Collapse: The Blog

Happy Birthday, C:TB!

Collapse: The Blog premiered exactly one year ago this minute with its inaugural post, "Things Fall Apart." In that time, it's grown substantially. Here's to another year!

Moving On

For the foreseeable future, I will be posting pretty much exclusively at The Orthosphere, the new common far-right blog set up by Herr Sellanraa. I'll probably continue to cross-post, but in an effort to drum up support for our collaborative effort (and also so I don't have to split my attentions quite so much), I will probably wind up disabling comments at C:TB. Leave feedback over there, not here. (Probably for the best, since I'm given to understand that Wordpress has a much better spam filter than Typepad does).

I'll leave this blog up for reference but I'll probably switch it to a free (i.e., uglier) format; no sense in me shelling out ten bucks a month for a blog I'm pretty much no longer posting to. Meanwhile, enjoy The Orthosphere.

She's Probably Right

From Nancy Pelosi:

98 percent of Catholic women, I am told by all of you, use birth control to determine the size and timing of their families. So again its a women's health issue.

Precisely why heretics like her need to be excommunicated immediately, preferably Becket style:

Abortion as a Sacrament

Abortion is a sacrament for the leftist antireligion -- ritualistic child-sacrifice on the altar consecrated to the human will. So says Joseph at Arimathea (h/t Kristor):

Last month before the March for Life, I was thinking about an idea that I have encountered in recent years that abortion is a sacrament for the Left. Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life notes that Ginette Paris published the book, The Sacrament of Abortion, in A.D. 1992, wherein she supports abortion as a pagan affirmation of life. I was surprised that the idea has its origin on the Left, but I should get used to the perversity of this world. Although the prophet Isaiah proclaims, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!,” one must not forget that the wicked delight in wickedness.

Upon reflection, however, I think that the Left’s position is remarkably consistent given human nature. Consider sacrifice and its place in human society. Sacrifice is pretty much a universal human phenomenon. Man gives up something dear to his gods. Crudely, this act is seen as a transaction wherein the sacrificer seeks to appease divine anger or curry divine favor. The more philosophical understanding is that by sacrifice man makes clear to himself and to everyone the proper order of being, where lesser goods are given up for greater ones. The act of sacrifice to the gods demonstrates vividly to the human soul and to the human community the appropriate hierarchy of the world; it is an impressive (as in impression making) act that proclaims the community’s ranking of values.

As Joseph notes, the idea of abortion as a sacrament actually originates on the left.

"I Respect Your Opinion"

This isn't something we have to deal with a lot around here (my dissenting commenters generally being mostly spiteful, ignorant douchebags), but it bugs me nevertheless. Recently, a friend brought up the issue of homosexuality (the context was a revolting photograph she found online which I will not share, but which involved a half-nude gay man at a pride parade embracing an open apostate apologizing for Christianity's treatment of gays) and criticized the Christian take on the issue, on the grounds that it's inconsistent with Christian love. I've previously attacked this is a misrepresentation of caritas and what it means; simply put, love in this sense means not only expecting but demanding the best of the object of that love, which is naturally inconsistent with scandalous and reprehensible sexual behavior. Would you be content with your wife or daughter becoming a prostitute or a drug addict just because it makes her "happy"? No; such would be beneath her. The internal logic of interpersonal love is such that it demands excellence of its object.

Anyway, the discussion was polite and brief and ended with her saying we'd have to agree to disagree but that she respected my opinion. The subject was dropped and we went on talking about less divisive things. But it wasn't the first time I'd heard that formulation as a means of ending a discussion: I respect your opinion.

I respect your opinion! As if the subject of the conversation were whether my "opinion" was worthy of your respect. As if it were about you and me and not the truth. As if I were seeking your approval. It is a trope typical of the mind that can apprehend no truths beyond a conflict of two sovereign wills, moving at random throughout space and carefully agreeing to orchestrate their respective speeds and trajectories so as to avoid collision. At least the muscular and aggressive atheist/liberal/modern is acknowledging the existence of transcendent truth (albeit for no reason, no sound motivation, no good end, and in rank contrast to his own irrational nihilistic prejudices) when he declares, "You're wrong, and a jerk to boot." I might not say the same thing, but I don't pretend that my enemies' opinions are entitled to respect, especially when they're wrong on matters of grave importance and when their "arguments" amount to recycled cliches born of ignorance. There is no right to falsehood and error, after all, which is perhaps the one thing we and our neurotic dumbass enemies can agree on.

