This will either make you laugh or cry

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

The Irish Times probably isn’t too worried by what appears in The Daily Telegraph about it. For the rest of us, however, it is encouraging to have some confirmation that we are not alone in our nausea when we have to read it every morning – for the time being.

Damian Thompson took it to pieces in today’s Telegraph and tossed a few more Irish pc fellow-travelers under his kosh for good measure.

He begins by asking us to check out a few headlines, not telling us where they came from. It didn’t take some of us to pick up the scent. It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Here’s a trenchant headline for you, he wrote: “Transgender community celebrates ‘great diversity of gender identity’ in new book.” And another: “President tells youth groups to be vigilant against racist attitudes and to value diversity in society.” Care to guess which venerable organ published them? Here’s a clue: “Multicultural awards take place in Dublin following three-year break.”

Actually, that last one is a bit of a scoop. To anyone who knows modern Ireland, the notion that Dublin went a whole three years without multicultural awards is frankly incredible. Somebody really screwed up. They’re supposed to happen every month at least. The newspaper is the Irish Times, which these days makes the Guardian look like the bulletin of the Prayer Book Society. Rumour has it that it employs a special nurse to soothe joints sprained by marathon sessions of finger-wagging.

This week was a good one for the finger-waggers. The Irish parliament passed a law stripping political parties of state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates are women; in later elections the quota will rise to 40 per cent. This means that bright men will be dissuaded from entering politics because the system will fill the Dáil with dim hectoring feminists with DIY Sinéad O’Connor haircuts. (Incidentally, did you know that eight out of the past 10 World Hectoring Champions have been lady members of the Irish Green party? It’s called Comhaontas Glas. Don’t ask me how it’s pronounced: the bizarre vagaries of Gaelic pronunciation were designed to trip up the English.)

Anyway, my point is not that rigged elections will destroy the democratic mandate of the Dáil, though they will. It’s that an especially toxic strain of political correctness has infected almost the entire Irish intelligentsia. Small-government conservatives are treated like lepers – something that, the Guardian/BBC axis notwithstanding, isn’t true of British public life. Meanwhile, the sucking up to minorities is beyond parody: a recent Irish Times profile of the travellers made them sound like latter-day Athenians. How long before there’s a transvestite traveller quota in the Dáil?

Admittedly, the programme of thought reform is not complete: the Irish working class is still instinctively socially conservative. But it is, unsurprisingly, increasingly anti-clerical, and that takes us to the heart of the matter. Churchgoing in Ireland has fallen off a cliff, thanks to the clergy’s dreadful record of committing and covering up paedophile crimes. The moral vacuum at the top of a hierarchical society has been filled by political correctness, much of it imported from the European Union at the height of Ireland’s Brussels-worship.

PC ideology flowers on the ruins of religion. It’s not just Ireland: in Australia, Canada and metropolitan America, the Catholic Church is paralysed by scandal and the old Protestant denominations have turned into gibbering pantheists or angry sects. Secularism is spreading incredibly fast.

Well, we shall see. There is only so much nonsense – not to mention nausea – that people can take. Just now The Irish Times has something like a captive readership because there is no half-responsible alternative to go to.  The Irish Independent , although it has some good columnists – as even the Times has – is trying to be too many things at the same time. A few years ago Damien Kiberd shook up the radio news monopoly of the national radio service, Radio Telefis Eireann, with his Newstalk station. He did the same thing a few years before for the Sunday newspaper market with his Sunday Business Post. Newstalk is now owned by one the The Irish Times’ top hate-figures, Dennis O’Brien. O’Brien is now poised to take over Ireland’s biggest newspaper business, Independent News and Media and that “entire intelligentsia” to which Thompson pays his tribute is becoming apoplectic at the thought. Could an O’Brien-Kiberd combo be the way back to health and lower blood pressure levels for a lot of us?

