Fascism

[fpb]

That Fascism is a not right-wing phenomenon I am not even disposed to argue. Apart that it is based on the highly individualistic ideas of Nietzsche, apart that its supposed collectivism is nothing more than a matter of empty gestures intended to "steal its enemies' clothes" (but only their clothes); apart from the fact, which I pointed out in my article on Frank Miller and the movie 300, that Fascism instinctively seeks the agreement of existing state authorities, especially the army and police, apart from its innate nationalism, traditionalism, and irrationalism, there is the fact that to identify collectivism and the left is total nonsense. The inevitable corollary of such an identification is that the whole Anarchist movement would be the soul itself of conservatism. That laughter you hear is the ghost of Emma Goldman laughing itself sick.

Of course, there is such a thing as right-wing anarchism - namely, Ayn Rand's "objectivism". And indeed, Rand and Goldman are as like each other as a pair of twins: two Jewish Russian female intellectuals driven to extremism and something very like political insanity - that is, various brands of anarchism - by the experience of Russian tyranny. The sole difference is that Rand, coming from a later generation, experienced Russian oppression in its Leninist form; but, being also old enough to just remember Tzarist oppression, had nothing left for her restless obsession with politics except what we Italians call a fuga in avanti, a "forwards flight" - an attempt to escape an intolerable position by making a perceived forward move into novel and utopian territory. (Remember this concept of the fuga in avanti - it is very important to understand Italian politics in general and Fascism in particular.) Goldman and Rand were Russian enough not to understand state institutions except than as a tool of oppression (consider the eagerness and the sense of relief with which Russians of all stripes turned to Vladimir Putin's KGB-based regime), and so, neither of them could possibly accept the American commonwealth as it was, Goldman invented an ideal humanity for herself, and Rand an ideal capitalism. Neither of which had anything to do with humanity or capitalism as they are. Of the two, of course, Rand was the genuine innovator, but I do not find it in myself to compliment her for that.

In fact, Rand and Mussolini have this in common, that the politics of both arise from the collapse of socialist hopes in the wake of World War One. I do not think that anyone has properly understood the personal crisis that Mussolini himself must have undergone in and after 1914. He was already an established political leader, the admired guide of the hard-line faction in the Socialist party. No more than three years earlier (1911), he and the future socialist leader Pietro Nenni had risked jail by sabotaging the tracks for the trains that took Italian troops to war in Lybia (a war, by the way, that was very popular among the Italian public); he had even taken refuge from Italian law in the very Austrian Trentino that was to become one of Italy's main war goals four years later. Altogether, if there was one Italian political leader who had proved by his personal behaviour his commitment to pacifism and to Utopian socialism, it was Benito Mussolini.

The crisis of 1914 struck at the roots of his ideals. Mussolini's guiding light, like that of many other people before Karl R. Popper published The Poverty of Historicism (1942), was a belief in History and Progress as inevitably positive forces, as leading mankind to a bright future by inevitable stages, which to resist and try to reverse was as foolish as it was criminal. However, unlike the fanatical likes of Jean Jaures, who insisted on pacifism even in the face of vicious and unstoppable aggression. Mussolini was intelligent enough (his intelligence was his one virtue) to see that history had contradicted his ideals. Not only the war as such - he had resisted war before - but the lawless behaviour of the most "progressive" European nation, Germany's literally moralistic adoption of immoralism as a guiding light, denied the very notion of a progressive evolution towards a peaceful world commonwealth. If the most advanced nation in the world, with its great universities and its magnificent railways, its colossal factories and its glorious Social Democrat party, had grown into the future, not as a model of peace, but as a self-brutalized beast of prey, then the whole notion of a luminous progressive pacifist future was dead.

However, while the pacifist utopia had died for him, the notion of History as a positive force had not. And here we come across the really important distinction in Western politics, without which anyone can fall into the nonsense of declaring the mature Mussolini a Socialist: that is, the distinction between the central, axial Catholic tradition, and those who, in every age and in every direction, move consciously or unconsciously away from it. The important thing about Mussolini is that he was, by instinct as much as by family and social background, such a man.

The distinction between centripetal and centrifugal, moving towards the cultural core or away from it, anima naturaliter Catholica and not, is one that cuts across all political positions, with the possible exception of Anarchism. Personally, I cannot imagine a Catholic Anarchist, since Anarchism is based on the notion of the self-dependence of the individual, which flies in the face both of the majesty of God and of the Christian belief in Original Sin. But it is possible to be Catholic and authoritarian, moderate, democratic, or socialist; or none of the above.

