By Steve Bolton
In Romeo and
Juliet, Mercutio cries out for justice against the feuding Capulet and
Montague families with the infamous curse, “a pox on both your houses.” Yet
Shakespeare’s pen never set to paper a story half as tragic as the modern
quarrel between so-called liberals and conservatives, both of whom are leading
us to ruin because they are poxes
upon humanity.
The faux debate between the two factions has deceived
and drawn in so many of our opinion makers that there is no room left for a
Mercutio to point out the disgusting injustices of both sides. It took a
Canadian comedian, Jon Stewart, to shine light on the damage the partisans of
both sides are doing to American politics, in a broadcast of the CNN news
program Crossfire on October 15, 2004. "It's hurting America,” he implored the rabidly
right-wing host Tucker Carlson and left-wing co-host Paul Begala. “Here is what
I wanted to tell you guys: Stop... You have a responsibility to the public
discourse, and you fail miserably."[1]
Many Americans recognized the truth in Stewart’s words, which is why that
particular episode was the most watched in the history of show and continues to
accumulate hits on YouTube almost a decade later. Every word he uttered was
right on the money. Unfortunately, it was an incomplete truth, for the
situation is actually more dire than a mere obsessive quarrel between two
partisan factions. The real tragedy is that there is no faction left anywhere in the politics of America, or Canada, or
any other Western nation for that matter, which stands for good or right
reason. This makes it highly unlikely that good will be done anytime soon, or
that the decline of Western civilization can be halted.
On its face, the rivalry between the political Left
and Right is simply stupid. This is quite easy to prove; simply lean over in
your chair further and further in either direction and you will fall down. Or
if you prefer, try to imagine the American eagle trying to fly with just one
wing. In this way, the very terminology of “left” and “right” implies failure from
the beginning. Few political pundits today actually stop and think about such things,
because real thinking is hard work; they may be well-dressed, articulate and have
impressive degrees, but many apparently have no experience in the kind of
self-critical thinking required for actual insight. The media personalities and
politicians on both the left and the right today are perfect illustrations of
the lesson of Sirach 21:18: “To an ignorant person, wisdom is as useless as a
house gone to ruin. He has never even thought about the things he is so sure
of.” Thanks to a widespread breakdown in reason throughout our whole
civilization, we are beset by legions of people who don’t have any
understanding of the political terminology they use, demonize certain people or
groups without once asking why and make grotesque assumptions about the state
of the world, without bothering to check their facts. Nevertheless, the
simplistic idea that the world is divided into camps called the liberals and
conservatives has become increasingly common in recent decades, in large part
because it takes no mental effort, while providing villains to hate and allies
for the weak-minded to lean on.
The Cons of Conservatism
One
of the clearest examples of this is hate radio, which lambastes the designated
villain of the day on cue, in a frightening parody of the political ritual
called the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the same crowd
that despised Bill Clinton in the 1990s immediately attacked Barack Obama
without mercy the day he was elected; when prompted by the right-wing
propaganda machine, they began spewing hate at a deeply personal level,
without any real bearing on the bona fide mistakes both of these presidents made
in office. Like the brainwashed people in Orwell’s novel, much of America is so
myopically focused on the present that they have lost all sense of historical
memory – which is precisely why the Clinton and Obama bashers don’t realize how
far to the right both presidents were, at least on economic issues. Neither man
was a rabid Tea Party supporter, but they were certainly less critical of
capitalism than any Democratic president of the last century, or even such
Republicans of the past like Teddy Roosevelt with his trust-busting or Dwight
Eisenhower with his warning against the military-industrial complex. That of
course depends on how we define what phrases like “the political right”
actually mean, which isn’t clear at all. If it means supporting capitalism,
then Nixon was a bleeding heart liberal by Reagan’s standards, who would in
turn be considered a pinko by the lunatic fringe in the Tea Party today. Such
people like to charge everyone on the left of the political spectrum with being
a “socialist” or a “Marxist” without any understanding of what those terms
mean. They are not synonymous with political and economic equality, progressive
taxation, trust-busting, moderate state involvement in the economy, regulation
of business, the welfare state or even nationalization of key industries; these
are all things that capitalism preaches against, but which are not part of
Marxist thought. All of them are explicitly permitted (and some are even
mandatory) in the Catholic economic theory of distributism, which also condemns
Marxism, for entirely different reasons. Just as in Orwell’s novel, it has
largely been forgotten that Marxism has been as dead as doornail in America since the 1930s, but that doesn’t
stop our political commentators from tossing out epithets like “socialist”
quite routinely.
