Christmas: History gains its true perspective

The genius that leaves the modern in the shade. Photo by Denis Zagorodniuc

Some wise words, beginning with "History often needs shock treatment to get it back into the correct rhythm."

The writer points out that Marxism, both the "historical determinism" of yore, as well as its version flaunted by promoters of the Woke today, "promises a solution to historical woes: Cancel the past and replace it with a glorious future according to the dictates of powerful elites. [...] The proposal is utopian and ends in tyranny. So we must look elsewhere for a solution that protects human dignity."

Our observer of the world's ways continues:

Christianity offers us a view of history to evaluate all historical developments. The evangelists and early Christians were humble and honest historians. They fearlessly reported the genealogy of Jesus, which included saints and sinners, and accurately depicted his messengers—the Apostles—including their sins. The humility of the early Christians enhances the reliability of biblical history, and the Cross is hardly the stuff of huckster advertising.

Further, the Resurrection fulfils all of scripture. In the gospels, we hear a litany-like repetition of the phrase, “So that Scriptures may be fulfilled.” Portions of Mary’s Magnificat prayer of joy are rooted in Old Testament prayers. Jesus prays the psalms on the Cross. The references reinforce the unity of the Old Testament with the New Testament and restore the integrity of salvation history from start to finish.

The early Christians didn’t cancel history but evaluated the past by the Word. “So Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.’” (Acts 17:22-23) 
Ancient civilizations challenge modern arrogance. History teaches: Been there, done that.

Among the discolored ruins in Athens ravaged by time, the custodians provide a bright white recently-hewn block of marble. The unweathered stone provokes the imagination and allows us to visualize the glorious remnants as brightly elegant, unique structures that rival the splendor of modern skyscrapers. The ancients were hardly our inferiors in construction management. Confidence in ancient history helps us dismiss the false promises of Marxism that place faith in relentless human progress. 

However, that bright white piece of marble also suggests that [...] gospel historians were not, by default, inferior to modern progressives. The truth of honest testimony is immutable. “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Peter 1:16)

Truth in its absolute form, as derived from historical information, has been the focus of much of the theological argument in the Church over the centuries. Therefore, we can say this: "The Church safeguards the integrity of salvation history." Our writer states:

The deposit of faith of the Church—rooted in Scripture and Sacred Tradition—guarantees the unity of all of history and carefully guards the eternal truths of the Gospel. The Apostles’ Creed summarizes history from start to finish. The “one, holy, Catholic Church” delivers the Word until the end of time. Jesus is the Lord of history. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. (cf. Rev. 22:13)

The saving history of Jesus critiques all of history—individual and collective. Confident in the Word, we encounter Him throughout history in the Sacraments and realize our worth in His eyes. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

The writer of this piece is Fr. Jerry Pokorsky, a priest of the U.S. Diocese of Arlington. Trained in business and accounting, he also holds a Master of Divinity and a Master’s in moral theology. Read his full article here.  

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Gratitude uplifts as it reflects our reality

A quality of soul that must be cultivated... Photo: Source

During my more-than-a-month-long break away from the keyboard involving travel in the United States, I noted the generosity of many individual Americans and, conversely, their attention to saying thank you, even for any minor thing done by way of displaying the good manners that oils daily interaction.

However, in many ways, the spirit of the worldwide culture is one of narcissism and entitlement, so that gratitude has fallen from favour within the mentality of large swathes of society, especially among the young, who have been taught to believe they have a right to a life without difficulty. 

I want to tap into words of wisdom on why gratitude should be cultivated in our life:

Gratitude, of course, has many counterfeits, but the genuine article is worlds apart from either social ‘smoothery’ or self-interested charm. Genuine gratitude is, as it were, written into our DNA, into the ‘depth-grammar’ of our nature. It is almost a self-evident good, needing no support from argument, a quality of soul, a virtue, in the classical sense of a disposition that inclines us to act for the good naturally, with ease and even with pleasure. 

Gratitude and its opposite crucially define our character and decisively determine our outlook on everything, especially ourselves and our lives, marking a far more deeply definitive difference than any other distinction. Total, ingrained ingratitude is more a pathological condition than a moral failing. 