(The matter is complicated by the existence of a tendency which, having idealized the nation in an authoritarian sense, accepts, not the Catholic faith, but the presence of the Church in the history of the Nation - the Nation being the really hallowed and hallowing reality. This is the position associated with the Frenchman Charles Maurras and his Action Francaise; but, long before Maurras, it had been set out in the most beautiful language by our great poet Giosue' Carducci, Nobel Prizewinner for literature, 1907. Carducci was never Catholic, indeed a lot of his theorizing anticipates not so much Fascism as Nazism; but in his poems about Italian history, he often presented displays of popular and antique faith with such ravishing beauty of imagery and sound, as to almost deceive the reader. This was the ground on which Mussolini's party eventually sought an accomodation with the Church; but as the Church - especially under such a Pope as Pius XI! - was not easily turned into a mere instrument of the Nation, the agreement was never more than very fragile.)

Mussolini could not, ever, be Catholic. It was as impossible for him as for CS Lewis, and for much the same reasons. Lewis, as an Ulsterman, and Mussolini as a Romagna working-class person, instinctively associated the Church with evils too ancient, and too deeply rooted in their collective past, to ever allow them to look at it without a subtle, underlying disgust. And while Lewis had in the Anglican Church a half-way house where he could develop a viewpoint that ended up being Catholic in all but name, Mussolini had no such refuge. He lost the faith in historicistic pacifism; but he did not lose his faith in history, because he had nowhere else to go.

Now it is my view that this faith in History as a positive and ennobling force and in Humanity as something that was an end in itself and whose innate nobility would shine in the future, is the exact form in which the rebellion against the Church, the centrifugal rather than centripetal movement in history, has existed in the last three hundred years. It is still here today in the standard reply to people who insist on answering to Catholic teaching with the statement that this is 2008, that is, that history, rather than argument, has disproved it. That is one reason why, in spite of his classically "progressive" background, the agnostic Karl Popper has been widely taken up by the most pugnacious and orthodox Catholic thinkers, such as Fr.Guido Sommavilla SJ - and yours truly. That is why, in particular, various kinds of historicists could be in the most fierce possible war against each other. It was not the journey, let alone the destination, that they had in common; it was the starting point. There is only one centre, or one axis, of a culture; but there are infinite possible directions away from that centre. People need agree in nothing to be equally believers in "progress", in "humanity", in "history". Never mind Fascists and Communists: one just has to think of Woodrow Wilson, who started his political career in Pacifist Leagues and the like, and who was a historicist utopian if anyone ever was, ending his career by the violent and lawless suppression of anarchists and socialists within his country. Wilson, a southern racist under whose Presidency the Ku Klux Klan underwent a tremendous revival, managed nevertheless, like utopians across the recent centuries, to impress contemporaries as a kind of saint and manage to gain a completely undeserved moral leadership.

This centrifugal movement may be called progressive, or historicist, or modernist - taking for modernism a rather broader definition than Pope Pius X did (although what he condemned is certainly part of it). It has drawn many nominal Christians to itself - Wilson was one - but it is in essence a rebellion against Catholic teaching. And the case of Wilson, strange to us because his kind of superstition has mostly died down, reminds us of one particularly important feature of centrifugal progressivism: it was often heavily impregnated with Darwinism. Some of the pacifists who opposed the First World War were intensely Darwinist: they regarded the war with horror as a "lower", retrogressive kind of competition, getting in the way of the "higher", non-violent but essentially competitive, Darwinian mode of society where competition drives all social forms to a higher level. To give one instance, the idea that "lower" races would simply become peacefully extinct, giving way to the "higher" white race, was widespread across the West for a long time. And we should bear in mind that this kind of Darwinism was highly proactive. Faced, for instance, with the fact that "lower" types, from Irish Catholics to blacks, often bred more efficiently than "higher" ones, its reaction was not to accept the datum that contradicted its theory, but to demand action to reverse this intolerable tendency. At one extreme end of this we find Ayn Rand, with her passion for business competition as the real purging and ennobling force of history; but a great many pacifist entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century were of this kind. From a different branch of the same Darwinian tree comes eugenics, the notion that human evolution can be directed from above by selective breeding, to improve society by increasing the number of "higher" types.