When ideology blinds

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

An eminent historian said in a lecture I heard the other day, something to the effect that writers on history are always taking contrary views of each others’ work – that’s the way the debate progresses, that’s the way the system works. It’s an adversarial process for getting at the truth. At least one hopes it gets us nearer the truth. By and large it is a good one and one that should offer, over time, act as a defence against the crime of twisting an manipulating the truth to serve the purposes of ideology.

He was referring to historical writing but this process is one which serves all academe equally well. Modern historiography has benefited greatly from the honest rigour which this process has generated within it and few writers will now get away with the excesses of some of the historians writing 100 years ago or more.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for other more modern disciplines in the academic field. Just now the feeding frenzy being indulged in by the ideologues circling, snapping at and ready to devour the sociologist Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, Austin, is a sad example of the level to which academics can lower themselves – leaving aside the scavenging media elements feeding on the scraps of Regnerus’ reputation flying around from the mauling being given to him by his erstwhile colleagues. Continue reading here…

The massacre of innocence

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

This one was too long coming, often thought but ne’er so formidably expressed. This is truth speaking to the entrenched liberal establishment, that is, the power of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Who are the sexual abusers of our children asks Lisa Fabrizio, columnist in The American Spectator?  She doesn’t name names – because there are too many of them – but she mercilessly blasts the hypocrisy of the pharisaic establishment feigning scandal at the atrocities which they themselves have been perpetrating while pointing condemning fingers by the new time.

The last time we saw someone raise their head above this parapet and suggest that the permissive culture of the ‘sixties and subsequent decades had anything to do with the increase in the abuse of children there were screams of outrage from the defenders of the spirit that particular age who saw in it a threat to their precious “freedom” to engage in whatever “consensual” aberration grabbed their fancy.

Fabrizio will have none of it and shouts “stop!” to the hue and cry in the wake of the Pennsylvania State mess and the revelations of the heinous abuse crimes of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky.

She writes: The unanimous war cry across the nation has been: ‘We have a moral responsibility to protect our kids; we must preserve the innocence of our children!’ Are they kidding? Can they be serious? How can our children be innocent or protected in a country that, rather than defining deviancy down, has defined deviancy up; up to the level of not only acceptance, but approval.

Penn States’ scandal is for her just another example of the putrefying infection that runs right through American culture. There are few of us who cannot also apply it to our own diverse cultures and societies. The price will be paid in millions of dollars by Penn State for its negligence – as the price has been paid by other institutions for their negligence. But how long are we going to have to wait for recognition of the responsibility of those driving the ideology of permissiveness for the corruption of the innocence of whole generations of children. When will they be confronted with the reality of the abuse they have perpetrated: the TV organisations, film producers, the entertainment industry, the political campaigners for so-called freedoms to indulge this, that or the other deviant behaviour – on the basis that no such category of behaviour exists.

Fabrizio asks: What are the messages that our culture daily delivers to our kids? That they don’t need fathers to nurture and raise them; the idea that males are essentially useless to the family unit has proven not only dangerous to society — it is no coincidence that Sandusky chose as his victims, boys with no fathers in their homes — but criminal. That any brothers and sisters they might have had are too expensive or inconvenient, and will either be chemically destroyed or murdered in the womb because in today’s America, the family budget prioritizes toys for adults over the desire and care for children.

How can innocence survive in any of our citizens — let alone the youngest and most vulnerable — when our very laws now define classes of people based solely on their sexual proclivities? No, the innocence of our children cannot be preserved until it is restored.

If we really cared about our children we would stop teaching filth and perversion in our public schools by brainwashing them to believe it is good for Heather to have anything other than one Mommy and one Daddy who are married to each other. We would stop promoting the idea that free and unfettered sex is beneficial for them in any way and stop glorifying it on TV, using children as straight men for any number of unfunny and repulsive sexual jokes.

Sandusky and others who physically assault the bodies of our children are indeed monsters, but as the lynching parties assemble, let them broaden their gaze to include those who wound the innate innocence of our children’s souls.

Until that happens, child protection in this or any other country will be little more than a sticking plaster on a hopelessly putrefying wound.

