Noxious clouds, Noxious arguments
A long post rambling from logic to abortion to music, as I have not posted in a while.
There was something entirely appropriate about the cloud of noxious smoke that settled over the northern part of the United States in the last days of June. Ostensibly related to the vast wildfires in Canada but stinking of both plastic and suspicion, it was a fitting metaphor for our contentious and fractious times, let alone appropriately symbolic of what has become of the sixth month of the year, where one can hardly breathe when he exits his own home, and the safety and edification of one’s children takes on an increased urgency. There is the air we breathe, and there is the air we breathe. On the former, being a generally well-adjusted asthmatic, I suddenly found myself near the point of gasping in the chemical cloud and became a prisoner in my own home. As to the latter, those who are societal asthmatics – the types of people who both sense the poison in the air before everyone else and are sensitive enough to be hurt by it the soonest – have been gasping for years now. I was surprised to see people taking vigorous walks around my neighborhood even as the air took on a hazy tan quality even at eye level; there are indeed those who can shrug off the metaphorical haze as well, and they can be envied until one realizes that they may already be in hell.
During my formative years, one of the frequent topics I heard discussed among sensitive and thinking folks – the answers to which always fascinated me – regarded whether or not one would have hypothetically had the honesty, courage, and temerity to oppose the onset of the Hitlerian regime in 1930s Germany. (Somehow, the onset of something far more deadly – Communism in Europe – was never discussed).
This once hypothetical conversation in the west is now entirely outdated, as we have all now had the opportunity to rehearse our answer. If you would vote against the sanctity of life because of a bumper-sticker slogan, or perhaps you buckled under the vaccine mandates out of fear or convenience, or did nothing as your vaccine-resistant colleagues lost their jobs, you can be pretty sure that you would not in the least have opposed the nightmare which slowly descended on 1930s Germany (or 1910s Russia) either. As a Facebook comedian recently joked: “I know I wouldn’t have opposed Hitler. I couldn’t even resist putting a needle into my arm in order to be able to go out and eat.” Furthermore, in our time, if you work at any kind of level for major tech corporations (YouTube or Google) or supposedly philanthropic arms such as the Soros or Gates foundations, you need not wonder if he would have collaborated with the Atlantic slave trade to ensure your financial comfort, as you now work for a company willing to do business with murderous regimes that rape, murder political dissidents, keep slaves, administer forced abortions, and even harvest organs. You can add Pope Francis and his Vatican administration to that list, along with President Joe Biden and all of NATO, who also shamelessly work with Turkey despite that nation’s brutal repression of political dissidents. Or perhaps Germany, who is still – still – working with Russia because of their reliance on their oil? (So much for Germany being Europe’s greenest nation). Or perhaps Vanguard and BlackRock investing, who through the process of ESG investing are pushing all manner of woke ideology using our own money? No indeed: if one looks at the corporations, foundations, religions, and nations run by SWAMtP (the smartest, wisest, and most tolerant people), there is hardly any moral high ground to stand on. Swamped, indeed.
If there is one blessing to our confused times – and they are without a doubt the most confused times in recorded history – it is that we should at least be living free from illusions about our own supposed individual bravery. Life has a way of humbling you even in normal times, at least if you are paying attention to yourself in any meaningful way, while our times place the humility opportunities into overdrive. It is partly this, I think, which has driven the so-called “intellectual dark web,” as ideological boundaries have crumbled between once ideologically unassociated individuals, placing people like Camille Paglia and Bret Weinstein, RFK Jr. and Jordan Peterson, and Bishop Robert Barron in the same room: everyone knows something is up, and the SWAMtP desperately do not want these conversations to take place in the public eye.
And yet this opportunity for personal humility is only possible if you are willing or able to think critically. While this will risk the SWAMtP’s robots (who probably haven’t read this far anyhow) calling me a Eurocentric supremacist or some such thing, I would define thinking as: “using logic and tested methods of critical inquiry to systematically accuse oneself, with the ultimate goal of understanding one’s core motivations and reforming these motivations by rationalizing sensible beliefs from deeply considered first principles.” So a sensible thinker, beginning in both personal and epistemic humility, will not like the politics that benefit them personally, or follow the business practices that most enrich them, or listen to the music that gave them pleasure as a teenager, but rather conform such things to their adult pursuit of an uncompromising and functional truth. Of course, anyone attempting such a road will frequently fail miserably, but that is why it is so good at building humility. Clearly, when God set up the discoverable bounds of logic and valid disputation, he had our humility chiefly in mind. And when Christ calls us to ‘Metanoia’ – to change one's thinking – I think this relates as well.