Modernism, progressivism, the centrifugal tendency, cuts across the distinction between left, centre and right, because left, centre and right represent attitudes to Caesar, not to God. The further left a party may be found, the more oppositional is its position with respect to existing and/or traditional power (including social power). Conversely, the further right a party is, the more it is committed to existing and/or traditional power. That is, the definitions of left, centre, and right, are definitions with respect to earthly power and authority, not to God. You can go mad in both directions, especially if you are seized by the centrifugal modernist mania: so, Fascism, which strips the State of every attribute but power, glowers at one end of the spectrum at Communism, which claims all power for the Party; just as Ayn Rand, building a world with no reality but the power of money, glares at Emma Goldman, fancying a planet from which all kinds of power, especially money, have been banned. (By whose power?) And conversely, you can be sane at nearly every point of the spectre, so long as you accept that the world is not going to become paradise, and so long as you subject the test of your actions to morality and to God.

Certainly Mussolini was rooted in historicism. The collapse of his utopian pacifism was the result of an instinctively moral revulsion before German aggression and immoralism; but his belief in History as a necessitarian, unstoppable force meant that the moral instinct that had led him to fear and hate the German aggression quickly was bent so far out of shape as to become unrecognizable. Far from accepting the primacy of morality in human action, Mussolini dumped everything in the socialist/pacifist utopia that was simply and clearly moral, and was left with a naked and brutal historical force. At first it was not immediately clear to what an extent he had changed; he had spent most of the wartime years in the trenches, not doing much by way of writing and politics, and his erstwhile followers and friends could still remember him as the red hothead of old. That is why, for instance, the great Arturo Toscanini, a man who genuinely believed both in socialist politics and in patriotism, joined his first 1919 electoral list: he hoped to see patriotism reconciled with socialism. Within two years, he had not only left, but was Mussolini's sworn enemy, eventually leaving Italy after having got a dose of Mussolini's thuggery. He had found, like a good few early Fascists, that what Mussolini was now offering had nothing to do with socialism in any form whatever.

And here one has to get into some specifically Italian obsessions. Since the age of Machiavelli, Italy has been a country where to develop a coherent and successful policy has been exceptionally difficult. Immensely rich to begin with, and dreadfully exposed to the assault of lesser but better armed countries, Italy found herself invaded, her independent politics cut across and destroyed, her institutions remolded, her wealth taken over, by foreign forces. This was a wholly unstoppable process, but it developped a specially Italian disease which has not yet been cured (though if it is true that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, we may be at the farce stage): the dream of the Leader. Its first manifestation known to me is Machiavelli's The Prince, and the genesis of this book is more significant than its contents - or at least, you could not explain the one without the other.

Throughout the 1300s and 1400s, the city of Florence had been the centre of republican values and popular government in Italy, confirmed by the 25-year epic of its resistance to the powerful tyrant Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan. Even when the immensely rich banking house of Medici had become the undoubted leaders of the commonwealth, they had done so - at first - with careful respect of constitutional rule. However, just as the age of foreign invasions began, the third generation of Medicis decided they had had enough of republican forms and the city constitution. The city then decided it had had enough of them; but the Medicis allied themselves with one or another of the foreign armies that were fighting each other for the prize of Italy, and were brought back in by force. Machiavelli had been one of the chief diplomats of the republican government, and on the restoration of the tyrants, he was sent into exile. He then wrote The Prince as a kind of peace offering to the victorious Medicis.

Generations of scholars have tried in vain to make sense of this strange tract, apparently written in praise of tyranny by a passionate and indeed doctrinaire republican. The point is that it is best explained in psychological rather than logical terms. It is not wholly coherent. To begin with, of course, it is a peace offering by a defeated partisan to the victorious party; but more to the point, it incarnates the mood of a man who simply cannot tolerate the future that is becoming every day clearer for his country. As Machiavelli wrote, Italy (with the exception of the still strong and tenacious Republic of Venice) was falling, disaster after disaster, into the rule of less civilized but hugely more powerful foreign sovereigns. His treatise is best understood as the dream of means whereby the inevitable alien triumph can be reversed; specifically through the apparition of a unifier of superhuman genius, able to turn against the invaders the dirty wiles and divide-and-rule tricks by which the defeated always hold themselves to have been defeated. The dreadful experience of defeat and national humiliation, and the refusal to accept its finality, is what really binds together the pages of this strange masterpiece; and that is why, at the same time as he promotes a kind of politics that would most certainly be death to any republican or constitutional order, Machiavelli has strange fits of praise towards the tough and enduring Venetians, or - strangest of all - a wholly ideological and impractical passion for city militias over professional armies. The fact that city militias had not saved the city in 1516 did not discourage him: communism hasn't failed, comrades, it just has never been seriously tried.

