Reeling Forward

During a bout of insomnia last night, I felt compelled to reread Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement Address, “A World Split Apart.” Several passages jumped out at me, particularly the following.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say criminality as such? Legal frames, especially in the United States, are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There are many such cases.

Before you assume that I intend to directly connect Solzhenitsyn’s penetrating observations with the ongoing uproar over President Donald Trump’s recent executive order temporarily banning the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, grant me a moment to explain myself. The Trump ban, which many have argued is not only imprudent but ultimately ineffective for thwarting terrorist attacks on American soil, may or may not survive a legal challenge; what has certainly not survived, even in Solzhenitsyn’s time, is our collective capacity to confront evil. Obviously a vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists per se, that is, they do not wear suicide vests, gun or knife people at random, or set off homemade explosive devices in public places. That does not change the fact, however, that all Muslims profess religious error and that these errors, like all errors, pose a danger to all societies at all times and in all places. While the political situation today demands tolerance, it is always tolerance of some evil, not a tolerance of some good. However, even tolerance has its limits, particularly when confronting a false religion that has spread violence, misery, and immorality over the globe for more than 1,000 years.

This reality is ignored by the good liberals and deluded Christians of our day. The only thing that seems to matter is the “rights” of Muslims in positive, legal sense, not the fact that Islam itself is inherently dangerous. In an effort to (weakly) combat such claims, liberals will point to the history of Christianity, claiming that A, B, C, etc. atrocity was carried out by Christians and therefore Christianity is no less (and may even be more) dangerous than Islam. What’s missing from this analysis is a fair reading of what the Church actually teaches and, from there, an evaluation of whether or not this-or-that action, carried out at some point in history, comported with Church teaching. Tomorrow, I could go out my front door naked, covered in peanut butter, flinging sacks of dog feces at people in the name of Buddhism, Hinduism, Rastafarianism, and so forth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean my barking-mad behavior has any connection whatsoever to those or any other extant religions on the planet.

Islam, on the other hand, has a long and storied history of aggression toward non-believers with periods of relative calm coming at the expense of non-Islamic persons. The Christians of the former Byzantine Empire were not all forced to convert by the sword, but their continued existence depending upon living as second-class human beings under the Ottomans and watching as their church degenerated into an ethnic enclave, cut off from the wider Christian world. In more recent times, we have witnessed the Islamic State (ISIS)—a highly organized politico-religious movement that has managed to hold significant ground in Syria and Iraq precisely because its iteration of Islam is attractive to other Muslims—carry out one of the bloodiest persecutions of Christians since the days of the Soviet Union. People protest and call it an aberration without bothering to look back over centuries upon centuries of similar actions carried out in the name of the false Prophet Muhammad and his dirt deity Allah.

Even if it were possible, by the waive of a magic wand, to distinguish the “good Muslim” from the “bad Muslim,” that is, the terrorist, the liberals of today would opine that that such wand-waiving violates the terrorists’ rights. Where is the due process? What laws are being cited and what is their proper interpretation? Is there not a way for the text of the Constitution—or any other foundational document—to be read upside down, sideways, and inside out to protect these poor terrorists from being singled-out a priori and prevented from carrying out their terrible acts? If you think such questions would not be asked, then please let me encourage you to peruse social media; the idiocy that is now running wild is astounding.

Of course, terrorism and the scourge that is Islam is not our only challenge today. And, truth be told, it may not be our biggest problem. Returning to Solzhenitsyn, it must be acknowledged that our “[s]ociety appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence,” especially now, in the digital age, where “pornography, crime, and horror” come packaged together in a single streaming video from any number of online “adult” websites. Consumerism, and the destructive capitalism which feeds off of it, is no longer condemned by Christians, even Catholics, but rather propped-up by churchmen and “think tanks” who believe, without reason, that “human flourishing” is not only an end in itself, but can be secured materially rather than spiritually. As perverse as their theology is in parts, can any of us blame the ISIS fighter for looking upon our works, our empire of smut and entertainment (or smut-as-entertainment), and feeling nothing but revulsion—the sort that easily elicits violence?

The promise of liberalism, which many believe was renewed in 1989 with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, rings hollow today, and yet those intoxicated with liberal ideology still control the machinery of society. In fact, liberals now control the machinery of the Catholic Church, meaning that the truth of things, the very truth of life and what it is for, must now take second place to securing an unimaginative, prepackaged “living space” in this fallen world. We clamor on about rights without reference to obligations, rarely contemplating the doom we have secured for ourselves in exchange for transient pleasures, many of which are not even available to those consigned to destitution and depravity by an intrinsically immoral socio-economic system.

Ours is not merely “a world split apart,” as Solzhenitsyn said, but a world gone mad. The United States in particular is not “a shining city upon a hill” but rather—to paraphrase Carl Schmitt summarizing the counterrevolutionary thinker Juan Donoso Cortes— “a ship that reels forward, piloted by a crew of drunken sailors, who dance and howl until God decides to sink the ship so that silence can rule the sea once again.” When that day comes, no doubt there will be some of us, perhaps many of us, standing before the Throne of Christ weeping about our rights.

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