Just this past week, driven inside by the aforementioned vapors enveloping us in northern Ohio, I made the fundamental error of getting involved in multiple arguments on Twitter. (I continue to navigate this platform without great success; I cannot summon the narcissism seemingly necessary to build quick success therein, it keeps showing me things that make me very angry, and am not certain if I will stay. Prudential decision forthcoming). After years of epic (and admittedly largely fruitless) online pugilism -- I had generally avoided most such things in the interest of keeping my hard-earned peace -- I was drawn into a sprawling debate on abortion. I confess to wasting three days of clicking (something my paying clients will not be glad to read), hoping to get one of my interlocutors to reason in favor of abortion from first principles, stating a worldview that is at least decently considered and honest. Instead, from a number of random anonymous accounts slinging vicious ad hominem to one very public abortionist, I received the argumentative equivalent of South Park's Cartman saying, “whateva, whateva, I do what I want!”
It’s really an astonishing thing to behold: somebody who literally, as an assistant to an abortionist, makes the argument (when re-ordered): that “Reality is not logical. So arguing first principles and philosophical justification for my supposed right to kill another human being is entirely unnecessary.” And then, like Cartman:
Yes, South Park was unnecessarily crass and probably did more harm than good in the grand scheme of things, but in a few instances their satire absolutely nailed the moment and predicted the future. The generation which would emerge next – which was only in diapers when this episode was aired – would absolutely embody this iteration of the now archetypal Cartman. It’s shocking, because it’s absolutely spot-on. Then there is the (presumed) lady who denies that abortions end a human existence. This is not worth addressing, because it is the placing of a new feminist metaphysics over and above both logic (which they don’t believe in, clearly) or science, which defines the beginning of human existence at conception.
The fact remains: anyone who justifies abortion (and values intellectual consistency) must tell you why embryo, infant, teenager, and geriatric medical patient are different categories which deserve (or do not deserve) the protection afforded to human beings. Faced with Peter Singer’s devastating (and entirely serious) logical argument that the abortion position should allow for infanticide until at least two years of age, they revert to Cartman mode. Press hard enough, and you’ll likely find that their version of elder care is similarly ghoulish, but not surprising. The reason for their resistance to simple argumentation, of course, is because of where it leads: it leads to the inevitable conclusion that our sexuality is not some plaything that we can emancipate from responsibility. It leads one to consider that placing a barrier between intercourse and conception is deeply problematic, and that the supposed “right” to kill the unborn, statistically, is almost always used as a backstop to failed contraception. And logically, it leads to both legalized infanticide qua Singer and the worldwide push for Euthanasia. For the people (denizens of the SWAMtP) who supposedly care so much about individual rights, it’s a fundamental betrayal of their apparent core principles. And as such, there are only two ultimate options: acknowledge the futility of your position and change, or devolve into coat-hanger waving illogical madness.
But away from the dank and festering domain of ghouls, for it is a depressing one indeed.
At this time I was also rereading Peter Kwasniewski‘s excellent new book on music and culture, titled: Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life. (I say “re-reading”, because I had originally read it in manuscript form in a white heat, rushing to be able to give an honest assessment of the book for my little blurb on the back cover.) It is a deeply considered work which links the musical to the general, and one which deserves slow digestion. Therein Dr. Kwasniewski reminded me of some thing Aristotle had written 3000 years ago: that arguing with a person who will not or cannot work from first principles is like arguing with a vegetable. The west’s previous insistence on embracing the principle of non-contradiction also largely finds its roots in Aristotelian philosophy, being fully fleshed-out by the Christian Scholastics many centuries later.
“It is impossible to hold (suppose) the same thing to be and not to be (Metaph IV 3 1005b24 cf.1005b29–30).”
