Category Archives: Christ & Culture

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A Girardian Commentary on John the Baptist

For those who take an interest, Angel Millar has published my essay on Gustave Flaubert’s “Herodias,” a tale of John the Baptist, and one of the Three Tales (1877), at his People of Shambhala website.  We think of Flaubert as the consummate social novelist (Madame Bovary [1856] and A Sentimental Education [1869]), but he was also, despite not being much of a believer, a powerful religious thinker (Salammbo [1862] and The Temptation of Saint Anthony [1874]).

The essay is also a meditation on the function of the Holy Spirit.  Here is the link: http://peopleofshambhala.com/herodias-of-flaubert/

The essay explores additional themes such as the relation of mimesis and crisis and the relation of text and conscience.

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The Metastasy of Wickedness

The basic operation of every society is maintaining its essential order – the order that makes it the society that it is – in the face of adversity. It is the work of tradition: of transferring to rising generations the essential order of their forefathers, amended at the margin, or accidentally, so as to cope with changes in the environment.

This interminable project of social reproduction requires practical wisdom. And practical wisdom is possible only to the virtuous man, and then only to the extent of his virtue. Societies live or die, then, depending upon their preponderant degree of virtue. This is just as true for societies of multi-celled organisms – i.e., for men themselves – as it is for societies of men. It is true for any social organism: for the family, for the tribe, clan or people, for the church, for the guild or business enterprise, for the town or for the nation.

Thus the basic task of social existence, the quotidian moral housekeeping that is the sine qua non of successful social life, is the attainment and maintenance of virtue. The first and most basic product of society then, is righteousness. All other economic production is founded upon it. Worldly success – survival, vigor, prosperity, strength – is the fruit of practical wisdom, of applied virtue. Prosperity, then, is a fairly good indication of virtue.

There are to be sure in this Fallen world many ways to get rich by wickedness. Thus the fact that a man is rich is no sure indication that he is mostly righteous. But even ill-gotten wealth, such as that of the thief or gangster, is the product of a kind of virtue – a corrupted and ill-directed excellence, yes, but an excellence nonetheless (the competition among gangsters is keen, and ruthless; only the best survive). Likewise for the wealth of the corrupt executive or politician. The excellence of these sorts of men lies in their ability to game the system: to exploit the niches created by defects of the social order.

Such men are always with us. And indeed, they are not altogether useless, or they would never have succeeded at what they do. The corrupt politician succeeds by pleasing his constituents and his customers; the thief succeeds by pleasing his fences with the goods he offers; the Mafioso succeeds by pleasing the customers of his drug distribution system. The social utility of such men derives quite directly from their gaming of the system. In effect, their exploitation of defects in the system design corrects for those defects, or at least compensates for them.[1] Their gaming activities are similar in some ways to arbitrage. Like the arbitrageur, the wicked exploiter restores some equilibrium or other, and compensates for a defect of society.[2]

Can the system be gamed? It will be. Indeed, it ought to be.

Continue reading →

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It Will Take More Than Evangelism

From the popular, influential, and usually-right-on-the-money conservative Protestant blog “Pyromaniacs” comes a post that illustrates an important gap in understanding. The post is correct and important, but something is missing.

Here are some quotes:

One of the greatest dangers of the political activism of the so-called “religious right” is this: It fosters a tendency to make enemies out of people who are supposed to be our mission-field, even while we’re forming political alliances with Pharisees and false teachers.

To hear some Christians today talk, you might think that rampant sins like homosexuality and abortion in America could be solved by legislation. A hundred years ago, the pet issue was prohibition, and mainstream evangelicalism embraced the notion that outlawing liquor would solve the problem of drunkenness forever in America. It was a waste of time and energy, and it was an unhealthy diversion for evangelicals and fundamentalists during an era when the truth was under siege within the church. Lobbying for laws to change the behavior of worldly people was the last project evangelicals needed to make their prime mission in the early 20th century. Just like today. Remember Galatians 2:21: “If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.” And Galatians 3:21: “If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.” Continue reading →

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Say “No” to Same-Sex Pseudo-Marriage

The officially-mandated legitimization of same-sex pseudo marriage is absurd, contemptible and even evil. So naturally our ruling elite are enthusiastic about it, and the regular people are increasingly falling into line.

It therefore seems likely that homosexual pseudo-marriage will soon be enshrined into law throughout the United States. Our nation—at least most of our leadership class—is eager to defy God, nature and human tradition.

As traditionalists, we of the Orthosphere know that the legitimization of homosexuality—currently the most popular of the destructive leftist fads—is a great wrong. Let us therefore summarize the reasons why it is wrong so that those capable of acknowledging reality can at least have the satisfaction of a clear statement on this important topic.

We will not, of course, convince our opponents. And so we will not try, that is, we will not attempt to dot every “i” and cross every “t.”When someone is wrong about something as obvious as the superiority of heterosexuality to homosexuality he is not wrong because of inadequate reasoning. He is wrong either because he dares not defy the spirit of the age, or because his spirit rebels against God.

