Notes On Another Day At The Endarkenment

I was swapping e-mails with someone who I consider to be a good friend -- Martin McPhillips -- and we were talking about the Alito hearings when it came to this, with Martin in the first line:

> I've had to develop new theories just to deal
> with it.

I can't. I have no serious capacity for dealing with these assholes. It just instantly wears me out to even think about them.

And then, I realize that we're in an election year.

I imagine my whole online presence grinding to a halt. I will still watch, but I am simply running out of outrage, Martin, and that is the only sensible approach to any of it now.

I have no idea what I'll be like around this stuff a year from now.

~~~~~~~~~~

At this point, I would send off a word to reader Charles, who, three weeks ago, sent excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago", implicitly comparing his commentary on Article 58 of the Soviet constitution to the Patriot Act. Charles: now, see... I can imagine that you think I just blew it off. I could understand why you might think so, because you never heard a peep from me. But I didn't. I still have that e-mail marked unread and flagged for response, and I think about it often. I haven't thought anything that I consider worth putting up in written words, mainly because there really is very little to it. The thing looks bloody obvious to me.

~~~~~~~~~~

This (presented without apology to those never trained in proper quoteback management) is where things went with Martin and me:

(me) This, however...

>>> The bottom line is that if they're going to cheat,
>>> they can do that without needing any excuses. In
>>> that regard, I've long assumed that NSA had that
>>> capacity and has abused it all along. I don't regard
>>> any telecom or e-mail as secure, at least ultimately.

>>...is my problem.

>> I wonder if you recall when the working assumption
>> was that the FBI was archiving AC-ECW. That's
>> been my assumption forever, but it wouldn't make
>> it right just because I expected it.

> AC-ECW was subversive internet before there was
> subversive internet.

Of course. I always looked back fondly on what someone once called "the grand theatrical lunacy" of alt.conspiracy, but our group was the most serious work anywhere online. That's the whole reason why...

> I mean, that thing was a show, and it demanded
> that a stinking bunch of activists come in and shit all
> over the place to make it unuseable by anyone normal.

...it attracted such attention.

> I've gone back over that period a number of times
> and my conclusion is still that the Clintons were
> unique. I can't think of a single president of the
> United States -- not Nixon, not Wilson or FDR, no
> one -- who brought sheer psychopathology to the
> service of himself (and herself) as did those
> two. You might recall that I had little interest in
> policies. I had only my fear of Clinton as a person.
> I didn't think he was smart, just feral. I didn't
> even think that he was your basic socialist, just
> that when he thought about it that that was his
> reset position. I simply felt that he was dangerous
> and that we'd have been safer if we had just said,
> O.K., we'll install a Mafia don and know what we
> have, instead of waiting for this guy's next insane
> jerk in this or that direction. The Mrs., of course,
> was herself a ticking time bomb of a slightly
> different color.
>
> The disgrace of it all.

Oh, more than that, Martin. The menace of it all.

I was always able to conceive the mentality that would passionately work for the outright destruction of America in its essence: the individualist ideal. But I never saw it so clearly at work as in those years. And it was manifest in the two of them: him, in his utterly cynical opportunism; and her in her ruthless determination, which never really found its proper outlet, but which I could see coming. Between the two of them, the 1990's saw the end of my hope for this place and This Thing Of Ours.

The only really curious thing, to me, is how long it took me to really grasp the proper conclusion.

> But then that entire party was debauched by them,
> and as you say, the Clintonism has seeped and it
> is ruinous. And now it has bled back into the
> whole Hiss-Fonda-Cindy Sheehan monstrosity, and
> has grown incomprehensibly evil.

Well, not only that, but the cowardly stupidity of the conservatives. I keep using those two words to describe them, and it must get boring, but there is no other essence to it. They were always completely -- philosophically and (therefore) practically -- inept to deal with any of it.

>> My bottom line: between the bureaubots and the
>> terrorists, I know who I'd rather take my chances
>> with.