What
is truly shocking, however, is their misuse of the word “liberal” as an insult.
It is a historical fact that the Liberals of the 19th Century believed in
precisely the same economic principles as the capitalists of today; each time
hate radio mongers like Rush Limbaugh demonize “liberalism,” they are ironically
actually undercutting their own philosophy. Such gross misuses of terminology
stem from sheer stupidity, not the nefarious kind of word play that Big
Brother’s party machine uses for mind control purposes in 1984. Nevertheless, it feeds
political myths that help take the focus off the real villains in the upper
class, just as the careful manipulation of the Party does in Orwell’s novel.
For example, much of the American public now believes that “the System” is rife
with excessive entitlements, to the point that the rest of the world is now
dependent on our charity and the inner cities are populated with legions of welfare
queens. Actually, as I have detailed many times before (most recently in Incompetent Austerity), our military and economic aid is carefully crafted
to extract wealth from other nations, not to aid them at all; in fact, many of
those children you see starving overseas are going hungry as a direct result of
our policies, or those of institutions we control like the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank. Likewise, welfare abuse is at an all-time
low, thanks to decades of continual bare-bones cuts; our present entitlement
crisis comes directly from two sources, the Birth Dearth brought about by
abortion and contraception, plus the dismantling of progressive taxation in the
Reagan years. Bashing the poor takes the heat off of the rich (and those among
the poor who admire them) while providing defenseless scapegoats for people to
take their frustrations out on, but it has no more bearing on reality than the
scapegoating of the Jews in Nazi Germany. America makes the poor into its
whipping post, rather than a particular ethnic minority, because our national
sin is class prejudice and our national idol is money, not worship of a
particular race or ethnic group. Whenever the Right fulminates against
“liberals” and foams at the mouth about socialism, they simply demonstrate what
an ignorant rabble they have become, as well as what God they truly serve. It
is a weakness of both mind and soul to hate other men on cue, as the listeners
of hate radio do with demonized politicians like Obama and Clinton; it is
positively insane, however, to hate an enemy that does not even exist. We are
basically at the same level of the citizens in Orwell’s horrific future, who
wholeheartedly rage against internal and external enemies that may not even be
real, with the sad difference that our political commentators could learn the
truth, if they bothered to read it. There are no socialists or Marxists left in
America; there is only one economic philosophy that the upper classes of the
entire planet (save for a few holdouts like Cuba and North Korea) will tolerate
discussion of, and that is capitalism. It has only one rival left,
distributism, which most of the Western world has not heard of precisely
because it is a proven, viable alternative to all of these failed philosophies.
If the public bothered to read and think for itself, rather than parroting back
what the corporate media tells it to think, this would not be true. If the
common people were not gradually losing their common sense, they would realize
that Corporate America owns the mass media and will never permit genuine,
effective criticism of capitalism. Perhaps the most twisted triumph of the Right
in recent decades has been its uncanny success in painting itself as an
underdog, valiantly fighting off the “liberal media.” There is one thing that
the mass media will never be as long as it is owned by the rich, and that is
liberal – if we understand that term to mean anti-capitalist, which is
ironically the exact opposite of its original meaning.
