John C. Wright gets it

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 3:45 pm by Mark Shea

John C. Wright gets it 2014-12-31T15:45:39-07:00 Mark Shea

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Modern thought is composed, with innumerable minor variations, with two great main streams: the revolt against the Church in the name of Reason, and the revolt against Reason in the name of Nothing. The first revolt we can call, with no violence to the term, Modernism. The second we can call Postmodernism.

A typically interesting and insightful essay that treats, inter alia, of satanic ecumenism (though he does not use the term).

Also, I think Wright’s reader, Monte Cristo, has a point which also bears on the phenomenon of Satanic Ecumenism when he adds that the problem is not just on the Left:

Christ is often the very first thing that goes under the Conservative bus in their quest for their much-desired “War of Civilizations” against 22 Muslim nations whose combined gross national products do not equal that of Spain’s. You are war-makers, not peace-makers. It is the collectivist right as well as the collectivist left who have turned the U.S. Republic into a divisive, over-taxed, over-regulated, over-extended, empire that is on the brink of collapse. If the West is in danger of destruction it is not just the nihilistic left who must bear the burden of blame; it is also the heretical, egotistical, hubris-besotted, pagan right which must also shoulder an equal share.

Whether God exists or not is an interesting question. Whether empiricism has invalidated empiricism is also an interesting question for debate. You have gotten up on a box to denounce the collectivist left for, among other things, being apostate from the old conception of Liberalism. I concur that the charge is fair and your case holds merit. Nevertheless I can also hold up a mirror and point out that the modern collectivist conservatives are likewise apostate from the Old Right as well. One of the most ironic signs of the times is a “Christian Right” which in no way acts as if it actually believes what it nominally professes. If the Christian religion dies, it will not be on the point of a Muslim scimitar but from abandonment.

My own encounters with the zealous pro-torture members of the Christian community (people who form a larger percentage of torture support in the Christian community than torture supporters in the general population do) and with the crazy deference people pay to pagan war zealots like Victor Davis Hanson who instructs us that “War is the natural state of things” shows me that Monte Cristo has a point. Countless conservative Christians are showing themselves to embrace as “realism” a sentiment indistinguishable from gnostic theories that the created world is not fallen but is, rather, the creation of an evil god.

Here’s the truth, made as starkly plain as possible for easy comprehension. Both the Utopian Left and The End to Evil crowd still dominating the Right believe lies, because both tell us we come from chaos, we live by war and our destiny is oblivion. Whether it’s the lefty secularist spouting materialist arguments for a social order based on Darwin, or the Righty who believes in the healing and redemptive power of democratic capitalism imposed by force of arms, both are taking it for granted that the Christian revelation is a fairy tale for suckers. The former may approach it as a thing to be rooted out and destroyed and the latter may regard it as a thing to be exploited by the strong. But the person who says “War is the natural state of things” no more believes that “It is only in Christ that man can learn the truth about man” (as John Paul II taught) than the P.Z. Myers zealot on the Left does.

The astounding thing is that Christians take the End to Evil crowd seriously as “realists” while deriding the Left as utopians. People who endlessly appeal to Ticking Time Bomb scenarios in their moral calculations are as realistic as those who endlessly appeal to 14 year old Thelma and her tubal pregnancy by her syphlitic father as the benchmark of realism in all abortion discussions. People who imagine we can spend ourselves into prosperity creating the Great Society in Iraq (and, with luck, Iran!) at gunpoint are as realistic as those who think we can create it here by dumping a trillion dollars into some Rube Goldberg health care bill built on preserving the sacrament of abortion. What all our ruling classes and their obedient servants committed to the Party Line agree on is this:

On any given day, the likelihood of a “limited competence” post on a conservative Catholic’s blog equals the likelihood of a “doctrinal authority” post on a liberal Catholic’s blog.

Equivalently,

On any given day, the likelihood of a “limited competence” post on a liberal Catholic’s blog equals the likelihood of a “doctrinal authority” post on a conservative Catholic’s blog.

That’s more or less how Satanic Ecumenism works: enemies of the Church’s teaching figure out ways to find happy concord in telling the Church to Just Shut Up about their pet issues. It never lasts for long, of course, because they cannot long stifle their loathing of one another and keep up a united front. But while it lasts, you can enjoy the spectacle of both Marc Thiessen *and* Catholics for a Free Choice declaring that the Church lacks all competence to give any answer to the questions like “When does a human person come into existence?” or “What is torture?” so it should just butt out and let teh Big Boys handle such real world questions and stick to theology about airy fairy stuff like the Trinity. And Catholics, depending on whose ox is being gored, cheer.

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