Fall of the Republic

There is an interesting video produced by Alex Jones called "Fall of the Republic", which in my view merits watching, and is available for free here.

Though I don't agree with everything in the video, and think certain things are overly sensationalist, the main points of the video are sound.

One of the amusing things is in the beginning is that one of the contributors attributes to America the concept of the separation of powers, limited government and the establishment of government in such a way that it serves a common good. This idea actually comes from St. Robert Bellarmine, whose political treatises never left Thomas Jefferson's desk.

Nevertheless, they trace the work of globalism and the current globalist banking industry in creating the crises that grips us presently. The contributors to this documentary compare it to oligarchy, and demonstrate how the international elite function by that and force various policies to erode the rights of the general population.

The video also exposes the establishment of a world governing body of scientists who enforce the state doctrine of population control, family planning, social engineering and climate change.

The significance of global warming doctrine is that by identifying carbon dioxide as the evil which is "destroying the planet", the world governing body will have the right to tax you and me for the right to breathe. This is essential to breaking down sovereignty and self government, which are so necessary to defending a society from control by an external force.

It also shows us many examples of how a police state is on the verge of being created, and (in my opinion) strongly makes the case for a hidden hand controlling Obama by demonstrating the numerous flip flops from his campaign promises of transparency and change and the reality of continuation of Bush policy, and has nothing at all to do with change.

The movie also has the benefit of not being partisan with respect to right and left, taking aim at both Obama and Bush and demonstrating continuity of Obama and Bush's administrations. In reality of course (as it seems to me), there is total continuity of government since 1988.

The film, bringing us several contributors in the form of economists, climate scientists, researchers and bloggers, really hits the nail on the head of the present crisis. It is also aided by numerous video clips of the elites themselves telling us from their own mouths that accountability, sovereignty and freedom do not matter.

Where the movie fails in my view, is in the concluding half hour they describe the work of the global financial elite as trying to destroy capitalism. What they fail to note is that it is the logical and necessary conclusion of capitalism. The instabilities of capitalism are only solvable, those who have can only make certain they continue to have if they turn modern economies into a slave state. The world the film attempts to show us was predicted by Hilaire Belloc nearly 100 years ago in his work "The Servile State", which he makes the case that capitalism must ultimately end in the restoration of slavery.

Another shortcoming (in my view) of the film is that they do not spend enough time explaining the mechanisms of banking. They spend some time talking about derivatives, and the breakdown of regulation with respect to them, but they do not spend enough time talking about banking either in its proper role or its abuse which is at the heart of today's problems.

The proper function of a bank is to put capital into the community. If x number of people have invested in a bank, and they find (as has always been the case) that people need only 10% of their money at a time, they make an investment on some kind of productive enterprise. This gains the bank a profit, and it was on a productive loan for something say such as mining or manufacturing. The fee they charge for the use of their money is just, it is a percentage of the profit earned with their productive loan. In that sense their money was capital, without which the productive venture could not have worked, and thus the bank has infused capital into the community.

Banking today by contrast takes capital out of the community, and then demands more from the government when they run out of money.

Another of the film's flaws is they act as if America is now the last country standing in the way of the global elite. There are many other countries with many members of their populace just as alarmed as we are, albeit they might be a little less organized and noted than resistance in this country.

Nevertheless, in spite of these and other shortcomings or its Amero-centric outlook, "Fall of the Republic" is an important movie with an important message, our allegiance ought not be to democrats and republicans, neither to 3rd parties, but to a unifying principle of society guaranteeing our freedom and sovereignty, which as Americans is the constitution and the bill of rights. Even as a monarchist I can take that over the new order that is coming.

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Non Angeli sed Angli

It is likely no secret that most people, having completed their high school history requirement, resolve never again to touch the subject. And why should they want to? The accumulation of names and dates, states and battlefields was made as dull as possible by books that were as “scientific” as possible, that is, by books with the story taken out and only a dull hiss left over. But history is a narrative, and without understanding this narrative, this adventure, one might say, or even this romance, one cannot understand even oneself, much less one's time in history and one's place in the story. Even the humane sciences these days aspire to become more “scientific” by becoming less historical. No where is this more true than in economics, where the study of history was dropped from the University of Chicago graduate program in 1972, with all the other major universities following suit soon after. I mention economics because it demonstrates just how silly is the notion of having a humane science apart from a human history. No science is more dependent on history than is economics, where all the data is historical, and all the ideas formed in the cauldron of history.

