Ross Douthat’s new column on the systematic rape culture in Rotherham, carried out under the protective shelter of what appears to have been not just police looking the other way, but an active criminal conspiracy by the authorities to destroy evidence and intimidate witnesses, is required reading:

Show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I’ll tell you who is likely to get away with rape.

In Catholic Boston or Catholic Ireland, that meant men robed in the vestments of the church.

In Joe Paterno’s pigskin-mad Happy Valley, it meant a beloved football coach.

In status-conscious, education-obsessed Manhattan, it meant charismatic teachers at an elite private school.

In Hollywood and the wider culture industry — still the great undiscovered country of sexual exploitation, I suspect — it has often meant the famous and talented, from Roman Polanski to the BBC’s Jimmy Savile, robed in the authority of their celebrity and art.

And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.

Douthat suggests that in each case, the really deadly moment comes during the transition between an older period of settled certainties and a new period of overturned morals. After the moral revolution, the old authorities lose their presumed aura of respectability, their untouchability, and crimes will be exposed and punished. People can leave those institutions behind or reform them. It is during the revolution, when the old authorities are still untouchable but those who wield their power begin to sense that all things are permissible, that the great horrors occur.

An implication he does not explicitly draw from this would be that the exposure of the Rotherham crimes is a sign that multiculturalism’s aura is on the wane in England. Let us hope so, and let us hope the next abuses are caught and punished sooner.

(continued from Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3)

Let the reader be prudent before going on. I am going to simply comment on a few passages from Bakunin that help us to see the nature of the trap, here; then I hope to move on to a few conclusions.

Jehovah, […] expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

[…] God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he bad induced them to commit

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

I cite this–the full passage is nauseating in its wrathful calumny–only to note two things. The first is the direct misrepresentation at the base of this retelling of the story: the “tree of knowledge” is not a tree of access to information, but precisely a marker of moral freedom. The misrepresentation is literal, in that “tree of knowledge of good and evil” becomes “tree of knowledge” in Bakunin’s revision.

The other–and this is crucial to grasp–is that Bakunin’s reading is not alien to the text, not a modern and secular questioning of a traditional text.  No, Bakunin is asserting that one position was always already embedded in the text, and that he and all right-thinking people have at last realized the correct perspective within the text.  That is to say, Bakunin has adopted Satan’s logic before he even introduces the name of Satan, just as the Hebrew Scriptures have always already known that God was present and active in the world, before proceeding to name Him and tell of His deeds.

Compare Bakunin’s language above with Satan’s language in the Hebrew Scriptures:  “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The text presents this as a lie constructed of apparently true words, as God says, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”  Bakunin assumes from the first the Satanic construction of this passage, that God has attempted to deprive Adam and Eve of some “knowledge” by forbidding them to eat the fruit.

It is important to realize this, because the interpenetration of secular nihilism, religious Satanism, anarchism, and other explicit philosophies of negation is easy to miss behind the camouflage Continue reading →

I do not find much to argue with in Mr. Bellow’s essay, but I would add this: The most profoundly conservative works of popular culture in recent memory were not produced by conservatives and certainly were not conceived of as conservative projects. In fact, many of them were produced by people one assumes are hostile to conservative views.

(source: Mayhem Is Everywhere | National Review Online)

In a recent exchange with Greg, I had occasion to mention my view that Christians interested in the arts “will need to evolve a manner of speaking that (1) retrenches within the Christian tradition and (2) sees whatever is real, whatever is True and Beautiful and Good that is *actually* presented, even in fiction, even in secular work, for our appreciation. That will be the Second Innocence of Christendom.”  I think this article hints us in that direction (see also the essay Greg links, and the Adam Bellow essay Williamson refers to; I approve the direction Williamson is extending Bellow).

Incidentally, Williamson is simply repeating post-Romantic ideology, and not any real canon of aesthetics or cultural excellence, when he says that “Didacticism is an enemy of art, and as such it should be in artistic matters rejected by conservatives, whose allegiance should be to aesthetic standards rather than to narrow political and cultural agendas.”  The supplement “narrow” is the giveaway. 

Eh, even Homer nods.

I find it important to note that Greg issued a royalty-check reality check to Os Guinness, recently.

