Who is Well Armed?
Against Misplaced Faith
Further to the Provost affair, please see at Brownstone The Service of Dissent. We resume now the series that began with Seeking a Christian State?
It is sound doctrine, even sound political doctrine, to say that none but the virtuous are good and that none but the good are free. The vicious may know and enjoy a form of freedom, derived from the works of the virtuous, but they remain bound by their own vices, as if their feet were in the stocks. Their politics, and perchance their religion, represent vain attempts to liberate themselves.
The socialist system is one such attempt, albeit a dour and pessimistic one. As Chesterton observes in Eugenics, it is “founded not on optimism but on original sin.” Lacking the divine antidote, it harbours deep doubts about man. Hence it “proposes that the State, as the conscience of the community, should possess all primary forms of property,” on the grounds that “men cannot be trusted to own or barter or combine or compete without injury to themselves. Just as a State might own all the guns lest people should shoot each other, so this State would own all the gold and land lest they should cheat or rackrent or exploit each other.”
Chesterton, however, was still more wary of the capitalist alternative, the inequalities of which the socialists were trying to overcome. Capitalism, being the more adaptive of the two, was quick to compound the crimes committed in the name of socialism. “All that official discipline,” he writes of the latter's revolutionary regimens,
about which the Socialists themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive, was taken over bodily by the Capitalists. They have now added all the bureaucratic tyrannies of a Socialist state to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a Capitalist State. For the vital point is that it did not in the smallest degree diminish the inequalities of a Capitalist State. It simply destroyed such individual liberties as remained among its victims.
That observation, made in 1922, is remarkable for its own promptitude, and still more remarkable for its prescience. “It is very probable,” he adds, that in due course “the rich will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic side of the bargain; and will feed men like slaves as well as hunting them like outlaws.” Which seems to be what today's philanthropists, men like Gates and Soros, mean to do. And why should they not, having already embarked, in the name of science and progress, on “their great campaigns and cosmopolitan systems for the regimentation of millions”?
There is nothing wrong with regimentation in its place. The monk is regimented, the soldier is regimented, all who are under vows of obedience are regimented. There is a place for regimentation in sport or in the laboratory, in schools and in hospitals, which were invented by those who had taken vows of obedience. But today we face a different kind of regimentation, to a different end. Volleys of laws, commandments, and decrees, volumes of unreadable regulation and legislation, are prepared for us by satraps of every description and none. Armies of bureaucrats launch these volleys against us in anarchic barrage, marching forward under their covering fire, capturing our cities, our suburbs, our countryside.
Sustainable Markets Initiative Legal Task Force
Anarchic does not mean uncoordinated but unprincipled. This is law-making that does not respect the purpose or nature or limits of law. Despite its claims, it does not respect the man for whom the law is made. It serves to evacuate the notion of private property of any real meaning, to make war on privacy per se. It is directed even at the most intimate spheres of human life; against the doma and the doma kyriakon, the family home and the house of the Lord. For the instincts of those who craft it are all against the common man, who would be no more to them than a means of profit were he not also perceived as a threat.
Its perverse nature came to light in the lockdowns and other pandemic liturgies, which with astonishing coordination introduced what Chesterton called anarchy from above. Pan demos—all the people—were introduced to the “new normal” of regimentation by their betters. The stated purpose was to save them from themselves and from their last enemy, death. The real purpose was to aggravate their fear of death and, just so, to render them more pliable.
I said in part three that we are engaged in a contest. It is not a political contest between the Left and the Right, which are but two feet moving the lumpen centre in the same direction, steering the body politic to a single, unhappy end. Neither is it a contest between libertarians and traditionalists. Rather, it is a soteriological contest between ends.
On the one side it is known that liberty requires virtue; that only by seeking God as his highest end can man discover how to order his lower ends aright, including his political ends; that regeneration, not regimentation, is the true need of man; that resurrection, as Solovyov maintained, is a man's only real hope, since for every man death is inevitable.