These reflections came to me while reading a very remarkable history, G. K. Chesterton's A Short History of England. Perhaps it should not be called a “history” at all, since in its brief 87 pages, there is little space for the recitation of names and dates, but it certainly is a story. It is the story of a people that Pope Gregory the Great took for angels. Walking in the marketplace, he saw some slaves for sale whose beauty impressed him, and asked who they were. “Angli,” (English) came the reply. “Non Angli sed angeli” said Gregory, “Not English but angels.” Well, the English are not angels, but they might be something that is actually more interesting; they might be Englishmen. They might be a race with a story to tell and a struggle to finish. The end of the angels' struggle we already know; our own story, and that of the English, is yet to be known. We are always in the middle of a story but we can never know whether it is a tragedy or a comedy; we can only know that it is a struggle, and try to come to grips with our part in the story. We always find ourselves, as we do when reading Homer, in media res in our own epic.

If Chesterton's Short History is not a history in the conventional sense, it is certainly a story in the epic sense. He conveys to the reader a sense of the narrative line of English history, and without a narrative it is impossible to understand history. Our “science” of history has deprived it of meaning. Or rather, such a science is really is really dishonest; it attempts to place its own narrative beyond critique by calling it “scientific.” Chesterton offers us a narrative interpretation of history, and an interpretation is always subject to critique; the historical scientist also offers a particular narrative, he calls that interpretation “science,” and who would dare criticize science?

Chesterton has a particular target in this extended essay. Or rather two. The first concerns the use of history itself, because Chesterton already knows what the post-modernists have only recently discovered, namely that history is used to justify a particular state of affairs. Our author makes this concern explicit:

I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdened mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, and his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he enjoys; and may be content of leaving behind him a yet more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect (and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited.

Chesterton tells this story in behalf of his disinherited countrymen, so that they may regain their inheritance. Now, those who are familiar with post-modernism will instantly recognize in this all the post-modernist themes, namely history as narrative, power as knowledge, and text as context. The Enlightenment preached that knowledge was power, and that science (understood as naturalism) trumped narrative (man's “myths.”) However, this science was itself merely a narrative, one that refused to submit itself to any criticism, but rather demanded the right to be the sole arbiter of every other narrative. But in arbitrating all other disputes, it is not a just judge. Although the Liberalism of the Enlightenment believed that knowledge gave us the freedom to manipulate the world to our will, what it really did was take away all freedom. The man “below stairs” is kept in his place because power forms what he can know of his place, and hence the grounds on which he can object to his place and seek a better one. Power controls what he knows; it even dictates what is knowable, and by marginalizing all other forms of knowledge, it marginalizes all other (and truer) forms of freedom. The man in the inferior place cannot seek to regain his inheritance until he knows that he has been disinherited, and this is the knowledge that power seeks to deny him.

For these reasons, Chesterton is the first and finest of the postmoderns (see G. K. Chesterton—Postmodernist). To be a true postmodern, one must first be a pre-modern, but a pre-modern who insists on applying the classic wisdom to the current situation. And this is where postmodernism has its biggest problems. Lacking a pre-modern foundation, its critiques of the Enlightenment have nowhere to go. They end up being excessively modern and insufficiently post. And they end up being obscure. The ideas that Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault place in incomprehensible French, Chesterton states in clear and elegant English. (See Is the Devil from Paris?)

Chesterton has a second concern with is connected to the first: the rise of what he sees as “Prussianism.” He writes this essay in 1917, in the midst of the darkest days of World War I. Chesterton was a supporter of that war, a war which cost him his brother's life, Cecil. And Cecil's death was a loss to Distributism as well, since Cecil was its practical and organizational genius, as much as Gilbert was its literary genius. Gilbert's support of the war strikes us as problematic, and at odds with his opposition to most imperial adventures, such as the Boer War. But Chesterton saw in Prussianism the modern man par excellence. For him, it was the Prussian spirit, rather than the French Revolution, which really heralded the downful of Christian Europe. The ideals of the French Revolution, liberté, égalité, fraternité, were, after all, just ancient Christian ideals stripped of their sacred roots, and whithering on the vine. The French Revolution could be re-Christianized; Chesterton did not think this was possible for the Prussian evolution. Prussia was the last place in Europe to be converted to Christianity, and the first to leave it; they had barely become Catholic when they were asked to become Protestant. And perhaps “asked” isn't the right word.