So we will simply make a series of true assertions, and not attempt to rebut every pseudo-objection raised by the other side. Continue reading →

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Forgive them, Father

… For they know not what they do.

How many of our secular interlocutors have really heard the Gospel? Very few, I wager. If they had really been praught the Gospel, had learned what the Christian religion actually teaches, then they could never think that “if all things need to be caused, what caused God?” was a serious argument. Yet they routinely trot out just such nonsense as if it were absolutely unanswerable. They have no clue that they are not even talking about the same things we are; no clue that they are engaging in mere malapropism.

But this is hardly surprising, given the post-war collapse in Christian philosophical morale. With the very officers and professors of the churches running about for the last few decades demythologizing everything they can lay hands on – a wave of iconoclasm far more radical and dangerous than we have ever seen, that has in many churches overturned even the Creeds and the Scriptures – how could anyone be serious about catechesis, or preaching the Gospel, or evangelizing?

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Enemies of the cross of Christ

For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping), that they are enemies of the cross of Christ; Whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is in their shame; who mind earthly things.

– Philippians 3:18-19

Today is Holy Wednesday, in which we commemorate the betrayal of Jesus by one of his own. Fittingly enough, today was also the day when large numbers of Christians publicly expressed their betrayal of the cross of Christ (or continued to express, rather) in order to align themselves with the spirit of the age by agitating for gay “marriage.” I witnessed this today among my own friends, many of whom rushed to change their Facebook profile pictures (in concert with about ten million other “critical thinkers” who all happen to think and dress and talk exactly alike all the time without any apparent coordination) to a giant equals sign, for, yanno “marriage equality.” Because, they say, Jesus was all about equality, tolerance, and acceptance.

Thank God we’ve got the dumbest generation of spoiled, incompetent narcissists in the history of the world to tell us how Jesus really feels about gay “marriage.” I guess Genesis 18-19 was a giant head fake.

Let us take some time this week to do penance on behalf of these useful idiots (emphasis on the latter word), the better to console the sacred heart of our Lord, wounded as it is by the sins and ingratitude of men.

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A tale of two bishops

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Glorifying God, leaking into the world the love that he leaks into us through the wounds and breaches and gaps of our own lives, is a severely practical and down to earth activity.

In that sense we do in the world what God does in us. We receive His love where we are vulnerable and weak, and lose sight of it when we claim strength and power. Christians reach to the jagged edges of our society, and of the world in general. Food distribution, places for rough sleepers, debt counselling, credit unions, community mediation, support for ex‐offenders, support for victims of crime, care for the dying, valuing those who have no economic contribution to make, or are too weak to argue for their own value. All this is the daily work of the church, which goes on every day and everywhere. We leak out into the world the love that God leaks into us.

The above bit of revoltingly banal, worldly shlock comes to us from the Christmas sermon of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who was enthroned today as head of the Anglican Communion in a ceremony that looked like this:

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Good News: Nero is Back

Conservative commentators from every part of the spectrum right of Obama have recently noticed an ugly turn in the discourse of the Left toward overt hatred of their ideological adversaries. More and more of us have seen that the knives are now suddenly out, the claws no longer sheathed. Leftist politicians forthrightly share their fervent hope that such as we might die, and do not stop either to consider whether it is just, or proper, or polite to say such things, or having said them, to repudiate the evil that perfuses their hearts. Furthermore, with the Obama presidency the cult of personality, of the Dear Leader and his wife, so reminiscent of the Perons in Argentina, has reached a new florescence. The regal appearance of Queen Michelle at the Academy Awards last week, bestowing the regime’s approval on the most popular folks of the Hollywood amen chorus (backed up by members of the Praetorian Guard), was only the most recent instance of this trend. And while we may react with horror to this turn of events, most folks take it in stride, or even rather like it. It makes them feel comfortable.

What’s up? It’s the First Century all over again, that’s what. The old Imperial cult that deified Caesar is back. And orthodox Christians are now in the same relation to the state cult that they were in the days of Nero: unruly, disloyal, seditious, essentially treasonous fanatics, a threat to public order and propriety, insane and wicked sinners against public piety, and in the event of any public disaster the first scapegoats.  

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A Simple Proof that Liberalism is Bad and Must be Repented of

The reader probably knows this already. But here at the Orthosphere we’re not just interested in conversing among ourselves. We’re also interested in evangelism, in spreading the word.

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And what is the word we spread? That the current system is fundamentally broken and wicked, and that we must all repent of the liberalism that is killing us spiritually, intellectually, emotionally and socially.

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So there is a need for simple and visceral proof that liberalism is wrong, proof that anyone who has been paying attention to the world can acknowledge as valid. Here’s one such proof:

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Ask yourself: According to our leaders, what is the greatest social good?

The answer is obvious. They all say it is diversity.  All of Western Civilization is currently organized around the moral principle that diversity is the greatest good, and opposition to diversity is therefore the greatest evil.

[John Q. Public knows that diversity is held to be an important social good. He may not be aware that it is held to be the highest social good, but that realization will come later, if he pursues the line of thought that we are opening up here.] Continue reading →