(Machiavelli died before the worst, but his obsession with city militias did not die with him. In 1527, the Florentines tried again to get rid of the Medici tyrants, and to defend their city with city militias - and they were overwhelmed and destroyed by the Emperor's mighty professional army. Machiavelli's recipe for city militias had been tried once again - and failed once more, this time to the complete destruction of the Florentine Renaissance. What was left of the city settled down under Medici control, and for one century or more, not a single man of talent arose from a city that had, until 1527, produced more genius than Athens.)

This disastrous dream of the Man of Willpower who can tame and defeat the horrid difficulties of politics has since haunted the Italian imagination. The most disastrous people in Italian history, Napoleon, Crispi and Mussolini, all tried to embody that dream. It is a classic and repeated case of "fuga in avanti", an attempt to escape from the tremendous difficulties of making policy for a country so complicated, intractable, and untypical, that practically anything can be counted to go wrong. Mr.Berlusconi is its latest incarnation, and here, I must say, we have moved from tragedy into farce.

In the moment of ideological upset when his old pacifist dreams had died, Mussolini drew his idea of his further policies from the writings of Nietzsche, then at the height of his popularity. Nietzsche's theory of the coming Superman gave a wholly different, non-pacifist slant to the historicist perspective that Mussolini was unwilling and unable to abandon; and his belief in natural aristocracies and in creative violence justified the fact that this former pacifist had found himself preaching war.

However, Mussolini did not just fasten on the then fashionable Prussian philosopher. His political path from then on was quite individual and represents the most fantastic, step-by-step reversal of everything he had previously thought and done. It was also fantastically specific to his own province and background. The former socialist pacifist sold himself to the most reactionary and politically isolated class in Italy, the landowners of Romagna - his own native land - a caste so rapacious, so narrow, so enveloped in a kind of resurrected feudal imagination, as to belong more somewhere like Russia than in Italy; a caste possessed, what is more, of the finest arable land in Europe, which it shamefully mismanaged. They were despised even among their fellow rich. (Once in the early nineteen hundreds, one of them went to the Prime Minister, Giolitti, to complain about a peasant strike. "These men have been loyal to my family for centuries, and now villainous agitators from outside are driving them to revolt." "Good," answered Giolitti coolly, "perhaps now you will find out what it's like to be them." Giolitti was no revolutionary, but a moderate, managing kind of man; he just knew the kind of crew he was dealing with here.) The hatred of the peasantry for the landowners burned brighter in Romagna than anywhere else in Italy, and for good reason; it was the fire that had propelled Mussolini himself, the son of a self-taught village smith, to national prominence as an uncompromising Socialist leader. Now he came back to his own native land, at the head of bands of disgruntled army veterans out to stamp out socialism by force of arms. From the moment when he first organized his "Fighting Bands" - Fasci di Combattimento - the strikes and social disorders that had frequently struck Italy were turned into anticipations of civil war.

Everything Mussolini did from 1919 to 1939 must be interpreted as a genuine reversal of everything he had ever believed before. The former socialist agitators sent his bands to murder socialists; the man who had known in person how vicious the Romagna landowners were took money from them to crush his own former comrades; the pacifist turned into a violent warmonger (in the first two years of his government, he threatened war against Britain, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and Turkey, actually invaded Turkey, and sent a token force to take part in the French occupation of the Ruhr). The former egalitarian socialist set up a class-based administration in which rank and privileges went strictly together and the lower orders were kept out of anything that could spell prestige. (In 1926, for instance, privates and NCOs were excluded from the national military games, reserving the prices for the officer class alone; a wholly unnecessary and damaging measure which only shows how keen Mussolini was to create a caste state.) The man who had made his career as part of the powerful Socialist group in parliament, destroyed parliament rather than have to account for the murder of the Socialist deputy Matteotti. In all this, Mussolini worked hard to be, and to be seen to be, the very reverse of a socialist; and so, there is an element of tragic farce in the way that the man who had broken with his socialist past out of Italian patriotism and disgust at German aggression eventually threw his country into the support of a much worse German government that nearly every Italian citizen loathed.