But gratitude is much more than an individual attribute: like courtesy and kindness, and generosity and compassion, gratitude is an indispensable condition of civilised existence. A world without gratitude would be a terrifying, brutish, dangerous place. A world where ingratitude was valued over gratitude would be the nearest thing to a definition of Hell. 

No wonder that ingratitude cuts more deeply and more painfully and is more shocking than almost anything else: hence Lear’s lament: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child.” The whole of King Lear could be read as a meditation on the catastrophic social and political impact of ingratitude and how only gratitude counters the negative and ultimately destructive effects of resentment, the most destructive and demoralising of all human emotions, and regret, the most negative. 

But gratitude figures in our lives so deeply because in every particular expression of gratitude, we give implicit expression to our sense of the given-ness of existence itself, no less real for being so difficult to articulate. And that gratitude for the given-ness of everything which lurks in the metaphysical undergrowth of every particular ‘thank-you’, concerns – to steal a line from Wittgenstein – not how things are but that they are. And, by extension, not how we are, but that we are.   

To see life as a gift, something that need not have been, is to see it, implicitly, as purposefully brought into and sustained in existence – created, in other words - as opposed to being the result of a random concatenation of meaningless events. A world whose existence is not an a priori necessity is a world for which, despite its shadow-side, it is impossible not to give thanks. 

And if to feel, almost as a default setting, an overwhelming sense of gratitude, is to affirm implicitly the gift of existence itself, it also implies the existence of a Giver. The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), catches the same intimation when he says of someone in a similar position to the grateful leper [one of a total of 10 lepers healed by Jesus] that “He felt gratitude: so, he couldn’t not believe in God.”

That’s why gratitude is so closely allied to reverence and respect, wonder and awe. It is a prime candidate for what an American sociologist of religion in the 1970s, called “a signal of transcendence”, an aspect of ordinary life which, even if we find it near impossible to say how or why, constitutes a source of meaning and value, written into and read off from our everyday experience of the world, but pointing beyond: an inkling of something more.

All of this is present in this particular gospel where, as always, everything is more than it seems; and this is why Jesus gives such extraordinary weight to the grateful response of the Samaritan leper. His gratitude is an expression of faith, even if unacknowledged, the more remarkable, because the detested Samaritan would have been, from a Jewish point of view, the least likely person to exemplify faith. But, Jesus says, it is precisely his faith that has healed him. 

Faith and gratitude, then, if not exactly interchangeable, are certainly correlative, in that both see and savour the miracle and mystery of being, finding it impossible either to take it for granted or to be anything less than awed. Faith, in its essence, sees through ‘giftedness’ to a Giver. 

To conclude, there are two other elements of our modern view of gratitude discussed by the esteemed writer of the words I quote that deserve noting. First:

Until Christianity, gratitude wasn’t prized in anything like the same way. Aristotle, for instance, thought it was demeaning, that it rendered us inferior. Cicero thought the purpose of gratitude, as well as the exchanging gifts, served only the purpose of furthering one’s career. And, with his sense of Stoical self-sufficiency to the fore, Seneca felt that, since you must never be in anybody’s debt, you should equal, if not exceed, the gift given by a greater gift in return. 

Seneca's lack of a sense of generosity is, perhaps, evident again in Western culture. But the second point worth noting is this:

The source and object of all gratitude, whether acknowledged or not, is God, the ultimate cause and goal of existence and the ultimate source and goal of love, however and whenever we genuinely experience it. God is Love Itself, Goodness Itself, and Being Itself; and [to paraphrase Acts 17:28], “it is because we are loved that we exist”.

Gratitude is a quality of the soul, and it is a measure of our understanding of reality in all its dimensions.

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This is a huge deal. Sex changes for children - the Biden-approved policy - is unraveling before our eyes. https://t.co/WHrWliu2oi

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 28, 2022

The clinic was the only NHS one in the whole country. Other centres will now host such clinics. But the key point of the Cass review that gave rise to this closure was that Tavistock was too free with its hormone suppression therapy, putting at risk the future of young people like Kiera Bell, who took the centre to court for not challenging her feeling that she should become a boy. 

Homosexuals share a cruel nightmare

Joseph Sciambra ... renounced homosexual activity out of disgust with what goes on Source

They did disgusting things to each other, because, as gay journalist Randy Shilts said, “there was nobody to say no.” (And the Band Played On pub.1987)

Another man who admits that as a wild young homosexual (born 1969) he did disgusting things is Joseph Sciambra. He is the mover and shaker behind an organisation that aims to rescue those 'who are still trapped within the homosexual lifestyle and within the false “gay” orientation'.