Life, death or deadlock?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters, Faith Matters1 Comment

What has gone wrong? There can be no doubt but that something has gone very badly wrong when the very basis of mankind’s self-understanding has come to a pass where the vision of life and good living itself has been perverted beyond recognition. How did we get to the point where the termination of life, both by oneself and by another is considered a moral option? How did we reach a point where in the chaos and confusion emanating from the meltdown of our financial system, everyone talks about regulation and regulation agencies but no one talks about a moral sense of right or wrong or of the springs from which such a sense emanates. How did we come to lose our sense of the meaning of human love to the extent that it is now the pretext for the wholesale abuse of human sexuality?

Some years ago – not too many – in the aftermath of the emergence of Islamic rage against the West, the historian Bernard Lewis asked the same question about the collapse of Islamic civilization. He did so in a book which was simply titled, What Went Wrong?

I attended Mass one morning recently in a Dublin parish church. The parish priest concelebrated while a priest whom I had not seen before was the main celebrant and he preached a short homily. That homily gave me at least part of an answer to the question, what has gone wrong for us?

Bernard Lewis, 85 years of age, is professor emeritus at Princeton University and for many is thedoyen of Middle East studies in the West. How, his question asks, did the preeminence that the Islamic world once enjoyed and the civilization it had created collapse?

Lewis’s argument is that the success of Muhammad in establishing not merely the Muslim religion, but also an empire dominated by that faith, served to create a society that is totalitarian by its very nature, bound by rules and strictures that make it too static to adapt and compete with a West where Christianity, in contrast, does not demand control over the political and economic spheres.  The very foundations of these respective faiths for him hold the key to the histories of both civilizations – to date.

Could it be that the true crisis of the West today is that it may now be about to abandon the very reason for its triumph – its Judaeo-Christian heart, in favour of an amalgam of so-called “politically correct” principles founded on…nothing.

 Lewis argues as follows: The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread Muslim rejection of an imported secularism inspired by Christian example, may be attributed to certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two cultures.  The first, and in many ways the most profound difference, from which all others follow, can be seen in the contrasting  foundation myths–and I use this expression without intending any disrespect–of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. 

The children of Israel fled from bondage, and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before they were permitted to enter the Promised Land.  Their leader Moses had only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter.  Jesus was humiliated and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over  the ruler, and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to their purpose. 

Muhammad achieved victory and triumph in his own lifetime.  He conquered his promised land, and created his own state, of which he himself was supreme sovereign. As such, he promulgated laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made peace.  In a word, he     ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim tradition.

On the contrary, Lewis goes on to explain, Judaism and Christianity had the concept of the secular state forced upon them by circumstance from their very beginnings. Where Christian theologians like St. Augustine developed complex theories to explain and justify the secular state, Muslim thinkers never even had to face the dilemma. 

Judaism and Christianity, in that view developed spiritually and lived spiritually in alien worlds before they came to terms with those worlds. They knew what true freedom was. They knew the place of law and regulation but also knew what their foundation was. On the other hand, lacking any sense of the secular and the eternal play between the City of God and the City of the World within which lives our sense and enjoyment of human freedom on a day-to-day basis, the Islamic world became crippled and dangerously resentful of its triumphant rival.

But if that rival now abandons the principles of the faith – and in particular if the ministers of that faith begin to abandon the authentic teachings which, in its Scriptures and traditions, have sustained it for millennia –  and which have given it its very essence, then the future is very uncertain indeed.

And this is where my epiphany in a Dublin parish church comes in again. After that Mass I went to talk of my concerns to the homilist – but the bird had flown. What had he said that was so worrying? It was more what he did not say that was the problem.

His homily referred to a film in the context of the gospel of the day (Matthew 9. 1-8). The film recounted the story of a young man who announced to his family and friends that he was gay. His mother was distraught and left the event at which this announcement took place, apparently rejecting her son in the process. The preacher made no further comment on this other than simply to pose the question to himself and his congregation: “How do I react when people tell me things I don’t particularly want to hear”.