Comments

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

I see you're back to writing long entries again! Are you feeling better?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I was practically forced to write this one.

[redcoast.livejournal.com]

Well, good! It's good to try!

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

An interesting and well put together article. I wanted to ask a couple of things of you. Firstly your comment that C S Lewis "as an Ulsterman, instinctively associated the Church with evils too ancient, and too deeply rooted in their collective past, to ever allow them to look at it without a subtle, underlying disgust". I'd be interested in knowing where you encounter this "subtle underlying disgust" in Lewis' writings. Some of his writings contain ideas which point towards a Catholic theology, but in the Anglican Church he was returning to the church of his youth, the Church of Ireland having the same mixture of high and low church as its english sister church.

To be fair to you I should say that I am 'an ulsterman' from the presbyterian community (lapsed) rather than the more rarefied and (in the past) politically privileged anglican population. I also live within a mile of Lewis's birthplace and often visit the place he said he imagined when he pictured Narnia, the Craigantlet hills, just a mile away. I think your view of 'ulstermen' in this statement is an over-simplification and from everything I have read by and of Lewis may be especially misplaced in his case.

I would also be interested in your definition of Darwinism. How do you define the term? In this article it sounds like a political philosophy rather than a scientific theory. Eugenics seems as far away from the idea of 'natural selection' as it is possible to get. Indeed it owes much more to the selective breeding of plants and farm animals which had been going on for many centuries before Darwin was born.

In fact I would be very interested in seeing how all the parties to this discussion define their terms. What does left-wing mean? What does right-wing mean? Fascist? Communist? Do we all mean the same things when we use those terms.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

CS Lewis' mature theology is not Anglican, but unmistakeably Catholic. He speaks of the Eucharist in unmistakeably Catholic terms ("Next to the Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest reality accessible to your senses") and confesses that he believes in Purgatory. That being the case, the question "Why are you not a Catholic" has to be asked. Lewis himself was asked it, and he spoke vaguely of things that had changed in the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages, but never came up with any specifics. In a man so willing to take on any and all comers when debating religion, this is a very remarkable attitude indeed. Tolkien, who was Catholic, felt that he could perceive a certain underlying Ulster prejudice in his sometime friend - "the ulsterior motive", he called it. And you have to remember that Lewis lived through the upheaval of the Irish revolution and civil war. Lewis described himself all his life as an Irishman, and the Ireland of his childhood, the Ireland he speaks of in Surprised by joy and elsewhere, was a country where Dublin and Cork were no less accessible and no less part of the same world than Belfast. His own father, I seem to remember, came from Cork. Lewis fought in the British Army in WWI; that is, he had the same kind of background as the Black and Tans, or as those Irish prisoners who nearly lynched Roger Casement when the German authorities unwisely allowed him to speak to them. (It is not commonly remembered that, when Padraic Pearse and his people started the revolt, most of the young Irish most committed to Union were away from Ireland, and a considerable part were never to come back at all.) AS civil wars go, what happened in Ireland from 1916 to 1923 is moderate enough, but it was nasty enough to paint itself in the memory of all who took part. Tens of thousands of loyalists and Protestants left Eire for ever. Lewis and Tolkien's own friend, Neville Coghill, had the dreadful experience of being subjected to a mock execution by an IRA patrol. Anyone who was on the losing side of the Irish disturbances was not going to feel very happy about Catholicism. Lewis himself admits to an abiding, irrational fear of Catholics in his letter to Sr.Penelope CSMV of April 10, 1941, making a joke of it, but I think that, in the light of his fairly evident bad conscience about it later and elsewhere, we might take the hint just a bit more seriously than he wants us to.