Save that on unlike Aristotle‘s time our vegetables vote enthusiastically, and are corralled by special interest groups into vicious (but amoeba-like and therefore difficult to control) digitally-drive conglomerates ready to burn down nations (just see the current riots in France for the latest example) to make their point. Our vegetables also control culture, academia, and the media, or at least occupy prominent public positions in such areas even as the true control is wielded by the same types of men who would sell their souls just to make an extra dollar from China, never mind the rampant human rights abuses this links them to. Nor is it merely a corporate sin, as once storied organizations like The international Olympic Committee have similarly lost all moral credibility over doing business with the devil. One indeed wonders if Socrates would have kept his famous magnanimity on social media, which seems to bring out the worst in all of us.
So yes, there are indeed people out there who really think that globalists started the fires in Canada, perhaps in order to frighten us further with their climate change narrative. Three years ago, I would have automatically scoffed at such thinking as simplistic and unlikely. But we are now in a new era, where we have just endured the most powerful governments in the world working hand in glove with the pharmaceutical industry to accomplish the growth of government hegemony and the enrichment of big pharma through a vaccine resulting from Trump policies: all this is enough to make one’s head spin, and I am no longer so sure about anything. Yes, Justin Trudeau still strikes me like a pathetic patsy, and I am quite certain he could no more reason from first principles than the ghoulish harpies who engaged me on abortion on Twitter. And yet this type of person becomes even more dangerous when they ascend the elite ladder of globalist influence. You and I would not start such fires – or make people forcibly inject themselves with what was ostensibly an experimental drug – because we might feel a responsibility to our society, or – even more fundamentally -- a fear before the judgment of Almighty God. The Trudeaus and Merkels and Pelosis and Soros of the world, by contrast, have no such compunction let alone healthy ontological fear; they act in the interests of their own power and ideological dominance. A Priest recently told me that the old pattern of old folks returning to God before it is “too late” is rapidly crumbling, with old folks increasingly clutching their errors like sacred pearls (certainly not rosary beads) until their last rattling breath. Looking at the aforementioned group’s shameless clinging to power based in falsehood, I am quite sure father was telling the truth.
So returning to Canada: surely, the sorts of people who are most entwined in the extreme environmentalist agendas are not only powerful globalists, but also ostensibly ignoring the very issues which could most quickly lead to the immediate reduction of carbon emissions. They are unwilling to consider nuclear power, and they are ignoring issues such as the Darvaza crater(which spews as much into the atmosphere annually as the entire Unites States), or China’s (there they are again) criminally rampant pollution, while they are willing to overlook human rights abuses to create enough batteries to enrich the electric car industry, or take away your gas stove, or make you eat bugs. They already collapse our sense of family and work overtime to ease access to the killing of the the unborn. As so, glimpsed this way – objectively, in the painful light of revelatory truth – do you doubt that these same people would light a few Canadian forests ablaze? Yes, I recognize that arguing from potentiality proves nothing, and I have nothing to prove here. I remain fully agnostic on this particular issue (and the climate panic in general), simply because I generally withhold judgment until I know an issue very well. Yet I absolutely refuse to dismiss the people who hold such suspicions, because they are entirely justified in the context of modern history, just as suspicions about the vaccination industry are entirely based in logical conclusions drawn from common experience). I am also no longer willing to accept the media’s trotted out experts explaining such possibilities away: those same experts have absolutely lied through their teeth throughout the entire pandemic, censored what should be free conversation on a whole host of issues, and are responsible for billions of people being unnecessarily jabbed with an experimental medication they possibly didn’t need, including young children who statistically had almost no chance of dying from this virus. And they know they crossed the line, because more thoughtful (or desperate) pundits have already called for a post-pandemic amnesty. No sensible person can any longer “accept the expert opinion”, and this earned distrust of public institutions is a tragedy for our already collapsing culture. It will not be easily rebuilt.
Yet something even more precious is lost in the usurpation of the information age by the serial grifters: rather than have debate, for instance, on what may be a climate catastrophe or what certainly is a crisis regarding abortion, or whether or not our current charitable government constructs enable rather than assist generational poverty, we instead have the waters muddied by the power-grabbers. From the legacy media to academic publishing to the military to banks and major investment firms, once vaunted institutions have been hijacked by ideologues using them as vehicles in a global power grab cloaked in fear.
Again: something precious has been lost, and it will not be easily rebuilt.