It was no earth-shattering heterodoxy. But that phenomenon of late 20th century heterodoxy of which it is a symptom might ultimately put in the shadows the breach in Christendom effected by the 95 theses nailed on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. The moral implication was clear to all. There was no moral issue whatsoever about the choice and actions of the gay son. The moral deviance was on the mother’s side, in failing to deal adequately with nothing more serious than something that she did not want to hear – like a choice of political party she might have disapproved of, a choice of a wife deemed unsuitable, or ever a rejection of her very good dinner. There was no recognition that what the mother might have been dealing with was the realisation that her son had made a choice which she knew to be immoral according to the norms of natural law, the teaching of the authentic Judaeo-Christian faiths and the law of God.

If our secular world continues on its rudderless way, guided only by groundless and flawed politically correct principles, and if the ministers of the Judaeo-Christian religions abandon their duty to hold up before their faithful followers the authentic shared principles of those religions, then the freedom we have enjoyed coming from the very heart of those religions will perish and we will end up with totalitarian systems fighting it out among themselves – to the death or deadlock.

Do we really deserve this?

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

The “silly season” seemed to start early this summer – not even waiting for our revered political assemblies to take their well –earned breaks. A month ago the newspapers were already scraping the bottoms of their troughs of choice. Time spent on them in the morning got shorter and shorter as the weeks moved on. America excepted. While the political battle being engaged in there over the next few months is not promising to be very inspiring, it is, however, offering some food for the politically curious among us.

This, from an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post by Anne Applebaum, makes an astute but somewhat dark observation on the prospect ahead of us there – and like it or not, it is a prospect in which we all have a stake.

“You know the stereotypes already. Both Obamas come from what might loosely be called the intellectual/academic meritocracy, the “liberal elite,” the post-WASP Ivy League, easily caricatured as the world of free-trade coffee, organic arugula, smug opinions and Martha’s Vineyard. The Romneys, by contrast, belong to the financial oligarchy, the “global elite,” the post-financial-deregulation world that is just as easily caricatured as one of iced champagne, offshore bank accounts, dressage trainers and private islands.

“The two groups have some important overlaps. Although Romney got some attention for holding a fundraiser in the Hamptons last week, Obama has raised more money in the Hamptons overall (the president scored particularly well in Sagaponack, by one account, where the median home price is $4.4 million)….

“They also have some important differences. The financial oligarchy, as we learned from the Barclays scandal in London last week, is happiest when it operates in deep secrecy, where it can manipulate interest rates, package derivatives, hide its profits and shelter its taxes as it sees fit. The liberal meritocracy prefers to operate in the glare of publicity, where it can give lectures, write books, make documentaries and generally promulgate its own views as loudly as possible. Aged 34, Obama wrote his autobiography. Aged 37, Romney founded Bain Capital.

“But while you might think one or the other group more preferable or more offensive for reasons of politics, culture or taste, you certainly cannot argue that either of them is in close touch with “average” or “ordinary” or even “middle-class” people, however those terms might be defined. And although they and their supporters may shout about “radical left-wing professors” on the one hand or “Gordon Gekko” on the other, neither Obama nor Romney can plausibly claim to leading a populist revolution against the “elites” who are allegedly destroying America.

“Which is just as well, because the political success of both Obama and Romney proves that radical populism in the United States has failed spectacularly. For all of the attention they got, neither Occupy Wall Street nor the tea party has a candidate in this race. Neither found a way to channel inchoate, ill-defined public anger — at the deficit, at the banks — into electoral politics or clear alternatives. Whoever wins in November, we’ll therefore get the elite we deserve.”

Did the Irish electorate deserve the “elite” it has been landed with for the next several years – with not another prospect in sight for at least a decade? One wonders what cataclysm we will have endure before we can escape from the politically correct mediocrity we are now crippled with.

The Shattered Mirror of Our Times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Many years ago the late Bernard Levin, the most gifted columnist of his generation, wrote an article for The Sunday Times entitled The Cracked Mirror of Our Times. In it he cited a number of social and cultural phenomena of the late twentieth century that for him represented all that was rotten in the British society in which he lived and – often – lamented. I am glad he has been spared witnessing the shattered mirror of the culture of our times today.

