Creepy Sanctimony

One of the Greats

“One of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time” would be a fair description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or J-JR for short.  But he is also one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Modern period.  We need to understand why both assessments are fair and accurate.

First, the appellation of über-sanctimonious creep.

Paul Johnson, concluding his essay on J-JR, writes:

Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not with to admit.  The acceptability of what Rousseau wrote depended in great part on his strident claim to be not merely virtuous but the most virtuous man of his time.

Why did not this claim collapse in ridicule and ignominy when his weaknesses and vices became not merely public knowledge but the subject of international debate?
  After all the people who assailed him were not strangers or political opponents but former friends and associates who had gone out of their way to assist him.  Their charges were serious and the collective indictment devastating.  Hume, who had once thought him “gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested and exquisitely sensitive”, decided, from more extensive experience, that he was “a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe”.  Diderot, after long acquaintance, summed him up as “deceitful, , vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice”.  To Grimm he was “odious, monstrous”.  To Voltaire, “a monster of vanity and vileness”.  . . . These judgments were based not on the man’s words, but on his deeds, and since that time, over two hundred years, the mass of material unearthed by scholars has tended relentlessly to substantiate them.  One modern academic lists Rousseau’s shortcomings as follows: he was a “masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latest homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic, introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable, and miserly.” . . . .

The truth seems to be that Rousseau was a writer of genius but fatally unbalanced both in his life and in his views.  He is best summed up by the woman, who, he said, was his only love, Sophie d’Houdetot.  She lived on until 1813 and, in extreme old age, delivered this verdict: “He was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive.  But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness.  He was an interesting madman.”   [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), p.26f.)

He had abandoned his children, almost certainly to their deaths, but the great J-JR sought to turn his infamy into a virtue–a “virtue” for which he is still celebrated and adored and lionised to this day.

To sum up, it is widely known and well documented that J-JR was grossly immoral, unethical, deceitful, and manipulative.  He was also an egomaniac.  Why, then, is he held in such reverence and awe, even to this day?  Because he was a man whose life exemplified his teaching and writing.  J-JR was living the dream.  He shacked up with Therese Levasseur, a twenty-three year old laundress whom he made his mistress.  He ridiculed her in public-both in social gatherings and his writings.  He wanted the world to know that she was beneath him.  He despised her as a “coarse, illiterate servant-girl and despised himself for consorting with her.”  [Ibid., p. 19]  She bore him five children, all of whom Rousseau abandoned, leaving them at the Hopital des Enfants-trouves. 

Roussseau needed to justify this monstrous behaviour.  He did, by resort to developing a doctrine of the state which has proved music to the ears of all who would worship and adore power.  It is at this juncture that J-JR moves from moral monster to virtuous saint in the mind of contemporary Unbelief.  He had abandoned his children, almost certainly to their deaths, but the great J-JR sought to turn his infamy into a virtue–a “virtue” for which he is still celebrated and adored and lionised to this day.

Rousseau developed the idea that

. . . education was the key to social and moral improvement and, this being so, it was the concern of the State. [Hence he was justified in giving up his five children to the State’s care.]  The State must form the minds of all, not only as children (as it had done to Rousseau’s in the orphanage) but as adult citizens.  By a curious chain of infamous moral logic, Rousseau’s iniquity as a parent was linked to his ideological offspring, the future totalitarian state.  [Ibid., p. 25].

As everyone was given up to the State it would train everyone to think and act in concert.  Everyone would therefore be content.  None would resist the General Will, which is the command of the State.

Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to “consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State. . . . For  being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it.  It will be all they have and will be all they are.”  The educational process was thus the key to the success of the cultural engineering needed to make the State acceptable and successful; the axis of Rousseau’s ideas was the citizen as child and the State as parent, and he insisted the government should have complete charge of the upbringing of all children. [Ibid.]

For these doctrines, Rousseau is lionised in the West to this day.  He is the first Western apostle of  the State as Saviour and Redeemer.  From him descend the Marx’s, the Lenin’s, the Mussolini’s, and, albeit in milder form, the statists of our day, still clamouring for universal compulsory State education as the key to unlock human redemption. 

It is aptly ironical that the most influential Father of Western statism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, and remains, one of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time. 

Letter from NZ (About Stupid Offensive Bureaucratic Policing)

Police erode public faith with zero tolerance zeal 

Stuff
Karl Du Fresne
9th Janury, 2015 

Human nature is a perverse thing. It consistently thwarts all attempts to coerce us into behaving the way bureaucrats, politicians and assorted control freaks think we should.

Take the road toll. Since early December New Zealanders have been subjected to a ceaseless barrage of police propaganda about the futility of trying to defy speed and alcohol limits.  Stern-looking police officers have been in our faces almost daily, warning that zero tolerance would be shown to lawbreakers. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has found their lecturing increasingly tiresome and patronising.

Of course the police can claim the best possible justification for all this finger-wagging: it’s about saving lives. But what was the result? The road toll for the holiday period was more than double those of the previous two years. For the full year, the toll was up by 44 on the record low of 2013.  The figures suggest that people crash for all manner of reasons, and that the emphasis on speed and alcohol is therefore simplistic. 

[We are not sure that the focus upon speed and alcohol should be regarded as simplistic.  Ex-post facto examination of all fatal crashes are reported to demonstrate that they are they all-too-often causal factors.  But it is how the police focus upon these that needs to be rethought.  The artificial reductions in alcohol intake, the bureaucratic methods of testing and deployment, and the facile statistical targeting are all counter-productive, as Du Fresne points out.   Ed.]

The police focus on speed and booze because these are easy targets, and when the road toll comes down they can take the credit. In the ideal world envisaged by ever-hopeful bureaucrats, wayward citizens can be managed much as sheep are controlled by heading dogs. But people will never be harangued into driving safely; human nature is just too contrary.

Besides, police crackdowns are only one factor in achieving a lower road toll.  Improved road design, safer cars, better-equipped emergency services and more immediate medical attention all contribute too. It would be interesting to know, for example, how many lives have been saved because of the use of helicopters to get victims promptly to hospital.

Given that their heavy-handed propaganda campaign appears to have had minimal effect, I wonder if the police will now be humble enough to sit down and review their tactics.

[And whether perverse, bureaucratic-minded, statist politicians will rethink their zealous folly. Ed.]

They might also ponder the potential damage done to their public image by the zeal with which they immediately began enforcing the new alcohol limits.  It must have been like shooting fish in a barrel as they set up checkpoints to catch otherwise law-abiding citizens who had inadvertently consumed one glass of sauvignon blanc too many.

It was a formidable display of police power, but how many lives did it save? And how many of the apprehended drivers were left feeling humiliated and angry at being made to feel like criminals for unwittingly doing something that was legal only days before, and that probably posed no danger to anyone?

Police will say, of course, that they were merely enforcing the law. But there is a point at which the benefits of aggressive law enforcement have to be weighed against potential negative consequences, such as public resentment. I’m not sure our police bosses have done this equation.

Or our politicians.  Ed.

Sir Robert Peel, the 19th century British politician who established the police force on which ours is modelled, established the principle that police must operate with the consent of the people they serve. Put another way, they can’t risk burning off public goodwill. Judging by public reaction to the zero tolerance campaign, as expressed in forums such as letters to the editor, talkback shows and online news sites, that’s exactly what is now happening.

This is the consequence some police officers feared when the old enforcement branch of the Ministry of Transport merged with the police in 1992. They realised the negative public sentiment attached to traffic cops was likely to rub off on police. And so it has turned out.

We tend to associate the phrase “police state” with brutal fascist regimes, but the term can apply to any country where the law is enforced so zealously that it impinges on the lives of responsible citizens. It’s not overstating things to suggest that our own police are in danger of slipping into that danger zone.

In November, TV3 reported that police had thrown an impregnable cordon around Hamilton’s CBD on a Saturday night. No vehicle could get out (or in, presumably) without going through a checkpoint. To me, that sounds almost like a police state.

Yes, I know the object of the exercise was to catch lawbreakers, but I bet I wasn’t alone in thinking we had crossed a new threshold. And I bet I wasn’t alone in feeling uncomfortable at the obvious satisfaction of the police inspector in charge, who seemed to relish exerting such control over the lives of her fellow citizens.

Emerging Tyrant

The Metamorphosis of the Liberal Secular State

In his book, The Abolition of Liberty Peter Hitchens makes some interesting observations about the origin of the police force and how it has changed radically in the modern era.  But these changes have not occurred in a vacuum.  They reflect a religious and philosophical sea-change amongst the British people (which has been mirrored in the Antipodes as well).

The biggest watershed involves the doctrine of morality–specifically, where morals reside and who is responsible for acting and living moral, ethical lives.  He writes:

The old, pre-1960’s law, based on unchanging moral codes, assumes that conscience is individual rather than social, that man can improve himself by work and free will.  It assumes that he can refrain from committing crime through self-control and, if that fails, can be deterred from repeating it by exemplary punishment.  If these things are true, then man does not need to rely on his rulers for a better life.  This is why a belief in self-reliance, self-control and conscience is now the great heresy.  ( Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Liberty: the Decline of Order and Justice in England (London: Atlantic Books, 2003),   p. 32f.]

Where does evil reside?
  In Christian Great Britain (and the Christian West, in general) evil resided in every human heart, and it was the responsibility of every human being to suppress and control his sinful inclinations in society at large.  But as the West, under the influence of the Enlightenment, jettisoned the Christian faith, the doctrines of socialism gradually took comprehensive control of the community.  The state, representing mankind in the abstract, increasingly took responsibility for eliminating crime. Evil came to be seen as residing in “social conditions”, the air and general atmosphere, rather than in human souls. The focus came to be upon the One, not the Many.

Those who believe in this religion of government must design society, as we have, on the assumption that goodness is imposed from above by the wise generosity of the elite state.  They will be guided by the belief that, without such wisdom and generosity, people will naturally behave badly.  Implicit in this creed–a sort of socialist version of original sin–is the belief that everyone who can do bad deeds will do bad deeds unless he has the correct housing, income and health care. . . . To help people overcome their sinful state, they need subsidies, handouts, counselling, intervention from social workers, help and treatment.  They have no vice or virtue of their own and cannot be expected to behave well unless they are looked after.  The elite state has taken all virtue upon itself.  Deterrence and punishment are therefore not merely cruel but wrong.  [Ibid., p. 32.]