Although terms like “liberal” and “conservative” have
become commonplace in our political discourse, it is hard to say exactly what
they mean. It is difficult to distinguish between them based on their economic
policies now, because the so-called liberals are also succumbing to capitalist
dogmas with each passing decade, albeit at a slower rate than the lunatic
fringe in the Tea Party. Perhaps the political Right is so obsessed with money
and the status is brings that this minor difference is sufficient to explain
their hatred of “the liberals.” They call themselves “conservative,” but this
is also a misnomer, almost to the point of being a lie, because this faction is
hardly averse to radical social change of a certain kind. Over the last couple
of centuries they have been on a crusade to supplant existing social structures
with capitalist ones in every corner of the globe, through every conceivable
means ranging from military intervention to trade embargoes to union busting to
vote manipulation. For generations they have sought to build a global
marketplace in which usury, speculation, commercialism, class prejudice and
every other ugly doctrine of capitalism could flourish and now, at last, they
have it. Turning the world into a paradise for the rich has been a bloody
affair, however, in which a slew of disparate opponents had to be overcome, all
of them truly conservative in nature. Peasants, for example, are normally set in their ways (often for
very good reasons) but their old-fashioned social and economic traditions have
been intentionally uprooted everywhere across the planet, from the wheat fields
of Kansas to the highlands of Guatemala and from the countryside of India to
the jungles of the Congo. In the last few centuries capitalists have
deliberately engineered a planet-wide shift away from independent family farms
focused on local trade to giant agribusinesses directed towards export markets;
in the process, they have also purposefully reduced the peasantry of the whole
planet into mere landless laborers, millions of whom are deliberately kept just
a day’s unfair wages from starvation. As part of the same process, global capitalism
has disrupted or even forbidden innumerable locally devised ways of fending off
economic disaster, like community seed banks or the complex systems of water
rights devised by North African peasants, thereby leaving the poor even more
vulnerable to economic shocks. This is the where the planet’s starving children
come from, not a shortage of resources. Right-wing economic policies can hardly
be considered “conservative” in any sense of the word, although they are ironically
quite liberal, at least by the oldest definition of that word. On the other
hand, the people they now call “liberals” have also stopped decrying abuses of
economic power of any kind, even ones that directly threaten the pocketbooks of
American voters, such as outsourcing and union busting. The two sides only
differ on how quickly they’re willing to allow capitalism to spread and deepen.
The political Left is now marching in step with the political Right on these
issues, although it may be a few paces behind. If there is actually a bona fide
division between the two political factions, then it must be a dispute between
two groups of capitalists within the elite, who own together own the propaganda
machine we call the mass media lock, stock and barrel. If there is a bone of
contention between them, then we will have to look at other issues, beyond the
socio-economic ones that the political Right focuses on so compulsively.
Their loathing
of this shadowy, amorphous thing they call “the Left,” yet cannot coherently
define, is just another example of the obsessiveness that characterizes our
political system today. The smorgasbord of disparate causes they call “liberal”
actually have little in common with each other, save that they are equally
unbalanced and single-minded; perhaps the only thing that holds the fractious
political Left together is its common dislike of the Right, which is itself a
self-fulfilling prophecy of right-wing paranoia. It is hard to give credence to
the Right’s insane vision of a monolithic bloc of liberals conspiring to foster
radical social changes, when there is no coherent philosophy welding together
such widely divergent ideas as gun control, homosexual rights and environmental
protection, beyond the old saying that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Unlike capitalism, which is intrinsically evil, these causes are beneficial, at
least in the right place, time and proportion. You don’t have to be a supporter
of gay marriage, for example, to recognize that homosexuals have some rights, even if we don’t agree on
what those rights are. Gun control doesn’t mean we should confiscate every sharp
blade in America, nor does the right to bear arms cover nuclear weapons. That all
seems obvious on paper, but unfortunately, this is precisely the kind of common
sense that has entirely vanished from our public debates. One disturbing fact
darkens our political discourse today: the partisans of any cause simply don’t have any
concept of ever stopping, let alone where the precipice into madness might
be. Some of our fanatical forbears forgot the dangers of fanaticism as well
and thereby turned temperance into Prohibition, anti-Communism into McCarthyism
and aversion to the occult into the Salem Witch Trials. Yet temperance was a
good cause, if we take it is in its original sense as a synonym for moderation,
just as opposition to Marxism and witchcraft certainly are. They went sour
precisely because some of our ancestors failed to stay within reasonable bounds
and turned them into virtual idols. The mark of unreason is this inability to
see the proper bounds of a good thing, but the single-minded fanatics who
dominate our politics today don’t seem to be conscious of any limits to their
causes whatsoever, which is positively dangerous. For example, you don’t hear
many passionate advocates of either gun control or gun rights delineating any
specific bounds at all to their demands. The same is true of any other
single-issue lobby in the political arena today, whether it is in favor of
increased defense spending, or women’s rights, or black civil rights, or any
other cause in between. This is why so many of them have already passed the
telltale mark of madness: destruction of the very causes they set out to
champion.
Conservative
hawks, for example, have been overspending on the armed forces for so many
decades that they have actually undermined our national security in the long
run. As Paul Kennedy pointed out in his classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers[2],
this has diverted funds away from the
resources our industries, educational systems and families need to churn out
more weapons and soldiers. Another classic example from the opposite side of
the spectrum is the feminist movement, which started out demanding liberty for
women but by World War II, had merely succeeded in taking women out of homes
they owned with husbands who loved them, working to raise children who would
love them in return, in order to toil in factories and offices making widgets
and shuffling papers for capitalist employers bent on extracting maximum labor
from them for minimum pay. As English philosopher G.K. Chesterton pointed out, “Ten
million young women rose to their feet with the cry, We will not be dictated to: and proceeded to become stenographers.”[3]
Since then, the feminist movement has gone so far over the edge that it now
champions causes like abortion, which early feminist heroines like Susan B.