Chesterton's essay is also a lesson in good historiography, namely that it is written with humility and charity. Chesterton always tries to see the world from the viewpoint of the people and times he is describing, and without this act of humility, real history—history that is not merely ideological special pleading—is impossible. Chesterton is always quick to praise the virtues of his enemies, nor does he hesitate to chide the vices of his friends. And always, there is his quick wit, his apt turn of phrase. In this brief book, I gained a deeper understanding of the English nation, and their semi-angelic struggle.

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Is the Devil from Paris?

Is the devil from Paris? Many people seem to think so. And if not the devil himself, then at least a particular demon, one whose name is not “Legion” but “Postmodernism.” Postmodernism is a philosophical movement that originates largely with a legion of Frenchmen, three in particular, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault. This “unholy trinity” (as Jamie Smith calls them) has raised a challenge to the received wisdom of Enlightenment thought that many find as perplexing as it is (at times) incomprehensible. By the “Enlightenment” I mean basically the challenge of 17^th and 18^th century philosophy to the authority of traditional faith and belief, in general, and to the Catholic Church in particular. This challenge consisted of asserting the autonomy of the individual, and a claim of a pure “objectivity” which results in a science that has a unique access to universal truth and rationalism to which all cults, creeds, and cultures must submit themselves if they wish to have any validity.

However, as much as persons of faith might appreciate a challenge to such rationalism, they often find that postmodernism has a basic problem. Namely, although it purports to reject the Enlightenment's notions of truth, it regards these notions as the only possible notions of truth. Hence, postmodernism secretly accepts back what it rejects, and ends up rejecting truth itself; it therefore ends in nihilism. Indeed, in practice, postmodernism often ends up as hypermodernism (see Battling the Swooshtika), the idea that we have no real identity save what we create for ourselves, largely (in a capitalist society) through the products that we buy or the politics that we practice, products and politics that have no real meaning in themselves, save the meanings we can be persuaded to give them. This results in the primacy of marketing and ideology.

Nevertheless, a critique of modernism should be welcomed by Christians, or at least by those Christians whose Christianity has not been completely tainted by rationalism. And we find that many Christians have indeed appropriated the postmodernist critique; this forms the heart of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, for example, which would return theology to its pre-Enlightenment (and even pre-14^th century) roots. And Pope Benedict XVI appropriated much of postmodernist thought in his recent encyclical, Spe Salvi (see The Postmodernist Pope.) From the other side, postmodernist critics are discovering the value of Christianity in their analysis. For example, Slavoj Žižek has made heavy use of Christianity in general and G. K. Chesterton in particular (see G. K. Chesterton, Postmodernist.)

One problem, however, is that the postmodernists often use a vocabulary that is inaccessible to general reader. Indeed, it seems to some that the postmoderns get entirely too much credit for translating Enlightenment drivel into incomprehensible French. Hence postmodernist thought has remained beyond the reach of most people. This problem is addressed by James K. A. Smith in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture). In this brief book (156 pages), Smith manages to take the most problematic expressions of postmodernism and not only to explain them in clear and accessible language, but to show their relevance to traditional Christianity. Jamie Smith concentrates on three statements of postmodernism: “There is nothing outside the text” (Derrida); “An incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard), and; “Power is knowledge” (Foucault). Smith undertakes the formidable task of making these statements understandable in plain English, and showing their relevance to Christianity. Concerning the Derrida's “deconstructionism,” Smith concludes that it helps us recover two key fundamentals of the faith: the centrality of Scirpture for mediating our understanding of the world and the role of the community in the interpretation of Scripture. As for Lyotard's “metanarratives,” these help us recover the understanding of faith as a narrative, rather than a collection of propositions, and the confessional nature of our narrative. In regard to Foucault's Nietzschean claim that “power is knoweldge,” Smith counters that it should “push us to realize what MTV learned long ago: (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b) the necessity of the church to enact counterformation and counterdisciplines. In other words, we need to think about discipline as a creational that needs proper direction.”