Sound familiar?  But, here is the thing:  the welfare state always trends toward the authoritarian state.  The same elites which hector so incessantly about helping the “degenerate classes” by providing for them, lifting them out of poverty to a state of grace by providing health, welfare, and education services for them, will eventually begin to to demand greater state powers, surveillance, policing, punishment, intervention and imprisonment.  In other words, the socialist state always morphs into the punitive state.  Hitchens explains why this transformation is inevitable.

By sucking all personal responsibility out of the population, government actually does the opposite of what socialism claims and hopes to do.  It creates a society of endemic crime which must be unceasingly placated by welfare.  If an ungrateful people persist in their violence and dishonesty despite the elite’s goodness towards them, it has nothing left with which to control them (and asserts its goodness) except external force and fear.  This requires the weapons of the strong state, an armed and obedient gendarmerie separate from the people and owing its allegiance directly to the state, with great powers of arrest, search, interrogation, investigation and detention. [Hitchens, op cit., p. 33]

The state which takes all good to itself and sees itself as Messiah, making all subjects and citizens good by  changing the socio-economic environment of all, will inevitably become the Leviathan state which oppresses with external force and fear. It is no accident that the biggest steps towards the authoritarian unaccountable state have occurred under left-wing governments (we use the term to refer to Labour administrations).

In the United Kingdom it has been the Wilson, Blair, and Brown administrations which drastically changed the role of the police from one which took its authority from the people and the communities they served, to a force which answered to the State.  In doing the bidding of the State, answering primarily to the Prime Minister and his Cabinet (rather than answering to the communities they served as they had formerly), the police, under the patronage of their political masters, sought and were granted ever greater powers by  compliant Parliaments. 

In New Zealand, it is no accident or quirk of history that the last Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark deliberately manipulated and connived to make the NZ Police subject to more direct control from the Prime Minister’s office. She was following the British precedent.  The Tuhoe raids were a manifestation of new statist policing, as engineered by Clark.  It is positive that this trend towards a police-state has been arrested and reversed to a degree by the current government.  It is also positive that the police have now formally apologized to Tuhoe for their “mistakes”.  By the police apologizing, the historical reality of the police force answering first to the public and their communities has been re-asserted. 

Not that Right wing governments are exempt from making similar attacks upon the liberties of the citizens.  They tend to follow along and build upon the blueprints of Labour administrations. Their secularism and socialism merely seek to keep a respectful distance from the more radical Left.  As long as the mini-skirt is just a centimetre longer than the tart on the high street, august “conservative” or “right wing” respectability can be maintained.  At least that is how the Centre Right mind usually rationalises its fast-following of the Left’s authoritarianism, even while congratulating itself on its “conservatism”. 

The longer end-game is not hard to predict.  Doubling down on folly is the only option available.  There are no other options in the hidebound, ideological view of secular humanism.

Although social democracy has failed to abolish or even reduce crime and wrongdoing, despite decades of trying to do so, it cannot accept that its ideas are wrong and have failed.  The suggestion that socialist reforms might actually increase crime by undermining morality is impossible for the left to accept.  Instead, it insists that it has failed because it has not yet gone far enough, and so demands yet more taxation, yet more spending, yet more social workers, yet more treatment.  Forced to admit that crime, disorder and bad behaviour have still not responded to this treatment, it reaches increasingly for the crude bludgeons of authoritarian rule, curfews, surveillance, confiscations, limitations on the liberties of all to control the license of the criminal few.  Taken much further than it has already been, this idea will lead to the destruction of personal freedom for all but a very few powerful or rich people.  [Ibid., p. 33.]

Granted all of this seems pretty bleak.  And it is, in the immediate term.  But we are not downhearted at all.  The Lord Jesus Christ is greater than any self-important, privileged elite and its puppets, alll enslaved to the secular idolatry of socialism.  It has ever been His way to give rebellious cultures just enough rope by which to hang themselves.  And then, it pleases Him to point out, in contrast to the hell on earth Unbelief has created, His yoke is easy and His burden is light, for any and all who renounce their faith in the state and, instead, come to Him.

The rebuilding of Christendom will commence with an much greater determination not to go down the wretched road of Unbelief again.  The idol of secular humanism will lie broke in the Temple of Enlightenment.

The Glories of Post-Christian Britain

Multi-culturalism, Orwellianism, Censorship and Neo-Criminalism

James Bloodworth

The Independent

Thursday 1 January 2015

At some point saying “offensive” things online stopped being a social faux pas and became a potentially criminal act.

Dare to be rude about the wrong person or group and, in a bad parody of Erich Honecker’s East Germany, you could hear the knock on the door in the middle of the night and be dragged off to some dreary police cell for questioning.

I exaggerate of course, but not much: around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online, with around 20 people a day being looked into by the forces of the law, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The overused Orwellian cliché has finally become the reality: Big Brother in the form of an overzealous and under regulated police force really is watching you. As Police Scotland terrifyingly informed us this week, “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media and any offensive comments will be investigated.”

And so, in a further erosion of free expression, the police in Scotland have this week decided to investigate former Apprentice star and professional controversialist Katie Hopkins for off-colour comments made online about the Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola.

Doing what she is paid handsomely to do (and presumably what got her 291,000 Twitter followers), Hopkins came up with the most grotesque thing she could say about the issue and condensed it into 140 characters, tweeting that the nurse in question was a “sweaty Glaswegian” and referring to Scots as “Jocks”.
In response, the perennially thin-skinned of Twitter cobbled together a 12,000-strong petition demanding that Hopkins be charged over the tweets and handed it to a police force desperately looking to justify its place in the world at a time of falling crime.

Predictably the police pounced on it. As Detective Inspector Glyn Roberts of Police Scotland put it: “Inquiries are ongoing into the nature of these tweets and to establish any potential criminality.”

Since the birth of social media a fruitful relationship has developed between those who seek to offend and those who spend every waking hour looking desperately for something to be offended by. Indeed, notoriety of Katie Hopkins is largely due to the legions of people who froth with outrage at (and publicise) her every utterance.

But now things are getting really serious, for at some point we accepted the dreadful premise that unpleasant – and yes “offensive” – opinions ought to be silenced by force. Idiotic views are now considered matters for law enforcement and it is utterly terrifying.

This isn’t only about professional controversialists like Hopkins: what of the woman found guilty of a public order offence for saying that David Cameron had “blood on his hands”? Or Azhar Ahmed, who was prosecuted for an online post mocking the deaths of six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan?

All vile and grossly insensitive certainly; but on balance I think I’m more afraid of the Twitter Stasi and their increasingly zealous police enforcers.

Rather than obsessing over their tweets, we ought to leave the Katie Hopkins’s of the world to the obscurity they so richly deserve. And more importantly, we should keep the police out of it.

Making Things Right

False Messiahs

We are not sure if you have noticed, but the world is slightly short of being a perfect place.  People die, for one thing.  They get ill and suffer and expire.  Moreover, accidents happen.  On other occasions, human beings become angry and in a fit of rage they attack and murder other human beings.  Worse still, some coldly and systematically plot the demise of neighbours. 

You get the point.  We could go on for a long extended description of all the things which are wrong with the world.  In fact, the world would not contain all the books that would need to be written to describe exhaustively every aspect and scintilla of imperfection on this terrestrial ball.  The Christian calls this imperfect state of the world fallen.  The world is filled with evil (natural and unnatural).  Moreover, we–human beings–are responsible for the world’s fallen state.  The world was originally created to be without sin, evil, or wrong.  We humans (not Nature, not the animal kingdom, not the solar system) brought all this evil and imperfection to this planet.  In a fit of galactic stupidity we decided to rebel against our Creator and replace Him with ourselves as gods.

The fallen condition in which we live necessarily means that humanity spends a great deal of time and effort combating evil and protecting itself from the worst excesses of wrong.
  In this struggle fallen man finds himself searching for saviours of one kind or another.  A saviour is someone or something which will solve our problems and roll back (or at least contain) the dangers on every hand. 

For some, their saviour is wealth or enough money to build a moat defending them from harm or attack.  Wealth can protect from hunger, disease, crime–a whole host of impending threats.  For others, their saviour is an abstract facility, such as the facility of human reason.  If only we could all ratiocinate better, the world would become progressively more perfect, less fallen.  (This particular option is a thin disguise for the actual case: everything would be solved if other people would agree with me.)

Still others place their faith in a particular ideology.  The Greens, for example, believe that perfection would be achieved on every level if only there were less human beings and they did less.  The Greens believe that fewer, more quietistic human beings would solve all the world’s problems.  Human-less Nature is the saviour, humanity is the great threat and evil.  At root, the Greens detest the human race. 

But for the vast majority of people in the West, their saviour is the State.  Government, with its rules, regulations, conventions, education systems, taxing powers has the potential to be the saviour of mankind.  Any imperfection encountered can be vanquished with more state controls and rules.  This leads to a widespread faith in the Plan.  Government rules and regulations will solve all evils: actual and potential.  Behold, O man, your god.  Humankind will save itself through the government’s all encompassing Five Year Plan. 

Except it won’t, of course.  The gummint has so far failed to stop people getting ill.  Last time we checked, people still die.  They lose their tempers.  They fight and quarrel.  They get drunk even when alcohol is verboten.   In fact, it would appear that every marginal increase in state rules and regulations actually provokes unintended consequences that make the world more fallen than it was before some politicians and their cheering crowds got some bright ideas. 

So strong is the faith in government that people get positively angry if someone suggests to them that the state is incompetent–necessarily incompetent–and that it will only make things worse.  The outpouring of anger at such a seditious, blasphemous idea exposes the religious foundations of statism in bright relief. 

Here is just one example of the myriad failures of the government as our god.  Some important folk decided in their wisdom that one death on the roads was one too many.  Zero tolerance for road deaths.  How will this be achieved?  By the Plan.  The bureaucratic plan will comprehensively rule and regulate road behaviour so that all road deaths will be prevented in the future as we enter a more perfect world. 

First come the rules–constantly modified and tinkered with–to remove the imperfections of fallen human behaviour.  Then comes the hectoring.  This is followed by policing the rules: stops, breath tests, fines, suspensions, cancellation of drivers’ licenses, seizing of vehicles–we would need several long paragraphs to itemise all the compliance and policing powers and actions to ensure rule-compliance.  The  more zealous and comprehensive it becomes, the more risks and potential accidents there are.

