What this is all about
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Mad.
Spitting mad today. Fed up and ready for a change.
In the last few years I have maintained a blog, sometimes more than one at a time, to try to say something to the world. Every now and then I have thought of quitting (I don't think I can. It's a kind of compulsion.) But I've been told that what we are doing here, as Catholic bloggers, is worth doing, worth taking seriously and doing diligently. For many of us, it's a whim gone horribly wrong. A lot of bloggers have families and jobs and lives and find it a huge struggle to deal with this compulsion to tell the world what we think.
Today I have been asking myself seriously why I am doing this, what, if anything, I am trying to accomplish, as a Catholic, as a Traditionalist, as an anglo-Canadian, as a political observer, as a writer. I've grown impatient with people who can't decide one way or another what they are doing, or who spend more time whining than pointing the beams at something worth blasting. It made me think about what all this is for and in the context of the bigger picture, I think my conclusion is that it is for something very specific. Communication is a weapon, no matter what the medium.
Don't get me wrong, I know that the internet is silly. It is ephemeral, self-referential, and, I believe, one of the final expressions of our suicidal cultural narcissism. Everything about the internet is what most Traditionalists reject about modern culture. Except for one thing: communication. There is no other medium that is so readily accessible, so fast, so universal, so able to bring people into contact with ideas and each other.
I am not discounting the fact that only a fairly small portion of the world's people can get the net, and even fewer can have it at home at their disposal 24 hours a day. But more and more, and in ways that many of us miss unless we are paying attention, the net is deciding the direction of our society. It has always been true that only a tiny minority can influence the direction of society. The net has considerably expanded that pool. You and I can get into it and if we are really as smart and tough as we think we are, we can play with the big kids in the deep end.
The net is, perhaps, the final frontier of politics and social influence, and for those with a little initiative, vision and will, it can be a field in which anyone can climb into the ring and go as many rounds as he has strength for. Examples abound of nobodies using the net astutely, in addition to applying a strong will and thick skin, and making a difference. Net writers, bloggers, sites like Drudge and Jihad Watch have started to make the giants worry. LifeSite had our first real test and forced the New York Times to stand down. Matt Drudge broke the Clinton scandals and contributed to the Republican win. Others have made NBC, Reuters, and the BBC tremble. All the major political parties in every country keep a close eye on the bloggers. The Jihadis, the homosexuals, the lesbofeminists, all the enemies of Truth use the net to great effect. It's a sharp weapon.
When I read about the effect of the media coverage of the Tet Offensive, how the news outlets used it to demoralize the American public and concede to the communists, I realized that this medium can be one of the most powerful weapons in the Wars ever to come along. Think about it, in those days, they had newspapers, television and radio. Compared to the net, those are children's toys.
There is no question that it has become a major engine of our society and that it is, for now, an open field. Anyone with wit and strength can play for good or ill.
There is still some question whether the internet has contributed to the acceleration of The Big Collapse, or has merely recorded it, but while we're fighting over that, there is no question in my mind, the good guys fail or refuse to use this as a medium to our loss.
Which brings me to the manifesto part.
If you haven't figured out that we're at war, and that the War is between the Devil and the Church, the serpent and the Bride, then stop reading now and go read the comics page.
And we're losing. Politically, socially, spiritually, in every field of human endeavour, things are falling apart. The centre is not holding. If you have read me for a couple of years, you will know what I mean in some detail. But don't take my word for it. Read Steyn. Read the blogs of Iraqi Christians. Coptic Christians. Read a little LifeSite. Read David Warren. Oriana Fallaci. Benedict XVI is saying it to the whole world. It doesn't take long to figure out, not only that the big slide has started, but that we are pretty far down already and picking up speed.
And while we are busy pfaffing about with our toys and distractions, with gay marriage and environmentalism, with reality TV, and shopping, and, yes, dithering around with the neo-Catholic compromise, the world is gathering itself for a convulsion bigger than anything we have seen since the Empire fell. The wolves never stopped watching and just recently, they have seen an opening. The barricades have been breached and the enemy is pouring in and we've been too drugged to notice.
What is at stake?
Lives, for one thing. Lots of them. Abortion was just one of the devil's little tricks, the first of many, and between the abortion we can see and the kind we can't we've lost more lives than it will ever be possible for anyone to count. We're moving on to other things now, and if we have time to explore the possibilities fully, we may end up somewhere no one ever imagined before in waking life. (Not without hallucinogenic chemicals anyway).
After individual lives, we know pretty well that what we used to call Christian civilization, and all that goes with it, are at stake. And with the help of CNN, we have a pretty good idea of what the alternative looks like.
