The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (49 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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A revelation of a love that transcends the political protects man from tyranny, and it does this in a most paradoxical way. The victors in the ideological struggles of the last hundred years claim that law simply is what we make it—and whatever we want is all right, so long as we observe some ill-defined and ever-shifting “rights.” That makes us at once masters and slaves to law. It also unmoors us from place and time, from any community with a beloved tradition, and, as we see in our day in the call for homosexual “marriage,” from the plain realities of our own bodies.
 
The older view, audible in the following passage from Leo XIII, is that we cannot be slaves of the State, precisely because we are
not
gods and do not determine for ourselves what good and evil mean. The State, our creation, cannot be the ultimate giver of laws, because we ourselves are not the creators of our nature:
 
 
Marxism in America
 
Among the ten measures Marx and Engels insisted upon in
The Communist Manifesto
:
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance....
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. . . .
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
 
Three out of ten isn’t bad, but even
they
didn’t call for
compulsory
government education.
 
 
 
Of the laws enacted by men, some are concerned with what is good or bad by its very nature; and they command men to follow after what is right and to shun what is wrong, adding at the same time a suitable sanction. But such laws by no means derive their origin from civil society; because just as civil society did not create human nature, so neither can it be said to be the author of the good which is human nature, or of the evil which is contrary to it. Laws come before men live together in society, and have their origin in the natural, and consequently in the eternal, law. (
Libertas Praestantissimum,
June 20, 1888)
 
 
Notice that the Pope contradicts the notions of Hobbes, and the ambitious claims of socialists. We do not live as lawless savages and then finally unite in a contract to surrender our claims to all goods; nor do we fashion our own order, bowing to some idea of universal social progress. Wherever man is, there the laws already are, and they are the foundation of the civil order, not the other way around.
 
It is strange, but it’s just this placement of man among eternal laws that grants him his highest dignity as
this
man or woman, in
this community,
among
these neighbors.
Marx despised the workmen of flesh and blood whom he had to mold into a revolutionary machine. His system subjected the individual to the inexorable march of economic evolution. The Pope does not consider any inexorable march of anything anywhere, except that of time, to eternity. That frees him to call things by their proper names. Theft is theft:
The Socialists wrongly assume the right of property to be of mere human invention, repugnant to the natural equality between men, and, preaching up the community of goods, declare that no one should endure poverty meekly, and that all may with impunity seize upon the possessions and usurp the rights of the wealthy. (
Quod apostolici muneris,
December 28, 1878)
 
 
 
What’s wrong with taking money from people who have more than enough? Nothing, if they give it voluntarily, or if it’s their reasonable contribution to the upkeep of a modest State. Much, if it is intended to efface the good of the poor man’s endurance and the diligent man’s labor and the rich man’s generosity. For it is not the duty of some faceless generic “rich” to pretend to assist the faceless and generic “poor” by funneling cash through the works of a covetous State. It is the duty of this rich man to help that poor man—and perhaps with more than money. It is especially the duty of Christians:
Taking [the poor] to her arms with maternal affection, and knowing that they in a manner represent the person of Christ Himself, who accounts as done unto Him any benefit conferred upon the lowliest among the poor, [the Church] holds them in great account, [and] brings them aid to the utmost of her power.
 
 
 
The Church reminds them, meanwhile, with a clear-eyed realism and genuine solicitude for their welfare, “of the words by which Jesus pronounced the poor to be
blessed
,” not to fool them into being content with injustice, but to encourage them neither to envy the rich nor to despise their own lot.
 
Ringing throughout the works of Leo are the call for a fair deal for workers, and the assertion of the primary rights of those small incarnate groups without which we can hardly be called men, no matter how rich we are. First among these is the family, that stubborn old institution marked for destruction by the new “societies”:
We have the family; the “society” of a man’s house—a society limited indeed in numbers, but no less a true “society,” anterior to every kind of State or nation, invested with rights and duties of its own, totally independent of the civil community. (
Rerum Novarum,
May 15, 1891)
 
 
 
But even those groups are not simply ends in themselves. It is the most practical and genuinely economic thing in the world to recognize that man is not simply a practical and economic animal. Therefore even to understand and enjoy the perishable things of the earth, man must raise his head high toward the things that do not perish:
The things of earth cannot be understood or valued aright without taking into consideration the life to come, the life that will know no death. Exclude the idea of futurity, and forthwith the very notion of what is good and right would perish; nay, the whole scheme of the universe would become a dark and unfathomable mystery.
 
 
 
 
 
God Is Not Quite Dead
 
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.
 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(614–17)
 
 
In Coleridge, the Romantic love of nature is inseparable from piety: we love these things because God made them and loves them. His is not a nature religion, but old-fashioned and humble Christianity, rightly applied to our treatment of nature. It is a universe away from the inhumanity of politically correct environmentalism—saving seals and slaying children.
 
 
And with that most politically incorrect lesson, an embarrassing teaching about the nature of man, we end our purview of the century. Everywhere in the West we find man, uprooted from the families and communities that connect him to the past, homogenized into the “masses” of large cities. And we find the self-appointed intellectuals offering him a new futurity. Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley and John Stuart Mill hold forth the shimmering ideal of “science,” ushering in a time when we will all be comfortable materially and satisfied with knowing, if not God, then how carbon molecules make up plastic polymers, or something equally exalting. Marx and his comrades offer the dictatorship of the proletariat—meaning, it turns out, a dictatorship
over
the proletariat, with everybody who is not a dictator a prole. Oscar Wilde and his fellows laugh at pretensions old and new, and enjoy a refined debauchery. America heralds herself as everyone else’s future, brash and innocent.
 
The glorious future would come soon enough, with gunshots in Sarajevo and Moscow.
 
Chapter Nine
 
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A CENTURY OF BLOOD
 
H
ow to write just a chapter on the glories and disgraces of the last tumultuous century? I might discuss the sad historical irony of good men portrayed as villains, and bad men, or at least morally compromised or unscrupulous men, hailed as heroes, whose portraits were fit to grace coins and stamps. The twentieth century had plenty of such, because it was a century of propaganda, of the visual image, of the art of rhetoric so debased (or perfected, the cynic would say) that people came to assume that all political discourse must be based upon lies. And then they ceased to care about the lies.
 
Take Herbert Hoover, for example. Unlike his predecessor, the quirky Calvin Coolidge, who parlayed deadpan silence into political fame, Hoover had no political skills, no presence. He was simply a mining engineer, a businessman who had developed industries in pre-Communist China, the husband of one of the first women to graduate from Stanford with a doctorate in geology, and the savior of postwar Europe, since it was he who had overseen distribution of food to all parts of the war-ravaged continent. Had he never become president, he would have died a hero. But the depression came, Hoover fought it feebly with liberal half-measures, was despised by men who had lost their jobs and their lives’ savings, and was swept aside by Franklin Roosevelt, who ran on a platform of deficit cutting, and who then grew the federal government, in size and in reach, vastly beyond anything that previous Americans could ever have imagined, or tolerated. At the turn of the century, William McKinley, declined to campaign personally for his re-election, as he believed it was beneath the dignity of a sitting president. By the end of the century, image would be all in all, and, if William J. Clinton is any evidence, nothing was beneath the dignity of a sitting president.
 
Guess What?
 
Socialism did not die; it only changed its dress.
 
Hacks, frauds, and bad writers flourished in the twentieth century.
 
A few people still believed in the dignity of man, the sanctity of human life, and the benefits of virtue and liberty. By the end of the century they were scorned as “conservative.”
 

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