How does that work?  Rodney Hide explains a present reality with which we are now all familiar:

Overtaking on the road safely and within the law is now all but impossible.

The speed limit on the open road is 100km/h. The police are applying zero tolerance. You can now be ticketed at 101km/h. The speed limit for heavy vehicles and cars pulling caravans, boats or trailers is 90km/h.

Do the maths. In good driving conditions we are advised to apply the “two-second rule”. At 90km/h that’s 50m. So you pull out 50m behind a truck and trailer, the truck and trailer is 20m long and you pull in once safely 50m past. You have to make 120m to pass safely.  If the truck is doing 90km/h and you stick to 100km/h it takes 43 seconds to gain that 120m.

At 100km/h you will have travelled 1.2km. You must allow for a car coming towards you at 100km/h. To pass safely you need 2.4km of clear road.  That doesn’t happen often.

So you wait for a passing lane. The traffic behind the truck and trailer builds up. Finally you get to a passing lane. The front cars take off – at 100km/h. I drove Auckland to Queenstown these holidays and typically only the first two cars would make it past.  I would then watch in horror as a couple of frustrated drivers would try to pass the line of cars and the truck and trailer without the benefit of a passing lane or a clear road. It was frightening. And predictable.

The rules and regulations increase risks and cause more accidents.  Most police officers are smarter than the politicians, though, which is a saving grace.  They use discretion–that is, until some mid-level police bureaucrat demands proof of compliance with the plan–and then it all turns to custard. 

The solutions lie in the government being retired as the omni-competent saviour of us all.  But the world will still be fallen.  Men will still manufacture saviours of all shapes and stripes.  Their solutions will only serve to exacerbate our fallen state.  Their saviours will only make the world more imperfect. 

There is only one amongst the human race who alone is qualified to be our Saviour.  He alone can deal with our fallen condition at its root.  All the rest only add to the curse.

Relishing A Messy Society

No Mess, No Life

A free society is always a mess.  Because folk don’t like a messy society, they end up wanting to curtail freedoms left, right, and centre.  As Chesterton acerbically put it, when people stop believing in God they end up believing in anything and everything.  One of the things they inevitably come to believe is that society can get rid of all messiness; virtual perfection is attainable.  If we had this authority, that rule, a new extension of government regulations and powers every messy problem we face would be duly solved.

A Christian society, on the other hand, is a mess.  Always.  Why?  For two reasons.  The first arises out of an acceptance of human limitations.  We are finite creatures, with limited understanding and abilities.  The second and worse cause of mess is that we are fallen creatures, in a fallen world, with hearts that are deceitful and desperately wicked.  Yet it is Christian society which maximises freedoms (even while accepting the inevitable messiness.)  In this sense, Christians love the mess, because the alternative is unthinkable.

The Christian accepts both the messiness and the duty to advocate for a free society.  The Christian can do this with sanguine hope and positive joy because we believe in Providence–the faithful governance by God over all things, both visible and invisible.  God devolves His authority to men, and promulgates His law both authorising human rule over the creation, and, at the same time, delimiting the extent of human rule and authority.  Because parents are given special authority and competence to bear and raise children, it does not mean the state, or the church, or the school or any other authority can subvert parents and replace them.  There are boundaries the state and other authorities may not cross–without putting mess on steroids.  This holds true, even when parents make a mess of raising children.  The messiness of some homes does not justify setting up kibbutzim so the state can become the uber-parent.  (If you didn’t like the dysfunctional state of some homes, wait until you see the dysfunction wreaked upon us all when the state becomes the Parent of everyone.) 

These days, because the State is the only authority and power to which secularism can appeal, every mess requires a statist solution.  Is there unemployment?  The government must sort out the mess by welfare payments for those out of work, forcing interest rates lower, and vastly expanding government jobs.  Are there drugs on the streets?  The government must declare a war upon drugs, expanding government powers, surveillance, and punitive punishments.  Are pupils leaving school unable to read or write?  The government must step in to define and control curricula and teaching standards to ensure literacy and numeracy.  And so it goes.  Without end.

At each step, freedom diminishes; external, illegitimate authorities and controls are extended.  And the people love it.  For them, mess and uncertainty are the problem.  The Christian man, however, knows that mess is a necessary and intrinsic part of a free society.  He also knows there is a God-directed way to deal with mess.  Sometimes it requires benign neglect. Some problems ought to be ignored.  Under the loving hand of Providence they will self-correct and diminish.  Sometimes decisive action by local civil society or neighbourhood groups is required.  At other times, it requires interdiction by the Department of Defence.  But the existence of mess, in and of itself, does not provide an argument nor justification for extensions of statist power.

In our secularist atheistic culture messiness becomes the fuel for a white hot nuclear core which relentlessly expands the mandate, role, and grip of the state until the inevitable meltdown. 

Without freedom, there will be no mess.  When there is no longer any messiness, we will all be dead. 

Making Sport For Neighbours

Left Wing, Right Wing, and Industrialised Inhumanity

Mr Bennett once sarcastically remarked that the raison d’etre of the Bennett household was to make sport for its neighbours, so the Bennetts, in turn, could laugh at them.  It was a wickedly clever line parodying respectable society in Georgian England.    Similar observations could be made in our day about our “masters” the political classes, and their fawning, downstairs attendants–the media.

Let’s face it.  The media long ago ceased to be the bastion of liberty and the ever vigilant constructive critic of politicians and government.  However much the modern clutch of media personnel may deny it, however they may mock and laugh at the antics of those upstairs, in reality they need those pollies for their jobs.  They depend upon them.  The political classes and the media are our modern version of the Bennetts and their neighbours. 

Every so often little tizzies break out in the neighbourhood.  It makes sport for the rest of us.
  One of our local pollies–Russel Norman, leader of the Greens, is one such self-important fellow.  He sees himself as the defender of freedom, one of the last voices before humanity drowns in a slime of its own making.  He is one of the most amoral of the good-guys.  For Russel, the state is his lord, master, and saviour.  Well, it would be, if he, Russel, were running it.  Russel is a character resembling Mr Collins, so puffed up with self-righteousness he risks exploding, whilst spending most of his time simpering after his patroness–which, in Russel’s case is not a person but the State itself.  Russel has been a fawning political creature all his adult life, lusting and craving for power.

Recently a Beltway rag, Trans-Tasman, had the gall to suggest that one of his “flock”, the inestimable Catherine Delahunty, whose gravitas makes a ciggie paper look weighty, was an ineffectual member of Parliament.  Russel drew himself up on his hind legs and barked out the most cruel of insults.  He sarcastically accused Trans-Tasman of being a Far Right publication!  Snorts and belly laughs all around.  Good old Russel–once again making sport for his neighbours.   

The spirited, irrelevant exchange raises an interesting question, however.  We have become accustomed to using the appellations, Right, Left, and Centre to characterise politics and the arrangements of government. The terms, Far Left and Far Right are code phrases for being unhinged and unbalanced.  For folk like Russel almost all politicians and political parties and media are right-wing extremists, a perspective derived from where Russel himself stands on the spectrum–which is reflexively Left. 

But nowadays these terms are are of limited meaning (in an ideological sense) and actually reflect little more than class snobbery.  To be Left is to occupy the elevated ranks of the Upper Classes, whence all others are seen as grovelling scrubbers, mere tradesmen, and the ignorant, great unwashed.  To be Right is to hold to a similar snobbish demeanour, except that the Right, by self-assessment, occupy the Upper Classes whilst Russel and his colleagues are at home in the mudflats. 

Historically, the appellations “right” and “left” served to denote where one “stood” on the appropriate role and function of the state.  The right-wing of politics denoted authoritarian control centred upon the apparatus of the state, protected by the interests of the wealthy and the monied.  The left-wing denoted the interests of the bottom-feeders, the masses, those who would rise up to cast of their masters and seize control of the levers of power and all goodies.

But both “wings” are part of the same house.  Both alike represent the ultimacy of the state–the power of some to rule tyrannically over others.  Historically, the “Right Wing” has produced fascism.  The “Left Wing” has produced the dictatorship of the workers’ alleged representatives.  Both alike have killed, starved, executed, and cruelly imprisoned millions upon millions of human beings (in a very short space of time).

The distance between Right Wing and Left Wing could not accommodate a Catherine Delahunty, much less a cigarette paper.  It is all smoke and mirrors, noise and babble.  Both Right and Left Wing are of the same spirit.  They both end up at the same place–an institutionalised tyranny where man’s inhumanity to man becomes industrialised.

As Lizzie Bennett once observed, there’s nothing funny about that. 

Shelob’s Cobwebs

Ideological Inanities

“. . . When thou speakest, people say,
Did we hear a donkey bray?”

Of all world-views which compete in today’s ideological marketplace, statism ranks as one of the more gullible, ignorant and one-dimensional.  One can confidently predict what our numerous resident statists will say on any public issue of the moment.  Whatever concerns or ails us, doubtless more government rules, regulations, controls, intrusions, money, and government programmes will fix the problem. 

This becomes even more ludicrous when controversies arise in those few areas where the state already runs a monopoly, such as education.  The failings of our monopolistic government schooling system are well documented.  When you are already operating in a statist monopoly, the only response left when failures emerge is for the statist to adopt an Oliver-Twistian pose, stick out the porridge bowl and demand more (taxpayers’ money). 

The Green Party is a statist party.  All it ever wants for Christmas is more government, less freedom.  True to form, its education spokesman and ardent advocate for monopoly government schools, Catherine Delahunty slammed a poor little one-year-old, nascent charter school, the Vanguard Academy over the weekend.  It was failing, terribly.  Why?  Because it has just experienced a substantial drop in its roll.  Commissar Delahunty unsheathed her Cossack sabre and launched a full frontal attack, slicing through the air with a dreaded press release:

Charter school roll plunge

One of the five Charter schools lauded by the Government as a success has lost a quarter of its school roll this year, with each student now costing four times as much to teach than children in a regular public school, the Green Party said today.

Latest Ministry of Education roll count data shows that Vanguard Military College had 79 students attending in October this year – 25 percent below the 108 students it is funded to teach and the 104 students it started the year with.  “Plans to open four more of these [charter] schools next year must be put off till Government can prove they’re value for money, good for students and aren’t damaging neighbouring schools.

