I recently completed the boat safety course in anticipation of a couple of weeks at the lake with myriad grandkids. I don’t own a boat but there aren’t too many takers to drive the boat that is available, and I anticipated a call to service. Had I known that the course is both long and relatively complicated I might not have started it. All this to say that I have the metaphor of an unmoored boat headed for a crash in my mind.
The past ten or so years can be seen as the unmoored boat in my view. What in the world is going on when a sizeable portion of the populace believe in lactating men who can get pregnant and, apparently, demand abortions? Where sex is neither binary nor a genetically determined characteristic but rather is a gender phenomenon which is personally determined and therefore infinitely flexible both in definition and time. I can be a sort of man today and a mostly woman tomorrow. In fact, I can be a cat or a sparrow as the mood takes me. When someone makes a highly popular movie about the sex trafficking of children as young as infants, it is denounced as a racist QAnon conspiracy. To allow children to self actualize they must be exposed to their own sexuality at ever younger ages and at the feet of gaudily painted men who like to dress up as women. We are now told that the strength of a nation is defined by an undefined diversity and that the best border is no border. Not only that but it is racist to investigate the background of those who walk across the border beyond enquiring as to their name. How about the notion that safe cities are unpoliced cities or theft is reparations? If you are white, then you are privileged - a racist statement meant to defeat racism. And we think the Medieval flagellants were weird. I could go on.
I find all this more than disorienting and not a little disconcerting. Apparently, a significant portion of the western world has gone completely mad. This is not a new historical phenomenon, but it is one thing to read about the maddening of crowds and another to experience it in real time. The question is why these phenomena and why now? Here is my two-part theory.
The first part of the theory, and perhaps the most significant in terms of impact, is associated with a loss of creativity. A friend recently sent me an opinion piece by Chris Bray, a fellow substacker, that is a pretty insightful dissection of modern art. Where is the creativity? A couple of weeks ago a friend argued that, since the 1980’s, the world of popular music has been a desert. It is hard to disagree. The slack river that is starting to stink is a very good metaphor. But, in reference to today’s maddening, I think the deeper element of latent violence and danger points to an unmoored boat.
As explained in other substack entries (here), I believe that creativity is an attribute of God in whose image we are made. To be creative is thus part of being human, but that creativity can only be released in an atmosphere of freedom. I must give you freedom if I want you to be creative in any positive sense. (To be clear, believing men to be “chest feeders” is not creativity; it is madness and a dangerous denial of reality). Reducing personal freedom, then, is a good way to stifle creativity. The new book by Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy (Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet) largely agrees with my thesis and backs it up with very interesting data. I feel affirmed.
A return to creativity, then, is not a matter of hoping that things will one day turn around in the swing of some cosmic pendulum. It will turn around when we once again acknowledge the Creator in whose workshop we toil, recognizing that we bear His image, and must offer creative freedom to those around us. There is a reason that the Bible is insistent upon the fear or respect of the Lord being the beginning of wisdom. And if the result of this respect is wisdom, then it follows that the result of an absence of this fear is not malevolence, but foolishness. The Bible is not shy about this topic either. How about “professing themselves to be wise they became fools”? The malevolence follows the foolishness.
But why is there a turning from God at this point in history? I think history demonstrates that there is a cyclic pattern of losing our fear of God which is always followed by catastrophic results. The history books of the Bible make this point abundantly clear. Books like The Fourth Turning calculate the period of the cycles and make predictions based on this phenomenon. Nietzsche made some ghastly and accurate predictions based the notion that European society was killing God. Can you kill He whom you fear? Francis Schaeffer carried the concept further and, in the 1980s, predicted the descent of creativity into banal stupidity. The Russians whom I met on my travels in that country universally insisted that the Soviet years were their punishment for forgetting God. It is not a new phenomenon.
It is one thing to stop fearing God recognizing that this comes with consequences. It is quite another to understand how this “fear stripping” came about. Again, this is a theory for consideration only.
In Jordan Peterson’s group investigation into the meaning of the Book of Exodus, it was pointed out that the Jewish holy days were mostly based on a remembrance of historical events. The holy days of the competing religions, on the other hand, were reflections of cyclical phenomena such as the winter solstice and the fecundity of spring warmth. History, it would seem, is of primary importance to Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian God. It is so important to Him, in fact, that He parted it by becoming a participant for 33 years.
