I started to set up a two-headed conditional in my last post, saying, “If you believe in the Resurrection…,” but I never came back to fill in the contrary.
Simply put, if you don’t believe in the Resurrection (thus incurring a responsibility to take account of “the democracy of the dead”) you have no choice but to live in a different sort of democracy of the dead.
After all, as John Maynard Keynes famously put it,
Jay Nordlinger, renowned for his spirited defense of the oppressed in Cuba and China, weighs in on the Wisconsin incidents:
A while ago, a couple of people involved in the Wisconsin case, on the conservative side — or the freedom side, or the rule-of-law side — came to visit us at National Review. They told us what had gone on. We listened in horror.
I had just finished reading, in pre-publication form, Roger Scruton’s novel about Communist Czechoslovakia. That book was not only fresh in my mind but pulsating all over my mind. And what I was hearing about Wisconsin, in good old Amurrica, reminded me of the book (as I noted to our guests). I was not being figurative, or poetic. I meant, it really reminded me of the book.
In the past, I’ve said that most people aren’t democrats at heart. The democratic spirit is relatively rare. Some people chastised me for saying this. I will now say that, at a minimum, many people aren’t democrats at heart. In a democracy, they must be curbed. They must be guarded against, constantly. Do not assume that people as a whole, including those in power, are devoted to the Declaration and the Constitution and Mom and Abner Doubleday and all that stuff. It isn’t true.
(source: ‘Wisconsin’s Shame’ . . . | National Review Online)
Consider and compare this vision of democracy, Continue reading
I am unremittingly hostile to the kind of abuse and mistreatment that is considered “normal” on our frat- and sorority-ridden campuses, these days, and have spoken out about the ridiculous manner in which some now attempt to use a totalitarian, moment-by-moment public adjudication of privately-given “consent” to accomplish poorly and unjustly what has from time immemorial been accomplished by marriage (public giving of permanent and exclusive consent together with embrace of responsibility for all offspring of the union) and its related cultural institutions. As a result, I am pretty tough on “rape culture” in the sense that concentrates on real dangers to the sexually vulnerable, though unlikely to subscribe to tenuous ideological constructions that erode our grip on reality and our ability to preserve ourselves and protect others.
And it is in the grip of that unfortunate irony that I happened to read two pieces in juxtaposition, today.
These two pieces lead me to meditate on how close to deranged our conception of “safety” has become:
Students at both Oberlin College in Ohio and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., have been crying out that they fear for their safety because conservative groups invited someone who disagrees with their views on sexual assault and rape culture to speak on campus.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism?, spoke at Georgetown last Thursday and is scheduled to speak at Oberlin tonight.
[…] Georgetown students placed a “trigger warning” sign outside of the speech, advising that it would “contain discussions of sexual assault and may deny the experiences of survivors.” A photo on Twitter shows a student holding another sign reading, “TRIGGER WARNING: anti-feminism” and advertising the location of a “safe space” for anyone who might feel traumatized by Sommers’s opposing views.
Compare this to the following (and do read the whole thing): Continue reading
Republicans and Democrat(s?) [are] announcing their presidential campaigns, so we must revert into pre-adolescence and spend a year and a half enduring black-hat/white-hat baby talk. Keep this in mind: Every time you hear a politician or activist explain that the world is the way it is because villainous so-and-so is the tool of unsympathetic thus-and-such while heroic so-and-so really cares about sympathetic thus-and-such, what you are hearing is about as meaningful as the croaking of poorly educated frogs or explanations based on the four humors, hepatomancy, astrology, or the keen insights of John Oliver, each of which is about as intellectually defensible as the next.
Satan, Snidely Whiplash, or Lloyd Blankfein: It is a comforting myth that the world’s worst problems can be explained by the presence of individual malefactors, because then the solution becomes simple: Burn the witches.
(source: Black Hats and White Hats)
And there you have it, folks!
“The Chinese officers beat us. Then we were made to stand at the wall with our hands up and were beaten again,” 25-year-old Ngawang Wangdon [said. S]he was detained in a solitary cell for a month.
“Every five days, I was taken to questioning and was beaten,” Wangdon said. “Some Tibetan prisoners were beaten for not being able to speak Chinese,” she said.
At Trisam prison, “every morning, the officers made us face the sun and stand for 45 minutes. Anyone who moved was beaten,” the [Tibetan Buddhist] nun said.
[…]
“We were beaten from 10 p.m. until 3 a.m. with our hands cuffed and tied with ropes. The officers shocked us with electric prods,” she recalled. There were also other occasions when she was made to kneel on the ground, was beaten and shocked with a prod on the back of her neck and in her mouth. […] Wangdon says she still suffers from kidney problems caused by the torture during her years of detention and imprisonment.
[…]
“I believe basic human rights are universal. I want people to recognize and support the universal human rights, including those of Tibetans,” she said.
(source: Tibetan nun speaks of torture by China – www.phayul.com)
So, which of these, say you, is the sort of thing no regime that claims to uphold “human rights” or to subserve any understanding of humans as each possessed of an innate and inviolable dignity could countenance? The sort of thing that no society of decent people could possibly tolerate? Above? or below: Continue reading