“Vanguard has been trumpeted by National as a success yet official data shows it is struggling to hold on to its students.  Principals in state schools are concerned about the disproportionate amounts of funding Charter schools are getting, saying that they’d be able to achieve amazing things for their own students if they had access to a similar amount of resources. “Charters are able to pay for transport, uniforms, stationary [sic] and even food for their pupils. Even if they were succeeding, it’d be no surprise given the level of resources.

“The problem with Charter schools is that they suck resources and students away from public schools. 

So, a fairly predictable rearguard eructation from one of our card-carrying statists.  But maybe she has some valid concerns?  Blogger, Cameron Slater went to the trouble of  asking the CEO of Vanguard Military College, Nick Hyde for a response. 

Vanguard Military School has continued to defy the critics and is happy to announce that it has produced outstanding results for 2014. Partnership Schools have been created to use innovation and to try different methods in an attempt to assist any child who if they continued in their current school environment would fail.  Vanguard has built its model around a military ethos and has a focus on producing productive citizens for New Zealand.

At the start of the year we enrolled 45 Level 2 students of various abilities and we are happy to announce that 41 of them have successfully gained their NCEA Level 2 qualification for a 91% success rate.  9 of them also finished off their Level 1 Certificates and a further 3 went on to gain NCEA Level 3.  We also hope to announce similar results soon about our Level 1 students.  I would also like to point out that Maths, English and Physical Education are compulsory for all students and our results have been moderated by other local schools in the area.

Today’s attack on the school by Catherine Delahunty and the Green Party has been disappointing.  As a school we are here to serve our students, their parents and the communities that they come from.  We have an open enrolment policy and accept all.  We have invited politicians of all parties to visit us, see what we are about and how we do things, as we can appreciate we are new and different.  Catherine Delahunty nor any member of the Green Party has visited our school or even spoken to us.

The “roll plunge” she talks about are students graduating and leaving on their own terms. An example is of 2 students who gained their NCEA Level 2 qualifications during the year, sat and passed the New Zealand Army entrance test and were offered service in August. As a school we have assisted them to be productive citizens for our country.

If she had, she might understand that our school is different and is not about keeping students for the entire year if they have already gained the qualification that they enrolled for.  The “roll plunge”  she talks about are students graduating and leaving on their own terms.  An example is of 2 students who gained their NCEA Level 2 qualifications during the year, sat and passed the New Zealand Army entrance test and were offered service in August.  As a school we have assisted them to be productive citizens for our country.  By holding them at school for a further 4 months is not in the student’s best interest.

Vanguard Military School’s priority is to get our students the NCEA qualification they enrol in and then assist them into apprenticeships, courses, jobs, the NZDF and next year when we enrol Level 3’s we hope to send some to University.  We appreciate that we receive tax payers money and therefore will continue to strive for top results but we are also entirely comfortable with our students graduating on their own terms and leaving us to become the best they can be in their chosen field.

The school is currently taking enrolments for 2015 and already has 127 students signed up.  We are full at Level 2 and Level 3 and only have a few places left at Level 1 before we reach our maximum roll for 2015 of 144.  So to anyone reading this out of interest, maybe hop on google and check out your local schools results and compare them with a 91% success rate at NCEA Level 2 because in my eyes that’s a lot of happy students, happy parents and hopefully happy taxpayers.

Regards

Nick Hyde
CEO

The roll plunge hysterically decried by Delahunty occurred because of exceptionally high numbers of pupils successfully graduating.  Which leaves Delahunty in the laughable position of objecting to a charter school because it has been so successful.  However, like all ideologues, statist Delahunty will not let the facts get in the way of her just-so ideologically hide-bound world view.  

But there is something more sinister at work here.  Statists like Delahunty don’t really care whether government schools succeed or fail.  Rather, the driving concern is that they all be the same.  It’s social justice, don’t you know.  The statist “people’s education system” will have controls and rules so that one size must fit all.  If that one size just happens to be uniform mediocrity, that would be a preferable outcome to having many schools succeed and some fail.

For Delahunty the worst possible outcome would be for those failing schools to be transformed into charter schools and copy Vanguard’s success.  She would have us believe that Vanguard’s success is a cause of the monopoly schools’ failures. “The problem with Charter schools is that they suck resources and students away from public schools,” she writes.

Private sector, bad.  Government sector, the only and highest good.  Behold Shelob’s cobwebs in the statist mind. 

Inglorious States

Too Busy

One of the rotten fruits of statism is the failure to get the fundamentals right.  The modern idolatrous state is too busy running around hectoring citizens over what they are to eat and drink that it fails in its proper responsibilities such as preventing and detecting murderers.

Michelle Malkin provides us with a case study of rotten fruit–the US Federal Air Marshals Service.  These folk are supposed to ride incognito on aircraft to prevent or intercept airplane hijackers in action.  Not any longer.  Statism has deflected the attention of Sauron away to other, bigger things–such as golf, and fundraising.

. . . 13 years after the 9/11 attacks, the freedom to warn is in danger and vigilant whistleblowers are under fire.  Listen to Robert MacLean. He’s a former Air Force nuclear weapons specialist and Border Patrol agent recruited by the government to serve as one of the first federal air marshals after 9/11.

In 2003, MacLean underwent emergency training to prepare for a new round of al-Qaida hijacking threats. Jihadists exploiting visa and screening loopholes had planned to target East Coast airliners, according to intelligence analysts. For unknown reasons, however, the Transportation Security Administration abruptly called off air marshals from duty on nonstop, long-distance flights — just two days before the anticipated hijacking.

How did they notify the air marshals? Cue the Keystone Cops. “TSA chose to send the unlabelled text message to our unsecured Nokia 3310 cellular phones instead of our $22 million encrypted smart phone system. There were no markings or secrecy restrictions on the message,” MacLean recounted to Congress this week. “We all thought it was a joke given the special training we had just received and the post-9/11 law that nonstop long-distance flights were a priority.”

A supervisor told MacLean the agency was broke and there was nothing he could do. Appalled at both the dangerous pullback and the reckless way in which the feds notified the air marshals, MacLean then contacted his department’s inspector general hotline and was warned he would be “cutting (his) career short if (he) pursued the issue further.” Instead, he went to the press and made his homeland security concerns public. In 2006, MacLean was fired.

More than a decade later, the dedicated security expert has battled the feds who retaliated against him. He was forced into bankruptcy and shut out of law enforcement jobs. His legal case heads to the Supreme Court this fall. God bless him. Despite the consequences, MacLean would do it all again in a heartbeat.

“I blew the whistle because I had to,” he testified this week. “I could not live with the tragedy risked if I had been the cynical silent observer.”

Whistleblowing and the cursed idolatry of statism do not mix.
  Meanwhile, the federal government of the United States has far more important things with which to occupy itself, such as defending the Revenue authorities from charges over their tyrannical abuse of power and the undermining of democratic government.  US commercial aircraft remain undefended.  Not a priority.

The competing demands of overreaching statist governments are relentless and ignominious failure always follows hard on the heels.

Today, the Federal Air Marshal program remains riddled with mismanagement, corruption and neglect. In April, FAM Director Robert Bray resigned amid an embarrassing gun scheme probe. And earlier this year, six of 24 air marshal offices closed, and hiring was frozen in Las Vegas, Seattle and Denver. Yet, according to one of my sources, “the last class of air marshals graduated from the academy in 2012. The service has not hired any mission-flying FAMs since. In that same time frame, they have promoted or hired over 300 people, and continue to do so, for supervisory and administrative duties. Almost every supervisory position includes a paid move and a yearly salary of $100,000.”

Every 9/11, pundits talk about how “everything changed” after the attacks. But the homeland security bureaucracy is as petty, vindictive, wasteful and stupid as ever.

The government that asserts its competence in everything ends up being a “jack of all trades and master of none”, blundering from one failure to another.  The only thing it is good at is the profligate waste of citizens’ unlawfully expropriated property. 

Secularism and Despotism Necessarily Coeval

We Know What They Mean

Any discussion about rights–that is, human rights–can only proceed intelligently and rationally these days if it is prefaced by careful definitions.  Are we speaking about demand rights, freedom rights, natural rights, civil rights, egalitarian rights, and so on?  “Debates” over rights usually amount to little more than ships passing in the night, respectively catapulting slogans into empty air, with a mutual conviction that he whose foghorn is the loudest wins the debate.  All heat, no light.

Having said that, there are few things more amusing than watching a secular humanist trying to deal carefully and intelligently with human rights.  To unroll the broadest canvas, we must remind everyone that when a secularist talks about human rights he or she immediately casts the discussion around the role and responsibilities of government.  The reason is not hard to discern.  For the secularist, the State is the highest authority in existence.  There is nothing, no-one to whom the secularist can appeal beyond the power and condescension of the State.

We should note, however, that this view is an oddity in the grand scheme of things.
  Secularist atheism has a relatively recent history in the trajectory of human thought.  Prior to the Secularist Age rights were understood to come from the Deity–which makes sense, since rights inevitably originate from and are enforced by the highest existing power.  Thus, in a Christian/Deist world, statements about, and discussions of, human rights acknowledged the Deity as the originator and guarantor of human rights.  Most famously this truth is found in the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

The secularist version of rights runs like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal by means of the process of evolution and are endowed by this process with certain unalienable rights.  To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men . . . 

So, governments secure the rights given to men by the processes of evolution.  But when rights are breached or remedies sought there is no solution beyond the appeal first to the State, and then possibly some vague appeal to to the processes of evolution, which means in effect that the appeal beyond the government goes nowhere.  Evolution is, after all, utterly and absolutely impersonal.  It is also random, nothing more than the result of brute chance.  To appeal to a rock is stupid.  To appeal to evolution for redress of wrongs would serve as a working definition of insanity.  Thus, to all practical intent and purpose, for the secularist, the State is the creator, definer, bestow-er, and remover of rights, for evolutionary processes have made it so.

To illustrate how secularists are utterly undone when they commence discussions about rights, consider the following.  Blogger David Farrar calls our attention to a conference sponsored by NZ Initiative:

Janesa Jeram at the NZ Initiative writes:

There is a common saying that human rights are what make us human. But with the modern expansion of human rights beyond its classical origins, are we becoming more human, or less?

This week, The New Zealand Initiative hosted Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, Tim Wilson, who spoke on freedom, “the fundamental human right.” Tim Wilson argued that human rights are supposed to be sacrosanct principles, and criticised the expansion of human rights from their classical liberal origins.

The traditional liberal human rights were narrow, confined to freedoms such as freedom of speech, association, movement, worship and property rights. The government’s role was simply to protect those rights.