If you doubt me, ask yourself the following questions:
Why did youtube just try to erase RFK Jr for criticizing the vaccine industry, and just how far does big Pharma’s ?
Why has the left gone from being anti-corporate power to corporate shills?
Why do Republicans almost never follow up on their breathless promises to their voting base on moral issues?
Why do Democrats do nothing to really improve the lives of African Americans, and yet hold almost total sway over them as a voting block? This seems to be true whether you approach the issue from the left or the right.
What do you think of ESG investing?
Why were once experienced and storied medical professionals serially censored during the height of the Covid epidemic?
Can you question the dominant narrative on climate change without being called a climate denier?
Can you point to any major medical journal which would publish articles that question the prominent vaccine narrative, or a scientific journal which would dare consider contrary approaches to climate change? Do you even know how corrupt academic publishing has become? As in, both scientific publishing and the social sciences?
Look at France today: can you easily ride a middle ground opinion in which both police brutality is wrong and the burning of cities and cultural landmarks in protest is wrong? How much is such an opinion being shown in the media?
Do you think we need to topple historical statues to save feelings?
Indeed, can you even tacitly question the issue of Merkel-style immigration in Europe without being called a xenophobe or racist? Just what double-standards on race and culture do you hold?
Can you separate the issue of individuals who deal with same sex attraction or gender dysphoria from the LGBTQ ideological agenda? Can you even admit that such a clear agenda exists? Can one be against aspects of this ideology without automatically being labeled some kind of something-phobe? (Or, once again, in France, arrested?) Do you know any ex-gays, or people with SSA choosing to live in celibacy, or practicing homosexuals who name and disagree with the agenda? Did you even such a minority exists before I mentioned them here?
Are there any major public intellectuals or talking heads who you dismiss out of hand as a result of groupthink as opposed to a considered deep-dive into their work? (Jordan Peterson, once again, is a great example of such a knee-jerk lightning rod: no shortage of people from far-left atheists to highly religious traditionalists dismiss him out of hand without really sensibly approaching his work, which is generally moderate and open to discussing issues with a wide ideological range of serious thinkers).
We can list questions and contentious subjects for many pages, but I think these suffice as a starting point by those insistent on clinging to their previous notions of normality.
Certainly I am not alone in perceiving the rampant spirit of confusion that seems to have settled upon the developed world, or the conflicts of power and profit and ideology holding powerful sway over what should be otherwise rational conversations between competent adults. Indeed, the loss of freedom of speech is secondary to the fact that even as we maintain some semblance of it (and God bless the intellectual dark web for fanning the flames of free inquiry and discourse), it remains nearly impossible to find sources of information which somebody else cannot dismiss outright, often for valid reasons.
Something precious has been lost, and it will not be easily rebuilt.
Which in a very admittedly long-winded way brings me back to the issue of beauty and the arts. While being a composer in the modern world may seem like a bit of a thankless task, we try to remember that music can bring clarity when the world spins about you. In a time like ours, it provides an amazing service to humanity. And ironically enough, the very clarity and re-balancing we seek can be instantly accessed by using the same digital tools which also keep the Kardashian Empire in power.
There is an ancient clarity which can be experienced in serious music, including much serious contemporary music. One of my personal favorites in terms of “palette cleansing” works which can sandblast the stench of modernity and confusion from us is Arvo Part’s Berliner Messe – when words confuse, the balance of the spheres can re-orient:
Returning to the question of the sanctity of life, the great James MacMillan wrote a stunning work whose ontological orientation is quite clear in the matter, while also demonstrating to continued power and relevance of contemporary orchestral composing:
My own humble contribution to this conversation comes in this case through a work for four musicians – two singers and two string players – called “Before I formed you…” The piece sets two biblical texts on the sanctity of life and the shattering dignity of the human person: Psalm 139:13-15, and Jeremiah 1:5.
Whether through music or philosophy or theology (or hopefully, all three), the process of organizing our thoughts more clearly can lead to the organization of our very fundamental selves, balancing our being towards a humble acquiescence of the truth. Few things are more important in this life. This is Metanoia.
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Those interesting in streaming or purchasing the album version of this work (and its companion works) can click here for all purchase options for my latest CD, “Metanoia.”