On the other side are those who make man out to be his own saviour; or, rather, who make some men out to be the saviours of others, all because they refuse to believe in the true Saviour or to acknowledge his resurrection. And these, perforce, become lords of all the rest, who at first willingly, then unwillingly, become their subjects, even their slaves. Here the power of the state becomes grossly inflated. Its budget likewise; which, as the libertarian likes to say, is nothing but armed robbery. Quoting Mencken, Ciarán O'Regan reminds us that the basic tactic “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary," while the heist is carried out.
The men who invent these hobgoblins have dropped population bombs (all duds), created climate crises (equally phoney), provoked unnecessary wars, run false-flag terror operations, collapsed markets and currencies and governments, addicted a whole generation to their drugs, manufactured pandemics and imposed lucrative countermeasures, invented nature-defying cults. They are chameleons, now red or blue or green or rainbow, but they sting like scorpions. Ideologically, the common object of their attacks is the premise that man precedes the state, that he possesses an a priori right to provide for himself, to look to his own welfare, to speak his own mind, to govern his own affairs. That is the one thing they cannot abide.
Each assault on this premise serves to justify new regimens to be imposed. The coup de grâce will be the assigning of a number in place of a name. For the chief characteristic of a man with a number is that he in a queue, that he is on the dole, that he has nowhere to go and nothing to call his own. Even the countryside will not save him. Such a man, though he may not yet know it, is well and truly displaced. He is quite literally de-nominated. He is Chesterton's tramp and will be treated as such.
Yet in God's eyes he is a man, for all that. He has already been claimed and vindicated by the Saviour. If he knows that he is a man, he also knows, as Leo and Chesterton knew, that “to consent to any treatment calculated to defeat the end and purpose of his being is beyond his right.”
Therefore he will fight back. He will take up the sword against those who devise such treatments. Perhaps it will be a sword of steel, if he can find one, though the church has placed serious moral conditions on their use and the state, as Chesterton foresaw, is making them more difficult to find. More often its blade will be forged by sacrifice and hard work. Sometimes it will be the sharpest sword there is, the sword wielded by the martyr. However things go, he knows that he cannot give himself up to servitude by consenting to treatments calculated to defeat the purpose of his being, because that would be to "violate the most sacred and inviolable rights of all," the rights of God himself.
Even lovers of liberty, unfortunately, tend to stop short of grounding their resistance on this solid rock. They do not come to the contest well armed, even if they come armed, like Mr Moicano, with muscular limbs and Ludwig von Mises. Lovers of virtuous liberty may come better armed, but they will not fare much better if their resistance is grounded only on familiar customs and hoary conventions. Here in part four (pursuing the programme of part two) I wish to question each in turn, beginning with the latter.
Querying the Traditionalist
"St George, he stood for England," begins one of Chesterton's poems; as should every Englishman, no doubt, though there be some who deny it. The Paris Statement makes the same point. But how can the Englishman or the Frenchman, to say nothing of the Brazilian or the American, stand for anything if he must stand for everything? And everything is what he is now asked to stand for. His whole culture is being systematically deracinated. The very borders of his country are being erased, like the borders of his own land. If he permits himself to think about it, it drives him mad.
For the most part, the traditionalist is not yet so mad, or so much in despair, that he is ready to deposit a note for his family on the high altar before depositing his brains on the floor beneath it, in bloody punctuation of his belief that “an individual severed from tradition can have no identity at all.” As Matthew Rose explains in First Things, that act of protest, performed a decade ago by Dominique Venner at Notre Dame cathedral, was not really the act of a traditionalist at all, but rather the act of a rebel against the decadence aided and abetted by traditionalists. It did make clear the limits of tradition, however, beginning with the Nietzschean neo-pagan tradition that had got into Venner's head before being let out again by his own hand. It did, in its perverse way, make clear what is wrong with relying on tradition, even on older and sounder traditions than Nietzsche's.
What is right about traditionalism, you see, is also what is wrong with it. It relies on habit rather than on moral heft. It rests on custom rather than on conviction. When the world changes, it tends to change with it, if a little behind it. It is polite to a fault. Venner preferred to be as impolite as possible.