Modern society has deviated from these fundamentals, and human rights can now include everything from the right to education, right to shelter, right to non-discrimination, right to a decent wage, and the latest: the right to be forgotten.

The point Tim Wilson makes is that these social aspirations are not the same as human rights. Society may aspire to have equal access to education and shelter, or anonymity and privacy for internet users, but these should not be conflated with human rights.

Then David Farrar comments:

I think this is a critical point. True human rights are rights that protect us, not rights that the Government gives us.

Think about that comment for a moment.  Farrar is a proclaimed secularist.  To what higher authority is he implicitly appealing when he speaks of “true” human rights, as opposed to “rights that the Government gives us.”  No matter how hard he tries–whether he would appeal to Nature, or evolution, or the cosmos, or reason, or whatever–in the end these are just meaningless abstract impersonal vacuities.  In Farrar’s world, “true human rights” (as opposed to false ones the government gives us) don’t really exist; they are metaphysical and cosmological nullities.  In the end, he has to come back to the State, the Government, for there is no other being, no other entity, no other power in his secularist world to which to appeal.

It is true that classically–that is, within the framework of the Christian religion–

The traditional liberal human rights were narrow, confined to freedoms such as freedom of speech, association, movement, worship and property rights. The government’s role was simply to protect those rights . . .

but that was because the government was believed to be a minister of God, and subservient to the Almighty Creator of all things, and charged by God with protecting human rights. If the government failed to do its duty, it would answer to Him.  But this view has long gone; the secularist world view now holding sway can no longer confine human rights to a narrow protection of human freedoms.  There is no higher power than the State to which the secularist can appeal to maintain such a limited, delegated charge.  And the State has a life and power of its own: within secularism there is no higher power to limit, restrict, and control the State and the extension of its power and interests.    

But, it gets worse.  Western secularism has championed democracy, which means that the State officially serves the interests of the people–it is government of the people, by the people, for the people.  Which is all well and good, except . . . . in order for the State to win favour with the people it has to bribe them with “goodies” which is pays for by extracting money and property from some in order to distribute to others.  The secularist democratic State inevitably invents human rights that are coeval with the extensions of its power and largesse.  This is not an aberration of secularist democracy–it is inevitable.  That is why in the West the most vast extensions of government power yet seen in Western history have occurred under secularist democracies.

Farrar demonstrates just this contradictory confusion.  He wants a limited role for the State and a narrow list of human rights.  But then he betrays his own position:

This is because, often, if not always, these social aspirations come at the cost of freedom. While they may be worthy goals, they should not automatically be given equal status to the classical human rights.

Human rights were originally enacted to protect the individual from state tyranny, and necessarily limited the power of the state. Social aspirations masquerading as rights expand the power of the state.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t aspire as a society to make sure everyone has education and shelter. But we should not talk about this as a human right.

He wants a limited State, but at the same time he wants an expanded power of the State to make sure everyone has education and shelter.  The power to “make sure” anything happens or exists can only come, in the secularist’s mind, from the State.  But then comes the sniffy qualification: “we should not talk about education and shelter as a human right”.  But you cannot have it both ways.  If you want the State to provide education and shelter in a “make sure” fashion, you have to be a cheerleader for a vast expansion of State power.  Therefore, when Farrar speaks of “aspiring” as a society to achieve universal education, he is not talking about a voluntary coalition of the willing.  He is referring to the State education system, which he supports and endorses in principle. 

But you also have to argue, at the same time, for a vastly diminished right of private to property, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  You cannot have it both ways.  The Government is going to end up telling you where, how, why, and in what your children are going to be instructed and educated.  It is going to make sure that these things happen.  To make sure everyone has shelter will require the Government’s expanded power to regulate the housing market, controlling both the supply and demand for houses.  In the end, the citizen is told where to live, what kind of housing is appropriate, and what he will have to pay.

The broadest definition of a human right is this: it is the ethic by which people get their due, or what is owed them.  If governments expand their power into education–as part of its programme of systemic bribery of an electorate–they will inevitably warrant their expansion by an appeal to human rights.  The people will be told they have a right to education, it is their fair due.  And they will happily believe it–especially since someone else will be paying for it.  The notion that such things are their human right provides moral cover for such a perverse idea.  The power of the State must be wielded to ensure it and see it is provided.  It is inevitable, therefore, in a secularist world that education therefore will be cast as a human right–and so it has come to pass.

The point is this: if you want a limited list of human rights (which are essentially freedom rights) then it is necessary that the role and boundaries of government be restricted severely in society.  As soon as you grant to government a duty to provide education you are necessarily going to have to carry the case by appeals to a manufactured and inflated schedule of human rights.  The freedom right to pursue an education has morphed into a demand right that others provide it.  And you are going to have to accede to a huge expansion of State power, since in the secularist world, the the State is the final and highest power.  There is no other.  If everyone must be educated, the State alone can do it for the State has the power to command and compel.  It alone can deal with the recalcitrant and malcontent.  It alone bears the sword.

Moreover, as we have argued, democratic government has provided no limitation to the vast expansion of the powers of the State we have seen over the past two hundred years.  Rather, it has made it worse.  Democracy has left the population open to bribery by the State, by politicians, and by bureaucrats by which the Government has suborned the electorate to accept a vast expansion of State powers through expanding State rules, regulations, gifts, doles, and “services” for such “dues” as health, education, and welfare.  “If you want more money, vote for us.  If you want better schools, vote for us.”  The electorate has been gladly complicit, agreeing with its masters that such things are human rights, after all.  It is right and just that the State should do this for us.  And on the other side of the ledger, human life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has withered on the vine.

In a secularist civilisation, human rights become a pretext for vast expansions of State power, diminishing freedom to its vanishing point.  When secularists talk about human rights we know what they mean.

True human rights–life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–are meaningful and possible only if we pre-suppose from the outset the existence of the Creator and Sustainer of all things, and the State as just one of His servants.   

.

Falling Shadows and Anthropophagic Banquets

The Trajectory of Statism

We have never been interested in political party activism–even whilst finding politics an entertaining sport.  We loathe and detest the incipient statism of almost all modern political parties.  The idea that the State is the saviour of mankind is a falsehood which has brought ruination and devastation to countless peoples and nations throughout time.  Our political confession of faith is pretty simple: Jesus is Lord, and no putative statist religion or its devotees will ever conquer Him, regardless of how many high priests and acolytes it may put forward.

In the long arc of human history, statists and their political parties–even those which falsely profess Christianity–are doomed to antipathic ridicule as evil nullities.
  

By the “long arc of human history” we have in mind the actual historical fulfilment of the Great Commission by our Lord whereby all the peoples and nations of the earth will become dedicated followers of Him, acknowledging Him gladly as their Lord and Saviour.  When eighty percent of a population profess Christ from the depths of their hearts, politicians with statist pretensions will be execrable in voters’ eyes.

Meanwhile, our Lord graciously restrains the boundless ambitions of our statist politicians and their political parties.  They are thwarted from doing their worst.  In fact, the all-controlling governance of our Lord ensures they end up hoist on the own petards.  The New Zealand Labour Party is an example of how Unbelief so often succeeds to failure, followed by political impotence.  Over at Kiwiblog, a guest and former active Labour Party member, now resigned from the party, documents how the Party has gorged cannibal-like upon itself and is now a skeletal adumbration of its former ignominious glory.

We have selected several paragraphs as dainty morsels from this particular anthropophagic banquet.

. . . . Clark’s scorched earth policy to purge the party of Rogernomics and ensure there were no upstarts to her throne has left the party with a caucus deprived of serious talent and not representative of middle NZ and its values. The same is true for the wider party because the middle class, centrist moderate party members have also voted with their feet. This once proud party that was home to so many across the spectrum is now dominated by trade union hacks, rainbow activists, academics, government sector employees, feminists and PC metrosexual men. These groups make up maybe 15 to 20% of New Zealand’s population and have a political orientation much further to the left than mainstream New Zealand. . . .

But Goff knew that the Clark’s purges had burnt off much of the centrist membership of the party and that Clark’s supporters still held all the levers of power in the party and that unless he pandered to the base, his days as leader would be numbered. So began Labour’s journey away from the vote rich centre – driven by the need to placate a harder left base because the pogrom Clark set in motion 20 years before left the party absent its former moderating influences. . . .

Whilst Shearer and the ABCs managed to beat down Cunliffe’s putative coup, they could not stop the harder left and more radicalized party membership from amending the Constitution to give the membership and the unions a say in electing the leader. Despite Cunliffe’s unpopularity in his own caucus, he is a hero to the party membership and left wing enough for the unions. Labour handed power to determine its leader to its membership that, over the last 20 years, increasingly represents a narrower left wing slice of the NZ electorate. . . .

Labour was once a great party. It attracted people of energy, passion and ability from many walks of life. It had reforming zeal usually tempered by the realism of its once broader membership base and if it went too far, the voters returned the Treasury benches to the safer hands of National. Labour’s 1984 to 87 Cabinet, despite their leftist roots, embarked on a series of dramatic reforms that have transformed NZ into the more vibrant and dynamic economy it is today. The left of the party waged a war so total and absolute to purge the party of that instinct that it has destroyed modern Labour and left it a shrunken left leaning shell of its former self that struggles to attract electable talent, will not rejuvenate its caucus, offers policies that excite only 25% of the country and fights with the Greens (who are seen as more pure and virginal) for the centre left vote. The harder left base are tone deaf to the electoral realities of New Zealand politics believing that they will win the day if the great unwashed knew what was good for them and if the policies of the left were articulated better. Without a major change of direction, Labour’s prescription is a recipe for long term electoral oblivion!

The Annals of Soft-Despotism

A Fillip to Ivory Poaching and Trafficking

The drive to be as god always lurks the heart of every human being.  That, after all, was the original temptation in the Garden of Eden when our first parents fell into sin.  The serpent hissed that if Adam and Eve were to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they would not die at all, but would become like God, knowing good and evil for themselves.  (Genesis 3: 4)  Adam and Eve bought the lie.  We, in our turn, were born into the lie, believing it and yearning to live it.

One of the downstream effects is to believe that power and wisdom are conterminous.  This is why the idolatry of statism has such a powerful hold over our hearts and minds.  We are born believing that, as gods, we should have power and dominion and that when we secure power, we will be wise and effective.  We will make things happen–for good, of course, albeit good-as-it-seems-to-us, according to our lights, since we now think that we know good and evil for ourselves, on our own recognisance. 

