Thursday, November 9, 2023

Hamas and the “Unveiling”


It’s now been a month since Hamas entered Israeli territory and brutally murdered hundreds of civilians, kidnapping more than 200. Israel currently sets the death toll of the attacks at around 1,200. The event in itself is horrific, but also horrific has been reaction from the left in the US and Europe. Rod Dreher has called the double shock of these weeks an “Apocalypse,” in its original meaning of “unveiling”.

Which is to say that something has been revealed. But what?

Here I’ll try to gather some of the best, most provocative writing on this question. Note that this is not writing on "biblical apocalyptic". Also, I’m certainly not part of the woke left, neither am I looking at this war in terms of white hats vs. black hats. In my view, the Israel-Palestine conflict is one in which no side is completely in the right, and worse, it’s a conflict for which there are no good solutions. Anyone who pretends there are clear, morally unambiguous solutions, is either lying or shallow. And probably both.

But one key crux can be neatly summed up as follows: If tomorrow the Palestinians were to lay down their arms and sue for peace, they’d get peace. If the Israelis were to lay down their arms and sue for piece, they’d get genocide.

This is a truth that’s been clear for decades. And part of what's been “unveiled” in recent weeks is that much of the western left really thinks the Israelis should get genocide.

The pieces I’ve chosen relate to this cluster of questions: not just the two sides in the war, but the two sides in the West, and the two sides in all of us. Yes, it’s a question for me of good and evil, because I believe in good and evil.

One of the wisest early reactions to the atrocities came from a writer on the left, Sam Kriss. Kriss needs to be more widely read. In this piece he doesn’t get right into the events of October 7, but begins with some paragraphs on Poland and ghosts. It’s a subtle, brutally honest essay, especially powerful because it comes from Kriss, known for his phantasmagoric satire. Read Kriss’ “But Not Like This”.

On the theme of unveiling, Konstantin Kisin sees in the left’s celebration of Hamas atrocities a wake up call.

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.



Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.



The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

Read the whole piece. Kisin lays out Thomas Sowell’s classic explanation of why people disagree about politics, the difference being that some of us have an “unconstrained vision” of human nature while others have a “constrained vision”.

Over on X, Carl Benjamin underlines the ever-more-glaring conundrum our liberal West has gotten itself into thanks to "unconstrained" tolerance. Needless to say, Sam Kriss wouldn’t agree with Benjamin on much, but I find Benjamin irrefutable on this aspect of the unveiling. He writes:

The pro-Palestine protests that are currently being held across the West elicit such a deep and pre-political feeling of revulsion because they evidently represent a foreign nation asserting itself in our midst. Liberals are suddenly taken aback by this because it hits liberalism in a particular blind spot. Liberalism processes the world in terms of indistinguishable individual agents each of whom is, theoretically, a rational, self-authoring individual that is consciously following their own conception of the good life.

This conception of a person is demonstrated to be shockingly wrong, as the protests reveal a tribal mindset in which the individual is not something separate from the religion and community, and is certainly not considered to be self-authoring and rational. In fact, devotion to and willingness to act upon the creed is the metric of worthiness, a collective self-denial which is antithetical to the individual self-aggrandisement worldview of liberalism.

Suddenly, it becomes apparent to the average liberal-minded Westerner that there are some things which actually shouldn't be tolerated if the liberal order is going to persist, but it is far too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

What are our options, exactly? These protesters have human rights. They have the right to protest, to speak, to denounce our civilisation and tell us to our faces that they plan to take over. What can we do about such things? Nothing, of course, liberalism demands we tolerate such ill-faith. But should we have such people in our societies and organising in such a fashion? Evidently not.

The pre-political revulsion is still there and reveals us not to be the liberals we once thought we were. We know, in our heart of hearts, that we cannot have a safe and stable civilisation without the good will necessary for such an endeavour, and now we are trapped with people who outright repudiate us. Since the only test liberalism could impose on newcomers was "can you follow our rules?" and not "will you join our tribe?", we are conceptually helpless to organise or resist such forward motion on their part.

Nations are held together by the sentimental bonds which provide a tribal framework of agreement and kindness that goes unspoken because it does not need to be said: we are countrymen, therefore we will show one another we have good intentions, respect for each other's interests, and mutual concern for our standing in society.

Put simply, Aristotle was right when he said that the basis of a nation is the bond of friendship.

We can see that many of the pro-Palestinian protesters and their supporters did not consent to joining our tribe and do not extend the hand of friendship to the peoples amongst whom they reside. They hold to the ways of their old countries, and in many aspects view us as rubes who, for reasons unknown to them, allow all of this to happen.

The rules-based worldview of liberalism permits this. Prior to its establishment, in any other time and place, it would be simply unthinkable for a foreign community to desecrate the statues of national heroes and the local idols of our social values. Yet here we are, and the police do nothing to stop it. In other times and places, such transgressions against the gods of a society would be punished most harshly because it would be understood that a foreign community resides here at our pleasure and not from some abstract right, but our authorities cannot even recognise a crime has been committed against the dignity of our country.

The newcomers are not liberals. They are from the old world of tribes. They don't understand why we permit this either, and make no mistake, they don't respect us for this tolerance. They think we are weak when we do not assert ourselves and our interests, and they are not wrong.