By Darwinism, in this article, I definitely meant political Darwinism, or Social Darwinism, including but not restricted to Eugenics. There has long been a wholly unphilosophical and unreasoning tendency to see evolution as something inevitably positive and inevitably leading to better and higher forms. This is nonsense, but it is a nonsense that dominated Western attitudes through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is not dead yet.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

It seems that Lewis's views of prayer expressed in Letters to Malcolm were pretty Protestant, and indeed one detects a disturbing Platonism in some of his writing...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The Platonism in Lewis' writing is not exactly concealed (check the Professor's refrain, "It's all in Plato" in The Last Battle), and nor does it seem to me at all dangerous - unless you reckon St.Augustine and Pope Benedict XVI dangerous. Platonism is, if not connaturate to the Christian religion (Irenaeus of Lyons and Thomas Aquinas, to quote only two giants, were not Platonists), at least a "recognized party". And I think that the essay you quote pushes the issue of Lewis' "barbs" against Catholicism much too far. For instance, about the passage about devotions to Saints, what Lewis has to say is nothing more than what many Catholic reformers have said down the years, indeed what the Vatican itself has backed by outlawing a number of outlandish devotions and derubricating several unhistorical saints. (If only they had got rid of the euhemerized pagan goddess St.Bridget!) As for the relevance of Tolkien's dislike of some features of Lewis' thought, while I appreciate (and indeed mentioned) the importance of "the ulsterior motive" in assessing Lewis' allegiances, nonetheless you have to remember that Tolkien was a very partisan kind of Catholic: a supporter of Franco, an avowed opponent of democracy, and a man who carried in his bones the rage of seeing his mother literally die of malnutrition because of the stone-hearted rejection by her Protestant relations. His Catholicism was considerably more partisan and exclusive than that of, say, GK Chesterton; almost to the point of being sectarian. Incredibly, he was not only pained by CS Lewis' refusal to support Franco in the Spanish Civil war - in which Lewis took the only possible course, damning both sides as tyrannical and vicious - but he actualy ascribed it to Lewis' supposed anti-Catholic prejudice, as if the only reason to disapprove of military tyranny and subversion were religious prejudice. Did Tolkien even realize that he was practically defending Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon?

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

I remain unconvinced over Lewis and his ulsterism. To ascribe a negative prejudice to his decision, or rather non-decision, to become a Catholic seems to assume that the Anglican Church could not accomodate his beliefs. More than any other the Anglican Church is a broad church, containing as it does functional athiests right through to high-church 'catholics' whose differences with the Catholic Church are minimal. If a return to the church of his youth accomodated his beliefs, then why would he change?

And I woulde reject utterly your assertion that Lewis came from the same community which gave rise to the Black & Tans. Lewis came from a very different class and indeed country. The Black & Tans were not recruited from Ireland as a whole or Ulster in particular, they came mainly from England and were drawn from those who had no other opportunities after their return from the war. Indeed many were alleged to have come from jails, or to have selected 'service' over prison when before the courts. Not at all similar to Lewis' middle-class background.

That being said, I'm afriad Irish History is the subject which has caused me to distrust almost all history. I have seen, in my lifetime, a total rewriting of the history of events over the last 100 years. A process that continues to this day, especially over events over the past thirty years. Events that I lived through, that my parents and grandparents lived through have been denied or warped. If similar changes and, on occasions, outright distortions occur in other areas, then it is difficult to treat any history as anything other than fiction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I take your corrections about Irish history, the more so as I have written my article on Fascism exactly to challenge the same kind of politically motivated rewriting of recent history of my own country which you decry. My basic point was, I know who and what Fascists are - incredibly, I have even had Fascist friends. So I regard Mr.Goldberg's thesis as an imposition. About the Black and Tans, I generalized from the life history of William Joyce, the man who became Lord Haw-Haw, who certainly was an Irishman, fought in WWI, and became a Black and Tan. All his later politics were dictated by his embitterment in the years that followed the war. My point was not that Lewis would ever have become a Black and Tan - I agree that his upper-middle class background would not have agreed with becoming a cheap pseudo-soldier - but that he came from a group which essentially had their own country taken away from them about 1922. Lewis described himself as an "Irishman" (not an "ulsterman", a definition he associated with sectarianism) to the end of his life, and while his swift entrance into Oxford gave him opportunities that less fortunate loyalists may not have had, we cannot imagine that the transformation of three-quarters of his fatherland into a foreign country did not affect him; the more so as he met Coghill there, with his stories of IRA brutality. He said himself that he had "been taught from the cradle never to trust a Catholic", and that meeting with such men as Tolkien and Dr.Havard had been a real revelation. And may I say, I have met a few Anglicans and a few Protestants in my life. When I come across someone who gives as much value to the first part of the Scriptural injunction to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" as to the second, "for it is God Who works within you", and indeed makes it one of his most frequent quotations; who does not like hymns; who believes in Purgatory; who is conscientious about the details of the sacrament of marriage to the point of lawyerliness; who regards the Eucharist as the holiest thing you will ever encounter, transcending human reason; who has the highest possible regard for the priesthood, and not only for the Anglican but for the Catholic priesthood (read his correspondence with Don Giovanni Calabria); and who seems to pattern himself after GK Chesterton - well, I think I have some reason to ask, Why are you not Catholic?