(Obviously my friend didn't mean it this way; it's just one of those things people feel the need to say, I guess. It probably dates from that long-ago age when liberalism was actually concerned with niceness instead of mere round-the-clock sodomy-at-any-price. At any rate, I object to the formulation itself, not the motivations of the speaker).

Valentine's Day and the Far-Right

Will S. at Patriactionary asks how patriarchal traditionalists ought to regard Valentine's Day.

The consensus over there seems to be that we should not take it too seriously because it's commercialized. My response is that anything worthwhile is going to be commercialized in this awful, apostate age. The more important the occasion, the more intense the commercialization (e.g., Christmas!). That's not less of a reason to celebrate it but more -- nobody wants to commercialize occasions no one gives a crap about (like Arbor Day).

I get that it's fashionable to be cynical about things like this. But it isn't right, at least not usually, and we ought not be acting like black-hearted misanthropic leftist cynics cocking our eyebrows at every social convention and asking, "But what use is it to me?" Holidays, like pretty much everything societies do, exist to structure things for us, to express some social value while commemorating a special occasion. I give gifts on certain holidays because those holidays afford me an opportunity to do so, and because I'm not mindful enough to think to do such things entirely on my own. Yes, the choice of day is semi-arbitrary: so is the choice of beloved. It doesn't mean the day or the love is without meaning or value -- or duty.

Over at The Spearhead, the title says it all: "if it isn't mutual, it isn't worth it." But the affectation of generosity in a calculated effort to extract something in return is precisely the wrong attitude to bring to any relationship, much less a romantic one; it's just a horrible way to live, period. If you give to your beloved, give simply because she is your beloved, not because you want something from her. (Even giving out of a grudging sense of social obligation is better than refusing to do anything for your beloved on the basis of some spiteful antiprinciple, although obviously, the ethical ideal would be giving out of simple generosity in response to the opportunity which Valentine's Day, however arbitrary and commercialized, has afforded). Frankly, if you're the kind of douchebag who gives gifts to a woman in the hopes that she'll put out (and I am not so vain to say that I have never been that kind of guy), you deserve to squirm through this holiday in the grips of sexual frustration.

The reverse is also true: a good woman should not expect (much less demand) anything, but accept gifts with a generous and gracious heart. Woe to the man whose wife has a cash register for a brain, for love -- if it is really love and not a seminal fluid-soaked counterfeit -- keeps no record of transactions. (And it goes without saying that men likewise should not expect or demand gifts nor women give out of calculation or pressure. But then no one, the people at The Spearhead evidently notwithstanding, believes otherwise).

In short, we on the far-right ought to be glad that society takes seriously the notion that love is essentially an act of unconditional giving, even if many people use it as an opportunity for exploitation and sexual indecency. It means that it yet recognizes some transcendent value and some basically sound ethical principle, that it is not yet so totally mired in self-worship that it cannot even move itself to give freely to another.

Maybe I'm just biased, though, on account of the fact that I have a rockin' sweetheart this year.

On Work and Human Nature

Long-time readers know that I regard employment as key to the health of any society. Employment integrates the individual with society in the pursuit of the common good; it enables him to discharge his duties to himself, his family, the state, and God; and it keeps him healthy, happy, productive, engaged, and mindful of his obligations to others. Unemployed people suffer physically and mentally, their families tend to disintegrate as they sink into poverty and despair, and they tend toward political extremism, crime, and other indicators of social pathology. A society that doesn't take employment seriously, that thinks having a sizable proportion of its people unemployed is good, and that is willing to tolerate any degree of chronic and involuntary unemployment, is radically deficient, not only organizationally but morally and with respect to its basic priorities.

Work, in other words, corresponds to human nature in a very real and powerful way. (Hobbies and social activism serve the same purpose for those who are moneyed enough not to need to work, at least not regularly). It's not for nothing that earlier societies envisioned work as a form of prayer: a divine office, executed with a humble heart, in accordance with the will of God.

Unfortunately, modern society has more or less succeeded in severing the link between work and the natural human impulses that rationalize and ennoble it. Man is atomized, reduced to interchangeable cogs in a utilitarian economic machine. He is fired wantonly and encouraged to change jobs for reasons of even minor convenience. The resulting bitterness, despair, and alienation is captured perfectly in movies like Office Space and Falling Down. The modern historical norm of hating one's job, detesting one's coworkers, resenting one's superiors and exploiting one's subordinates is grossly unhealthy from both an individual and social perspective.