This essay on Hayao Miyazaki’s evaluation of Japanese culture is fascinating. Fascinating, that is, provided you know Miyazaki – if not, drop what you’re doing and go find out!

It’s interesting to me seeing confirmation that Miyazaki is a believing animist. This only deepens my appreciation of the extensive continuities between Christianity and the higher paganisms. While the overlap with other “world religions” like Islam or Buddhism comes in formal thought – ethics, philosophy, even theology – the overlap with something like animism comes in the narrative. Consider Princess Mononoke: The world is under a curse; the great spirit is killed by men, yet also can’t be killed, because he is always all around us.

Miyazaki says his goal is to draw people’s attention away from fantasy to what is real. This is a deeply ironic statement when you think about the fantastic content of his films, yet the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. The real point of My Neighbor Totoro is not forest spirits and magic trees, but two little girls whose mother has cancer. The real point of Kiki’s Delivery Service is not the broomsticks and black cats, but a thirteen-year-old girl who needs to find her purpose in life. The real point of Princess Mononoke is not the gods and demons, but the tragic fact that human beings can neither transform nature nor refrain from transforming it without killing a part of their own humanity. It is very much the real world Miyazaki wants us to live in.

Trying to get us to see the real world is, I suspect, the goal of all religious people who are engaged with culture. The very considerable cultural edification produced by Miyazaki’s films might very well be classified in the “first they must convert to serious paganism” file. Shame on us that there’s no Christian Miyazaki.

Even more interesting, though, is his analysis of what ails Japan. He describes what he sees as a vast distortion of desire; the opportunity to use technology to shape desire has been used to alienate children from what is real:

The desires of many—if not most or even all—Japanese children, Miyazaki believes, have been hollowed, stretched, inflated for the false, and, thus, deflated for the true. The beauty of woman for man and man for woman, especially, has been supplanted by the cartoonish, pornographic, robotic, and monstrous. This is what he meant when he called animated films “the source of the downfall of a people.”

But although Miyazaki has never fully extracted himself from his Marxist past, he does not (as so many tiresome people do) equate this distortion of desire with capitalism and place his hope in central planning. Quite the contrary, his hope is exactly where it should be – in entrepreneurs who take the opportunities that only capitalism provides and use them to produce a better culture:

His animism may explain the content of his films, but not necessarily his approach to film craft. His criticisms of Japanese culture and the manga industry offer a better starting point. The largest problem facing the manga industry is that the people running it are anime fanatics, known as otaku in Japan. These “sickly otaku types,” as Miyazaki called them, were reared on manga and Japanimation, and developed an inordinate desire for them—their shape, scale, motion, symbols, and narrative tropes. Such children, “locked in [manga’s] own enclosed world,” became illustrators themselves, reinforcing the enclosure. With their arrival in the industry, characters became boxier, eyes ballooned, and, to be frank, breasts grew larger. The expressiveness of the manga industry was further attenuated, a cycle that cheapens and thins the general taste of Japanese society. These otaku, “raised amidst the clamor,” Miyazaki said, “probably can’t be the flag bearers for new images.”

To bear “new images,” to make films that liberate, the filmmaker must himself be liberated, free of the customs of the genre. That’s why Miyazaki frequently stresses that he does not “watch film at all” and describes his own career as an ongoing effort to escape the yoke of his great forebear, Osamu Tezuka, the father of manga, creator of Astro Boy, and Miyazaki’s greatest influence. That’s also why he strongly urges that, if an illustrator is to spur audiences to seek and love the world, he must himself be filled with its riches. That is, he must gain an intelligent understanding of it by cultivating “a constant interest in customs, history, architecture, and all sorts of things.” Otherwise, he “can’t direct.” And if he doesn’t have time to study, he must “look carefully at what is right in front of [him].” If he fails to do so, no matter what he makes, “it turns out to be a film we’ve seen somewhere, or something we’ve seen in manga.”

Verily, freedom and economic development create opportunities for people to distort their desire. But to contract freedom and development would only deliver us into the hands of an elite formed by that cultural decay, locking in the distortion of desire, freezing in place the present decadence. The solution instead lies with those who not only make responsible use of their opportunities, but inspire others to follow them in doing so (“to spur audiences to seek and love the world”).