Prof. Smith notes that, “One of the reasons postmodernism has been the boyeyman for the Christian church is that we have become so thoroughly modern. But while postmodernism may be the enemy of our modernity, it can be the ally of our ancient heritage.” This is an important insight; it may well be that the best way to be “postmodern” is to be “pre-modern.” While the postmodern is often forced into nihilism by an inadequate notion of truth, the Christian has older models and older means, and so can appropriate the postmodern critique to the advantage of Christ and His Church.

My sole critique of this book comes in Smith's application of postmodernism to liturgy, an application that strikes me as excessively modern rather than pre-modern; it seems to me to be mere “muti-culturalism.” However, this is a nitpick in an otherwise excellent treatment; liturgy is hard, especially for the liturgists. If you can read but one book on Postmodernism, this is the book to read.

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The Postmodernist Pope

When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything like a nail. The particular hammer I am wielding these days is that of postmodernism, while I prepare to write an article on rather surprising use of G. K. Chesterton within some postmodernist authors. Now, postmodern writing is deliberate designed to give the reader a headache, so it is with a sense of relief that I took a break to read the Pope’s latest encyclical, Spe Salvi. I was astounded to find the major elements of the postmodern critique of modernism were incorporated into this remarkable encyclical.

The postmodernists critique modernism, and especially Liberal Capitalism, on the grounds of modernism’s radical individualism and naïve notions of “objective” and “scientific” truth. The postmodernists insist on regarding the individual in his social setting, and they make language and culture the primary means for understanding humans. In other words, they make relationships the key to humanity. However, postmodernism has a real problem, in that it secretly accepts back that which it purports to reject; having rejected Enlightenment notions of truth, received from Bacon and Descartes and Hume, it then regards these as the only possible notions of truth and so ends rejecting truth itself. Therefore, its critique has nowhere to go except to nihilism or relativism. The postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment is very good, but lacking a clear alternative, it is a dead end. Indeed, the postmodernists attempt a critique of capitalism on the grounds of justice, but having relativized truth, such a critique must fail. As a practical matter, post-modernism ends up as hyper-modernism (for a description of how this works in practice, see Battling the Swooshtika). However, Christian thinkers can, and have, appropriated elements of the postmodernism into their thought because they have a more secure and older notion of truth, one that is not vulnerable to either the modernist or postmodernist attack. The Radical Orthodoxy movement especially has appropriated postmodernism to the advantage of the Church.

But then, no one is more radically orthodox than this Pope, and in this encyclical he shows that his orthodoxy—and the Church’s—is more than a match for both modernism and postmodernism. He is able to turn the best within each to the advantage of the Church and the believer. However, his critique is not solely directed outward; he uses the postmodernist language to critique a Christianity based solely on an individualistic and purely private notion of salvation; in other words, his critique is also a self-critique. Pope Benedict will not allow us to abandon the world to its own devices, while we sit by in splendid isolation. No, the Pope rejects the notion of the “‘salvation of the soul’ as a flight from responsibility for the whole, and …[a] project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others.”

While this community-oriented vision of the “blessed life” is certainly directed beyond the present world, as such it also has to do with the building up of this world—in very different ways, according to the historical context and the possibilities offered or excluded thereby.

The Pope begins this meditation by taking up one of the key postmodernist themes, that of language as primarily performative rather than merely informative, and this is especially true of the language of the gospels. What this means for Benedict is that:

The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.

What unites the informative and performative elements of the Gospels is the virtue of hope. Benedict here enters an argument that has raged since the Reformation over the proper understanding of Hebrews 5:1, “Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.” What does the term hypostasis mean here? In the ancient Church, it was translated as substancia, “substance,” something that actually existed. But beginning with Luther, it was translated by “assurance.” In other words, hope was demoted from the substantial order to the merely psychological. (Cf. my article, Lost in Translation: Hope and Hypostasis in Hebrews) For the Pope, hope is substantial, and this makes all the difference in the world:

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.

The Pope goes on to demonstrate the shortcomings of the Enlightenment notions of progress and rationalism. Without Christian hope—and the God who is the substance of that hope—progress and rationalism become barbarism and irrationality. The modern world has sought its freedom by cutting itself off from the very source of freedom.