For myself, I feel ludicrous guilt even contemplating leaving my current job, and not only because there are many who'd be happy to have it and my gripes are pretty minor. Work itself is a gift, and man ought to -- indeed, wants to -- be in a position in which he can cherish it, as he would any good thing. Modern society affords him no such opportunity; indeed, it abstracts from our economic order all that makes it human and salvages only that which makes it impersonal, bureaucratic, and insufferable. This is true not only at the micro level but at the macro, too. Suppose our elite was presented with two economic plans: one would cause the Dow to shrink to around 2,000 (much closer to the historical norm) but cause unemployment to drop within rounding error of zero, putting all those who want work in stable jobs that would provide for at least their basic necessities; the other would put 20% of the population out of work but cause the Dow to rocket up to 50,000. Which would they pick? We all know the answer.

What can be done to repair this situation? For one thing, recognition of the fact that stability in employment matters is necessary. It's not enough that a man should always be able to find a job somewhere; having to find a new job every 12 months is a bad, or at least suboptimal, situation. He must, if he wants, always be employed at the same place or by the same company. A community of fellows (which is really all a workplace is, and the demand for which arises from human nature) cannot spring up where the population is transient. Ask anyone who lives in a sizable military town.

Deprioritization of economic goods in favor of basic human goods matters, too. "Is this good for GDP" should be asked only after "Is this good for the health of the polity" is answered favorably. We should resort to technocratic economic number-crunching only where failure to do so imperils our primary goal of promoting a healthy and integrated social order, and even then subordinate it to that goal, seeking to cause as little disruption as possible.

How do we enforce this? Possibly the same way we enforce our present order, which seeks to smash the traditional family, unduly elevate talentless minorities just to stick it to white people, and enrich psychotic criminals. That is to say, announce a set of standards and then proceed to severely sanction--socially, financially, and legally--any employer who does not comply, while rewarding to the greatest extent possible those that do. Carrott and stick. It works for the PC apparatchiks; it can work for us, too.

"Our Ruling Elites are Serious About PC"

A real gem from Dr. Charlton, posted in response to Bonald's humorous post about insufferable Catholic sermons relating Old Testament attitudes toward leprosy to "discrimination":

@Kristor – “Just think if AIDS was transmitted that way. Think we’d have AIDS colonies? You betcha we would.”

Actually, we probably wouldn’t, not in Britain anyway. And this is a measure of the pervasive dishonesty of our society. The ruling elites would very probably deny AIDS was contangious, and claim that the people were dying from something else – discrimination probably.

When AIDS arrived in Britain, and the government was running terrifyng TV averts about icebergs of disease, and people very high up were genuinely concerned that there might be a wiping-out of the younger generation – nonetheless clear and vital facts were deliberately concealed from the public.

In particular it was stated again and again that *everyone* was at risk, nobody was safe. Later it emerged that hetero-sexually transmitted AIDS was almost 100 percent confined to a very small group of recent immigrants from certain parts of Africa, almost entirely living in London.

This was a high risk population, the government knew, but the UK public was never allowed this information, and was indeed fed upon lies – presumably some people caught AIDS and some died as a result…

It was an early example of the politically correct airport ‘security’ policy, where anyone *could* be a terrorist (even if such people never have been terrorist so far in the history of the world); so the checks are ‘random’ (yeah…) and include detailed spot searches of young children travelling in families (it happened to us!), 85 year old grandmothers etc. Meanwhile, known and obvious high risk groups waltz-through ‘security’.

Our ruling elites are serious about PC. Societal annihiliation from leprosy would, for them, be a price they were prepared to pay.

Yet it cannot be said that this is acting nobly, stoically, on principle; because they would lie about the reality – lie to themselves and lie to others.

If the elites were to say clearly – leprosy is an incurable and terrible disease which is contagious – nonetheless we should allow lepers to live among us as equals because discrimination is the worst of evils; and the result will probably be that eventually nearly everybody will have leprosy – including you and me and our children; but that we should nonetheless do this because we should act by the highest principles of morality and the highest principle is non-discrimination…

If the PC elite would say something like that, they that would be respect-worthy, so far as it went. To suffer, deliberately, in pursuit of high goals is noble.

