Vive le Roi! Vive la France!

219 years ago today, on 14 July 1789, the original terrorists — the Revolutionaries of France — initiated their diabolical democratic movement with the storming of the Bastille. So many of the ills of the world since then began then and there.

But the Revolution will fall. Heaven is a Kingdom, not a republic, and Christ is King, not president. As above, so may it be below.

Down with the Revolution! Long live the once and future Christian Kingdom of France!

Whither The Secular State?

A Christian registrar who refused to carry out gay 'weddings' won a landmark legal battle yesterday. Lillian Ladele, 47, was threatened with the sack [being fired], bullied and 'thrown before the lions' after asking to be excused from conducting civil partnerships for same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs.

But yesterday a tribunal agreed that her faith had been ridden roughshod over by equalities-obsessed Islington Council, which had sought to 'trump one set of rights with another'. The groundbreaking decision could lead to firms facing 'conscience claims' from staff who say their own beliefs prevent them carrying out part of their job.

Yesterday's ruling found that Liberal Democrat-run Islington Council in North London cared too much about the 'rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual' community. It also found that the council – which gave Miss Ladele an ultimatum to choose between her beliefs and her £31,000-a-year job – showed no respect for her rights as a Christian. Source: London Daily Mail, 2008 10 July

The objections are predictable. "What would we all say about a registrar who refused to marry people because they are genetically inferior (according to the registrar’s understanding of such) and would produce defective offspring?" wrote one sensitive soul in reaction to this story. "If my ethical beliefs say that people with genetic diseases should not reproduce, and as a registrar I would refuse to marry them, it should be accorded less value than someone’s religious beliefs?" Another sincere writer declares in response that "Government needs to be able to define a job description and anyone who can't fulfill those duties, no matter the reason, should find another job." Still another opines that "the interpretation of words from an ancient book are more valid than one's own moral code developed independently of such dusty old books. You can all go back to your regularly scheduled programming, and lionization of this woman because her beliefs coincide with your own, and no other practical reason." [Link] It seems that many people, even on the so-called Right, object to Ms. Ladele's refusal to "marry" two persons of the same sex. The basic objection they share is that Ms. Ladele is a government official, and that those in the employ of the government of a democratic state should be neutral on matters of religion.

A lot of people share this view (even in England, a nation which has an established Christian church!). Unfortunately for them, however, the idea that a government should be neutral on matters of religious belief is absurd. There can be no such thing as a de facto secular government.

The modern concept of secular government flies in the face of everything we know of human history and behavior. Governments do no appear ex nihilo; they arise from human beings living in society. But human beings cannot live together in society unless they are bound together by a glue of culture — a shared system of thought and values based upon a cult, i.e. upon religious beliefs. Humans who share the same culture consider themselves “brothers” — members of a nation, a “family” defined by that culture. Bearing this in mind, it is obvious that no such thing as a secular society has ever existed, nor can such a thing ever exist. Once a given society loses its culture, the members of that society no longer consider themselves brothers, but competitors; the society then degenerates into a mass of competing nations, each defined by its own culture. A war of all against all follows, until one nation gains enough power to impose its culture on the others by force.

No government without society; no society without culture; no culture without cult. No matter what kind of secular constitution a given society might have, culture will out; in the end, someone’s morality will be legislated; someone's God is going to be the basis of government.

Our society is not exempt. The so-called Reformation removed the Catholic Church as the cultural root of the West; from the wreckage of Christendom came the wars of the nation-states, each with its own culture. Now "liberated" from the shackles of Catholic culture, every man was now free to be his own pope — to define Christianity to suit himself (each acting always under the “inspiration of the Holy Spirit”, of course). Christ the King was replaced by the individual Liberty enthroned, which stripped the nation-states of their sacramental hierarchies and replaced them with the cult of the Common Man, aka Democracy. Every man was now both his own pope and his own king. Then, came the rise of Baconian materialism, which denied the substantial and supernatural basis of existence itself; reality was now defined strictly as “that which can be poked with a stick”. By redefining the Universe (and Man himself) as mere material, Western man arrogated to himself the role of Creator as well. Each man was now his own pope, king, and God.

Yet the West hung on, protected from the worst excesses of self-deification by the lingering remnants of what once was called “Christian decency”. Despite the elimination of God as creator (by Darwin) and Christ as Savior (by Marx) in the minds of Western man, there remained a sort of genetic resistance to taking Liberty, Reason, and Materialism to their ultimate philosophical ends; there were some things that civilized, European people just didn’t do. As late as the 1890s, for example, the idea of soldiers deliberately targeting noncombatant civilians in time of war was unthinkable by Western military men. Any British, French, or German ship captain found to have deliberately sunk an unarmed ocean liner would have been brought before a court-martial on war crimes charges.