Even the most hardened cynic must have found his stomach turning as he listened to the Irish Foreign Minister proclaim his support for “true love” and marital commitment  in Dublin at the weekend. The Irish Labour Party leader, Eamon Gilmore, proclaimed these sanctimonious words in what was probably the most tacky and tasteless  and naked – almost literally – display of hedonism and sexual exhibitionism ever seen on the Irish capital’s streets. It had nothing whatsoever to do with true love, true friendship or any kind of permanent commitment.

Gilmore declared that it was time for Irish legislation to move in the direction of public opinion and legislate for gay “marriage”. This will not be easy because constitutional hurdles will have to be overcome by means of a popular referendum. At that point many feel that the politicians in parliament – who are fully subscribed, almost to a man, to the media’s gay agenda – will find that public opinion may be of hues other than those of the rainbow. It will be even less easy if the people  Mr. Gilmore is campaigning for continue to display themselves in  vulgar exhibitions of the type witnessed in Dublin’s Fair City at the weekend.

In Facebook comments on Gilmore’s statement,  Maria Conroy Byrne asks if there is “any political party that would disagree with him? As far as I can see, they all seem very similar at the moment. Is there any brave TD (member of the Irish parliament) who’s willing to put his head above the parapet and express a different opinion?” Brendan O’Regan’s view is simply that “they’re afraid to appear illiberal.” That fear stalks the political streets of Ireland today just as the rainbow exhibitionists did in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on Saturday.

As the gross display drew to a close on Saturday Gilmore said he congratulated the organisers. He said that the parade also had a political dimension.

“As leader of Labour, a Party for whom the politics of personal freedom is so central, I acknowledge that when it comes to promoting understanding and respect, progress has been made in recent years. However, there are some outstanding matters, and if we as a Party are serious about building a new progressive society, these are matters that we will have to resolve.

“I believe that in certain key areas, our laws are out of step with public opinion. I don’t believe for example, that it should ever be the role of the State to pass judgement on whom a person falls in love with, or whom they want to spend their life with.

“That is why the issue of same-sex marriage is to be included for consideration by the Constitutional Convention. I believe in gay marriage. The right of gay couples to marry is, quite simply, the civil rights issue of this generation, and, in my opinion, its time has come.”

If it has, and if that time has anything of the flavour of what Dublin witnessed on Saturday, then it is going to be a nasty and brutish time indeed. The bizzare and grotesque representatives of humanity who displayed themselves on the streets of the capital last week are the people who claim to be eligible for the nurture and upbringing of children. Good night.

(an earlier version of this post appeared on MercatorNet’s Conjugality blog this morning)

An open letter to Mr. Kevin O’Sullivan, the Editor of the Irish Times

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

While there is an element of what you, Mr. O’Sullivan, might call ideology – but what I would simply call professional instinct and religious fidelity – in this, ultimately it is a matter of trust in the integrity of your newspaper.

I am a journalist and at the start of my career worked for a newspaper which stood alongside The Irish Times as one of Ireland’s three national dailies. I know how honest mistakes, errors of judgement and differing personal perspectives can all render news presentation less accurate and dependable than editors would wish.

However, the story on the front page of yesterday’s Irish Times shattered all my confidence and trust in your paper’s sincerity and commitment to even-handedness. The entire thrust of the story and my dissatisfaction with it as straightforward presentation and reporting seemed to me to come from something inherently dishonest.

I would be reassured if you were to tell me that there was here an honest mistake or a simple error of judgement at play. If not I have to say that I doubt if I can continue to subscribe to the Irish Times, something that I have been doing consistently for 50 years. A paper which could bring itself to stand over such a gratuitous and tendentious news report is no longer a reliable source of news.