Because that would lead to questions of where this specific non-discriminative principle of morality comes from, and why it should be primary; and to this question they have no answer, because there is no answer.

But the ruling elites don’t, they don’t ever state honestly the truth as it is known – not even to themselves in private.

They would say that the threat of leprosy was exaggerated, mistakes in diagnosis were made, it was possible to make transmission unlikely, maybe some people were resistant, that it is actually curable, that the problem with leprosy is exaggerated and most due to prejudice against people who look strange, that it was a disease mostly of the poor and some ethnicities – they would raise up a dust-storm of psuedo-doubts and red herrings until real leprosy had disappeared and been redefined as being an *arbitrary label* imposed due to prejudice.

The Ongoing Apostasy: 58% of Catholics Support Contraception/Sterilization/Abortion Mandate

Courtesy of the Public Religion Research Institute:

A majority (55%) of Americans agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Four-in-ten (40%) disagree with this requirement.

. . .

Roughly 6-in-10 Catholics (58%) believe that employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception.

So supporters of this moral abomination are actually slightly overrepresented among Catholics.

The chickens are coming home to roost in holy mother Church. As Dr. Feser notes (and has anyone else noticed that his tone is getting more polemical with time? I love it!):

For decades now, the majority of Catholics have been ignoring the Church’s teaching that the use of contraceptives is mortally sinful.  Even priests who accept that teaching rarely speak about it from the pulpit.  Theologians and professors in Catholic colleges and universities who reject it are for the most part allowed to teach and write against it unmolested.  As a result, it is widely assumed that a Catholic may in good conscience dissent from the Church’s teaching.  It is also no doubt widely thought that many churchmen are embarrassed by this teaching, and expect it someday to change.  The bishops have made no serious effort to counteract these perceptions.  Though they often issue bold statements regarding prudential matters about which they have no special competence -- economic policy, immigration policy, health care policy -- and have been extremely vigorous in promoting a strict abolitionist position on capital punishment that Catholic teaching does not actually require, they do not seem to think it urgent to correct the vast number of Catholics who flout a basic moral doctrine, the teaching and enforcement of which is the bishops’ special responsibility.  How surprised should they be, then, when those hostile to the Church’s teaching judge that Catholics will “roll over” for policies like the one now issued by HHS?

. . .

It goes without saying that the bishops have also done very little to discipline those Catholic politicians who publicly and obstinately promote policies which the Church teaches are gravely immoral.  Only a few individual bishops have dared to state publicly that those Catholic politicians who promote abortion or “same-sex marriage” ought not to receive Holy Communion.  But no such politician seems to have taken these admonitions seriously, and even the most conservative bishops seem to regard the harsher penalty of excommunication as unthinkable.  How surprised should they be now that one of these Catholic politicians -- Kathleen Sebelius -- has moved on from promoting abortion "rights" to actively persecuting her fellow Catholics, while other Catholics in the administration (such as Vice President Joe Biden) stand by without protest?

The great apostasy is here -- has been here for some time.

Repost: Homophobia and Moral Intuition

From early October of last year:

A common objection to, say, the right-wing stance against gay marriage is that it's based on nothing but homophobia. Let's set aside for the moment the fact that this is a grossly reductive caricature of what we on the far-right actually believe; the reasoning itself doesn't work because it doesn't really explain anything -- if opposition to gay marriage is wrong because it's mere homophobia, what makes homophobia wrong?

If same-sex attraction is valid because it's natural (where "natural" is understood simply to mean "occurring in nature"), why isn't instinctive revulsion to those attractions valid for the same reason? Certainly not because it's irrational or arational or something, because it has no less rational value than same-sex attraction.

. . .

I imagine the leftist narrative concerning historical homophobia is that it is a religious innovation that in no way corresponds to human nature -- that it was foisted on otherwise ignorant people by a small band of malicious ones -- a benighted feature of traditional society with which we Enlightened citizens of the common republic of man have done away. But if it's the case that people will accept something that has no basis in their natures merely because social authorities bludgeoned it into them, isn't it just as possible that the modern acceptance of homosexuality was borne of such conditioning? Conversely, if people are naturally inclined toward neutrality or even acceptance of homosexuality, why did homophobia linger so long in the West after the temporal authority of the Church was shattered -- and why has nothing but a Herculean intellectual and social effort waged over the course of decades only just now succeeded in making homosexuality palatable to a narrow majority of people in a nation founded explicitly on liberal principles?