what the world needs is less love and understanding

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that what the world needs is a whole lot less love and understanding.

We’ve tried the love and understanding and compassion thing. We have compassion oozing out of every pore. We’ve tried treating criminals with compassion. It doesn’t work. Putting people in prison stops them from committing crimes. Compassion doesn’t.

We’ve tried treating sexual deviants with love and understanding. They respond not just by preying on our children, but by demanding that we should celebrated their predations.

We’ve tried compassion as a basis for foreign policy. We’ve had humanitarian interventions, which usually leave behind chaos and misery. The West has given away billions in foreign aid. On balance it’s made things worse.

Love and understanding is what you get when a society becomes hopelessly feminised. Women believe that problems can be fixed by love and understanding. That’s why rational societies don’t let women run things. They confine women to the domestic sphere, where love and understanding actually works.

What we actually need is a much greater sense of duty, and responsibility, and an acceptance of the necessity for moral rules. We need a willingness to punish wrong-doing. We need to accept that bad behaviour (including sexual misconduct) should have unpleasant consequences. Bad behaviour should not be rewarded with hugs.

Tolerance is another word for not caring. A tolerant society is a society that just doesn’t care.

Whenever you see love and understanding starting to blossom, step on them.

the future of religion, part 2 - Islamised Europe or a European Islam

On the subject of the future of religion another post at A Political Refugee From the Global Village asks Will the future see an Islamised Europe or a European Islam?

Personally I’m not convinced that either is inevitable because I’m not convinced that even Islam can stop the steamroller progress of the death cult of secular liberalism.

I also fear that a European Islam might be a bit like modern Christianity - in other words basically secular liberalism with a few quasi-religious trappings. Of course Islam does lack some of Christianity’s worst weaknesses, such as the masochistic turn the other cheek stuff and the cult of hugs and feelings. Islam might be better able to resist the feminising tendencies.

What it comes down to is a religion’s ability to fight off the poison of feminism, and it’s an insidious and deadly poison indeed.

A European Islam, or even an Islamised Europe, would certainly be preferable to the sewer that liberalism has in store for us.

I should make the point (and this applies to my previous post as well) that these speculations about the religious future of society do not represent the future I would like to see. The future I would like to see is a return to something very like the pre-Reformation unity of Christendom, and something very like pre-Reformation Christianity. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Of the futures that are actually likely to happen, or are at least possible, most are rather unpalatable. The religious fascism I speculated about in my previous post and a Europeanised Islam are not the futures one would have hoped for. It’s a matter of choosing the least worst option. Secular liberalism offers a never-ending descent into degeneracy and decadence and despair. Any alternative would be better than that.

the future of religion

A recent post at A Political Refugee From the Global Village tackles the question of finding a substitute for belief in God. This is a question that people like Jordan Peterson seem to be grappling with, although in Peterson’s case without any success.

The first question to ask is whether any society has managed to survive without religion. The answer is, it depends on what you mean by religion. Did the classical Greeks and Romans actually believe in their gods? Or in any god at all? They seemed to be pretty sceptical but the fragmentary nature of the sources makes it difficult to know just how much the average person in the classical world believed in religion.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of religion is that it provides the only viable foundation for morality. I think it should be noted that if the classical world was characterised by scepticism it was also characterised by depressingly low levels of morality.

What about Asian civilisations such as Imperial China? Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Shintoism don’t seem to be religions in quite the same way that Christianity or Islam are religions. Nonetheless they seem to have worked fairly well as the basis for building civilisations and they seem to have done rather better on the morality front than the Greeks and Romans.

It might therefore be possible to base a genuine civilisation on a religion that is more like a civic or communal faith than the relationship with a personal God that is the way most of us think about Christianity. It has to be stressed however that the great danger is that such a religion will be wishy-washy and vague and woolly-minded and hopelessly feminised, just like modern Christianity. That just isn’t going to work. What is needed is a civic religion that is strong and virile and hard-headed.

There has to be a focus of devotion and if it’s not a personal God then there seem to be only two alternatives - the focus has to be worship of the state or worship of a king. Kings are hopelessly out of fashion and the ridiculous and pathetic constitutional monarchies of Europe have discredited the idea of monarchy altogether. The focus of devotion is therefore going to be the state.

That sounds like plain old totalitarianism but it isn’t, or at least not necessarily. The totalitarian societies have that so far come into being have been little more than slave states, with ordinary people being nothing more than anonymous cogs in a machine. A state religion could, perhaps, offer a great deal more. It could offer a genuine sense of purpose with the people being part of the state rather than servants of the state. It would be a very difficult trick to pull off but it might be possible.

Such a system could be described as a kind of religious fascism. It could incorporate some elements of Christianity and of paganism.