The news report was in fact nothing less than a pretext to make a not-so-veiled attack on the Catholic Church and its teaching. I had to read it several times before I could believe that it was actually saying what I seemed to understand. I still cannot work out what connection it was making between Catholic moral teaching on contraception and sterilisation and the dubious medical procedure which was ostensibly the subject of the report.

In the end all I could see was that an individual doctor seemed largely responsible for the continued use of this procedure in a particular hospital when other hospitals had ceased to follow this procedure. That he did this was attributed to the “church”. Carl O’Brien’s introductory paragraph on the front page – or was that your subeditor’s work, as undoubtedly your headline was – told us that the Government’s draft report “says one of the reasons it was used was to obey laws influenced by the Catholic Church that banned contraception and sterilisation.” However, in his report on page 5 Carl writes that the “report suggests this”. There is a difference.

This is a bad and regrettable scene, Mr. O’Sullivan. It simply adds to my growing suspicion – a suspicion I have so far tried to resist out of respect for the integrity of my profession and my colleagues – that the Irish Times really does have an anti-Catholic agenda.

I asked a few friends this morning if they had read the article and what they thought in meant. One described it as an utterly ridiculous story with a ridiculous angle. Another no longer reads the Irish Times because of the constant slant it gives its stories on the Catholic Church. A third only reads the Irish Independent now. That is something I would rather not have to do – but I fear that for Irish news coverage I may now have no alternative.

Sincerely, Michael Kirke.

The unborn child – personal property disposable at will?

On By Michael KirkeIn General1 Comment

Intelligent people can sometimes surprise us – with their utter folly. Take, for example Eric J. Segall. One can assume that Segall is an intelligent man because he is a law professor at Georgia State University. In mid-May, in an article in the Los Angeles Times, Professor Segall was discussing the probability of a backlash if the United States Supreme Court forces a change on the American people in line with President Obama’s recent “evolution” in the matter of gay rights. That change might well do more damage than good to the future of gay rights and other important causes, he argued.

Professor Segall’s main argument did make some sense. He was saying that changes forced through by the Supreme Court were not such a good idea. Congress, he said, was the better forum to effect change in a democratic society. But it was where he began to cite the precedents for this that his credibility broke down. To compare, confuse, to even suggest that there was even a remote similarity between the abolition of slavery and the campaign of self-indulgent adults with same sex-attraction looking for pseudo rights was astounding.

“By way of comparison,” he said, “at the time the Supreme Court invalidated bans on interracial marriage in 1967, 16 states prohibited whites and blacks from marrying, and there were few organized political movements devoted to defending the racism behind the anti-miscegenation laws.”

Not to see the essential difference between a battle to overcome an inhuman prejudice such as racism and an issue where those opposing change are doing so on the basis of the integrity of the conjugal relationship between a man, as he is biologically, and a woman, as she is biologically, simply beggars belief.

But that was the least of his folly. Roe V. Wade was then dragged into the equation and identified as a “progressive change” in the same way as civil rights battles of the 19th century – presumably including the abolition of slavery – and child labour laws in the early 20th century were progressive.

Arguing that legislation was a better way of effecting change than judicial activism, he holds the view that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe V. Wade that abortion was a fundamental right protected by the 14th Amendment, set off a very undesirable anti-abortion movement. That decision overturned most state laws on the issue and “less than a decade later, the Moral Majority and the Christian right had become major forces in American politics.” How dreadful.

“I am a strong supporter of abortion rights, and if a woman’s right to choose had been truly secured by Roe, maybe the backlash would have been worth it. But poor women today still have a difficult time obtaining abortions, and burdensome regulations on abortion are proliferating every year.”

Regardless of the pros and cons of legislative as opposed to judicial activism, what seems preposterous in all this is that people like Professor Segall now think there is a parallel between the struggle of the African American against racism, and the system of slavery out of which it grew, and the assertion that yet-to-be-born, but actually living-in-the-womb, human beings are expendable at will. The frightening moral blindness involved here makes them incapable of seeing that the rights claimed by pro-abortionists are parallel with the very rights claimed by slave owners over the lives of the slaves whom they regarded as their personal property.

