nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

So, here we are. Christmas Eve. I’m sitting in the corner of a McDonald’s, chugging down my third gallon of sweet tea, mulling over the real possibility of ending up homeless for a few days, thanks to the latest in a long series of family issues bordering on—no, firmly planted in, irretrievably sunk WIPP-style in—the absurd. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and, although some of the singers of the Spanish-language Christmas carols (why would they translate something as terrible as Jingle Bell Rock?!) do have ridiculous American accents, I haven’t heard a word of English since I ordered. What fun.

Such things make it far easier to understand the liberal absurdity of “emancipation”, described most accurately by Carlyle:

Certainly the notion everywhere prevails among us too, and preaches itself abroad in every dialect, uncontradicted anywhere so far as I can hear, that the grand panacea for social woes is what we call “enfranchisement,” “emancipation;” or, translated into practical language, the cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally the case at the rate we have been going for some generations past. Let us all be “free” of one another; we shall then be happy.

Our institutions are flawed, and rather severely so; not only that, but the flaws—more accurately, the heresies, for heresy is, as Belloc said, nothing more than “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein”*—are aspects of an ideology, Moldbug’s “Universalism”, which has been on the rise for anywhere between two and twenty centuries, and now clearly holds the scepter of prestige in the entire Western world. (Of course, one who follows Alain de Benoist’s origin story of Universalism would not see it as a heresy at all, but my sense of decency prevents me from criticizing Christianity one day from the center of its calendar—a center for which we may very well have capitalism to thank, since I, at least, would expect the center to be the far more theologically significant and far less easily commercializable Easter. But on the other hand, as early as 1833, it “all other doth efface”.) Given all this, is it any surprise that those institutions are commonly seen as irreparable?

Anyway, it is Christmas Eve, so I suppose I should post something in the spirit of the season. Here’s the least intolerable version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen that I could find, besides the instrumental Mannheim Steamroller versions:

And a relevant bit of context from Frost:

Whether you believe in the particulars or not, I think the ideas of God and The Devil as metaphors for the just authority and the temptations of evil are useful. If you believe in Good and Justice, why not call this natural order ‘God’? If you believe in Evil, why not call its personification ‘The Devil’? I make this mental substitution all the time when reading dusty old books, and it works just fine for me.

Leaving aside the problematic notion (it is a rare man who can withstand violations of subsidiarity with his morals intact!) of one “Savior … to save us all from Satan’s power”—a notion that Alain de Benoist would surely call Christian to the core—the message is strikingly relevant. Nobody at this point can deny that we have strayed far into the clutches of Satan, although if you ask ten people, you’ll get eleven Satans; we clearly now stand at the beginning of a paradigm shift, but there is agreement on neither the paradigm nor the shift. (My own prediction is that, just as the last century belonged to the left, this one will belong to the right. After all, the first Whig was the Devil. But I am most likely either too optimistic or too pessimistic here; it’s anyone’s guess as to which.)

* As for Belloc, I doubt the practical existence of such a scheme as he posits; there are many complete, self-supporting schemes out there, but none that can withstand the human factor. One that could, of course, would be utopian. This probably relates to dialectics somehow, but I’ll leave that up to someone more well-versed in that system than I.

In closing:

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface:
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

From a comment at The New Republic:

Another good piece of ammunition against [Rick Perry] is the Christian prayer rally that he’ll be headlining. The event’s organizer had this to say:
“This is an explicitly Christian event because we are going to be praying to the one true God through His son, Jesus Christ. It would be idolatry of the worst sort for Christians to gather and invite false gods like Allah and Buddha and their false prophets to be with us at that time. Because we have religious liberty in this country, they are free to have events and pray to Buddha and Allah on their own. But this is time of prayer to the One True God through His son, Jesus Christ, who is The Way, The Truth, and The Life.”

In other words, by appearing at this event, Perry will be insulting pretty much anyone who’s not a Christian and endorsing the view that the Buddha and Allah are “false gods” (never mind that Buddha is neither worshipped in the Christian sense nor regarded as a god, while Allah is just the Arabic name for the same god of Abraham that Christians and Jews worship).

I find it interesting that religion—that is, real religion, characterized by actual, uncompromising belief, as opposed to the weak platitudes and vague references to some floating, bearded guy with no discernible traits other than a fondness for America that are so common today—is so alien to many in America that someone thought a weak tie to an expression of it would be a suitable attack on a politician in a primary for the more religious of the two parties.

Of course a Christian would say that the gods of other religions are false gods. It is part of the Christian belief system that the god of the Christian religion is the only true god. If you do not believe that the god of the Christian religion is the only true god, either there’s a very strange theological loophole that I’m not aware of, or you are not a Christian. Are all Christians unelectable now? Are all Christians ‘insulting’ all non-Christians by no other action than simply being Christians?

I’m not religious myself, but, all other things being equal, I’ll take someone who is not afraid of offending a group to which he does not belong by stating a basic principle of a group to which he does belong over someone who is. The political implications of that dichotomy should be obvious, especially on issues such as immigration, which have clear ties to intergroup conflict.

(As an aside, Christians, Jews, and Muslims do not worship the same god. Imagine three Arnold Schwarzeneggers: one is the one who exists in the real world, one never starred in Terminator, and one never ran for governor. They have the same origin and name, but they are clearly not all the same Schwarzenegger.)