Politeness, I dare say, is a disease the traditionalist shares with the progressivist. It is common among those who think evil merely a form of ignorance, an illusion produced by want of education. Where that folly leads is evident. Probity is lost to politeness, the factual to the suppositional, the definite to the vague and diffuse. Eventually, progressivism prevails. Particular places and peoples, and the things they prize, are rendered of no account. Tradition itself dies, even in the museums built to memorialize it.
Mr Z. reminds us of Jesus’ warning against all this, a warning to which I alluded earlier:
Of all the stars that rise on the mental horizon of one who carefully reads our sacred texts, I think there is none so clear, illuminating, and startling as that which shines forth in the words, “Thinkest thou that I come to bring peace on Earth? I come not to bring peace, but divisions.” He came to bring truth to the earth, and truth, like good, before anything else divides.
Jesus, in fact, reserved his rudest words for the polite men, the unity men, the middle-axioms men, addressing them just as John the Baptist had. "You brood of vipers! How can you, being evil, say anything good?"
Politeness may be a virtuous habit in the virtuous. It need not always get in the way of truth-telling. The problem arises where politeness forbids distinctions between good and evil. There, peace is not preserved. Instead, public discourse becomes moralistic without actually being moral. Eventually, whatever the traditionalist himself may desire, it becomes more and more passionate in its promotion of once obvious evils and in its refusal to countenance correction. The descent into madness accelerates. Violent chaos ensues.
On the soi-disant New Right, there are those who recognize this and are prepared to do something about it. They want, among other things, to restore a more traditional sense of right and wrong. They hope to become a potent political force, recapturing social institutions and gaining control over the state apparatus, which they think dominated by a cross-party alliance of globalist neocons, about whom they are justifiably quite rude. They, too, will take up a sword.
Not long ago, Christopher Rufo published a manifesto for their counter-revolution. “Most intelligent conservatives,” he writes,
especially younger conservatives, who joined the political fray at a moment of sweeping ideological change, already recognize that familiar orthodoxies are no longer viable, and that ideas without power are useless. The Right doesn’t need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends... For fifty years, establishment conservatives have been retreating from the great political tradition of the West—republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing—in favor of half-measures and cheap substitutes.
First among these substitutes, says Rufo, “is the self-serving myth of neutrality,” a myth that may arise from classical liberalism but has taken new impetus from libertarianism.
Following a libertarian line, the conservative establishment has argued that government, state universities, and public schools should be “neutral” in their approach to political ideals. But no institution can be neutral—and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology.
We must be realistic, he thinks, not merely reasonable. “Reason is the slave of the passions. Political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith—on irrational, or at least subrational, feelings that can be channeled, but never destroyed by reason.” The marketplace of ideas model doesn't fare any better, then, than the myth of neutrality. “The chief vectors for the transmission of values—the public school, the public university, and the state—are not marketplaces at all. They are government-run monopolies.”
Rufo's strategy for rectification is not, like the libertarian's, more severely to limit the state, but rather to conquer it through activism that concentrates “on three domains: language, institutions, and ends.” That means engaging in agitprop, “channeling truth towards victory.” It means entrenching a new discourse among the elites and eventually ensconcing those ideas in the law. “Win the argument, win the elite, and win the regime”: that is the path “from pamphlet to power.”
Lest that sound too crass, however, or indeed too Nietzschean, Rufo stresses the necessity of reconnecting political action to something higher than politics, of restoring a discourse of ends that embodies itself institutionally. Without attraction to ends, interest in means naturally wanes. That “the language of ends has almost vanished from American life” is not so much a hindrance, he thinks, as an opportunity. Teleology must be brought back into play, and can be. “Because of its religious adherence, the Right still has access to the language of ends,” and “ends will ultimately triumph over means.”
The best way to counter the degradations of American institutional life is to remind the public of the fundamental purpose of those institutions, and to communicate that purpose. What is the purpose of the university? What is the purpose of a school? What system of government will guide us toward human happiness? These questions provoke doubt and anxiety in the current regime. And no wonder. The idea of happiness, properly understood, can be revolutionary.
