On the exportation of lowlifes
Dear H,
The other day I met a man who runs a school. He said it’s a classical school, which made me ask him what he considers to be “classical;” and he answered that a brain isn’t the only thing kids need to grow. So he focuses on building their souls and tastes too.
Multiple choice was thus out and Plato was in. But most interesting of all was that he had his kids pledge, every day, to live for the good, the beautiful, and the true. I didn’t ask whether this was in addition to the Pledge of Allegiance because I didn’t care. A pledge of allegiance is a murky thing and a pledge to the other three supersedes it, at least in many ways. If your country is doing good things then you’re for it, and if it’s pushing ugly things you can stand up against it —which is for it, in the long run, anyway. You can pledge allegiance to lots of things; but ultimately, if you’re not for the good, the beautiful and the true, are you good for your country anyway*?
But this brings up a small issue, and that’s whether what’s beautiful and what’s true are necessarily the same things. The study of history is pretty ugly, after all; and the study of evil is necessary to defend good things against rotten things. You have to study history if you don’t want to live it. To read a really ugly history book — say Solzhenitzen’s Gulag Archipelago — is a good step to not ending up in one. But spend too much time on the atrocities and suddenly the world becomes ugly.
I always had this objection (albeit secretly) when I came across that famous passage of St. Paul’s,
whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.
The light is worth fostering, and bolstering, and propping up in all kinds of ways. But the irony of it is that if you want to keep it in real life you have to be a little bit ugly. It could be argued that Americans were at our best we were at our most dangerous, and probably our most treacherous. The CIA, to which we ascribe countless atrocities both in our country and beyond it, was the first step to not being overrun by the KGB.
Thus I posit that the mass killer and the good mother are two sides of the same coin. To keep the Shire you have to push the Empire**. If you don’t have the empire, or at least enough killers to ward off the other empires — to maybe ward off your own emperor — you end up with the slums of Jakarta. To be a maker of good dreams is to be a master of making nightmares. Your ability to be ugly, treacherous, and dangerous is your ability to focus on the good, the true, and the beautiful. The question is, can the price ever be so high, that you end up destroying the thing you paid for in the first place?
Paul’s answer, and the Christian answer for millennia, was yes, you can ruin everything you're aiming for — and so far from cultivating the manly virtues for what you can get here and now, Christians were taught to look to the future. Then God would provide good and beauty not in part, tainted by the ugliness necessary to buy it, but in full.
So you lose the world and you gain your soul, hypothetically; and Christ told us to give to Caesar what belongs to him, and Paul told us to submit to the authorities. Two things Christians disregarded at the Boston Tea Party, and for which we owe these sinners immensely***.
Yours,
-J
*I say that you can be for the good, the beautiful and the true and be against your country some way. But loyalty is one of those beautiful things too, and you can only be loyal when it’s hard to. To trust in God Himself is to really believe He’s good even when He throws Hell at you, and to do what He says even when it sounds stupid. If this isn’t faith, then what is? Isn’t this the story of Abraham and Isaac?
Thus I believe America is one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. I also believe it’s one of the most disgusting. To stand by anything because you approve of it 100% is to stand by almost nothing. To choose people and nations only because of your ideals is to make a mockery of all fidelity. To be a parent is to be in the business of straightening out, at least partially, an ignoramus and a screw-up. Marriage is admitting your partner is a scoundrel before she proves it, and that whatever happens, you’ll try to get through it.
But imagine a world where we weren't willing to throw things away because of our ideals. Is love accepting that the world will never be perfect? Or is it refusing to believe things can't get better — and that shunning, abandonment, maybe war will have to be fought in order to make them better? Every person will answer this his own way in his own time, and we had better pray we’ll be right.
**The Shire still persists to this day, but due to a vile counterreaction against “fascism,” colonialism, and Victorian prejudice, it’s currently being resettled by Orcs. Theodore Dalrymple writes in Our Culture, What’s Left of It, that in 1921, the year his mom was born, only one crime was recorded for every 370 people in England and Wales. By 2001, there was one for every ten of them. Pretty impressive, since it imploded only after the English renounced colonialism.
**Christianity’s tendency to smother the masculine virtues is one of its worst vices, and the reason why so many (actually good) Christian men come across as hypocrites. The more seriously they take their religion the less good they are for defending a country — a choice that, thankfully, many fudge on every day. A truly “Christian” man is a quisling. Hard for a real man to respect, and hard for a healthy woman to lay.
I’ll note here that when America and England were most sincerely religious, we were also our beefiest; and that also, today, the parts of America most likely to churn out good Christians are the parts of American most likely to churn out good patriots. Who put the Second Amendment there — a legal, permanent contradiction to 1 Corinthians 13? And who supports it now?
But supposing the Second Amendment is the law — what should Christians do then? Is that the authority — to arm for rebellion? Or is authority whoever’s in charge, whatever the law says? What happens when the law is king — and it’s a law against bad kings? What happens when the power is supposed to be derived from us? What happens when your vote for the President is as good as the President’s?
These questions are all unanswerable if you take Paul’s command to obey all authorities seriously, and in America we take this for granted. But there were times when we couldn’t.
Macaulay writes in his must-read History of England that King James II tried to turn protestant England Catholic, and went so far as to invite Louis XIV to invade. The Bishops were thus at a crossroads. Yes they were bound to obey the king. But what if the king was trying to turn England's soul? Wasn’t the Anglican church part of the ruling class? Didn’t they have duties themselves — even if he tried to get rid of them like Nero would? Did the early Christians submit to everything Nero wanted? Or did they give to Nero what was Nero’s, and refuse to give him what was God’s?
Eventually the British called for help from the Dutch. The Dutch were Protestant and they sent over King William. King William beat the shit out of James and sent him packing for France. But the question then was who was actually king. Was it still James, who had rightful title — and a title given supposedly by God? Or was it William, who was currently running the government? Was power legitimized by the good you did and why you ruled? Or did authority come from power itself? In other words, did Christianity automatically side against whoever was weakest?
These are all questions we’ve swept aside, for now; but when things get ugly, we’ll see many Christians choose what’s wise — and the most “sincere” of them will sell us out, on principle, to whoever has the most guns.
***There is of course a slight counter-argument to the idea that the Shire and the Empire are one and the same, and that’s that the people doing the looting and killing weren’t the people who were making the Shire. An exportation of British criminals and underclasses into Australia, Africa, and the American South may have turned part of the world into hell, for a time, while making things comfortable at home. If you want to have a great society, you have to put the worst to work — doing what they do best, which is making life a mess. The question is where you want to unleash them, and whether or not you can sleep on it.
As Lord Wellington, the man who beat Napoleon, famously put it,
A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class — no matter whether your son or my son — all must march; but our friends — I may say it in this room — are the very scum of the earth. People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling — all stuff — no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children — some for minor offences — many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.
— a much healthier, cheaper, more positive solution than prison.