> Never. I'd never go in that direction. These terrorists
> aren't going to stop unless they are stopped and
> unless they are stopped it will go biological and/or
> nuclear and they'll have us right where they want
> us: back in the 14th Century, their home turf.

I know that, Martin. I fully understand the threat. But I'll tell you what is my practical touchstone in the face of that: it's the people who fought off the attack on Flight 93 and ended up planting that thing in a field in Pennsylvania.

Look: they are philosophically inept, too, to confront the largest dimensions of what is happening to their country, but -- by & large -- I believe they still have a visceral feel for what to do when that kind of whistle blows. I am talking, of course, about people not given to camping at the president's house all summer long or standing in front of Israeli bulldozers. IOW: if we take up the Maoist metaphor, the fish will have no water in which to swim, in this country. Certainly not yet. And when it comes down to the military nuts & bolts of destroying us, the essentially guerrilla nature of their fight will face, just about at every turn, a virtually atavistic but nonetheless potent resistence right down at the level of some soccer-mom tanking her minivan at the corner gas-station who won't have it if she can do anything about something that she just happens to see going way wrong at the right moment.

Now; I know damned well that this is a slender thread on which to hang something like "national security", and I hold no illusions that it will get through un-blooded. We'll get tapped again. For sure.

However, I also do not -- cannot -- believe that everything this government is cranking up will be worth the payoff in terms of identifying and/or neutralizing the threat[s]. More and more, these people will not be able to get out of their own way -- all while they're killing everything in the essential spirit of Americans which is necessary to keeping them in the fight. This is a long view, Martin. And it goes to essentials of mind and spirit: they will necessarily be destroyed by the mount of government power, ostensibly for a noble purpose but also working concurrently with the decades-long degradation of individualism that we both understand. It's all going in the direction of total dependence of individuals on these fucking assholes who ride through Washington like it's their personal field of gold walled with insatiable power.

It will be the rest of our lives, Martin, but it won't be long, in historical terms, before that job is done, and once it is, I think it will be quite fair to declare that the lights have gone completely out.

I am convinced that we are at the final turning point. Liberty really is finally being traded for security, and I can never endorse that. Not under any circumstances.

>>>> These are hard, weird, days, Martin.

>>> Did you see Steyn and Kimball et al at the New
>>> Criterion?

>> Yes, and I generally agree with you. It's to the point
>> where I wonder what's going to become of all the
>> real-estate of Europe in the next fifty years or so.

> Well, it will be Muslim.

Oh, I can see that. What I wonder about -- only idly and vaguely because I really don't care -- is the precise political organization of the thing.

> You could be arrested for calling it something by
> something other than its Muslim name. Don't laugh,
> renaming places is among the first thing that
> conquest brings. It's the signifier.

I know.

> And it doesn't happen because Muslims are so clever,
> but because the Europeans are so stupid. It's the
> ultimate suicidal impulse, and their fondest concern
> (the Europeans) is that they drag America down into
> death with them.

Of course.

>> And then, I realize that we're in an election year.
>>
>> I imagine my whole online presence grinding to a halt.
>> I will still watch, but I am simply running out of
>> outrage, Martin, and that is the only sensible
>> approach to any of it now.
>>
>> I have no idea what I'll be like around this stuff a
>> year from now.

> You're not going to like my answer, but only the
> Church, in the broadest sense of the word, can
> save this country from its own suicide.

Consider this:

"A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm hand of faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes."

I thought of you when I first read that. It's from Vol. I of Durant's "Story of Civilization". He was writing about Babylonia. The thing that struck me, first, was the authority lent to it by the facts of the long course of history. The whole arc of birth and death of cultures almost looks like an immutable law when we look at the facts over thousands of years.

Ernest Brown sent me some Aquinas a while back, which I only began to read on that last jaunt to Japan. It followed on my reading of a little thing by Richard E. Rubenstein, entitled "Aristotle's Children", subtitled: "How Christians, Muslims, And Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom And Illuminated The Middle Ages". The whole thing refreshed and reinforced my concept of the Church as (notably reluctant) midwife to reason: the rise of humanism took place under what Rubenstein referred to as "for centuries the Latin world's only unifying, civilizing agency" in the long wake of the collapse of Rome.

