The bride got shot on her wedding day -but it was just a thing
We are all like Bombur now. What will it take to wake us up ?
It’s now so predictable and precise even.
If the mainstream media do not report on the ethnic identity of perpetrators of violent crime, they are black or muslim. If they don’t report on the victim’s ethnic identity, the perpetrators are black, muslim or migrant. So I read about ten reports of the shooting of a bride in a tiny village in the south of France — Not a peep. Just a normal bride and groom in a little village — shot up by an everyday kind of shooter. This stuff goes on all the time. The subtext is ‘we are reporting it…cause it happened….but that’s all you need to know. Nothing more to look at….Move along!’
Registering the coded language, I concluded rather absently to my wife, who was not really listening, that it just must be Muslim/migrant gang violence from one of the neighbouring cities. And sure enough, she was a young Moroccan whose family lived (probably) in Marseilles and had booked the hall (but only Morocco World News reports this pertinent fact).
The whole thing is appallingly sad. Obviously! A beautiful young woman shot down with a malicious intent that is stunning.
But it also points to the complete degradation of ordinary life in many parts of Europe….most of Europe in fact. The common denominator is ‘diversity’. Partly this is because of substantive nature of the diverse communities — Islamic immigration is a massive problem. It’s also the fact of diversity itself. The loss of a strong, affective, shared identity and sense of a ‘survival unit’ — the loss of the idea that ‘we are in this together’ (as at Dunkirk), means also an unwillingness to go out on a limb, to exert social pressure on malefactors….and also a loss of any shared sense of what behavioural norms should be. So vandalism and school misbehaviour facilitate horizontal peer pressure (in the sense of Gabor Mate ) which in turn normalizes gang affiliation — and then it is too late. And now we are stuck between criminal gangs, an osmotic Islamic invasion of the cities, progressive politics that refuses even to see and name the problem, and an overpowering lethargy that emasculates any cultural reaction before it has even started. The latter is a function of legalized /decriminalized drugs, a narcissistic therapy culture, social media, vaping, sophisticated VR entertainment and porn. Like Bombur falling into the evil enchanted river in Mirkwood, we have allowed ourselves to be anaesthetized. Our cognitive blade has been dulled. Our society is disintegrating from the inside.
This week
reported her own traumatic recognition of the metaphysical assault that has, this week, dealt a deathblow to the old world — the one we inherited from generations of small platoons who carried the torch for hundreds of years.Mary was talking about the legalization of abortion right up to term and the embrace of empathic mercy killing by the state. She’s of course absolutely right. We have lost the instinctive solidaristic understanding of any kind of sacred ‘we’ — that is linked umbilically to the ground of all being, ‘I am who I am’. In other words, Baal is back — for Mary in the guise of ‘extremist bio-libertarianism’. But Screwtape has an extensive wardrobe.
But Screwtape has an extensive wardrobe.
Democracy was not the means. It was the outcome of a liberal individualist society built on the foundations of Christendom. Now this foundation has been destroyed, don’t expect democracy to last. We are living through an increasingly authoritarian liberalism — in which individual quiescence is secured by ever more demoralizing technologies, drugs and manipulations. But if we are moving into a post-democratic society, to some extent this creates a kind of countercultural freedom.
Mary’s piece was a ‘prayer for Albion’. But when/if Albion recovers from this metaphysical assault, it can’t be a passive reassertion of an old status quo. If Bombur awakes from this enchanted somnolence it can only mean conflict. As a complex system, societies are subject to hysteresis — the phenomenon where a system's output depends not only on its current input but also on its past inputs or history. It essentially describes a lag or delay in the system's response to changes in input, meaning the output doesn't immediately reflect the current input but also retains some memory of previous states. In the case of liberal society, the process of fragmentation and the collapse of the shared culture is so extensive that it is no longer possible simply to dial back the changes incrementally. The relatively stable post-war configuration that culminated in the 1990s is now unavailable. Any renewal would have to have to yank hard all manner of cultural levers — economic rules, welfare systems schooling, religious participation, speech laws, marriage laws, military conscription, public festivals and holidays — without reference to liberal-democratic shibboleths about public opinion.
Thus for instance, a reversal of mass migration, would need to be combined with a coercive and unrelenting insistence on integration and assimilation. The postliberal reestablishment of a single shared culture rooted in Christianity cannot be understood in terms of maximal individual freedom. That boat has sailed…..and it has been a disaster. Because it rests on a false anthropology, libertarianism will only further open the door to cultural implosion. Libertarians (and liberals generally) can’t comprehend the non-liberal mind. They expect free market societies to engender free-thinking rational liberal individuals. But in the West, liberal individualism was a product not of liberal economic and social arrangements, but of Christianity. Imposed in other contexts, liberalism has never prospered but rather engendered strange new authoritarian modernisms — Islamic, Hindu, communist.
The way back to some more benign liberal-ish (within certain parameters) society is not itself liberal — and certainly not libertarian per se. Although it could perhaps be best expressed as a libertarianism for families and households. There is no escaping it. The political task at hand is not political, but religious and metaphysical. We must find a way to rebuild and re-express an ascriptive, communitarian insistence that there is one true way — the way of Christ — that is better than others. In the negative mode this is indeed a full throated rejection of multiculturalism. But deeper than this, it simply means going back to Church and taking back the Church from liberal apostates and modernists. For sure there is a political dimension to this. But it can’t be front and centre. Yes we should resist measures such as re-criminalizing homosexuality. It is the height of arrogance for Christians to assume the relative weight that God might impute to different kinds of sin — and we are all sinners. Is my anger or selfishness, let alone sexual hedonism better or worse than your same-sex relationship? Who knows….and none of us should care. Those questions are above our pay grade. But we can and should remove state sponsorship of alternative, sinful sexualities. We should hand schools over to parents and resist the imposition of PRIDE ideology. We can and should reestablish Christian marriage as the only form of household given active support by the state. We can answer should reject public displays of performative obscenity and protect children from gender-cults. And even more controversially, we can and should impose curricula in schools and universities that reflect the prospective monoculture. Before any of that, we perhaps need to get psychologically accommodated to the reality that we live in an authoritarian society. The rule have changed. We have to change also. The culture ‘war of position’ is still war.