The slave trade in America accounted for the deaths of millions of African Americans. It is estimated that 11 to 15 million of those who were brought into America as slaves died unnatural and untimely deaths. That does not take account of the millions more who died in subsequent generations after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and before the abolition of slavery in North America. This carnage was defended for decades on the basis of property “rights”. The deaths of the yet-to-be-born resulting from the abortion trade, defended by pro-abortionists in the name of the “right” to choose, is much more accurately quantifiable. In the US it is reckoned to be 53 million since the Rove V. Wade decision.

Harriet Beecher Stowe in pre-Civil War America grappled with the conundrum of how her fellow-men, freedom loving citizens of her country, could justify the carnage, the destruction of life and the denial of freedom to other human beings which slavery entailed.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she observed,

“Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear. What brother-man and brother-Christian must suffer, cannot be told us, even in our secret chamber, it so harrows the soul! And yet, oh my country! these things are done under the shadow of thy laws!”

She described the horrors of the “property rights” enjoyed by slave owners and the way the law upheld those “rights”. Frederick Douglass, escaped slave and narrative chronicler of the miseries of the system described in factual but equally harrowing detail in his landmark account his early life.

“Let it be remembered that in all southern states,” Stowe wrote in her novel, “it is a principle of jurisprudence that no person of coloured lineage can testify in a suit against a white, and it will be easy to see that such a case may occur, wherever there is a man whose passions outweigh his interests, and a slave who has manhood or principle enough to resist his will. There is, actually, nothing to protect the slave’s life, but the character of the master.”

Can we not translate that observation right into our own time and say that in some countries where abortion on demand is now the de facto law of the land, “There is, actually, nothing to protect the life of a baby in the womb, but the character of the woman bearing it and the men and women who can bring their influence to bear on her?”

Horror stories of the abuses of abortion laws in countries where they have been passed surface with alarming regularity – like stories from Britain where the Daily Telegraph exposed widespread malpractice by abortion “providers” some months ago. Yet another was the house of horrors found in Philadelphia last year. Stories like these were also rife in the era of slavery in the US. Then as now, they were excused as aberrations and not typical of the system – and certainly not justifying the denial of the sacred property “rights” of slave owners. Mrs. Stowe noted it well. We can again translate her words to our own time and circumstances without any difficulty.

 “Facts too shocking to be contemplated occasionally force their way to the public ear, and the comment that one often hears made on them is more shocking than the thing itself. It is said, ‘Very likely such cases may now and then occur, but they are no sample of general practice.’”

Might we hope that someday a modern Harriet Beecher Stowe will emerge and write the novel – or make the movie – which will bring our planet’s inhabitants back to their senses where they will see the enormity of the holocaust in which a large portion of the world which calls itself civilized is currently perpetrating and justify on the basis of a simple “right” to choose.

Cassandra calling…

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Jonah Goldberg has just written a new book entitled The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. Goldberg is the bestselling author of Liberal Fascism, a book which set out to dismantle what he saw as the “progressive myths” that are passed-off as wisdom in our schools, media and politics.

Goldberg’s view of ascendant liberalism is that it portrays itself as reasonable, rational and rooted in the truth of the real world. The members of the liberal establishment claim to know what justice is and that those who oppose them don’t. If the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, he argues, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves that they’re not ideological.

Goldberg identifies the ideology of non-ideology as the Trojan Horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He argues that the grand Progressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false-flag of reasonableness is alive and well. He holds the view that this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

Golberg’s line is basically that this Trojan Horse is carrying within its belly a selection of “objective” journalists, academics and “moderate” politicians peddling some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun aphorisms.  Their hero is Barack Obama who casts himself as a disciple of reason and sticks to one refrain above all others: he’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and dogma of the right, solely concerned with “what works.”

Typifying this aphoristic onslaught are the following, with Goldberg’s antidote response:

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?

Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with the British Empire and ended slavery.

Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer: So you won’t mind if those ten guilty men move next door to you?

We need complete separation of church and state: In other words all expressions of faith should be barred from politics …except when they support liberal programs.