Anthony, Lucretia Mott and the like universally despised. In the effort to
protect women, feminists have killed a half a billion female babies in the last
40 years alone. Of course, this left-wing cause isn’t the only genocide that stains
our hands, for the right wing of the political spectrum is hardly averse to
mass murder. During the Cold War the U.S. and its Western allies killed Third
World peasants by the millions through direct military intervention, military
aid to the dictators of banana republics and similar means, all to buttress a
capitalist system that still starves to death 8 million children worldwide each
year. As one American commander put it so infamously, as he and his fellow
soldiers destroyed the homes of innocent civilians in the town of Ben Tre, "We
had to destroy the village in order to save it." In the course of the
Vietnam War, the U.S. and its allies calculatingly destroyed half the homes in
certain provinces, killed one-tenth of the civilian population and locked up
many of the survivors in “strategic hamlets,” in a military campaign that met
the international legal definition of genocide. As a result, we lost the hearts
and minds of the people of South Vietnam and then the war itself as a
consequence. Many of the soldiers who came home from that conflict were called
“baby killers” by a generation which tolerated the killing of one million
American babies each year, following the legalization of abortion in Roe v.
Wade. This sort of disgusting hypocrisy on both sides only worsened in the
‘80s, when Ronald Reagan funneled arms to death squads and dictatorships that
killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, including innumerable innocent
children, while simultaneously disparaging abortion in public. If there is a difference
between the political Left and Right in terms of atrocities, it is that one
side believes that the murder of foreign children is tolerable, while the other
believes that the murder of our children is inhuman. The truth is even worse
than that, however, for both the Left and Right are slowly learning to tolerate
each other's crimes, even as the hate between them becomes more intense;
neither side is willing to stand up for their virtues any longer, but they are
willing to fight for their vices. Reagan was the quintessential example of
this, for he was willing to subvert the Constitution in order to funnel arms to
the murderous terrorist group known as the Contras, as well as commit treason
by dealing with our enemies in Iran to do it, yet didn’t lift a finger to stop
abortion. Although he preached in public about Christian moral and “family values,”
he was our first and only divorced president, despite Christ’s direct warning
in passages like Matthew 19:4-9 that divorce and remarriage are equivalent to
adultery. There is one faction left on the planet that stands against both
extremes, one that has been increasingly silent for the last generation, but it
is taboo even to mention it. In the meantime, those extremes have been slowly converging to forge a new political
mainstream, one that flies in the face of everything our ancestors stood for.
For a deeper understanding of the forces that really animate modern politics,
we will have to consult some of them.
Anti-Catholicism: The Fulcrum of Modern Politics
There
are real divisions between the Left and the Right, but it is not possible to
understand them explicitly without Thomist psychology. This school of thought
may have been founded by St. Thomas Aquinas back in medieval times, but it
still explains human behavior better than most of the half-baked theories of
today’s modern psychologists. Under the principle of Occam’s Razor, the seven
virtues (charity, faith, hope, prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance) and
seven vices (pride, avarice, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy and spiritual sloth,
also known as acedia) ought to be one of the leading tools in the discipline of
psychology, given that they illuminate
the inner workings of human thought so well. Instead, they are ignored in favor
of the unsubstantiated ravings of men like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and John B.
Watson, which explain nothing, for one reason: religious prejudice. The
discipline of psychology has suffered terrible failures since its inception at
the end of the 19th Century precisely because those who staff it are not
allowed to speak of the human soul, let alone the Catholic description of it, which
has the distinct advantage of being true. Like those who staff every other
academic discipline, our psychologists are going to continually get the wrong
answers to their questions because they have thrown out half of the pieces,
forcing them to jam together the remaining ones in incoherent ways. If Thomist
psychology, or even merely the human soul, are reflections of reality, then any
theory that leaves them out will eventually fail. That is precisely why our
opinion makers have little understanding of the nation’s political psychology,
let alone their own. One single litmus test explains the whole of modern
political behavior best: with each passing generation, it is increasingly anti-Catholic. If the
well-defined, ancient code of morality set down by the Catholic Church two
millennia ago is correct, then we are in big trouble, for it is rapidly being
rejected by every political spectrum across the whole of Western civilization.