And so Western civilization tottered along, ever more liberal, ever more secular, protected from its own worst excesses by its legacy of “Christian decency”. Then came the 20th Century, the two World Wars, and the spread of the secular idea to the ends of the earth.

As a political entity, the United States is de jure a secular state; as a nation, however, it has survived and prospered as a de facto European Judeo-Christian nation, united by the remants of the shared European Judeo-Christian culture of the majority population. Sadly, as have the other nations of the West, we have slowly secularized, living off the cultural capital of pre-Enlightement Christendom while gradually becoming more and more liberal, more and more individualist, more and more materialist. In the past, this cultural legacy was strong enough to protect us from ourselves; now, however, the tattered strands of European Judeo-Christian culture are too thin to support us any longer. The collapse is coming.

And it will come, sooner or later. Our pretty little pretend castle of individual Liberty, materialist Reason, and idolatrous Self-Deification will collapse like the house of cards it always was. Civil war will follow. And, in time, one of the surviving cultural groups will impose its culture (and its God) on those who live through the years of chaos. For the sake of our descendants, I hope that European Judeo-Christian culture triumphs to serve as the pillar of Christendom reborn.

Until then, it will be the small victories — such as that of Lillian Ladele — that will give us hope.

Thomas M. Disch (2 February 1940 – 4 July 2008)

Thomas M. Disch, science fiction writer and poet, committed suicide July 4 in New York. He was sixty-eight years old.

Disch was an exceptionally talented writer. Unfortunately, he was a man without hope, without which no man can survive. A futurist who had little use for the future, Disch specialized in stories of humans struggling to survive against inhuman, invincible forces outside of their control. His first novel, 1965's The Genocides, is a bleak no-future tale in which the entire human race is wiped out by aliens; his (arguable) magnum opus, 334 (1972), is a detailed examination of the grim, banal, and ultimately futile lives of the inhabitants of the titular New York City address in a Tomorrow where the Great Society envisioned by the technocratic macro-planners of the late 1960s/early 1970s has become a reality. Anyone who has ever wondered what America would have been like if the fondest dreams of well-intentioned '60s liberals had come true need only consult 334, which depicts in grimy detail a nation of hedonistic underachievers, living cheek-by-jowl in huge, crumbling urban housing blocks, tranquilized by mindless TV and legal drugs and insulated from risk by the benevolence of MODICUM, the federal government's all-encompassing welfare apparatus. Imagine a world run by the Food Stamp bureau — that's 334.

His disdain for the techno-utopianism common to the science fiction of the 1950s and early '60s was not a personal flaw, however; rather, it was born of a deep-seated desire for honesty on Disch's part. As did most of his New Wave contemporaries, Disch considered the traditional American SF idea of the Hopeful Future both dishonest and adolescent; like them, his goal was to give it to the reader "straight" — i.e. to attempt to give readers an "adult" perspective — an "honest" (i.e. essentially hopeless) future, without flinching and with no punches pulled.

Despite his disdain for the Wonderful World of Tomorrow, however, Disch brought a rare gift to readers of science fiction: quality. Amid the dull dross that inhabits the dubious treasure box of commercial English-language fiction, Disch's works are gems of considerable sparkle: his settings are evocative and integral to the text, his prose and dialog are carefully polished, and certain of his characters have an almost Dostoyevskyan depth and luster. Ultimately, however, these shining qualities are subdued by the flaw of gray, depressing nihilism that lies at their core.

A certain misanthropy lay at the base of the New Wave movement; as a group, the New Wavers did not have much use for mankind. As did the Existentialists that predated them, the writers of SF's New Wave ultimately held that Man was the problem, not the solution, and that only a future without Man could honestly be called "hopeful". Disch and his New Wave contemporaries employed the world-destroying tropes of SF to realize the maxim l'enfer, c'est les autres in a fashion of which Sartre and the Existentialitsts of the past could only have dreamed, and to which the Earth-Firsters and Human Extinctionists of our day can only aspire. It may be that in the end that nihilism rose up and consumed him. (Ordinarily, I'd trot out Nietszche's well-worn quote regarding the Abyss here, but the man is dead, and it's too late at night for that literary crap.) Suffice it to say therefore that Thomas Disch was a talented writer, an influential critic, and a suffering human being. Despite his suicide, I pray that in his final moments he managed to open his heart to the Man that saves all men, and that he has somehow found in the Hands of a merciful God the hope that eluded him in life.