Well, what shall we make of this? Rufo is right to say that words matter, that institutions matter, that places of authority matter. Man is a social animal and, as such, also a political animal. On the political level, Rufo is right to identify courage, the courage to “recruit, recapture, replace,” as critical. His own boldness notwithstanding, however, or the early successes that his strategy can boast—the ousting of Claudine Gay from Harvard, for example—what he is aiming at may for the present remain out of reach. Happiness may be what all men want, but not all men are responsive to “happiness, properly understood” or prepared to cede power to those who seek it. And those in power have their own swords, with blades orcish but not dull, or cast by some still darker spell.
Much of the fighting, moreover, will have to be conducted underground. It will have to be pursued, as it was in Czechoslovakia and other eastern European states, in the form of a parallel polis. For the West is no longer free, or no longer free as once it was. From Brussels and London to Washington and Ottawa, vast tracts of it are controlled by the enemies of freedom. Traditionalists, like libertarians, are all heretics now, and are hunted as such. What we require are new iterations of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation and leaders in the mould of Havel and Scruton, or better yet, of Karol Wojtyła. Brashness is not the best form of impoliteness, nor winsomeness the only face of wisdom. Something between the two is needed. Tolkien was wise to offer us Aragorn as a model.
There are other problems as well. What is this talk of a system of government that might guide us toward human happiness? There is only one such, and it is not a system but a person. A system of government, if its checks and balances are working properly, may help us preserve freedom to pursue happiness as we honour the family, learn virtue, respect private property, insist on the rule of law within the limits of law, and look to the One who alone is good and happy and the source of all goodness and happiness. But a system of government cannot guide us toward happiness. The most we can hope for from secular governance, as I said in part one, is an arrangement in which the state serves, modestly and dutifully, a citizenry in which there is some consensus about Judaeo-Christian principles of justice, peace, and the common good, a system in which the church itself can operate freely in constructive tension with the state. I will have more to say about that in part five.
Nor is Rufo right to propose, if I read him rightly, that we fight Gramsci with Gramsci as we “channel the truth towards victory.” We do not channel the truth. We hand on the truth, if we have it; that's what traditio means. And we do indeed have it, if we belong to what Paul calls “the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.” But it is the truth that must channel us, directing us in the way of truth, as the whole testimony of the church declares. To channel the truth towards victory is to assume that we already know what victory is; and in secular terms we do not know, though we do know the victory of God in the resurrected and ascended Christ, a victory we celebrate this week in the Solemnity of the Ascension. We know, that is, the great mystery of our religion, which tells us what, or rather whom, to expect, not as the “end” of the secular but when the secular is at an end.
The New Right looks much too much like the Old Right for my liking. Or even like the New Left. We must not concede that reason is the slave of the passions. We must always be ready, as I expect Rufo will agree, to give a rational account of the hope that lies within us. But that means that we must also be ready to explain that genuine reform, even on the political level, cannot be had without a prior and equally genuine repentance on the spiritual level. If ends must govern means, and higher ends lower, then it is a revival of genuine religion that is most required. Let politics follow afterward, as best they can.
We must, in other words, have the courage to call for recruitment and recapture by God, as Bonhoeffer did when he drafted the Bethel Confession or Barth the Barmen Declaration. That is the single most effective thing that can be done on either level, for in 2024 we are facing our own 1933 crisis, in which power is being utterly detached from truth and justice. The outcome will only be different if we are so recruited. I will not elaborate on that here, however, but turn now to the libertarian, who remains deeply skeptical about putting the traditionalist in charge of institutions and laws he thinks ought not to exist.
Querying the Libertarian
Our concern is not with the kind of libertarian who thinks there should be no state, but with the kind who agrees that there should be only a very modest state, with limited powers of coercion. On what does he ground his resistance to the immodest state? Not in respect for tradition, or in some nostalgia for more traditional times, but in private property as sacrosanct.