Since I quote Rod Dreher above, and it was Rod who first noted Benjamin’s tweet, I should include one of Rod’s more knock-down recent essays. Dreher quotes Solzhenitsyn on where good and evil are to be found, and his follow up series of examples drive home the point. Solzhenitsyn’s are words to live by.

And Dreher’s is a voice that has helped keep many of us sane. Which is odd, because as a writer he’s rather, shall we say, hyped up. Many consider him shrill. Nonetheless, after years reading him, I have to agree he’s guided by a reliable moral compass. His book Live Not by Lies was brilliantly conceived and landed at just the right time. And he’s been rock solid on rejecting the temptations many on the right are succumbing to in reaction to wokeism. Dreher recognizes race politics as toxic no matter who is practicing it, and no matter what the provocation.

Many on the right, especially the young, are saying “Fight fire with fire.” Dreher is a Christian. He opts for “Fight fire with Christ, and take your knocks.” I suspect he’s saved more than a few people from the abyss.

Finally, I’ll present a more military/political analysis, an interview with former Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin. I take Yadlin to be a reliable source regarding Israeli intentions at present. The interview is revealing, and Yadlin offers plausible interpretations of the combatants and their motives.

Friday, November 3, 2023

Synodality to Synodolatry: The Imperial Narcissism of Team Francis

The pope with participants at the Synod on Synodality, 2023

Much digital ink has been spilled by faithful Catholics pretending to be confused by the Synod on Synodality. One can’t really blame them for adopting the pretense. It allows them leeway to maintain some of the reverence due the pope and our bishops. Still, what is happening at this synod is not confusing. So I will spill much less ink.

What they are doing in Rome at present is making an idol of the Church. They have largely written Our Lord out of the synod documents, and seek to worship in His place a Church reconceived as a progressive, well-meaning “community." To judge from reports and documents so far, the essential core of this new religion is the mere fact of community itself, figured as “walking together." According to one German bishop, such “walking together” is now to supersede Apostolic tradition.

That’s it. It’s a trite and shallow idolatry. It’s the self-worship of a right-thinking collective, with the “right-thinking” to be gleaned by "listening to" the western secular left. To do this particular listening is to hear “the voice of the Spirit." Amazingly, this is the claim we get from clerics who otherwise can’t stop talking about the importance of “discernment.” Larry Chapp, always a sensitive interpreter, has got their number.

The ”synodal Church” is the Church reconceived as social media. It’s the Church looking for likes and shares. And they hope to pull this off by means of a clumsy sleight of hand.

Clumsy? Consider: They offer 1) a single neologism, synodality, and 2) the assertion that the queried desires of a hand-picked group of Catholics can tell us where the Spirit is leading. Based on these two magician’s tricks alone, they intend to remake the Church. “Everything will change!” they say.

Yes, the Church is to become yet another site for the self-worship of the current West.

Which raises the larger, universal meaning. After all, through “synodality” the West’s therapeutic self-worship will be imposed on the Church in Africa and Asia too. More than just a shoddy bait and switch on the part of western clerics, then, this synod is also a matter of cultural imperialism.

“Listen to the margins!” they tell us. Then they choose the same margins American corporate culture now chooses. They impose the same idea of “marginal” our State Department now imposes. Except note: Corporate America and the State Department got there first. Does the Holy Spirit then take directives from US coastal elites? Apparently.

Our current pope is supposedly a strident critic of American capitalist culture, yet we see in this synod that he hears the same Zeitgeist our corporate CEOs hear. And just as these corporate CEOs now pretend to make their companies into “diverse and inclusive communities” of the right-thinking, putting their investors and customers in second place, so the men around our pope seek to do with the Church. No longer is it the faithful Bride of Christ who serves His will, but a sublimated “walking together” during which “every voice will be listened to.” And just as with our corporations and fallen universities, that assertion regarding “every voice” is a bald-faced lie. Watch what happens to those who disagree with this new version of the Church, who seek to keep faith with long-established magisterial teaching. Such people are “rigid," or even "dead." They are to be mocked or excluded.

Our pope then, by presiding over this remaking of the Church, makes himself the criterion by which Catholics are or are not part of the community. Given the context, it is a gesture of self-deification. He is the Vicar of Christ who presumes to change his Master’s teaching according to his own “right-thinking” as vicar, then to exclude those who point out what he is doing. He cannot cite magisterial teaching against them. All he can do is scoff and offer a version of the claim that they are “not in line with the values of our community”—values which are increasingly those of the western secular left.

The ideology driving the statements of synod participants and dictating the documents is thus more than familiar. It’s boilerplate 21st century identity politics. It’s the imperial narcissism of the self-obsessed western left. The only thing newsworthy about this synod is the fact that a pope and bishops are present, consenting to it. Yet that is very newsworthy.

“You are Peter, and on this rock I will found my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

I believe those words. Yet these men in Rome, the gates of secular self-worship have prevailed against them. So how will they fare with the gates of hell?

I believe it is still His Church. Which means I have to decide who these men are. These men who babble nonstop about discernment are finally forcing many of us to discern, though not along with them.