Honestly, I don't think we are going to have time to reach the conclusion of what the American neo-conservatives call the Culture Wars. The Culture Wars are actually just a front of the Big War and that seems to be heating up. The Culture Wars are what we mostly deal with on the net, and maybe my American friends can't see it, but from this side of the 49th it is becoming pretty clear that the culture, the philosophical, legal, moral and social foundation blocks, is almost gone. I imagine it is becoming clear to our English friends too. (Finally).
I think we won't get to the ultimate conclusion of the Culture Wars, of cloning, gay marriage, abortion, contraception, etc etc...before the entire business is brought to a close for us by our new friends. I think the Moslems will not give us time. Christendom has been threatened by her greatest earthly enemy before, but never in so weak a condition as she is now. Not only have our enemies found our weaknesses, we are ourselves nearly overcome by them.
Christian civilization is so ill, it cannot put up a fight.
This, however, does nothing to excuse those who do know from fighting.
The Big War is going on at a lot of fronts. First among these is the one between the ribs of every human being. The Spiritual Combat is the first and last battlefront and the most important. If you give in, if you die in your sins, if you lose your soul, the whole Muslim world can convert to the Faith, the Mass can be freed, abortion and gay marriage can be abolished in an hour, but the catastrophe is still complete. Everything depends upon the fate of every soul. The highest price possible, higher than the cost of the universe, has been paid for the fate of a single soul and the redemption accomplished hangs by the thinnest and weakest of threads: the human will.
After that, the fate of the homeschooling Germans, of the religious orders, of the definition of marriage, of even the Mass, is secondary. All the other fronts we fight on, in our various ways, are ordered to this. We must save our souls. All the things we are fighting for are ultimately about this. Life on earth is for this.
We want to save the Church and the civilization she nurtured only because of that first reason. Civil order, democratic freedoms, economic stability, all the things, in other words, currently under threat in the Culture Wars, are only means to the end. We don't want to subordinate the higher to the lower and if you forget the reason we are fighting, you might as well go home because you're going to do nothing but hurt your own side.
This is all why I write on the net. I remember having a discussion with a friend who is priest, one of the best I know. He objected to my persistent pugilisim, particularly against bishops. I think he was a little shocked when I said, "Father, we are at war. In war, you fight the enemy and that includes fifth columnists." This is, perhaps, the difference between what we, for shorthand purposes, call "neo-Catholics" and "traditionalists." Traditionalists know, sometimes only instinctively, that the situation we are in is so bad that we cannot trust to the old simple order of things. We cannot simply protect ourselves by being loyal company men. The shepherds have become the wolves and the sheep are forced to set up a watch.
The public front of the Big War is the Culture War the Traditionalist Catholics have frequently kept themselves aloof from that war, thinking, perhaps, that it is an exercise in compromise. Why fight to preserve "democracy" when most of us know that modern liberal democracies are based on an entire set of logical fallacies? Why engage in what looks to us like a manfestation of Americanism? Because it isn't. Because the Culture War, understood correctly, is just the Big-War-in-the-Papers. That US neo-conservatives can't see the whole thing does not mean that the war is not worth fighting. Just because the neo-Catholics don't understand why the True Mass absolutely must be restored before anything else can be accomplished, does not mean that we have an excuse to stay out of their fights on the abortion/euthanasia front.
Traditionalist Catholics have a duty because they have, for whatever reason, found out about, stumbled across, been forced to realize some things that a lot of other people haven't yet.
Trad Catholic bloggers have a duty to use this medium to its best effect to try with our last breath if necessary, to warn the world.
If you can't stomach it, if it seems too big a War to engage in, that's understandable. If you know that the best way you have available to you to fight the War is to raise your kids as Catholics, to homesechool, to start a business, to pay attention to the work that has been put before you by God as priorities, all to the good.
A friend of mine was sent an email by a young chap who asked something like, "Everything you write about seems self-evidently true, but horrible and catastrophic. What can we poor kids, who have entirely missed the Old World, do in the face of this? What can a 20 year-old undergraduate do to help save Western Civilization?"
For many of us, the first answer is the biggest and the only one we need. It will, after all, only be saved when a great majority of people turn back to Christ and to the ways of Christian civilization. The answer is to make yourself a living embodiment of that civilization. Read everything you can, become a practicing Christian. Wear long skirts or three piece suits. Get married and have fifteen children. Homeschool them in the Classics. Learn Latin, calligraphy, chant and take piano lessons.
For most people that's plenty.
But I am coming to think that Trad Catholic bloggers have been stuck with more to do.
If you are a Trad Catholic blogger and you suffer the symptoms, if you find you can't stop writing, even when it is only in your head, about the glories of the Faith, about Christian Culture and what threatens it, you may be stuck with more work.
If you do it, do it. Don't dither. Commit.
Don't vacillate. Commit.
If you think you would like to talk about this more, send me an email.
here it is in anti-spammer code:
(no spaces) qui custodiet sixty-six (in numerals) ampersand yahoo dot ca
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