The practice of chastity and the exercise of courage is the challenge he offers. He knows that the men who accept the challenge must fight a spiritual battle to 'overcome all same-sex attractions and any persistent attachments to the homosexual or the “gay” orientation'. Sciambra is not asking others to do anything that he is not doing himself with regards living out a more human lifestyle.

Two principles by which his group operates are:

We acknowledge that homosexual acts are not part of God’s plan for nature, humanity, or ourselves.

We acknowledge that the homosexual inclination is a part of our wounded false-self that can be healed.

Sciambra presents strong arguments on why his group accepts that the homosexual inclination is sign of a wounded person, and of the need for counselling and support on the way toward healing. Here is one presentation of his arguments where he poses the question: Do I have to become straight?

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The American Psychological Association Council of Representatives followed in 1975. Thereafter other major mental health organizations followed, including the World Health Organization in 1990. Yet, before and since, evidence continues to determine that homosexuality is indeed a mental illness.

The way in which most contemporary researches get around this fact is by blaming the high rates of psychiatric morbidity in homosexuals to social and cultural homophobia, internalized homophobia, and overall that homosexuality and mental illnesses are unrelated with the unusual rates of serious psychological conditions seen in homosexuals as “possibly linked with discrimination.” Only, this supposition is categorically false, for in the Netherlands, the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, in particular, gay men continue to exhibit a plethora of various mental disorders.*

* “Despite the Netherlands’ reputation as a world leader with respect to gay rights, homosexual Dutch men have much higher rates of mood disorders, anxiety disorders and suicide attempts than heterosexual Dutch men. Epidemiologists report similar disparities elsewhere in Western Europe and North America.”

“Exploring a Dutch paradox: an ethnographic investigation of gay men’s mental health.” Aggarwal S & Gerrets R. Culture, Health & Sexuality 16:105-119, 2014. 

Part and parcel along with any authentic program of healing from same-sex attraction, there must be at least a cursory examination of any childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse that was experienced by the person now dealing with same-sex attraction. Because some have survived particularly intense or violent abuse as children, professional therapy is highly advised; others, with a different story, perhaps therapy is not as necessary.

Here, it is not that mental illness causes homosexuality, but that the oftentimes extreme difficulties which some men experienced as children, who later become same-sex attracted, will eventually exhibit various mental illnesses because homosexuality never fully resolves the unattended wounds; [the controversial] Dr. Joseph Nicolosi put it this way: homosexuality is a “symptomatic failure to integrate self-identity. Symptoms will always emerge to indicate its incompatibility with a man’s true nature.” Ultimately, the decision to seek therapy is up to the individual; although it is possible, outside of a clinical environment, to naturally experience a diminishing of same-sex desires, and, henceforth, to witness an increase in attraction towards the opposite sex. Reparative therapy, while extremely beneficial to many, is not for everyone.

Sciambra offers a range of studies into the reality of homosexual inclination:

⊝ “Of the 1285 gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents who took part, 556 (43%) had mental disorder as defined by the revised Clinical Interview Schedule (CIS-R). Out of the whole sample, 361 (31%) had attempted suicide…Gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women have high levels of mental disorder…”

“Rates and predictors of mental illness in gay men, lesbians and bisexual men and women. Results from a survey based in England and Wales”. James Warner, et al. British Journal of Psychiatry 185, 479-485, 2004.

⊝ “LGB people are at higher risk of mental disorder, suicidal ideation, substance misuse, and deliberate self-harm than heterosexual people.”

“A systematic review of mental disorder, suicide, and deliberate self-harm in lesbian, gay and bisexual people.” Michael King, et al. BMC Psychiatry 8:70, 2008.

⊝ “Self-reported identification as non-heterosexual (determined by both orientation and sexual partnership, separately) was associated with unhappiness, neurotic disorders overall, depressive episodes, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobic disorder, probable psychosis, suicidal thoughts and acts, self-harm and alcohol and drug dependence.”

“Mental health of the non-heterosexual population of England.” Chakraborty A, et al. British Journal of Psychiatry 2011, Feb; 198(2):143-8. 

