an ebb and flow: Time to awaken from that ghost land

Even Nietzsche warned when fighting monsters, beware that you yourself do not become one. It never ceases to amaze how much such warnings aren't heeded and history once again repeats itself, particularly when its lessons are ignored in pursuit of post-modern revisionist efforts that always tread too far. Discord continues, as riotous vandalism picks up against an old target. As history has shown us time and time again, first it's monuments, eventually it's people...

For millennia, King Mob has targeted societies’ icons with varied goals and to varied ends, and few things are more foreboding than his desecration of civic art. Just as the targets have ranged from rulers to clergy, from tyrants to helpless, and from the guilty to the innocent, the outcomes have ranged from victory to defeat depending on the society’s strength and will. The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after, however, is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next. ...

A society that believes in itself builds monuments, a sick society does not, and a dying society watches as they are torn down. While Roman kings, French monks, American Tories, and Russian tsarists were unable to defeat the revolutions that first tore down their symbols, today in the United States we are simply unwilling.

Blood is already spilling, with civilian defenders, bystanders, workers, and rioters killed and seriously injured in cities all across the country. Without a committed and targeted crackdown on this disorder and its leaders, the committed and targeted killings of their opponents and critics will come next.

The increasingly violent mobs in our streets are chanting for it, and the revolts of human history have come to it every time. You can be sure the ghost of King Mob will see it done. He always does.

And in many ways, the cancel culture has the proverbial ball rolling in that direction with censorship, threat and ruin, targeting anyone who'd dare speak out against the ambiguity of the mob. It's as if those in the present who have nothing to live for would rather destroy everything for the rest of us, from our past to no clear future in sight...and for what? That's rather murky...

Despite our civilization’s wealth and technological prowess, many among us have been dispossessed of what matters most. ...

We are materially rich compared to the past, but many of us are spiritually and relationally impoverished, even poisoned. True sources of order, identity, and meaning have been deconstructed and dismissed. Our culture provides poor answers, or none at all, to essential questions about who we are and how we are to live. From the rioters and vandals burning, looting, and defacing to the ostensible authorities and elites allowing and approving the destruction, the absence of right understanding of human flourishing is obvious. ...

...the profound accounts of evil that Western religion and philosophy provided have been set aside for pop psychology and the half-baked Marxist leftovers of critical theory. Instead of being led to grapple with and understand the capacity for sin in each of us and in society, we are offered the shoddy substitutes of collective guilt and banal aphorisms.

...Merciless mob vengeance and cancel culture are mockeries of justice, and the half-liturgical prostrations that have become popular parts of protests are far from genuine repentance for sin. A bit of theatrical self-abasement while confessing the sins of others, and maybe a few personal sins of omission, is worth little. It does not rectify wrongs, provide forgiveness, or prevent us from returning to actively indulging sins...

Just as our culture muddles our self-understanding as moral and spiritual agents, it confuses our knowledge of our being as embodied persons. Existence demands we consider how we should live as men and women, but instead of guiding us toward fulfillment in accord with our biological natures, our culture offers us the same advice it does with regard to religion and philosophy: We are to make it up as we go along, with our only prejudice being against tradition. ...

See the poison for what it is. Our cultural leaders want to cut us off from traditional sources of identity, purpose, and fulfillment. We are instructed to create our own creeds, regard our embodied nature as optional, sever our connections to the past and future, and retreat from community and family in the present. Social media cannot fill the void this leaves, and in many ways makes it worse. ... We are being isolated.. Many people are effectively dropping out of life... Even the current violence has an unseriousness to it.

As the philosopher John Gray notes, “Woke activists … have no vision of the future. … [T]hey are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power. … Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present.” Abolishing the police is not much of a reform plan, and looting, smashing statues, and getting people fired are indulgences of destruction and cruelty for their own sake.

Rarely have would-be revolutionaries been so open about their nihilistic desire to hurt people and break things. This, as much as anything else, demonstrates the toxicity of their movement. The inability to articulate, even rhetorically, a vision of human flourishing reveals a project that is purely negative and destructive. It is societal poison, and those joining mobs are not the only ones our culture has dispossessed.

We must demonstrate that there is a better way of life, rebuilding and reinforcing the relationships and institutions that give us healthy identities and noble purposes. We must ourselves live that which we would protect and restore.

And while we must work towards a more virtuous standard of living, we cannot accept the left’s corrupted view of America as irredeemably racist...

Let’s be clear, the mobs pulling down statues make no distinction between Confederate and Union, slave-trader or abolitionist, secessionist or pro-Union. They make no distinction between American, Spanish, or Cherokee. They do not care if the monument was erected in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first.

... History tells us iconoclasm has no brakes, and is really just a precursor to something worse. The mob eventually tires of smashing statues and moves on to people.

[We] should reject the entire notion that tearing down monuments, whether to Confederates or conquistadors, can ever be considered salutary ...in any meaningful sense. To do so would be to accept the left’s corrupted view of American history, which demands we destroy all reminders of our sinful past [specifically Democratic].

Instead of accepting that [those] sins...redound to the present day, we can choose to think differently about the wide array of monuments and statuary across our national landscape. In the process, we can perhaps learn something important about ourselves as a people.

... What better way to excise our demons than to declare that they are overthrown, they have no power over us now, and that out of many we are at last one?

If only it could be. Yet this is the very thing the woke mob rejects. The ideologues of the left have wholly accepted the 1619 Project’s frame of American history as a catalogue of crimes. That’s why they tear down monuments indiscriminately. That’s why they ban books and films, and will certainly burn them publicly before long. That’s why they indulge in performative self-righteousness, slaying long-dead enemies as if they were alive and well today. For them, they are.

... The mobs rampaging through our streets fundamentally reject an America in which the Union has won the war, in which the vision of our Founders is slowly coming to fruition, in which the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., is alive and well.

That is not their country. They live in a land of ghosts and phantoms. They are haunted by a vision of America as an inherently wicked place. They are afflicted with bad dreams and dark thoughts.

... We need to help them wake up.

It's past time to awaken from that ghost land. Truth and knowledge (and a much-needed reality check) go a long way towards peeling away the obfuscation and getting to the core of understanding. Here's but a small sampling, but further exploration is vastly encouraged...

The Two Very Different Meanings Of ‘Black Lives Matter’

.....This action is taken effective immediately, but may also be used retroactively for destruction or vandalism already caused. There will be no exceptions!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2020

I just had the privilege of signing a very strong Executive Order protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues - and combatting recent Criminal Violence. Long prison terms for these lawless acts against our Great Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2020

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Time to awaken from that ghost land