“America has never
been less great than it is today. Like a vampire, the president has plunged his
fangs deep into the Constitution. His fangs are sharp, and he won’t let go as
he sucks the blood out of the very meaning of America. He has sunk them into
the flag, sucking away the red stripes, turning them against the stars of blue.
He has sunk them into the Justice Department, making it his own right arm to
administer his justice rather than the justice of the land. He has sunk them
into the Republican Party, turning them into wind-up vampires, hissing the
Trumpian line.”
Trump supporters are
not spared Harris’ op-ed lash: “For Trump supporters who voted for this man who
has brought a cloud upon the land, you are forgiven. But you know now what you
have done. The light of dawn has exposed this president. You see now who he is.
There are no mitigating factors. No rationales. No excuses. Continued support
makes you complicit in the continuing criminal acts of this crooked, conniving
president.”
Was forgiveness ever
so quickly withdrawn?
Forgiveness figures
prominently in Douglas Murray's latest book, The
Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, an exploration
of the breakdown of Western culture. Decades earlier Julian Benda identified
one cause of the breakdown in La trahison des clercs, the treason
of the intellectuals. Pointing to the wreckage he saw all about him in 1920,
Benda asked “Was it for this Christ and Socrates died?
There are two
problems with the postmodern world, Murray argues. Leftists in our time have
turned a failed Marxism, the perpetual war against the proles and the
bourgeois, into a multifaceted war of all against all. They’ve done this by
dividing mankind into oppressors and oppressed: men oppress women, whites
oppress blacks, teachers – said Paulo Freire, the author of Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, first released in English in 1970 – oppress students.
Freire’s book was used as a textbook in teacher education classes during the silly seventies. The oppressed in our time -- they are legion --
are viewed as having the only correct appreciation of racism, feminism,
identity politics, gender, transsexualism, ad infinitum. With the nod of treasonous
intellectuals, students are now taught by their teacher-oppressors to defer to
oppressed classes, always and everywhere.
The second problem
concerns what scientist and philosophers used to call objective truth, the
truth that lies outside one’s own subjective experiences; the truth that remains
true apart from our apprehensions of it. Some postmodern philosophers -- Murray
mentions Foucault as a noxious example – have quite done with truth. There is
no such thing. The world and everything in it may be explained in terms of
post-Marxian power struggles. Just as pseudo-science in the post-
Nietzsche period had murdered the Christian God, so objective truth in the
postmodern age has been murdered by its false philosophers. And what
we have now are various power struggles of a world at war with itself. Since
everything is a power struggle, including such fanciful pre-postmodern notions
as love and marriage, it is passion, loud voices, rather than reason, rational
argument, that decide important issues of the day.
There is only one way
out of this maze of irrational passion, violence and hatred Murray says – the
way of forgiveness. That was the way paved by Martin Luther King in matters of
race when he insisted that blacks should be judged by the content of their
character rather than the color of their skin. “The only means that we’ve ever
come up with as a species for the undoability of our actions is forgiveness,”
Murray says in a recent interview. “And our culture is obsessed with punishing any
and all erroneous action in the world -- often an erroneous action that was
only made erroneous 24 hours ago -- but spends no time thinking about
forgiveness.”
Forgiveness is
incommensurate with ignorance: To forgive is not to unknow or to forget; it is
to forego infinite repetition. Forgiveness may never be an affirmation of evil.
The evil is not to be ignored or soft peddled or defined away. It is to be
wrestled to the ground and defeated through forgiveness and rational
thought.
The postmodern mind
insists everything is a power struggle rather a search for enduring truths.
Pilate speaks to Christ in the language of the postmoderns. Pilate asks Christ,
“Are you a king?” And Christ answers, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the
reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone
on the side of truth listens to me,” at which Pilate, dressed in robes of
power, scoffs, “What is truth?”
No, no, the postmodern
power-worshiper replies, Pilate is right. Power is all.
Comments