The question is, is there a viable alternative? Liberals like Jordan Peterson would like to think we could have a kind of touchy-feely secular religiosity that is compatible with liberal democracy. This is mere delusion. Liberal democracy is a dead end. It offers nothing but futility, emptiness and death. It is a death cult. What is needed is something that would allow us to sweep liberal democracy into the dustbin of history. Whatever the future turns out to be like Jordan Peterson is not going to like it. He’s going to be doing a lot of crying.

British nationalism and Israel

While it’s nice to see expressions of nationalism among the Europeans and even the Britons there’s one thing that worries me a little. That’s the possibility that European nationalism is being manipulated by the Israel lobby for its own purposes.

This seems to be a particular problem in Britain where British nationalists appear to be disturbingly pro-Israel.

This is disturbing for several reasons. Firstly, Israel’s interests are most certainly not the same as Britain’s interests. In fact in many ways Israel’s interests are totally incompatible with the interests of European peoples. A very large part of the immigration problem facing Europe today is a direct result of Israel’s pursuit of its foreign policy objectives of destabilising any Middle East regime of which it disapproves. We need to remember that nationalism has a different meaning for Israel. For Israel nationalism means keeping Muslims and Christians out of Israel. The fate of Europe is a matter of complete indifference.

It’s also disturbing because it raises the question of money. Is Israel actually financing some British nationalists?

It’s also disturbing that some British free speech advocates seem to be quite OK with the suppression of any speech that is even mildly critical of Israel. The rabidly pro-Israel Katie Hopkins comes to mind.

The idea of so-called British nationalists who put Israel’s interests ahead of Britain’s is rather worrying.

Hilaire Belloc on Oliver Cromwell

Hilaire Belloc’s brief biography of Oliver Cromwell appeared in 1927. It would be more accurate to describe his Oliver Cromwell as a biographical sketch, or a biographical impression.

Belloc stresses Cromwell’s position as a member of the wealthy classes who had enriched themselves at the expense of the Church in the wake of the Reformation. That class certainly had a very powerful reason for fearing a restoration of Catholicism - they wished to hold on to their ill-gotten gains. Which may be a partial explanation for Cromwell’s fanatical and rabid hatred for Catholicism. Belloc makes the important point that a Catholic restoration was by no means an impossibility in mid-17th century England so the anti-Catholic paranoia of men like Cromwell was not entirely ridiculous.

The Cromwell that emerges in Belloc’s sketch was a man who stumbled into absolute power and proved to be entirely unfitted for it, having no coherent plan or vision. He gradually accumulated power and his own interests and his own survival meant that he could never relinquish such power. He was a kind of prisoner of his own success in the art of political intrigue.

Belloc notes that Cromwell had been regarded as a great villain for many years after the Civil War and in the 19th century was seen as a great hero but in reality he was neither, lacking the stature to be either a true villain or a true hero. He was on the whole a mediocrity who happened to be an outstanding cavalry commander and to be a remarkably adept intriguer and manipulator. His narrowness was the crucial factor. He may have been the greatest cavalry commander of all time but in the military sphere that’s all he was - he was too limited to be a genuinely great general. As a politician he was cunning and extraordinarily skilful but he was no more than an opportunist. His political career was ultimately an exercise in futility.

Cromwell was a disaster but you don’t need to be actively evil to be a political disaster, and Belloc does not see Cromwell as evil.

The book is what you expect from Belloc - eccentric, opinionated, provocative and fascinating.

education and orthodoxy

There are many sad delusions that are held by conservatives. One of the saddest and most persistent is that education used to be about broadening the mind and encouraging independent and critical thinking, before the cultural marxists took over.

In fact the purpose of education as an organised activity, whether carried out by government or by churches, has always been to teach people what to think. It has never been the purpose of any educational institution to encourage independence of thought, except within very narrow limits. In fact the function of education is to teach children to remain within those limits.

Education has always been about propaganda. In the past it was mostly about propaganda serving the interests of the current political establishment. There was a period in the West when education was used by the Left to undermine the current political establishment. Now the Left as it was once understood no longer exists. We have a new political establishment, a globalist neoliberal establishment, and education is once again employed to impose limits on thinking.

Conservatives also cling to the touching belief that universities used to be about defending freedom of thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities were established for the purpose of defining and enforcing religious orthodoxy. That is the purpose they still serve to this day. The nature of religious orthodoxy has changed, but the function of the university remains the same. Identifying and punishing heretics has always been the business of the university.

Defining orthodoxy and punishing deviations from that orthodoxy - this is what all education systems, from kindergarten to university, are all about. An education system exists in order to prevent freedom of thought. This is why churches, back in the days when they still believed in their own teachings, were so obsessed with founding schools and universities. This is why governments are so very interested in education.

