Samizdata

There are opportunities to enjoy stirring victories in the unlikeliest of places. Take, for example, the continued refusal of the Vatican to relent on the ordination of women priests.

As a Jew (and a secular Jew at that) this is a matter which should be none of my concern but somehow I can’t help getting my shorts in a knot over it. Every time the Vatican issues another refusal, I let out a cheer of the kind I emit when my football team scores at home. It stirs my blood and reinforces my hope that the forces of darkness can be kept at bay.

The reasons for my taking a stand on the issue become abundantly clear once you understand that the campaign to make the Church buckle is motivated not by matters of Catholic doctrine or faith but by a quite different agenda:

“It seems a topic that just will not go away – particularly in North America, where the feminist movement has successfully promoted an end to almost all gender discrimination in commerce, government, industry, and education. Increasingly, adults in North America are viewing gender-based discrimination in the same class as racial discrimination, and are rejecting it as bigotry, profoundly immoral, and irrational. Many criticize the Roman Catholic church for its stance on male-only ordination.”

Sounds familiar? Of course it does. The handprints of the post-modern leftists are all over this campaign and the issue isn’t women at all really, the issue is revolution by stealth. The Catholic Church is in their cross-hairs as being an institution which is ripe for ‘deconstruction’.

I can say this because I have witnessed this kind of ‘deconstruction’ campaign played out to its endgame against the Church of England. Each time it was attacked, it was foolish enough to relent to avoid bad headlines and every time it appeased, its antagonists just smelled the blood in the water and it sent them wild. So it died the Death of a Thousand Cuts and now the exsanguinated giant grovels embarrassingly meak apologies for its own existance to empty pews beneath the baleful glare of an irrationally hostile press.

It didn’t help the Church of England that it was the official religion of the British State and, as that State lost its sense of destiny and moral purpose, so did the Church. But the Church of Rome has not been co-opted by any government anywhere. Membership is voluntary and, consequently, so is abiding by its rules. If you don’t like what the Church is doing then you can always leave. You can go and establish your own Church of PC Drivel and preach it to whomsoever will listen. No-one is stopping you.

It is for that reason that I hope the Vatican continues to stick to its guns on this issue. I hope the Cardinals plant their feet, set their jaws, put up their dukes and fight resolutely. No compromises, no deals, no climbdowns, no retreats, no concessions and no surrender. If they don’t they will regret it. If they do then the dawn will soon come, the sun will rise shimmering over the horizon and send the moral-relativist vampires and their hideous acolytes screeching back to their coffins with nothing to show for their infernal efforts.

Just Say No, Your Holiness.You owe it not just to Roman Catholics but to all the rest of us who live by the doctrine of reason.

I’m sorry but I cannot help myself. I am compelled to do these kinds of things and it’s all their fault really. They gave me the key to the castle and now I am running amok. It is late but I am awake and ready to wreak havoc.

Brian and I have agreed, through our interactions in the mind-numbingly prosaic two-dimensional world of reality, that we actually agree with other about what we mean. We remain, however, at loggerheads at how best to express what we mean.

I wonder if the lefties have this problem? Did they cross-swords with each other for years in the quest to find the appropriate linguistic tools with which to re-educate the bourgeoisie and dismantle the institutions of capitalism? Not ever having been a party to that party, I cannot say, but regardless of the procedures employed, they certainly managed to pick a winner in ‘multiculturalism’; a tool designed not to facilitate the voluntary interaction of free people but rather as a vehicle for spreading moral relativism.

The task of moral relativism was to abolish judgement. For it is by judgement that we conclude that a flushing toilet is absolutely better than crapping in a ditch; that veal parmesan is absolutely better than grubbing in the dirt for berries. It is judgement and the unfettered ability to use it that underpins our civilisation, not the other way around. Our culture is the collective expression of millions of private judgements; it is the canvas on which they are painted and shown off to an awestruck world.

Like all marxist tools, it has been employed with staggering success and the task of people like Brian and I is to blunt them and render them redundant. This is what we’re doing now, I hope.

The first stage of this process is to clarify exactly what the word ‘multiculturalism’ means and why it must be rejected. I hope I have gone small way towards doing this. But, secondly, we must find instruments of our own by which we spread the idea that ideas themselves are more important than ethnicity; that far from being ‘non-judgemental’ civilisation requires that we be vigourously and unreletingly judgemental and thereby continue to improve the human condition. Ethnicity cannot be altered by judgement or at all but values (and, hence, culture) can. That makes the latter important and the former just boring.

The term that both Brian and I are looking for is one that will satisfactorily encapsulate the idea that anyone can be judgemental and everyone should be. In this respect, may I respectfully suggest that the term ‘Melting Pot’ is not the term we should look to. I was a young boy in the 1970’s when I first became aware of the term and equally aware of the nature of its propagandists. They were the post-modern lefties and Gramschian marxists and ‘Melting Pot’ was their dry run; their prototype. It was a taste-it-and-see experiment from which they could calculate the likely success of their fully formulated plans that lay in wait. It was the equivalent of throwing it on the stoop to see if the cat licked it up. Well, the cat didn’t just lick it up, the cat lapped it up so it was full-steam ahead from that moment on.

The term ‘Melting Pot’ worked so well for them because it tweaked all the right guilt nodules just hard enough to bring tears to the eyes but no so hard that it caused screaming. The screaming came later. It was right for them for the same reason it is wrong for us; because it manifestly fails to distinguish between ethnicity and culture and, in fact, actively sought to blur those two things into one

It is time to give each of those concepts autonomy. My suggestion of the term ‘monoculturalism’ may come with as many Hydras as Brian suggests and maybe it should not be the settled choice. So I submit it as a place to start.

The search continues.