.

We need to speak truth, keep our oaths, and judge without ideology.