That note, which he sounds loud and clear, has a Leonine ring to it. Unfortunately, the libertarian proceeds to ground the notion of private property in the notion of self-ownership. Like the fourteenth-century Franciscan, if to opposite purpose, he begins with himself and hence with subjective proprietorial rights, the rights of the individual, rather than with what is objectively and everywhere right. He thus makes of himself the very principle of justice.
This is no sounder now, and no more workable, than it was then. It was the refusal then to admit that it was unworkable that led to the alienation of church and state that so many take for granted now. With the advance of nominalism and voluntarism, that alienation began the inevitable divorce of power from any real concern for justice, or concern for justice with any real concern for truth. The Machiavellian era had arrived.
Now, the libertarian may object to the fact that we are being urged today to take new vows of poverty, not (like a Franciscan) in the name of Christ but in the name of Net Zero. He may object, not only to the alarmists, but to the falsely modest whose cultured tongues lay claim to heaven and earth alike, as if the throne of England were the throne of the universe. He may object to the fact that truth, which is everyone's property, is treated with no more respect from the Oval Office than a man's private property. Yet he seems unaware of just how all this happened. He is quite ready to fight against it, without realizing that his fight is futile.
The futility stems in part from his supposition that, if the functions of the state are privatized as functions of the market, if the political is made over into the economic almost without remainder, the basic problem will be solved. It will not be solved, unfortunately, because the problem of the fall will not be solved. Justice itself cannot be privatized and it certainly cannot be monetized. The privatization of justice, and of the state itself as an instrument of justice, is just the problem we are experiencing as the state devolves into a global network of public-private partnerships.
The futility stems also from the thick line he tries to draw between the legal and the moral. Take abortion, for example, a subject very much back on the table today. Morally speaking, says the libertarian, abortion may be reprehensible, as is refusing to feed one's young. But legally speaking, the mother has a right to abort her child, while it is not yet self-possessed, or afterward to let it starve just because it is self-possessed. She must not be subjected to autonomy violating coercion in such matters. The autonomy of the self-possessed is sacrosanct. The child who survives long enough to gain it is free to run away and take up with someone less reprehensible.
I use this bald example, which Rothbard himself used in The Ethics of Liberty, because it exposes a fundamental flaw in libertarianism. The libertarian regards himself as a realist, but he is not realistic enough about fallen human beings. I do not mean that he does not know how evil a man can be, or that force is sometimes necessary in defence of another man's rights. He knows all that well enough. It is not force to which he objects, but rather monopolies on force. Yet his anthropology is faulty because his theology is faulty. He starts with self-ownership when he ought to have started with the self as gift. How does Anselm begin his great treatise on freedom? “What do you have,” he asks with Paul, “that you have not received?”
I mentioned in another essay that Chesterton, teasing his friend H. G. Wells, proposed that if Wells found himself unable to start with a putatively historic fact like the fall, he might at least start with an obvious personal fact. “In his new Utopia,” writes Chesterton,
he says that a chief part of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had begun with himself—he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment.
Chesterton was right, but we do well to turn from what is almost the first thing to what is actually the first thing. The most obvious fact about Wells or Chesterton is not that they might be selfish or even that, as fallen creatures, they are sure at times to be selfish. The most obvious thing is that each is in receipt of his self. Neither is the source of his own selfhood.
The libertarian needs to ponder this carefully; the traditionalist also, for he sometimes makes the same mistake. The latter should concede to the former that the human being has no absolute right to life. A man comes into existence, not by right but by gift, the gift of God and of his parents. By way of his parents, he comes into existence as one bound by sin and subject to its consequences. He is under sentence of death from God and may, under certain circumstances, come under sentence of death from man also, thus hastening his death.
What must not be conceded, however, is that an unplanned pregnancy, or even a planned pregnancy not going according to plan, is justly among those circumstances. For the fetus has committed no crime against its parents. Neither has it committed any crime against God, save by association with its parents. Moreover, the unwillingness of parents to continue giving does not negate the willingness of God to continue giving. And the willingness of God to give, whether to parent or to child, takes precedence wherever there is a parent and a child.
