From Under the Rubble…Old School Friends
In the Rubble’s constant effort to cull unnecessary stuff, a brief student paper saw the light of day for the first time since the pre-Woodstock era. It summarized the much younger Rubbler’s first impressions after reading about friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics almost 50 years ago.
An excerpt:
The foundation of the best society is one which would include the highest bond of friendship among its citizens. Since this sense of friendship is voluntary and good, so will a sense of justice in the society be founded not on coercion but on fairness and mutual respect. The foundation of the family is the foundation of society: friendship
Wordy, to be sure, but clearly, Aristotle was on to something.
The love of the good guides this highest form of friendship – which is virtuous because it is the proper function of man to love the good and for mankind to share that love. The smallest natural community, the family, is built on a common love for the good.
Without the family, there is no community, because the family is the community’s basic building block.
Having learned at home to love the good, the family member is well-prepared to be a beneficial member of the polis, the society whose existence is based on the mutual loving and sharing of the good in common.
Hence, the community naturally embraces, pursues, and defends the common good.
Only by sharing that common love of the good can members of a community communicate – in the original Latin, “to make common.”
Communication becomes possible in such a virtuous community because words have a common meaning for all of them.
Diversity’s Destruction of the Common Good
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism)
The “Diversity” ideologues ravaging our culture are today’s version of the Biblical builders of the Tower of Babel.
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech,” Genesis tells us. But seeing their pride, the Lord said, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (Gen. 11:1,7)
For the inhabitants of Babylon, Babel was a disaster. For today’s Diversity ideologues, it is just another day at the office.
With Diversity enthroned, friendship gives way to pride. Goodwill gives way to envy. And as pride and envy of God caused the fall of Babel’s Tower, so too will pride “go before the fall” of community. (Proverbs 16:18)
There is a logic here. For Diversity to prevail, ideologues must first destroy a community’s common vocabulary and the common love which that vocabulary represents in word and deed. Corruption of the language must precede the corruption of the community.
It also virtually guarantees it.
Once words are rendered meaningless, then the realities they represent can be rendered meaningless as well. Eventually, Diversity brands those realities as evils.
Scripture recognizes the evil of Diversity, and Lewis Carroll does as well:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
Welcome to the Diversity Dialectic. When you’re “Diverse,” nothing is “true” or “real,” so “marriage” can mean whatever Humpty wants it to mean.
So too “love,” “good,” and “virtue.” These words that once held the fabric of the community together are now turned against its members.
The newly-noxious neologisms are then employed to condemn the past, to hail “progress,” and to proclaim Diversity’s glorious future.
And, like Humpty Dumpty, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” can’t put the culture together again, once it’s torn asunder.
What Tocqueville saw as America’s unique and thriving community has collapsed into a cacophonous, self-indulgent corral, fenced in by ignorance and lust.
The result is the emergence of a “shrug culture.”
The young (and the not so young), raised on a content-free diet of feeling good about themselves, are not only reluctant to confront probing questions regarding reality, they lack the intellectual experience to do so.
“Whatever,” they say.
“Meh.”
And so the building blocks of today’s “communities” come tumbling down.
Power Lust Trumps Carnal Lust, Every Time
Farewell happy fields, Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell receive thy new possessor.
(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I)
Once “marriage” means “whatever,” those who defend reality and the honored place of marriage within it are transformed from champions of community into enemies of society and, eventually, the State.
All of which Pope Paul VI accurately predicted in his 1968 Encyclical, Humanae Vitae.
Curiously, in our sex-saturated culture, a casual observer might conclude that today’s frontal attack on marriage is primarily rooted in carnality and self-indulgence.
Not so. When base appetites prevail, the result is rot, not rule. Society would still be right side up, and sober thinkers could still call debauchery and perversion by their proper names.
However, there is more to the story than that. Carnality is indeed a compelling appetite, but appetites rise and fall, they swell and they dissipate.
And they melt before the Will to Power.
What is really at stake in the marriage debate is the attack orchestrated by the powerful on the foundation of virtuous community itself.
Since Aristotle, the family has been recognized as the essential and basic unit of society. It is thus the natural target for any budding tyrant.
As Augustine points out in the preface to his City of God, it is the libido dominandi (the lust for power), not pleasures of the flesh, which constitutes the ruling passion of the City of Man – that community of fallen angels and sinful men that love themselves to the exclusion of love of God.
That isn’t to say that aspiring totalitarians are not willing to orchestrate the carnal lust that prevails in the broader population. It serves their purpose to destroy both the vocabulary of virtue and, with it, the possibility of a virtuous, free community.
First the language goes; only then is the polis turned upside down.
Intellectually, the result is moral chaos; socially, it produces a gaggle of Babel Tower builders, violently colliding with one another and with reality.
Truth is no longer intelligible and virtue is no longer comprehensible. It is truly a war of all against all.
Thomas Hobbes saw such a scenario as inviting: enter the Leviathan.
And the Leviathan doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
The recent events surrounding Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO who had the temerity five years ago to contribute to the defense of the family, are representative. Worshippers of the Goddess of Diversity, brimming with envy, quickly adopt the armor of a Satanic horde, prowling about the world, seeking the ruin of souls.
And what about all those pioneering apostles of sexual ”equality”?
Ironically, today’s prophets of perversion will not rule. Nor will they be spared. Their turn will come – and then, the dialectic will grind them into bits.
They will eventually experience the same fate that the Prophets of Paris met when the Revolution “matured.”
Having been indispensable to the rise of the Leviathan state, their plaintive squeaks of “freedom” and “rights” will be snuffed out by the same Thought Police that they once cheered.
The Carnalites will stare in disbelief. “Hey, this was our revolution!”
Too late will they discover that “diversity” is a sham – it aims simply to negate and then to reverse accepted moral and religious views, first by breaking social communities into sharp little shards, and then rebuilding it – good and hard – according to the new ideological norms.
Diversity’s new Tower of Babel will turn into a Carnalite jail. And like France’s “revolutionary” Marquis de Sade, our own sexual liberation pioneers will soon discover that they’ve been had.
This article, From Under the Rubble…Old School Friends is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/from-under-the-rubble-old-school-friends/
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