David Mamet, a one-time liberal who blew the whistle on that establishment in the past decade, likes the book. Mamet in his liberal days was in fact a genuine liberal. The time came, however, when he realised the shallowness of his fellow travellers. He shouted “stop”, loud and clear, in his own book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, published last year.

“What can one say”, Mamet muses over Goldberg’s book, “to the self-proclaimed ‘independent’ who never has nor ever will vote other than Democratic; or to the wise soul suggesting, of any conflict at all, “the truth must lie somewhere in between”? Mr. Goldberg reminds us that one must stand up and demand of the muddled and supine either an absolute declaration of their principles and acknowledgment of the results of actions having flowed therefrom or a straightforward admission of their intransigence in refusing a concise reply.”

Goldberg’s take on the predicament of our civilization in terms of Barack Obama casting himself as a disciple of reason – whereas in fact he is nothing more than a pragmatist who is solely concerned with “what works” – finds an echo in another assessment of our current culture by Toby Young in the current issues of The Spectator. Young is re-visiting that seminal 25 year-old book by the late Professor Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, which opened with the following sentence:

‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’

In the intervening years since Bloom’s book was published, Young believes that this belief has become, if anything, even more ubiquitous. This all-encompassing relativism, he says, — which Bloom said was accepted as ‘a moral postulate, the condition of a free society’ — is shared by the educated and uneducated alike.

How did this happen, he asks? He first offers what he describes as a superficial answer – it is simply that children are taught to believe it.

If they happen to be studying the International Baccalaureate, they are literally taught it. One of the core requirements in the IB diploma is something called ‘Theory of Knowledge’ — or TOK for short — which is essentially a crash course in epistemological relativism. On the IB’s official website, it’s described as follows:

‘It is a stated aim of TOK that students should become aware of the interpretative nature of knowledge, including personal ideological biases, regardless of whether, ultimately, these biases are retained, revised or rejected.’

And the deeper reason? Why, he wonders, do responsible grown-ups feel a moral obligation to impose this doctrine? How did the ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger become such an integral part of the fabric of liberal democracy?

The root of the problem, I think, is that the bonds of Western civilisation have become too weak. In our increasingly diverse and multicultural society, the only values that command anything like universal assent are procedural ones — ethics, rather than morality. We’ve been taught to value tolerance and mutual respect and to abhor racism and homophobia — essential conventions if all the different ‘communities’ are to get along — without being asked to believe in anything substantial to anchor those conventions in.

On the contrary, as Bloom observed, the prevailing orthodoxy that’s taught in our schools and universities is that one set of substantive moral values is no better than any other and to claim otherwise is to risk appearing racist or sexist. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the survival of the procedural conventions depends upon a general scepticism about anything deeper or more meaningful — that the one strengthens the other.

At the time, I thought of Bloom as just another Cassandra, albeit one who could write with extraordinary clarity and power. Now, as the forces of chaos gather on the darkling plain, I’m beginning to think I was wrong. Today, he looks more and more like a prophet.

Kevin Tobin, commenting on Young’s Spectator essay brings us right up to date on the state of play.

At a conference held here in the United Sates, just last week, he tells us, a spokesman for the University of Notre Dame observed that behind the current freedom of religion firestorm here lay a smug secular conviction that religious belief is mere bias and not particularly worthy of respect. That is how far the idea that truth is relative has already taken us — to a direct conflict between a secular government and millions of religious Americans. Dangerous stuff. Stay tuned.

Back in 1987, as Young says, Bloom was cast in the role of Cassandra. Not unlike Cassandra, while people were intrigued by him, not many really took him seriously enough to do anything about his dire analysis. There are now many more prophets of doom around. That they didn’t heed Cassandra in Troy was unfortunate – for Troy. That we remain beguiled by the relativism-riddled but nonetheless totalitarian clichés enumerated for us by Jonah Goldberg, and that so many cling to the idea that their personal choice is the only ground of truth, may prove to be the source of an equally great misfortune unless we come to our senses soon.