What this means is that every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed. Yet every generation must also make its own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use of human freedom; hence, always within human limits, they provide a certain guarantee also for the future. In other words: good structures help, but of themselves they are not enough. Man can never be redeemed simply from outside. Francis Bacon and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity that he inspired were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed through science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task—even if it has continued to achieve great things in the formation of man and in care for the weak and the suffering.

The Pope also addresses, under the aspect of hope, the themes of the last judgment and the end of man, and he does so in a way that unites justice and grace with the judgment, which is shown to be the judgment of love—all consuming and purifying love:

The judgment of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace. If it were merely grace, making all earthly things cease to matter, God would still owe us an answer to the question about justice—the crucial question that we ask of history and of God. If it were merely justice, in the end it could bring only fear to us all. The incarnation of God in Christ has so closely linked the two together—judgment and grace—that justice is firmly established: we all work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Nevertheless grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our “advocate”, or parakletos (cf. 1 Jn 2:1).

There is much, much more here, and I can barely scratch the surface. This encyclical is but a day old. But I am convinced that it is an encyclical for the ages, one of those that will be read in generation after generation. It is an encyclical that not only addresses the Christian, but reaches out to those who, although they are concerned with justice, have held back from the faith, often because they found it too unfaithful to its own sources and too disdainful of the world. To these, the Pope says, “come home.”

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G. K. Chesterton, Postmodernist

Postmodernism is not a movement that one would associate with G. K. Chesterton. But comes now the postmodernist critic Slavoj Žižek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real. The title comes from the movie, The Matrix. When the hero is released from artificial world of the Matrix, he awakens to a devastated Chicago and is told "Welcome to the desert of the Real." The remarkable thing about Žižek's book is that the single most-cited source is G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

Now, postmodernism is not usually associated with Chesterton. However, Žižek may be on to something. The essence of postmodernism is a rejection of modernistic notions of truth and "objectivity," and the bogus claims to be able to reduce everything to a rationalistic "science." For the postmodernist, the narrative is primary, the story of our relationship to the world and the truth. However, postmodernism tends to end up in nihilism. Why? Because they secretly accept back that which they reject; they critique the modernist notion of truth, but then they regard this as the only possible definition of truth, and hence have nowhere to go but to the void. Therefore, the real problem with postmodernism is that it is insufficiently postmodern; it grants too much--everything in fact--to modernism, and in rejecting it rejects everything.

The Christian can make better use of the postmodern critique because we have an older notion of truth to fall back on; we are not trapped by nihilism, but can rely on the narratives known as Scripture and Tradition.

So what has this to do with Chesterton? In Orthodoxy, he examines the faith not as a series of propositions to be proved or disproved, but to be examined through his personal experience, through his own history. It is a history that begins with a rejection of all that Christians hold to be true and an acceptance of all that the moderns want. But he discovers, on this journey, that the only way to get the liberty that the moderns want is to accept what the Christians hold as true. That is to say, in order to be fully modern he must be fully Christian. This is not the explication of a rationalistic proposition, but the discovery of a real and personal relationship with the truth. It is through his own narrative that G. K. discovers the narrative beyond his own. Therefore, he may be the first and truest of the postmoderns.

Or perhaps not the first. The first may be someone from a long time ago. We assume that God gives us the best gifts possible. And in Scripture, God gives us not a catechism to be memorized, but a narrative to be lived. He gives us first the story of Israel's relationship with God, and then the story of God's own Son on earth; in other words, He gives us history and biography; He gives us narratives. Where we might prefer a Summa, He gives us a sermon; where we might expect a syllogism, He gives us a psalm. Prayer, prophecy, poetry, and parable are the means of truth.

This is not to reject the tools of logic, proposition, syllogism, etc. These are indispensable tools in understanding the narratives we have been given. But it is to establish the proper order between the narratives and their explication. We need theology to properly understand God, but at the same time we understand that God cannot be "trapped" in some "Theo-logic." The Logos both founds and exceeds all logic. In the last analysis, we are not interested in analysis for its own sake, but only for the sake of following more closely in His footsteps. So the first postmodern may be the first pre-modern, that is, the Holy Spirit, who guides us to all truth.

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