Do not be too quick to say that I have just made the libertarian's point, that I have conflated morality with legality. It is quite true that sin is one thing and crime another, and that reason can distinguish between them. But it is also true that, if life is a gift, right worship is the foundation of right reason, as right reason is the foundation of justice. Where there is no gratitude to God, there is no justice before God. That is why Ambrose declared in De officiis that faith is the surest footing for justice and that the church "is, as it were, the outward form of justice." That is why Augustine asked in The City of God how any people refusing to give the Maker his due can hope or pretend to give what is due to those the Maker has made. Has that people not already denied distributive justice at its very root? We must draw a line between church and state, yes. We must draw a line between morality and legality, too. But neither line should be drawn so thickly that the logical connection is broken.
Now law, whether divine or human, may sometimes give up the vicious to the effects of their vices, which is their natural punishment. It need not always impose some further punishment, though as a tutor it may do so. It may also seek to protect the innocent from fates imposed by the guilty—sometimes it must do so. Is the killing of a child in the womb not murder, because the child is in the womb? Is the starving of a child not criminal neglect, whether or not the child is old enough and well enough and wise enough to run away? To say that it is murder, or that there is criminal neglect, is not at all the same as saying that all murderers or all child-abusers should be prosecuted or punished in precisely the same fashion. To say that right worship is the foundation of right reason is not the same as saying that all people should be forced to worship rightly so that they might reason rightly; force, here, is not even thinkable, for gratitude is free or it is not gratitude.
Reverence for the Lord and Giver of Life, rather than a putative right to life, is the true basis for objecting to abortion. It was Bonhoeffer’s basis; perhaps it is also Milei’s basis. At all events, Milei stands apart from Rothbard, whose starting-point pushed him to an unfortunate conclusion. Political and legal theory cannot be made to rest on self-ownership without producing such results, for self-ownership is not the most fundamental fact. The gift-nature of life is the most fundamental fact. Or rather the Giver himself is the most fundamental fact.
That is why the traditionalist is generally closer to the truth, so long as he doesn't suppose that being a traditionalist suffices. The libertarian, by doing away with the state or most functions of the state, does away not merely with regimentation but with any public measure of justice. He privatizes justice, or tries to, even if he does not impose the results on others on the same scale as our corrupt administrations do.
One may sympathize with attempts to reduce the scale! For the dour pessimism about the common man that drives those who operate to scale is applicable, perforce, to themselves. The common man, indeed, is much easier to defend than the uncommon man. The truth, however, is that neither justice nor truth can be privatized, for neither collectively nor individually is man the measure of all things. God alone takes the measure of all things—God and the Righteous One to whom he has assigned the measuring.
This is the one who said, “I go to the Father.” This is the one qui sedes ad dexteram Patris. This the one who also declared to his disciples, who still declares in the presence of the angels, the saints, and the four living creatures around the throne, “the ruler of this world is judged.” This is the one who is the cornerstone of the new creation.
St Nicholas Church, Pernera
Let us take another example, one that Professor Pardy offers me as a test of my notion of the modest state: the problem of prostitution. “If a willing seller and willing buyer, both legally competent, and with full consent, make a contract for the sale of sexual services, in private and without imposing their activities on anyone else, is that activity to be permitted within your proposed political order? Or to be prohibited on the ground that it is vice and not virtue?”
Of course I have not proposed a secular political order, but only gestured towards one that takes seriously the distinction between virtue and vice and has some idea which is which. Still, it is a perfectly fair question, wisely crafted, which I will answer thus: It is not to be prohibited on the grounds that it is vice. That is the work of the church, not of the state. If something is to be prohibited by the state, it is to be prohibited because its effects are directly rather than indirectly injurious to the body politic.
Viewed in that light, we might set private prostitution aside, not for a consideration of public prostitution but rather for a consideration of the public promotion of contraception, which is a far more serious problem and one much better connected to abortion. As I explained four years ago in The Measure of the Beast, contraception and the contraceptive mentality lie at the root of a great many injuries to the body politic, some of them deliberately inflicted by reason of the fact that “there is money to be made, a lot of money, from the unfolding sexual revolution and from the disintegration of the natural family, which when healthy cultivates a well-ordered soul and a well-ordered society.”