[fuzzybunny916.livejournal.com]

Tolkien was anti-democratic?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, quite openly so.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have finished the essay you linked me to. Considering that I have just finished a long polemical essay, I hope you will forgive me if I don't tackle the whole of it in a systematic way; but I am afraid that the more I went into it, the worse it seemed to me. He misrepresents Narnia (where the Fall was partly averted, unlike our world, as everyone who read The Magician's Nephew ought to know) as being exactly like our world, and therefore having the same relationship with the Second Person of the Trinity. He does not connect Lewis' mention of Aslan "coming and going" with his devastating account of spiritual dryness in The Screwtape Letters, which is what Lewis obviously meant: that is, that there are times when we subjectively feel incapable of perceiving the presence of God in any way. The Narnia stories, after all, were very much written for children, and Lewis was not going to deliver as desolating and frightful a description of spiritual loneliness as he did elsewhere; but there can be no doubt that, by the "absence" of Aslan, he meant exactly that - that dreadful mystery that led God Himself to scream "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Indeed, by making this mistake, the author even fails to bring the proper theological charge against Lewis: that is, that he seems to have mistaken the Second Person with the Third, since it is the Spirit whose absence we feel in the periods of dryness. The worst of all is the denial of Lewis having any belief in the Sacrament and the Real Presence. What on Earth did Lewis have to say for this person to listen? He said that the Sacrament was the holiest object we will meet on this Earth; that we are under an absolute obligation to attend the Eucharist every week, and to do so at our territorial parish (scarcely a Protestant doctrine!); and that the redeeming power of the Eucharist is as real as the mightiest magic in the fables - favete linguis, be still and know I am the Lord. The whole essay seems to me written in the spirit, not of a sympathetic inquirer, but of an able though not over-scrupulous prosecutor out to get a conviction by hook or by crook.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

I have long maintained that the collapse of political language into "left" and "right" has done a great deal of harm, both theoretical and practical. Practically, it left a remarkable number of progressives vulnerable to
Marxist popular-front blandishments. Theoretically, it has left us without any words for those who want to change society in a direction other than (that currently promoted by those who call themselves) the progressive.

As for "fascist", it is notoriously slippery a term in English -- Orwell wrote that it had become meaningless as long ago as 1947 -- but in the context of this post it is clearly restricted to the specifically Italian origins of the term.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think in general the description of left and right is still useful in terms of support or opposition for the sources of traditional authority - e.g. a moderate or conservative person will be respectful towards existing authorities, symbols and realities of power, and precedent; while a person who is qualified as a left-winger will show a desire to alter or replace them. In fact, I argued elsewhere that in the USA the defintions are in some ways becoming more rather than less relevant, because of the formation of a definite class of hereditary aristocrats.

Fascism is to some extent something that belongs to a particular period in history. Never again shall we, in the west (places such as India, China or Russia may be another matter) see a combination of extreme nationalist and illiberal attitudes take, thanks to the collapse of more moderate right-wing forces, the dimension of a mass movement worthy of government. On the other hand, these elements - ultra-nationalism; traditionalism; militarism; irrationalism; violence as cleansing, wholesome, purifying; intolerance of debate or opposition - are not completely eliminable from the body politic, and even in a healthy democracy a certain percentage of the electorate - from five to ten per cent - will tend toward them.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Assume arguendo that the U.S. is developing a class of hereditary aristocrats. Are the people fighting this development in the name of popular sovereignty and equality
1) left-wing, because they're fighting against aristocracy, or
2) right-wing, because they are attempting to preserve existing authorities and symbols against those who would alter or replace them?

More generally, "traditional authority" is rarely one-sided. This is especially true in the modern era when recent concoctions set up against what used to be traditional have been around long enough to have some historical standing of their own. But it's also true in the past, e.g. the element of government by law and collective consent in medieval Europe which dwelt uneasily with the element of hereditary aristocracy.