Usually, what happens, is that we succeed only in magnifying evil and doing more harm.  Take something as prosaic as the protection of elephants and rhinos against extinction.
  Governments end up wreaking far more destruction upon the species than any good.  Why?  Because their power blinds them to arrogance and overreach.  Their sinfulness, combined with power, leads them to see issues in false religious nostrums, not in truth.

The US Government, in all its semi-divine wisdom, has announced that it is going to destroy all the ivory in its possession in an attempt to obstruct the ivory trade which threatens the very existence of elephants and rhinos.  This is manifest crassness.   But the demi-godlike thinking runs as follows: the ivory trade is evil.  Even to possess ivory is wicked. Therefore, we must have nothing to do with the unclean thing.  We must cast it out of our presence.  By setting this great example, by making this religious sacrifice upon the altar of our divine wisdom, we will discourage ivory poachers and the ivory trade.

The actual outcome?  The ivory poaching trade will become even more entrenched, more powerful, and more successful.  Elephants and rhinos will come under greater threat than ever.  The serpent sniggers into his sleeve.

It turns out the US Government has a huge stockpile of ivory, seized from poachers and smugglers.  Meanwhile, the demand for ivory, particularly from China, far outstrips supply, resulting in higher prices, making the illicit trade even more economically worthwhile.  The actions of the US Government will exacerbate the shortage, leading to higher prices still, making it more likely that elephants and rhinos will become extinct in the wild.

In principle, the best thing imaginable to kill off the ivory trade would be a surplus of ivory in the world, so that its price was twenty-five cents a ton. Since the Chinese love ivory ornaments, it would have been a far  better thing to remove the quasi-religious overtones in the US government that make ivory sacred, and have the government sell off its seized ivory, increasing supply in the market, dropping the price, and using the funds raised to make ivory poaching more risky by increasing surveillance and interdiction of the ivory traffickers.  Instead, it is grinding its ivory into dust to, well, set a good example.  To whom?  To the poachers and traffickers?  You have to be kidding.

This from The Guardian:

US ivory crush sends the wrong message to elephant poachers

Don’t give an incentive to criminals to kill more elephants. They see this as ivory getting scarcer, prices and demand going up

[Dr Daniel Stiles is a member of the IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group and has worked for the UN, IUCN, Traffic and many NGOs.]

On Thursday, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is planning to crush 5.4 tonnes of elephant ivory, seized since 1989 when US and international laws banned international trade of most types of African elephant ivory.

The stated purpose for doing this is “we [USFWS] want to send a clear message that the United States will not tolerate ivory trafficking and the toll it is taking on elephant populations …”, and that the action will tell criminals that the US will aggressively go after them for killing elephants for profit.

Admirable, but will destroying ivory get that message through to poachers, ivory traffickers and the workshops in east Asia and elsewhere that buy smuggled raw ivory?  I doubt it. I have been carrying out ivory trade investigations for almost 15 years, financed in large part by the organisations that have been promoting ivory stockpile destruction, which is linked to their fierce opposition to any kind of legal ivory trade. [Emphasis, ours]  Their lobbying resulted in ivory stockpile destruction in Kenya (2011), Gabon (2012) and the Philippines (2013), and they are vigorously working on several other countries to do it. The three governments all stated that the purpose “was to send a message” to those killing elephants for ivory.  Elephant poaching and ivory trafficking have increased since 2011 according to the UN’s Elephants in the Dust report (which I co-authored).

Apparently, a different message must have been sent to the criminals, as ivory bonfires and steamroller crushings have not deterred them. Having studied at close quarters elephant hunters since the 1970s as an anthropologist, and having investigated elephant poachers, ivory middlemen, workshops and retail outlets since the 1990s in Africa, Asia, Europe and the US, I believe I know what message they are receiving.

The message is: Ivory is scarce and with stockpile destruction is getting scarcer. The three since 2011 have taken almost 30 tonnes of ivory out of circulation, enough to feed China’s 37 legal ivory factories for five years. Now the US government plans to reduce potential global supply by another 5.4 tonnes. That means, with demand remaining stable, ivory prices will increase. Raw ivory prices in China have doubled since 2011, according to my sources. Poachers and those paying them now have increased incentive to go out and kill more elephants.

Yet another manifestation of prohibition, the lust to rule the world and human beings with “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”, to command with power to effect change.  The works thus wrought are far more destructive than the evil they seek to combat.  In fact, they make the evil far, far more likely to come to pass.

The US media and the biggest non-governmental conservation and animal welfare organisations in America have mounted a massive campaign to create awareness among the public about elephant (and rhino) poaching. The Obama administration (Presidential task force on combating wildlife trafficking) and the Clinton Global Initiative to prevent elephant poaching have taken concrete steps to save elephants. The public is demanding action.

In response, USFWS will crush seized ivory, almost certainly sending a message to criminals that they had better step up their killing of elephants before all the ivory is gone.

The serpent, ever the hater of all men and of the creation, hisses with mocking, spiteful pleasure. 

The Annals of Soft-Despotism

The Might of the Gentiles

President Reagan once quipped that the most terrifying words in the English language were, “I am from the government, and I’m here to help.”  We are aware that for many such a statement  borders on blasphemy.  How dare anyone have such a cynical attitude toward the hand that feeds us.

Modern governments in the West have arrogated to themselves (with the ardent support and acclamation of the people) the vain hubris of being responsible and empowered to parent and provide for all citizens.  Welcome to life under the soft-despotic state.  Freedom and responsibility is at first attenuated, then killed off, by kindness.  Men–free men–depart, not with a bang, but a whimper.  Underneath lies a besetting sin: idolatry.  Today it is almost universal that “free” citizens worship the government in one way or another.  Become subjected to almost any trouble, any calamity and the reflexive, natural response now is to intone the litany of the secular idolater: “the government has to/should/ought/needs to do something”.  It is the secular version of fervent prayer.  It is the established religion of our day.

The First Commandment teaches us that God does not tolerate the presence or invocation of idols anywhere near Him: “thou shalt have no other gods in My presence”.  The most frequently found rendering of this commandment is, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” which is perfectly acceptable, provided one remembers that the preposition has reference to God’s throne before which we come to bow, to worship God alone.  Thus, the commandment forbids worshippers coming into His presence, before His face, clinging to or clutching any idols, whether vainly imagined in the heart, or actually squirreled away in the pocket.

The translation “before” is far less helpful when folk misinterpret it to refer to a relative ranking of the gods.  In this perspective, the commandment is glossed to mean relative loyalty: “thou shalt make sure that whatever idolatries and loyalties you might have, they must not be greater than your loyalty to God.”  When it comes to the place of the government in the thinking of many Christians–and the honour and devotion to be given to it–this is how they think of the First Commandment.  Love God, and love the state as well.

When Christians bow down before the God of our fathers, it is grossly offensive and provocative to come also clutching to the state as our benign provider, our providential superintendent, our generous gift-giver, our saviour from harm and hardship, and the giver of our daily bread.  We fear that many do.  After all, it is what is taught and proclaimed almost universally these days.  It is so pervasive that it has become one of the fundamental assumptions about living, and moving, and have our being. 

This is a dangerous and sinister business.  After all, God is a jealous God.  He will not share His glory with another.  When we cling to idols, He will lift His hand to shatter them.  When a people cling to the government as their god, it does not bode well for the future of the nation.  In the end, we will be made like the ancient widows:

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.

Annals of Soft-Despotism

Regulating Rodent Love

The Christian faith has its believers professing from the heart, “The Lord will provide”.  The modern, Unbelieving substitute is, “The Government will provide”, which is idolatry, pure and simple.  God is not mocked.  When a culture turns away from the Living God to an idol, one of the divine indictments is to expose that idol to mockery.  A demonstration of the impotence of the idol, on the one hand, and a display of the dull stupidity of its devotees, on the other, is the standard divine approach. 

So, it is our duty as Christians to be active in sending up the idols of our age to the courts of mockery.  The incompetence of the State to be as God to us is to be displayed, described, and ridiculed at every opportunity.  Not the State in its legitimate functions, mind you–where it acts not to provide health, education, and welfare for all, but to administer retributive justice to the evil doer, and judge civil disputes with equity and fairness.  But we are addressing the State as idol, where it rears up to replace God in the mind and hearts of citizens.

Here is the latest folly from the “Master”, our all governing, beneficent, all-wise, providential government–this time addressing the vitally important manner of rat control, definitely in need of rules, regulations, procedures, protections, and punishments.

Glueboard traps

Glueboard traps are made up of a base (usually plastic) with a sticky glue layer intended to capture and hold live rodents. They are also used for insects, although this use is not affected by the Animal Welfare (Glueboard Traps) Order.

Internationally and within New Zealand, concerns have been raised over the humaneness of these traps. The main animal welfare concerns are injury and distress associated with being trapped, and the potential for inhumane disposal.

After consultation in 2008 the Government has decided to restrict the sale and use of glueboard traps in New Zealand. New regulations come into effect on 1 January 2010.

§  Animal Welfare (Glueboard Traps) Order 2009

The new regulations for glueboard traps are made under the Animal Welfare Act 1999.

As of 1 January 2010, the use of glueboards to catch rodents, including mice and rats, is prohibited, with the following exceptions.

§  Commercial pest control operators

§  People employed to conduct pest control on food production premises (excluding retail)

§  Department of Conservation employees and contractors

§  Boat operators transporting people or goods to or from islands that are free of mammalian pests (such as rodents), or who are working in close proximity to these islands.

All of the above people can use glueboards in the course of their work until the end of 2014. From 1 January 2015, the use and sale of glueboards by anyone is prohibited.

The use of glueboards for insects is not affected.

Using or selling a restricted glueboard is an offence under the Animal Welfare Act, carrying a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison or a $25,000 fine for an individual, or a fine of up to $125,000 for a body corporate.

Approval to use or sell a glueboard where it would otherwise be prohibited (and where it is in the public interest and no viable alternatives are available) can be gained from the Minister for Primary Industries.

Yours sincerely

John Corbett

Internal Communications Manager

Egg Producer’s Federation of New Zealand (Inc.)

So, why are insects not included, eh?  Why don’t they come under the same protections?  Or does our all-wise Government deem that insect life form is less important than rodent life-form?  It seems it does–which must surely be rank discrimination and prejudice on the basis of its own principles. 