As Stalin pointed out, “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

There’s nothing very mysterious or even sinister in all this. Any society that wishes to survive will naturally try to avoid the dangers of social chaos by preventing the propagation of destructive ideas. The problem we have at the moment is that we have a political establishment that wants to encourage socially destructive ideas. And conservatives, as usual, have no idea what is happening. If conservatives had understood any of this they would fought to retain control of the schools. We are in a situation very much like the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 60s. The political establishment intends to retain control even if they have to destroy society in order to do so. They are determined to enforce orthodoxy even though the orthodoxy they are enforcing can only lead to social disintegration.

 It’s all about power, and power is another subject about which conservatives understand nothing.

Hilaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was a colourful French-English man of letters who gained immense popularity with his light verse for children although he also made a huge impact as an historian, a Catholic apologist, a literary critic, an essayist and a travel writer. As the years passed his uncompromising belief that Catholicism was the mainstay of European civilisation put him more and more out of favour in an increasingly secular world.

In The Great Heresies, written in 1938, Belloc deals with the five greatest threats that the Catholic Church has faced in the course of its history. These threats were the Arian heresy, the rise of Islam, the Albigensian heresy, the Reformation and the assault of modernism. Belloc considers all five menaces to be Catholic heresies. This might seem questionable, especially in the case of Islam, but if you accept Belloc’s definition of heresy then it has to be admitted that he makes a reasonably convincing case.

Belloc regards a heresy as being a movement that eliminates one significant part of a system of religion or philosophy and leaves the rest of the system in place. The elimination of the one vital part changes the nature of the belief system in a radical (and sometimes unanticipated) way, and can destroy the belief system completely. In the case of Catholicism the success of any of these heresies would have resulted in a different kind of religion and this in turn would have changed the nature of our civilisation.

The Arian heresy, dating to the fourth century AD, was essentially a denial of the mystery of the Incarnation which obviously meant a denial of the doctrine of the trinity. The Arian heresy did not exactly deny the divinity of Christ altogether but it denied the fullness of his divinity. There were many heresies that in various ways denied the Orthodox interpretation of the Incarnation but Belloc sees them all as variants of Arianism. At times during the fourth century it seemed possible that Arianism would displace the Orthodox Catholic doctrine completely but it was not to be.

Belloc then turns to Islam. His claim is that Islam is essentially a simplified form of Catholic doctrine but like Arianism it denies the divinity of Christ. What distinguishes Islam most of all from other heresies is its lasting success. Although the expansion of Islam into Europe had been halted by the 18th century Islam was far from dead. From Belloc’s perspective, writing in 1938, Islam in fact seemed to be in much better shape than Christianity. Belloc believed that a resurgence of Islam was highly likely. While he saw Islam as a deadly threat it was not a belief system that could be dismissed with the kind of derision that he heaps upon the heads of the Arians. He might not have liked Islam but its history of success could not be argued with. Nor does Belloc dismiss Islam as a religion of savages. He accepts Islam’s claim to be regarded as a genuine civilisation. It is the fact that Islam represents an alternative civilisation with a track record of success that makes it such a deadly foe.

The Albigensian Heresy was so thoroughly crushed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that it’s scarcely remembered now but it was at the time a particularly dangerous and malevolent heresy. It was a dualist heresy. It solved the problem of the existence of suffering and evil by assuming the existence of a good god and an evil god. The physical world was created by the evil god and therefore everything in that world is evil and worthless. Dualist heresies are dangerous because they tend to lead to an acceptance of evil. The Albigensians were dangerous because they took the rejection of the physical world so far that they were prepared to commit collective suicide by refusing to marry and have children.

The next heresy Belloc deals with, the Reformation, is more controversial. Belloc certainly admits that the Church needed to be reformed but he has some very perceptive observations to offer on the nature of reforming zeal and why reforms so rarely end well. He also points out, quite correctly, that the elites of the time were happy to support the Protestant cause since they gave them the opportunity to transfer the wealth of the Church into their own pockets (elites haven’t changed much).

Belloc has no doubt that modernism is by far the most dangerous of all heresies, and the one most likely to prove fatal.

Belloc makes his biases crystal clear from the start. He believes that the unity of Christendom was essential to western civilisation and that the Reformation, as it turned out in practice, was little short of a disaster. He argues that the scepticism that began undermining our civilisation in the 18th century was a product of the Protestant Reformation. Belloc despised capitalism as much as he despised socialism and liberalism. He was no great fan of nationalism and his arguments for the advantages of the unity of Christendom are persuasive. I get the feeling that Belloc would have preferred to see feudalism preserved and perhaps he had a point. Belloc was a great believer in tradition and also in keeping power as decentralised as possible, hence his sympathy for feudal society.

The Great Heresies is Belloc at his provocative best. A must-read for anyone with any kind of traditionalist leanings.