Now, when I think of all this, I necessarily admit what Durant said, quoted above, about the ethical conditions attending the rise and fall of cultures. It should not require a genius to observe that a nation whose children whimper when they have to charge their Playstation batteries is not busy at grooming itself for flourishing under the demands of practical human life. And we hear, these days, a lot of noise about the function of religion in the polity, but I say it's bloody foolish to attempt to dismiss the import of religion as it came down the centuries to the point where America was born. The practical ethical implications -- dismissing their foundations and complete philosophical integrity, which is certainly questionable, at least, and the problems of which drove Aquinas' whole attempt at reconciliation of reason and faith -- are undeniable. The people who founded this country and set its culture on course were an expression of an ethics holding that the hard pain of toil was the only way to succeed as human beings. And I know lots of otherwise reasonable people -- dismissing the jabbering chimps on the Left -- who would scoff at a lot of this (the Objectivists are the principal example) for complicated reasons, but I see no way around the facts of history.

But here's the thing:

It is not difficult for me to distill the ethics of successful human life from the presence and history of the Church. I see two completely separable -- if not successfully separated by now -- matters here: 1) the history of this ethical track, and 2) the necessity of its application regardless of elements of its pedigree. In brief: I do not see the facts of its history as necessary imperative to take the Church as its sole vehicle in human affairs.

Here is something, Martin, that I have still never seen you come to terms with:

Me.

The fact that I am what I am, without the Church.

And here's what it means: I say you're wrong when you assert that "only the Church, in the broadest sense of the word, can save this country from its own suicide."

> It may not be the country that might have been, but the
> Church is the only institution that can hold together any
> country at all that we would be able to recognize as
> our own.

It would not be extremely difficult for me to analyze this as a variant of what Rand identified as "the mind/body split", but I'm not going to take the effort. In brief: the word "institution" irritates me with its insinuation that the right ideas ("mind") would not be enough, without practice dominated by the institution ("body") of the Church.

At the bottom line, I'll just say that this is mistaken, Martin. Humanism might someday be stuffed back nearly a thousand years into its box, but certainly not in anything like the foreseeable future. And that institution is never going to "hold together" people who -- for good reasons -- just about instinctively reject the claim over the authority of their own minds, and this the important part to bear in mind in this: I'm talking about people like me, who know what the Right Thing is, without the Church. Again: we're talking about a body of ethics that I maintain is both correct (if we're talking about success of human life on the scale that America has illustrated as possible) and identifiable independently of religion. If we can talk about that ethics as something distinct from religion -- which I say we can, and should -- then your "together" starts coming into view. Look: aside from a few scrapes that don't matter now (certainly not to me), you and I have never had a serious problem living together. Think hard about what that means.

This...

> We're already in a civil war, as surely as we
> were in a civil war by the late 1850s before the
> violence even began. I'm not saying that this will
> become a shootin' war, but the two sides haven't
> been able to talk to one another for years now.
>
> Don't let anyone kid you: there is no center in this
> country anymore. It doesn't exist, and I'd be surprised
> if there was more than 5% of people who, if pressed,
> wouldn't know which of the two sides they would
> choose.

...is correct. I say that anyone trying to hold a "center" is all set to get blotted out of the picture. Most of the people who say that they're in the "center" are thudding ignoramuses or simply calculating cynics doing what they can to harvest thudding ignoramuses to their side with enticing euphemasia. As always: the central antagonism is between individualism and its long history (what do you think Martin Luther was all about?) culminating in its political expression in America, and collectivism, of which Islam -- the pressing matter of the hour -- is only a species, now in league with the Left, born in late 18th century France. It is not an accident that the special focus of this fight is America, and the pace of the thing is picking up, as it necessarily must and as I've been pointing out for a long time.

Whatever else, this simply cannot go on without resolution.

I think we have no problem agreeing on that.