This standard is also much closer to the original ideas of the Founding
Fathers, who retained some of the Catholic ideals lost by their forebears in
the Reformation. What almost all of today’s political factions have in common is
that we know for certain that the founders and heroic figures of our democratic
past would not have approved of them. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and
George Washington have this in common: they certainly did not support either
homosexual marriage or concentration of Big Business in the hands of the few.
Nor did Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy, for that matter. Many of these
historical figures also opposed large, permanent standing armies for the same
reasons that Eisenhower cautioned against the military-industrial complex.
Susan B. Anthony and the original feminists considered abortion an unspeakable
crime; the vast majority of the American public still frowned on contraception
until the early 20th Century. Just a short time ago, all of these positions
were the mainstream, especially among the extraordinary men and women who are
now considered great leaders, but today their lone defender is the Catholic
Church.
The
one common denominator to all of the rapid political and cultural changes
occurring in Western civilization today is its accelerating flight from
Catholicism, an event called the Falling Away that was foretold in Matthew 24:9-24:14. This division between
the political Left and Right is not
the locus upon which politics turns in other civilizations in which this mass
apostasy is not occurring. In India, politics revolves the efforts of
organizations like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena to forestall
the decay of Hinduism, against continual inroads by Islam, Catholicism and the
West’s consumer culture. China is facing the bizarre, insoluble dilemma of
reconciling its official Marxist ideology with the widespread practice of the
exact opposite, dog-eat-dog capitalism. Its real religion is xenophobic
nationalism, which is using capitalism as a mere tool towards its single-minded
goal of building power on the international stage. Among the 1 billion people
in the Muslim world, politics increasingly revolves around the battle between
Islamic fundamentalism and decadent Western materialism implanted when the area
was colonized by European powers a century ago; if current trends continue,
that battle will soon be over, with the next one looming between divergent
brands of fundamentalism. In Sub-Saharan Africa, orthodox Christianity is
spreading like wildfire and quietly changing the whole political dynamic of the
region, which is creating flash points in North Africa in areas where it is
colliding with Islam. A generation ago, Latin American politics was
characterized by a genuine divide between capitalist military dictatorships and
Marxist guerrillas, some of whom were hard core Communists and others whose
ideas were closer to the Catholic Church’s concepts of social justice. Today,
that division resembles the pointless gulf between Left and Right found in
North America and Europe, albeit to a lesser extent, perhaps because the region
is closer to its Catholic roots. The politics of the whole Western Hemisphere
south of the Rio Grande are simply adrift, with numerous ideologically bankrupt
leftist movements coming to power through the ballot box but not following
through on their promises, while Western materialism and heresies
simultaneously spur crime and the steady growth of heresies at the same time.
The stark differences between the
politics of these major civilizations are directly tied to their religions for
a reason that would seem alien to secularized Westerners: it is not possible to
separate your religion from your politics. When our forefathers forbade the
establishment of religion and decreed religious tolerance, they did not forbid
religion by being intolerant to them all, as our generation has; they merely
sought to prevent the clergy from directly ruling, not to prevent religious
commentary on politics. Even if this were desirable, this kind of extreme
secularism is not logically possible, because a person’s actions are determined
by their religion or lack thereof. Our formal religious affiliation doesn’t
necessarily have an effect on our actions, but what we actually believe always
does. To put it simply, the heart determines what the mind thinks, which in
turn determines how we act. This is especially true when it comes to our moral
code, which each person takes into consideration when voting, whether they
realize it or not. Our behavior is best explained by the idols that we worship
and what devils we fear, including how we act in the voting booth.
A complete discussion of Thomist psychology and its
ramifications for political behavior could take up volumes, which ought to be
written but have not yet. Suffice it to say that the liberal vs. conservative
prism that Western politics is typically viewed through doesn’t really explain
anything any longer, unless we group the two factions by the vices they prefer.