Why, one asks, do rodents fall under the Animal Welfare Act?  To our knowledge, rats  are not husbanded (apart from the few kept as pets and for scientific research) and farmed in New Zealand.   Rats being eradicated in the community and on farms and in the wild are themselves wild animals and disease carriers.  Are they now to be placed in the same categories as domesticated animals, farm animals, and husbanded livestock?  Apparently so.  Will this arouse suspicion on international markets about the quality of our exported ground beef?  Will it suggest to our export markets that rat meat is now likely to be included in MacDonald’s beef patties? 

In the grand scheme of things, the “Master” is not only inconsistent in favouring rats over insects since flies can still be trapped on glueboards and made subject to cruel and inhumane treatment.  It would appear that the State in some ways values rats more highly than humans.  It is the small matter of penalties.  In New Zealand a thug can beat up a person in a cruel and inhumane manner and not get a prison sentence of six months.  But if he were to do something similar to a rat, the vengeance of the Master may  fall far more severely.  Six months prison and a $25,000 fine for the rat molester!  As for the brawler who knocks an old man’s teeth out–convicted and discharged. 

Behold the dumb stupidity and obtuse crassness of the “Master”.

Mockumentary Extraordinaire

Painful Embarrassment

In the comedy Dumb and Dumber we are treated to the spectacle of two idiots succeeding because of their relentless stupidity.  During the course of the movie the characters manage to mouth just about every inane cliche known to man.  To get comedy sharper and more sophisticated than this is a challenge.  Well, not really.  There is always a ready supply of sublimely ridiculous clichés  from every aspiring politician “positioning” himself  as a statesmen.

Take the following:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.  Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.  Senator Barack Obama, Berlin, July 24, 2008.

This has to rank right up there as one of the greatest chains of  dumb clichés ever strung together by a politician.
  If Dumb and Dumber were to have a sequel, this speech should be in it, and the movie called, “Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest.”  Where would we begin to critique this fatuousness?  How does one dissemble a cliché?

Surely this was self-parody, you protest.  We suspect not.  On the other hand, if Obama were serious–it would make him not just dumb, but pitiable. We would have to feel sorry for the guy.  It would represent relentless stupidity without the comedy.

What on earth would lead someone reputedly as sharp as Obama to mouth such inanities?  Maybe he sees himself as following in the train of the great rhetoricians of old.  Maybe he had a dream, and his mentor is Martin Luther King.  But with King, one always sensed that the meant it.  Moreover, King was sufficiently grounded that he spoke of aspirational goals.  He told us what he dreamed about, what he hoped for.  Obama proclaimed a portentous moment when the planet could be “saved” and it was now.  We could actually come together to stop “terrible storms” devastating the land. 

Well, we need to remember that Obama is the product of an advanced education in some of the most prestigious schools of learning in the United States.  Maybe he was too dumb to sort out the reality from the pablum.  Maybe he really believed all that pseudo-millenarianism that passes for hard-headed scrutiny in the hallowed halls of Columbia and Harvard.  Maybe the rube from Hawaii was not sophisticated enough to work out that Dumb and Dumber was a comedic parody. 

It is all too easy to let slogans substitute for scrutiny in the progressive halls of learning.  Maybe Obama was impressed by F. W. Hegel when that worthy announced:

“The State is the actually existing, realized moral life. . . . The divine idea as it exists on earth.”  As he proclaimed in The Philosophy of History: “[All] worth which the human being possesses–all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.152.]

Government, the State, really is the manifestation of God.  If that be true, then it makes sense for Obama to claim that by “coming together”–resolving through ballot box and law–the entire planet could be healed.  But why would Obama be so dumb as to believe something like that?  Ah, gentle reader, it’s what the intellectual Progressives in the United States have always believed.  It is the standard fare of Harvard and Columbia and the rube from Hawaii was not sufficiently sophisticated to see through it. 

Richard Ely was an intellectual mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, both Progressive lions.  He pronounced,

God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution. . . . [It] is religious in its essence . . . a mighty force in furthering God’s kingdom and establishing righteous relations.  (Ibid).

Such nostrums are commonplace in the Progressive schools. 

We fear that Obama did not perceive any irony while he was orating from the podium in Berlin that July day in 2008.  He was deadly serious.  Which makes for a completely different kind of comedy–more suited to the painful mockumentary punchlines of The Office.  Either way, it’s all a joke.  A pitiable one at that.  How embarrassing.

Meaningless Morass, Part III

Two-Heeled Achilles

In his book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg gives us a history of the concept of “social justice”.  It first entered the lexicon of the West in the middle of the nineteenth century, courtesy of the Roman Catholic moral theologian, Luigi Taparelli.

Taparelli was concerned to resist the statist view of reality, where there are only two entities that count–the individual and the State.  He argued that human beings are social creatures.  The individual is necessarily involved in more social institutions–more communities–than just the State.

These intermediary associations act as both bridge and buffer between the individual and the State.  The associations of “lower society” maintain their own autonomy . . . . Taparelli introduced the phrase “social justice” as a way to emphasize that much of the important stuff lay outside the realm of the State.  It had nothing to do with redistributing wealth (never mind fighting for gender equity).  Taparelli thought of and employed social justice in a completely different way that (sic) almost everyone, Catholic and otherwise, does in contemporary society.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.138.]

Just as “liberalism” back in the eighteenth century indicated the maximisation of individual liberty against the Leviathan State, yet today its meaning has been subverted and taken over by proponents of soft-state-despotism, so with the concept of “social justice”.
  In the hands, hearts, and minds of the Progressive movement in the United States, “social justice” has become “an empty vessel to be filled with any and all leftist ideals, and then promptly wielded as a political bludgeon against any and all dissenters”. (Ibid., p. 142).

Herbert Croly, the founding father of modern liberalism, writing in the early part of the twentieth century expressed it very clearly:

The idea of individual justice is being supplemented by the idea of social justice.  When our constitutions were written, the traditions of English law, the contemporary political philosophy and the economic situation of the American democracy all conspired to embody in them and their interpretation an extremely individualistic conception of justice–a conception which practically confided social welfare to the free expression of individual interests and good intentions.  Now the tendency is to conceive the social welfare not as an end which cannot be left to the happy harmonizing of individual interests, but as an end which must be consciously willed by society and efficiently realised.  Society, that is, has become a moral ideal, not independent of the individual but supplementary to him, an ideal which must be pursued less by regulating individual excesses than by the active conscious encouragement of socializing tendencies and purposes. [Cited by Goldberg, op cit., p. 143f.]

Society (aka, the State) must impose social justice, and that efficiently.  That is the first Achilles Heel of the modern idea.  But worse, no-one has any limits as to what the concept can be shaped and twisted to resemble.  What is “socially just” in the end amounts to nothing more than a social realisation of what anyone, or a particular pressure group, happens to consider good.  For the Nazi, social justice is achieving and maintaining the supremacy of the white ethnicity.  For the feminist, it is the provision of ubiquitous free abortion clinics.  For the beauty pageant contestant it is the achieving of world peace.  For the Marxist, it is achieving an operational egalitarianism–from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, and so forth.  So catholic, so diverse, so variable, so inclusive as to be devoid of precise definition.

This Achilles of social justice at first glance appears a mighty warrior.  But he is a peculiar miscreant.  He has two heels, both fatal.  Social justice promotes and legitimises a Leviathan-like State with no limits to withstand its power.  It also is a meaningless concept.  It includes everything, and therefore means nothing.

Established Religions

The Return of the Prodigal

Every human society has an established deity.  It’s inescapable.  In this context we define deity broadly: the god who rules is the object or person in which society places their trust.  Human beings inevitably have to trust someone or something to provide what only a god can: safety, security, provision, and care along with more abstract (but vitally important) realities such as truth, justice, righteousness, and wisdom without which no society can cohere.

Secular society’s god is the government.  Rules, regulations and laws coupled with property exacted from subjects and bestowed upon others in order to pay for the “justice”, blessings and benefits the god wishes to bestow is how this particular religion works.  And it works a doozy.  Every Western society without exception has kowtowed to this particular deity.  Why are the peoples’ of the West so resistant to the historical Christian faith?  Because they love their idol god, their respective governments.  You cannot serve God and Mammon, Jesus says.  The West now serves Mammon with a deep, abiding devotion.

Which would be great.  Apart from one minor problem.
  It is all a lie.  Whilst “In Government we trust” may be the universal creed of our time, its universality does not make it true.  Rather its universality is testament to how stupid, stubborn, arrogant and blind we have become.  Lemmings all.  It remains a false god; it will eventually lie broke as God’s patience and longsuffering come to an end–as they surely will.  When justice is not speedily administered the hearts of the wicked grow bold.  God’s justice is most often not speedy.  (There are a few salutary exceptions for our edification, such as Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), and Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11) but they are the exception to the rule.) But because making the government our hope and praise appears to work and satisfy for a considerable time, the hearts of people grow in their devotion to the lie. 

Whilst we cannot be certain, it is probable that judgement upon the West’s deity will take the form of displaying its creeping and relentless incompetence, leading eventually to spectacular failure.  Divine providence will parade our deity as a sham, an impotent huckster–which a moment’s sober reflection would have surely concluded decades ago.  We can see hints of this: the bigger and more intrusive government becomes in the lives of citizens and in society, the more incompetent and impotent it shows itself to be.  The more exposed to ridicule and mockery.

A couple of illustrations from the United States are to hand.  Firstly, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.  It is so big and vast a piece of folly that most legislators voted for the monstrosity without ever reading its thousands of legislatives clauses.  But they felt good about it because it was an act of worship of their god.  It even caused the Vice President to intone reverently and exultingly, “this is a big ***** deal.”  Now, the implementation of the law has just been suspended in significant part–which itself is an illegality–thus displaying the impotence of the national god.  Stupid is as stupid does.  This is not just the failings of one ineffectual, weak President: it is the failure of the national deity of the United States.  It is the failure of statism.

Secondly, the US Senate recently passed a gargantuan bill designed to “fix” the problem of illegal immigration. It is the role of the deity to fix things, right?  Once again the eructation from the god was voluminous.  Senators happily voted for the complex legislation without carefully reading it.  Even sponsors of a celebrated amendment could not explain the apparent contradictions in their offering.  “In Government we trust”: what is there to worry about.  More is good, after all.  The upshot: a graphic display of incompetence and impotence.  The idol god is being held up to ridicule.  No wonder the people are angry and brimming with frustrated sarcasm.  Can’t this god do anything right?