I made the connection then, and would make it more forcefully now, to lockdowns, for the same worldly powers, with Pharma front and centre, profit from both. By alienating men and women from their own bodies they take those bodies captive, pinning them in the stocks even from infancy. Not content with that, they've advanced as far as a cult of castration, another form of “consensual” violence to which (as Jarryd Bartle remarks) “the law struggles to respond.” The reason it struggles is that it has no longer any moral bearings by which to direct its response. For we have turned back from Christ to Cybele, admiring by turns “the mistress of wild nature” and “the protectress in times of war.”
The pagans of old already knew how to combine prostitution and castration. In rites of this sort priests were castrated or castrated themselves, while the common man, if not too common, contented himself with holy prostitutes. Would that it were still so! Instead, the priests castrate the common man while satisfying their own phallic urges with a phalanx of high-priced prostitutes. But I digress. My short answer to Professor Pardy is negative; the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, as Pierre Trudeau, cribbing from Leo, reminded us.
This answer, however, is rather more qualified than the answer supplied by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas on the parallel question of homosexual acts consensually performed in private. For what applies to contraception applies also to prostitution and homosexuality, which are but particular expressions thereof; namely, that public promotion does real public harm and ought, where it is egregious, to be prohibited, especially if it endangers the young.
That is tricky terrain, difficult to negotiate. But it invites a further reservation, one that concerns the privacy doctrine that featured in Lawrence, as it had in Griswold, without being properly resolved. Simply put, we cannot have it both ways. That is, we cannot defend the good of sexual privacy, for the sake of which we permit certain evils of sexual licence, while at the same time affirming those evils by permitting them public expression, as in the lewdness of so-called pride parades.
Who cannot see that the present assault on privacy (especially women's privacy) by the transgender movement, and the proliferation of “hate crime” legislation to prevent any contestation of this assault, is a direct result of embracing a blatant contradiction? Who cannot see that conformity is being demanded after all? Dissent is forbidden. Dissent is evil. Eliminate Dissent Immediately! That is the real meaning of the militant campaign that masquerades as sensitivity and compassion.
This Orwellian inversion portends a complete conflation of church and state. The state is becoming a church, a global church at that, albeit of the perverse kind that regards as haters of the human race all who will not approve of what it approves or condemn what it condemns. For in the coinage of that “inevitable” ideology some call socio-capitalism, the libertine state is merely the obverse to which the doctrinaire state is the reverse.
Doctrinaire, please note, is not a synonym for dogmatic. The Catholic Church is dogmatic because it has clear and firm dogmas, fixed beliefs such as “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” The state that is becoming a church is not defined by what it does believe, but by what it doesn’t believe. It doesn’t believe in sex, for example, for its instincts are gnostic. It doesn’t believe in science, for the same reason—not where “science” means something neither dogmatic nor doctrinaire but always subject to scrutiny. It certainly doesn’t believe in private property. How could it, since it doesn’t believe with the psalmist that “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof,” or in the God who says, “Thou shalt not steal”?
What it does seem to believe in, and quite devoutly, is a religion of deracination and despair. Why otherwise are the natural family and the supernatural church the objects of its most intense hatred? Preceding the state in the one case, and transcending it in the other, the family and the church are a barrier to theft and a bulwark against absolute control. In them even the tramp can find refuge; the best traditions of a people or nation likewise.
The state as church—or rather as anti-church, doctrinaire and censorious, suicidal and murderous—who is well armed against it? None whose deepest faith is in tradition, however venerable; or in private property, even himself as private property. He is well armed whose deepest faith is in God and his Christ. As for those who will not have Christ, they shall have antichrist instead. If they will not have the true church, they shall have a false one. If they will not have cooperation, they shall have conflation. But now I see that I must, in conclusion, clarify what I mean by cooperation.
Excellent piece...thank you! Your works are ones I always look forward to as they require time and thoughtful analysis to absorb, an experience lacking in most writing today. May God bless you and yours!
God bless you, Professor Farrow! And Ascension Theology remains a favorite. I return to it often!