In a very broad sense, the so-called liberals are more prone to the “hot vices”
like lust, gluttony and envy, whereas the so-called conservatives turn to wrath
more readily in pursuit of the “cold vices” of pride and avarice, the Original
Sin and the root of all evil respectively. We’re better off using the term
acedia for the last of the seven vices, for spiritual sloth has nothing to do
with laziness; it is a sense of inability to feel pleasure, thanks to
ingratitude. It is a sort of black hole that all the sins converge towards if
left unchecked. What Western civilization is beset with is basically a battle
between a loose coalition of hedonists and their austere opponents, who want to
turn the world into a monument to their own spiritual pride. It is a division
between moral “wet rot” and “dry rot,” so to speak, in which the profligates
and Puritans are each calling the kettle black. Neither side is a stranger to
genocide, with the Left being guilty of supporting abortion, a crime which
kills 30-40 million children a year, while the economic policies Right are
almost entirely to blame for the starvation that kills another 8 million
annually, as well as the lion’s share of deaths in unjust wars in the last
century. They differ only in their preferred victims. In their passionate
pursuit of causes without any sense of boundaries, the Left long ago passed the
point of causing more injustice than it has fixed; they have taken liberation
to the point of liberating monsters, thereby letting loose such horrors as
abortion and the breakdown of the family institution upon us; there is nothing
particularly “free” about taking someone else’s freedom, permanently, as fetal
murder does. Of the two sides, however, the political Right presents the more
alluring deception, for it masks itself in virtue, which fools many Christians
into thinking that self-proclaimed conservatives are our allies. In truth, it
was the conservatives of ancient Israel who demanded the Crucifixion of Christ,
which is merely one of the heinous crimes he warned us they would commit in
God’s name. He gave us a detailed
personality profile of the Pharisees and Scribes, perhaps because the spiritual
pride they represented was a permanent temptation to the souls of the upper
class. As I have discussed in more depth elsewhere, today’s conservatives bear
a striking resemblance to these bitter
enemies of Jesus, who masqueraded as religious men in order to gain public
esteem. They were lovers of money; they were fastidious about ceremonies and
dress; they routinely defrauded the poor and then gave a pittance back in order
to get public applause. In short, they were the spitting image of today’s
capitalist bourgeoisie, who fill the ranks of the Republican Party and other
factions like it in Europe. Their deception has succeeded in fooling many
Catholics, including some who believe that they are safe merely because they
celebrate the traditional Latin Mass, don’t miss holy days of obligation and
the like. Jesus said these things are important, but churchgoers strain out
gnats and swallow camels if they substitute observance of those things for authentic justice, which many conservatives
simply despise. They merely differ from the Left in which heresies they prefer;
instead of supporting gay marriage or whatever, they instead flaunt the just
war doctrine and innumerable dogmatic condemnations of every tenet of modern
capitalism, like hoarding of the means of production, charging interest,
engaging in speculation, overcharging customers and underpaying workers. The latter
is classed among the four “sins which cry out to Heaven for vengeance,” along
with homosexuality, but the Right normally only picks on the latter. Jesus
warned the Pharisees in Matthew 21:31 that prostitutes would get into Heaven
before them, which is probably also true today, for the spiritual pride which
infects them is exceptionally difficult to get rid of it. Class prejudice is
the same force that animated Satan when he believed that his superior gifts
gave him more worth in the sight of God than other angels. The results are just
as deadly to both the sinner and those they sin against, for millions of
innocent civilians died in the Third World in the last century at the hands of
men motivated by their favorite injustices, like militarism and greed. They
also bear some responsibility for the holocaust of abortion, for it is the
class competition that they deliberately foment which in turn serves as the
primary motivation for the vast majority of fetal murders across the planet.
The Cowardly Center
That failed angel has our civilization caught in a
particularly devious trap, in which we are left to believe that there is no
choice between the two extremes that the Left and Right currently represent.
This false dichotomy is a bit like preferring the Devil’s Left Hook to his
Right Jab; either way you’re going down. One of the telltale warning signs that
a Christian – especially a traditionalist Catholic – is at risk of being hit by
the Right Jab is when they begin to use “Left” or “liberal” as a synonym for
heretical, or “conservative” as a synonym for orthodox. There is nothing
particularly devout about giving in to a different set of heresies in order to
combat another. As Proverbs 4:27 says, "Do not swerve to the right or to
the left; turn your foot away from evil." As Jesus once said, when the
blind lead the blind, they both fall in the ditch[4]
- but that doesn’t mean there is only one ditch. It is tempting for humans to
take sides, for social support, but it does us no good if our newfound friends
are leading us into the ditch on the opposite side of the road, especially if
it's apparently more difficult to climb out of. Passages like James 3:16 and
Philippians 2:3 forbid party faction, but the problem of the Religious Right
goes far beyond that, for their program is riddled with numerous heresies which
make it just as intolerably anti-Christian as those of their rivals on the
Left. Unfortunately, the stark truth is that we have no allies left, save
perhaps for one lonely old man in the Vatican, who represents the last voice of
sanity on an increasingly unstable world. The pope is really the last prominent
defender of Christian orthodoxy, or even the noble ideals of our great secular
leaders of the past.