But this failure is not just in the big things.  Devotees of the established religion cannot help themselves.  They are reflexively loyal to their government-is-god credo even in the little things.  But equally stupid.  Equally impotent.  Here in New Zealand the Labour Party has got itself all wound up about sexual equality (one of the idol’s doctrinal axioms).  It is proposing to achieve gender equality in its candidates for Parliamentary seats.  Some electorates will ban any males applying for candidates selection.  It’s what the god demands.

Hoots of derisive laughter at this “man ban” have echoed through the canyons, coupled with distraught and injured feelings on the part of many as the national god is blasphemed and ridiculed. 

So will pass the secular West.  Its decline will be marked by anger and frustration at the increasing impotence of government and its failure to deliver the promised nirvana under its command and control religion.  It will also be marked by the derision of disappointed hopes.  It will not be an easy time.  In the foment we Christians hope and trust that God–the only true God–will again stretch forth His hand in mercy and compassion to a foolish, stubborn and rebellious generation.

And why should we have such a hope?  Because that is Who God is.  Did the father not rush down the road to greet the returning prodigal? 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Actual Thugs

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Douglas Wilson

It is not too soon to begin referring to the Obama regime as scandal-ridden. But what does this mean?

I was amazed at Obama’s first election, amazed that more people didn’t see through him. His gauzy promises, his tip-tilted nose, his serene arrogance, were all a sight for the prescient gobsmacked to behold. And then I was amazed again at his re-election — but this time I was amazed that the electorate hadn’t seen him. Now it was not a matter of seeing through him, it was simply a matter of seeing him. He had a record now; he had actually done stuff. Lots of people could see it, and they kept saying to the others, “Can you see it now?” And the answer came back . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . call it a continent-wide Huxtable presidency wish fulfillment syndrome.

But the American people, bless their hearts, are now starting to see the big E on the eye chart.
Of course, our collective nose is almost touching the big E on that eye chart, but we can at least see it now. The doctor has been most encouraging.

We have the AP scandal. We have the James Rosen scandal. We have the IRS scandal. We have the Benghazi scandal. We have reports waiting in the wings that these scandals are going to go much deeper, and that a couple more volcanoes may erupt any time now. And the reason we now have these scandals functioning as real scandals is that the mainstream media — fully complicit in helping maintain a purblind populace the last four years — has by some act of God awakened. This doesn’t make them virtuous, but it does make them interesting.

One of the central things this means is that we should be glad that Obama won re-election — this may well in retrospect be a profoundly merciful kindness from God. God draws straight with crooked lines. Obama is a Chicago thug and Romney appears to be a nice man, but they are both of them statists. Statism is always death, whether or not there are smiley faces at the top, and it needs to be discredited in real time, by those running it. And who better to discredit something than the discreditable?

Statism is thuggery, and I prefer my thuggery be run by actual thugs. It helps to concentrate the mind.

Progress and Its False Prophets

Moving Backwards

Most people assume that history is moving forward.  The present is better than the past.  The human race is heading to a higher, greater future.   In our secular humanist culture this assumption is undergirded by Darwinian evolutionism.  This has always seemed to us to be a most amusing idea: Darwinian evolutionism claims that development is achieved by the survival of the fittest.  That implies that there must be plenty of casualties along the way. 

Modern Western man never assumes that he (or Western culture) will be one of those casualties.  It’s always someone else, some other culture that is less than fit and will be destroyed.  Yet within the Darwinian philosophy, Islam might prove to be the better, more powerful culture that sweeps the West into the sea.  Darwinianism cannot predict such things; it only identifies the more fit ex post facto.  Herein lies one of its idiocies.
 

There is another stream of thought which has been married to Darwinianism.  Hegel proclaimed that human history was moving to an inevitable triumph.  The mechanism which moved it forward was the dialectic.  Each stage of human development had the seeds of its own destruction.  Those seeds would eventually coalesce into an antithesis, which would tear down the present, leading to a new synthesis, and another antithesis, and so on.  But eventually  the perfect would emerge, in which there would be no incipient antithesis any longer.  Thus, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man when liberal democracy triumphed over communism.  Fukuyama was asserting that western liberal democracy was the highest stage of human evolution: it represented the last (great) man, beyond which there would no development. A silly idea in hindsight, much mocked.  But consistent with current ideology, nonetheless.

The political ideology known as progressivism believes these inanities with a vengeance.  History is always making progress.  Given the previous rise and fall of prodigious numbers of civilizations this is a stupid position to hold, but idiocy is no respecter of persons.  Jonah Goldberg summarizes the progressive folly:

The Whiggish assumption in contemporary politics that today must be better than yesterday, this year more advanced than last year, this century wiser than the one that preceded it, is held most dogmatically by so-called progressives.  For them history is a vehicle with no reverse gear, and the engine that powers it is nothing more or less than the State.  This is the hardened, metaphysical, dogmatic cliche that makes it possible for journalists to glibly describe any expansion of the government into our lives as a “step forward” or an “advancement” and any retrenchment of government as a step “backward.”  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.12.]

All of which is nonsense, of course.  But it explains why the dominant religion of secular humanism and its Commentariat mouthpieces despise the Christian faith–for it speaks of judgment to come.   Christianity is thus rejected as blasphemous from the outset.  When Christians testify to the secular humanist world that if a certain course is pursued it will result in great harm and damage, even destruction, the prevailing religious secular orthodoxy cannot accept it.  It is deaf.  It simply does not compute.  Worse, it gives license to attack Christians as either mad or negative, evil, judgemental, and destructive.  Why?  Because they are questioning the religion of secular progress.

In the time of the apostles, sometimes rulers would choose the deluded, mad option.  When Paul was defending himself before Agrippa and Festus, we read that Festus said, “Paul you are out of your mind!  Your great learning is driving you mad.”  (Acts 26: 24)  Today, given the stranglehold of progressive ideology over our culture, it is much more common to see Christians rejected as being antithetical to society’s interests: negative, and destructive and even subversive is the Christian Gospel which rejects the implicit utopianism of our generation.

 The bottom line is this: without Christ the future of any culture is never bright.  We Christians love our cities, our nations.  But we do not love their destruction.  Therefore, we strive mightily to tear down the idolatry of secular humanism and its corollary of inevitable State engineering progress.  In Christ alone our hope is found.   

Shepherds, Bears, and Russia

Vlad Impales the Orphans

One of the images used in Scripture for the state is that of a shepherd.  Far from being a shepherd, the modern secular state is like a wolf that preys upon the sheep.  It has determined that some sheep need fleecing and shearing.  Others will be favoured and will receive the proceeds of the fleecing and the shearing.  The modern secular state divides the flock and sets sheep against sheep. 

When the Bible uses the image of a shepherd for the state it has particular reference to the enemies of the flock who would prey upon it.  The good shepherd defends the flock and protects it from those who would tear it to pieces.  Thus David, when contemplating the threat of Goliath to Israel, reflected upon his skill and faithfulness as a shepherd: he killed the lion and the bear that came up to devour the sheep. 

The more a government turns upon its own people, the more odious and disgusting it becomes.  We have recently witnessed one of the more egregious acts against innocent sheep.
  Vlad-the-Impaler-Putin and his cohorts have acted in a way which has harmed the interests of the most vulnerable and defenceless in Russia. 

Vlad is trying to make a name for himself in the annals of history.  He is wanting to reassert the greatness of Mother Russia.  In principle, there is nothing wrong with such an ambition.  It all depends on how one defines “greatness”.  But it rapidly descends to wickedness when you would use the most vulnerable as a tool to prosecute your ambitions. 

The breakdown of family life in Russia is notorious–a legacy of fifty years of secular state atheism.  Unwanted children are dumped in orphanages, where most live out their lives in utter misery.  Many have been adopted–particularly to families in the United States.  But Vlad has decided this must stop.  The interests and welfare of the most oppressed and vulnerable must be trampled upon.  America is the great rival; it is such a bad look having Russian orphans adopted by American families.  Therefore, he has terminated the programme.  Vlad the Impaler is driving his sharpened sticks into the wasted bodies of innocent Russian children, sacrificing them to some megalomaniac Russian nationalism. 

Many ordinary Muscovite Russians know what is going on.  They took to the streets in Moscow to protest Vlad’s latest attack upon his own people.  This from the Huffington Post:

MOSCOW — Thousands of people marched through Moscow on Sunday to protest Russia’s new law banning Americans from adopting Russian children, a far bigger number than expected in a sign that outrage over the ban has breathed some life into the dispirited anti-Kremlin opposition movement.  Shouting “shame on the scum,” protesters carried posters of President Vladimir Putin and members of Russia’s parliament who overwhelmingly voted for the law last month. Up to 20,000 took part in the demonstration on a frigid, gray afternoon. . . .

Opponents of the adoption ban argue it victimizes children to make a political point. Eager to take advantage of this anger, the anti-Kremlin opposition has played the ban as further evidence that Putin and his parliament have lost the moral right to rule Russia.

Victimising the most vulnerable children to make a political point is a wretched business.  The shepherd has become the bear: he has turned upon his own people to feast upon them, feeding his ambitions.   

Putin’s critics have likened him to King Herod, who ruled at the time of Jesus Christ’s birth and who the Bible says ordered the massacre of Jewish children to avoid being supplanted by the newborn king of the Jews.  Russia’s adoption ban was retaliation for a new U.S. law targeting Russians accused of human rights abuses.  It also addresses long-brewing resentment in Russia over the 60,000 Russian children who have been adopted by Americans in the past two decades, 19 of whom have died.

 This is how propaganda in the hands of a venal, self-serving, narcissistic government can lead people up the garden path.  The comparison with Herod is apt.  

Cases of Russian children dying or suffering abuse at the hands of their American adoptive parents have been widely publicized in Russia, and the law banning adoptions was called the Dima Yakovlev bill after a toddler who died in 2008 when he was left in a car for hours in broiling heat.  “Yes, there are cases when they are abused and killed, but they are rare,” said Sergei Udaltsov, who heads a leftist opposition group. “Concrete measures should be taken (to punish those responsible), but our government decided to act differently and sacrifice children’s fates for its political ambitions.”

 There are over 700,000 children in Russian orphanages.  Vlad-the-Impaler is willing to use them as pawns in his little game.  The shepherd has morphed into the bear and he has turned upon his own people.  Lenin redivivus.