Concerning fascism, I'd given up on it as a tool of analysis long ago, but you almost persuade me that it's a useful category.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You might like a look at my six-part study of modern American politics, where I set out my point of view about (among other things) what I call the New Aristocracy:
http://fpb.livejournal.com/217554.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/217701.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/219614.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/219784.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/223187.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/228779.html
Most of these also feature long and interesting comments sections.

Anima Naturaliter Catholica

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Ah, my friend! I am sorry that I ever doubted you. For a brief moment, while you were ill, I thought your ability to make luminous insightful comments about history and politics had deserted you. Your comments on Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis strike me as particularly penetrating.

You have put into words something I have been unable to articulate about modern politics: the modern ideological movements seem madness to me, everyone in jerky flight away from some unnamed core European ideal--and that core is the Catholic Church, the spirit of Christendom, and its life. The concept indeed of an ideology is a modern one: ancient ideas of kingship, law, and empire were not ideologies properly so called. Ideology is a substitute for religion. The religion for which it is a substitute is Catholicism.

Your comment on anarchy is also very well taken. Anarchist Catholicism is impossible to imagine, but an anarchist Protestant is easy to imagine (I know at least one myself).

I ask in all honesty--why allow Jonah Goldberg to dominate the best sellers list? Write your own book to refute him. You owe it to the truth. You write with passion and knowledge, a potent combination.

I am serious: think about your mark on history. Turn this essay into a book: your theme could tie in other things you have written on your livejournal.

JCJW

PS. You once said you meant to do a longer article on Woodrow Wilson, the worse American president ever. I would be curious on your thoughts of his comparison and contrasts with Mussolini.

Re: Anima Naturaliter Catholica

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I did not exactly invent the notion that the Catholic church and faith are axial to Western civilization. Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, and, with some modifications, CS Lewis, argued very powerfully for it. The problem is that in order to accept such a viewpoint at all, you have to be well on your way to accepting the Church for what it is, and, by and at large, the intellectual caste is not ready for such a step.

It may be that, in the future, the essays I am currently writing will coalesce into a book of some sort. But I do not see any way I could outsell Mr.Goldberg, who has a ready-made and faithful public.

Wilson has ended up in a very large, half-finished essay on the role of France in modern history. On your encouragement, I will get back to it and see if I can finish and publish it in the near future.

Thanks for the praise, but please, tone it down. I might end up believing it, and then where would we be?

Re: Anima Naturaliter Catholica

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"But I do not see any way I could outsell Mr.Goldberg, who has a ready-made and faithful public."

If you take up your pen as a sword on the side of the Christ, His beautiful bride the Church, and all His servants, saints and angels, you might find a ready-made and faithful public also.

Maybe I was lucky enough to get a book published. Or maybe anyone who sets his mind to it can also do it, if just given the right encouragement. So, think of this as encouragement rather than praise.

[cheyinka]

I was trying to imagine a Catholic anarchist, and I failed. My thought process went: perhaps everyone is responsible for their own families, where the highest secular authority is one's father? But then how does the parish->diocese->universal Church authority come in? It becomes essentially a theocracy.

Also, I was thinking about eugenics after your brief mention above. Is it still eugenics if, rather than prevent a given group of people from reproducing, their genes are altered so that they can't pass on a specific trait? I can't think of any specific trait which if absent would make the "superior race" folk feel better about the "lesser races", but I know that there are people who can't hear who insist on the capital letter in Deaf and desire the ability to choose that their children be unable to hear, and claim that preventing this choice is discrimination against all Deaf people. If everyone with genetically-transferred deafness had gene therapy such that all of their children without exception would hear, that would seem like "improving the human race", but I'm not at all sure that there's not something terrible I'm missing.

And, lastly, I really appreciate essays like this. The history classes I took never went into any depth on anything, and in any event my US history classes generally stopped at the Civil War or maybe as far as 1900 (as I went to school in Montana and Montana became a state in 1889).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your appreciation. I think the cases you mention definitely fall under the heading of Eugenics - after all, people are being manufactured to order according to someone's idea of a desirable individual, whatever that idea may be. However, considering that the Pope has just commissioned the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith to make a serious study of the moral aspect of the new reproductive technologies, I think we may soon have a more authoritative opinion on the matter than mine.