After seeing such a grim picture painted of the
world, it may be tempting to simply ignore politics and religion altogether –
but to put it bluntly, the smorgasbord of problems discussed here will continue
to injure and kill innocent people if they are not fixed, which will require
everyone to pitch in to solve. Perhaps the most startling example of unwisdom
bandied about today as if it were common sense is that topics like these ought
to be avoided, for they cause nothing but trouble. In truth, it is easier to
remain ignorant of them out of laziness, but that ignorance leads directly to
injustice. Politicians decide who lives and who dies. The religion you choose
will color everything you do, including your politics, and in turn make your
actions either good or evil. If you make a choice to ignore injustice and let
it flourish, merely to maintain peace and comfort in this life, you will
deserve to pay a price in the next. This is one of the chief reasons that Jesus
warned in Luke 12:49-53 and Matthew
10:34-37 that he did not come bring peace to earth, but to divide everyone:
"I came to cast fire on the
earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished! Do you think that
I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For
from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two
against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father,
mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her
daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law…”
"…Do not suppose that I
have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a
sword. For I have come to turn 'a man against his father, a daughter against
her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will
be the members of his own household.' Anyone who loves his father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more
than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow
me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses
his life for my sake will find it.”
There is something to be said for defusing tensions
in political debates if it's not constructive, as Stewart pointed out in that
classic episode of Crossfire. Passionate but pointless polarization only plays
into the hands of the Devil. It is absolutely necessary to point out injustice,
however, if need be to the point of provoking all-out war, if the sin in
question is commensurate. Simply toning down debate is not an answer,
especially if the topics under discussion are killing other human beings;
mildly acquiescing to all evils out of a spirit of false tolerance is not a
solution either If we fail to act out of a love of justice, we become guilty of
a different sin, discussed in Revelation 3:15-17: “I know your works: you are
neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you
are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For
you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that
you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” It is possible to lose
one’s soul by falling headlong into the ditches on either the Left or Right
sides of the road, but it is also possible for us be lost by not walking down
it at all. There is no safety in the center lane of the primrose path. There is
only one straight and narrow path, one delineated precisely by the moral code
and theology promulgated by Jesus, which is identical to Catholicism. The key
to setting the world right, which is practically identical to the mission of
Jesus, is to polarize the human race around this one particular axis. The world
may indeed appear to us as shades of grey, but only because the Devil has
succeeded in intermixing its constituent colors, black and white; it is the
goal of God to separate the two again, because that will make it impossible for
his rival to operate.
Until this becomes the linchpin that the politics of
the planet revolves around, it will be dangerous to adopt any kind of Us vs.
Them mentality, because the chances are that both You and They are both in the
wrong. It will also be just as dangerous to ignore politics and religion
altogether. If Catholicism is actually true, then the whole planet is in big
trouble, because the field has been largely ceded to these three factions. There
is a fourth fate, however, that bodes even worse for the future: the steady
convergence of both the Left and Right, as both gradually accept each other's
vices, in a sort of thieves’ bargain. Among those Westerners who still retain
some common sense, there is an unspoken hope that the rivalry between the Left
and Right will at least frustrate the plans of the radicals on both sides, but
this tug of war between evils is beginning to fail. If either side were free to
implement its entire agenda without interference from the other, they would
rapidly bring what remains of our empire crashing down, which is a fate we have
avoided momentarily. In the long run, however, both sides are grudgingly ceding
what the other wants, so that the vices of each are gradually being
established. Over the course of the 20th Century, the Right caved in on every
threat to the family values they supposedly cherish, from contraception to
divorce to abortion and now to homosexual marriage. Many of them, like Reagan,
now openly engage in the very same vices. In the same span of time, most of the
Left betrayed its commitments to defend authentic social justice, which is now
moribund, and to prevent militarism, which is now endemic. In the brief
discussion on Thomism and political psychology, I didn’t mention how the seven
virtues affect the conduct of both parties because as the last century wore on,
they increasingly paid little more than lip service to any of them. Just as
Reagan was willing to violate the Constitution to prosecute his illicit wars in
Central America, but not to end abortion, so too was Sen. Ten Kennedy, his
nemesis on the Left, unwilling to really defend labor rights but entirely
passionate about defending the right of women to choose to murder their own
kids. Yet neither George W. Bush nor the entire crop of Republican candidates
in the 2012 election were even in the same league as Reagan; likewise, Sen. Al
Gore, Bush’s opponent in the 2000 election, proved himself to be a right-wing
extremist throughout much of his career by voting in favor of such measures as
aid to the Contras. Gradually, these two factions are forging an immoral
consensus that is the exact opposite of Christian orthodoxy, or even the wishes
of the Founding Fathers for that matter. If the American eagle cannot fly
without both its Left and Right wings, then how more difficult will it be for
it to avoid going into free-fall if it flies
upside down?