After decades of not teaching history, are we surprised that history is now under such a direct attack? The tag line of my emails is a quotation from Cicero that if we don’t learn history, we are doomed to be forever a child. Statues of Sir John A. MacDonald are removed because he was a racist. In the United States, military bases are renamed because southern generals were racists. Here is a little factoid to keep in mind. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson owned six slaves, some of whom petitioned him to buy them so that they could escape the cruelty of their circumstances. In defiance of the law, he taught Sunday school classes to slaves and ensured that they were literate enough to read their Bibles. Today he is vilified. A racist you see.
In the absence of an understanding of history, we believe that real history started the day we were born, and that each succeeding generation is more intelligent than the one before. Worse, we begin to judge the events of history through the distortions of our own scratched, moral lenses. We, who sit quietly by as organs are harvested from unwilling donors. As approximately one hundred thousand underage, illegal immigrants to the United States go missing. Except they are not really missing. Who turn a blind eye to the dismemberment of children in utero. We who allow life swallowing drugs to flood into our communities from China because we can’t bear a price hike in knick knacks. Knick knacks made by slave labour. Scratched lenses worn by virtue signaling, hypocritical infants.
In the context of the Ukrainian war, grand pronouncements are made and sweeping judgements are declared about who is right and who is wrong with nary a thought given to the history leading up to this very sad and horrible event. Does history have nothing to tell us about why Ukrainians would involve themselves in such a ruinous and destructive civil war? If internet videos can be believed, one of the main actors in 2014, Arseniy Yatsenyuk has recently admitted that he and others involved in the EuroMaidan are now presiding over the destruction of their country.
Are we so enslaved to the gods of the Manicheans that we can’t see some nuance in the lives of historic figures or ourselves? Can we not throw off the insistent cacophony of the history-free media narrative by considering the historical precedents to current events? Reasonable people will come to differing conclusions about things like the racist tendencies of Stonewall Jackson or the validity of the Ukrainian war, but the conclusions can only have merit to the extent they are anchored in history. The revisionist dogmas preached today are only possible when historical ignorance is widespread.
Given this historical ignorance, is it surprising that we choose not to fear the God who created that history? The long-term solution, of course is to fear God and start teaching history without ladling on the uninformed judgements of dogmatic polemicists. Fortunately, I think we may be seeing the green shoots of a short-term solution as well.
The most potent opposition to those who want to take over the world is the middle class which has the most to lose by the stupidity of aristocratic fools. The best teacher of this need to control the middle class was George Soros who hopes to achieve that very end. When he speaks of tactics and strategies it is worth listening to him. On this topic he has been loquacious and consistent. How is the middle class to be controlled? Make them stupid with bad education, poor by removing their jobs, connected to the government by giving them “programs”, and fearful by threatening their lives. If these are the goals, then George and his friends are well on the way to achieving them.
But there is an element of simple mathematics that is being forgotten. When Ulysses Grant was promoted to Lieutenant General of the Union forces, he explained the simple mathematics of winning the Civil War. With a much larger population and an almost infinite pool of resources, the North was to fight until the enemy no longer had the resources to continue to fight. It meant the lives of hundreds of thousands, but the mathematics was inexorable and guaranteed.
In the current context, if you want to take over the world then your decisions and actions must be harsh and steady because their impacts can be traced back to you and the relatively few other people who are responsible for those decisions. If things don’t work out, then you are in big trouble. On the other hand, the much larger middle class can, individually, take thousands of aligned, but less personally consequential decisions that, in the aggregate, swamp the decisions of the despots. It is very difficult to awaken the middle class to its danger but once awakened the impact can be overwhelming.
Has the middle class begun to awaken? It would be instructive to ask this question of the presidents of Disney or Anheuser Busch. Did they predict a major loss of revenue and capitalization based on the socio-political decisions they recently made? Or what about Mr. Trudeau. Did he predict the end of his despotic covid regime as the hundreds of truckers passed from Manitoba into Ontario? Probably not. He was too busy going into hiding. All it took was for a relatively few, low risk middle class decisions to wound those companies and remove the lockdown farce of the federal government.
The awesome power of an awakened citizenry. If you look at current events as an elite descent into spiritual and cognitive foolishness confronted by a unified, middle-class response to recover a healthy fear of God, then shadowy things start to take on definable shapes. Am I injecting a spiritual element that is not rightfully there? Not if you listen to the truckers who occupied those cold Ottawa streets or talk to the fly-over country Christians whose preferences no longer include Budweiser beer or walks down the avenues of the Magic Kingdom.
We are currently unmoored, but I believe that the inevitable crash of the boat against the shoals of reality will soon be upon us. It will undoubtedly be painful from a societal perspective, but it is the necessary first step to recovery. I can hardly wait.