Authentic Wokeness
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| St. Augustine |
Authentic Wokeness:
“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
"The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others…In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
John Stuart Mill
“If we look at rights in this way, as instruments that safeguard sovereignty, and so make free dealings between sovereign partners into the cement of society, then we see immediately why freedom rights have the best claim to universality, and why claim rights – detached from the moral law and from any specific history of responsibility and agreement – present a threat to the consensual order. A claim against another, if expressed as a right, is an imposition of a duty. If this duty arises from no free action or chain of responsibility that would provide a cogent ground for the claim, then by expressing it as a right we override the other’s sovereignty. We say to him: here is something you must do or provide, even though your duty to do so arises from nothing you have done or for which you are responsible, and even though it is not a duty that follows from the moral law. This is simply a demand that you must satisfy. How different such a case is, at least, from that of freedom rights. For these are by their very nature ‘sovereignty protecting’ devices. They are vetoes on what others can do to me or take from me, rather than demands that they do something or give something that I have an interest in their doing or giving. The duty that they define is one of non-interference, and the interest that they protect is the most fundamental interest that I have, namely my interest in retaining the power to make decisions for myself in those matters that most closely concern me.”
Roger Scruton (1944-2020)
“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century...”
“...The final argument that impressed me was Burke’s response to the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burke’s eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.”
Roger Scruton, Why I Became a Conservative
“ ...it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?
Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.
My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.”
“Just as those who lose their religion feel an urge to mock the faith they have lost, so do artists today feel an urge to treat human life in demeaning ways and to mock the pursuit of beauty. This willful desecration is also a denial of love, an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And this, it seems to me, is the most important part of our post-modern culture: that it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable.”
Roger Scruton
“There is something destructive—destructive of the human itself—in cutting us off from the earth from whence we come and the stars, the angels, and God himself to whom we go...
It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity. The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary. We expire in the lazy, utterly helpless drift, the spongy warmth of an absolute uncertainty. Where nothing is ever true, or right or wrong, there are no problems; where life is meaningless we are free from responsibility, the way a slave or scavenger is free. Futility breeds carelessness, against which stands the stark alternative: against the radical uncertainty by which modern man has lived--as in a game of Russian roulette, stifled in the careless 'now' between the click and the explosion, living by the dull grace of empty chambers--the risk of certainty.
Oh, poetry is pretty stuff, they say, but in this desperate war, idle pleasure must be sacrificed for the survival of civilization, and the Church. Well, soldiers without poetry are gangsters, hired guns, blind means with neither love nor knowledge of the end, who will never achieve the end because the End is Truth, not a concept but three persons only known in beauty both on earth and as it is in heaven.”
John Senior, The Restoration of Innocence
Alexander Solzhenitsyn learned a truth in the Communist Gulag about human nature that Marxism/NeoMarxism invariably demands it’s adherents deny: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Whatever his newspapers might have said {at times anti-semitic}, when the Germans occupied Poland in 1939, Maximilian Kolbe sheltered as many as 2,000 Jews in his monastery outside Warsaw. Kolbe would probably have agreed with the poet’s conclusions about man’s unavoidable contradictions. In the final issue of The Knight of the Immaculata, in December 1940—the Nazis had allowed him to keep publishing in hopes that he would incriminate himself—Kolbe wrote: “The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”
Arrested by the Gestapo the following February on charges of subversive activities, Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz. When a prisoner from his barracks vanished, the camp commander ordered that ten men would be starved to death as a warning against future escape attempts. (The missing man was later found drowned in the latrine.) Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the men, a sergeant in the Polish army.
“I am old. . . .” said Kolbe, who was 47. “He has a wife and children.” In an airless underground bunker, he led the dying men in songs and prayer. After two weeks, only Kolbe and three others were left alive. Kolbe offered his arm to the executioner, and was killed with a shot of carbolic acid on August 14, 1941. The man whom he replaced lived to tell of Kolbe’s sacrifice. (So did a number of other prisoners who remembered his offer, and one of the guards from his last days.)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69162/the-doubter-and-the-saint Cynthia Haven
In his famous doctrine of ‘Blessed Fault,’ Augustine encapsulated the mystery of suffering: “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil at all.” Better to endure the pain involved in redeeming sinners than not to create human beings at all. Why did he do that? There is only one answer. Love. God loved us so much that even when he foresaw the sin and suffering that would darken and distort his creation, he chose to create us anyway. That is the most profound mystery of all, and one that inspires our hearts to worship.
How Now Shall We Live, Charles Colson/Nancy Pearcey
“In it’s sojourn here, the Heavenly City makes use of the peace provided by the earthly city. In all that relates to the mortal nature of man it preserves and indeed seeks the concordance of human wills. It refers the earthly peace to the heavenly peace, which is truly such peace that it alone can be described as peace, for it is the highest degree of ordered and harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God and of another in God. When this stage is reached then there will be life, not life subject to death but life that is clearly...and assuredly life giving. There will be a body, not a body which is animal, weighing down the soul as it decays, but a spiritual body experiencing no need and subordinated in every part to the will. This is the peace that the Heavenly City has while it sojourns here in faith, and in this faith it lives a life of righteousness. To the establishing of that peace it refers all in good actions, whether they be towards God or towards one’s neighbor, for the life of this City is utterly and entirely a life of fellowship.”
“You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”
St. Augustine
Truth sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and from these two comes a third, a holy and wonderful delight in God, who is love.”
― Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
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