This unspoken convergence has tainted our whole
political discourse to the point where there are no more Mercutios willing to
call both sides to account for their crimes, but plenty of sycophants willing
to congratulate one side or the other for their vices. The Left and Right may
be forging a new consensus to sprint down the primrose path together, thereby
creating a devilish new form of political centrism, but that doesn’t mean that
the political rhetoric between will become any less vituperative; if anything,
the more shallow their differences are, the more likely they are to intensely
hate each other, for that is a personality quirk of the master that they both
serve. The level of political discourse is likely to fall further in tandem
with the loss of reason and wisdom, thereby causing the third-grade level
understanding that our hate radio mongers have to degenerate further, into
kindergarten-level bickering. As William Butler Yeats once put it in the The Second Coming, one of the most
famous poems of all time, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are
full of passionate intensity.” The only practical solution is for the falcon to
hear the falconer again; only then will centre hold fast and the blood-dimmed
tide be dammed again. As Chesterton once said, the difficult part of
Christianity is not to hold one virtue, but to hold them all simultaneously,
with ferocity; today, there is little left on the political landscape except
factions which ferociously hold their vices. Yeats must be flipped on his head,
so that the best are full of passionate intensity, while the worst lack all
conviction. Until that day comes again, Western civilization will continue to
sink under the weight of increasingly bad leadership, tolerated or even
approved of by increasingly bad citizens. Our religious leaders must likewise
realize that the false dichotomy between “liberal” and “conservative” is a
deadly trap, one which can cost them their souls. There is only one important
dichotomy, between orthodoxy and heresy, which mirrors precisely the real
dividing line in the human race: between those who deserve to go to Heaven and
those who get what they deserve when they are sentenced to Hell. To paraphrase
Martin Luther King Jr., we must dream of a day when men are judged by the
content of their character; a time that name as a name, Judgment Day, when no
one will be wronged and justice will be done at last. Perhaps only one
prominent religious or political figure on the planet would consider that to be
Good News; to the rest of us who refuse to listen to him, including the vast
majority of Western bishops who have abandoned him, it will be Bad News. Hundreds
of millions of people still listen to the pope, but they are the invisible,
forgotten poor, whose opinions are regarded of little consequence because they
are scattered and seemingly powerless, like the urchins on the streets of
Calcutta or poor peasants tilling small plots in Colombia. They may be simple
and even illiterate, but they something that our wayward political hacks
don’t understand: the only true division
is between good and evil, not Left and Right. The rest of the planet is in for
a painful reminder of that, if they fail to heed the only voice of common sense
left today, that of the pope. Until we listen to him, every reform we attempt
will be poisoned and doomed to failure; because religion is a matter of
practicality, we will not see practical solutions to America’s problems until
it has a serious change of heart. I often wonder if the pope ruminates on Yeats
while pondering the bleak future of the Western world, for it is going to be
quite difficult for us to maintain his vision of Spiritus Mundi, its gaze blank
and pitiless as the sun, in a twenty-first century of stony sleep. If we fail
to awaken from our unprecedented moral free-fall in time, then that rough beast
may soon slouch towards Bethelehm to be born, its hour come at last. Whether it
slouches to the Left or to the Right is of no consequence.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[2]
Kennedy, Paul M., 1987, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers : Economic
Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. Random House: New York.
[3]
See p. 51, Dale Ahlquist, 2003, G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense.
Ignatius Press. He In turn cites p. 205, Maisie Ward, 1942, Gilbert Keith
Chesterton. Sheed and Ward: New York.
[4] Luke
6:39 and Matthew 15:14.