⊝ “Gay/lesbian and bisexual respondents had higher levels of psychopathology than heterosexuals across all outcomes. Gay/lesbian respondents had higher odds of exposure to child abuse and housing adversity, and bisexual respondents had higher odds of exposure to child abuse, housing adversity, and intimate partner violence, than heterosexuals. Greater exposure to these adversities explained between 10 and 20% of the relative excess of suicidality, depression, tobacco use, and symptoms of alcohol and drug abuse among LGB youths compared to heterosexuals. Exposure to victimization and adversity experiences in childhood and adolescence significantly mediated the association of both gay/lesbian and bisexual orientation with suicidality, depressive symptoms, tobacco use, and alcohol abuse.”

“Disproportionate exposure to early-life adversity and sexual orientation disparities in psychiatric morbidity.” McLaughlin KA, et al. Child Abuse and Neglect. 2012 Sep; 36(9):645-55.

⊝ “Compared with heterosexual respondents, gay/lesbian and bisexual individuals experienced increased odds of six of eight and seven of eight adverse childhood experiences, respectively. Sexual minority persons had higher rates of adverse childhood experiences compared to their heterosexual peers.”

“Disparities in adverse childhood experiences among sexual minority and heterosexual adults: results from a multi-state probability-based sample.” Andersen JP, Blosnich J. PLoS One. 2013; 8(1):e54691.

⊝ “The studies reported childhood sexual abuse (CSA), childhood physical abuse (CPA), childhood emotional abuse (CEA), childhood physical neglect, and childhood emotional neglect. Items of household dysfunction were substance abuse of caregiver, parental separation, family history of mental illness, incarceration of caregiver, and witnessing violence. Prevalence of CSA showed a median of 33.5 % for studies using non-probability sampling and 20.7 % for those with probability sampling, the rates for CPA were 23.5 % (non-probability sampling) and 28.7 % (probability sampling). For CEA, the rates were 48.5 %, non-probability sampling, and 47.5 %, probability sampling. Outcomes related to SCE in LGBT populations included psychiatric symptoms, substance abuse, revictimization, dysfunctional behavioral adjustments, and others.”

“Stressful childhood experiences and health outcomes in sexual minority populations: a systematic review.” Schneeberger AR, et al. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 2014 Sep; 49(9):1427-45.

⊝ “Among 287 participants, 211 (73.5%) reported experiencing [child physical abuse] CPA before the age of 17…”

“Association between Childhood Physical Abuse, Unprotected Receptive Anal Intercourse and HIV Infection among Young Men Who Have Sex with Men in Vancouver, Canada”. Arn J. Schilder, et al. PLoS One. 2014; 9(6): e100501.

⊝ “The research results indicate that, as compared with the group of heterosexual individuals, in the group of homosexuals there occurs a worsening in psychological functioning, which may be also manifested by an increased indirect self-destructiveness index. The increased intensity of indirect self-destructiveness in homosexual individuals may be considered a manifestation of worsened psychological functioning.”

“Indirect self-destructiveness in homosexual individuals.” Tsirigotis K, et al. Psychiatria polska. 2015 May-Jun; 49 (3): 543-57.

Read this essay by Sciambra about the "cruel" consequences of male homosexual activity. For instance:

I am constantly reminded of the excesses of my past. The bathroom has become a torture chamber. Basic biological functions are excruciating and painful [...] anal fissures, prolapses, and huge distended hemorrhoids.  

The tendency towards acts of self-harm by those with a homosexual inclination—see the studies above—is borne out with in the case of  Sebastian Köhn who describes his nightmare of suffering endured since picking up monkeypox during encounters with several men during New York City's Pride "festivities" in late June. It says a lot about the mentality of those caught up in the male homosexual lifestyle that though Köhn had worked in sexual health for a long time, he embarked on his wild weekend even though he knew monkeypox was spreading and the implications for homosexual men. 

Köhn relates that having picked up monkeypox the outcome was this:

My [initial] anorectal lesions, which were already very painful, turned into open wounds. It felt like I had three fissures right next to each other, and it was absolutely excruciating. I would literally scream out loud when I went to the bathroom. Even keeping the area clean, like washing myself, was extremely painful. It was a two hour process each time.

One wishes Köhn a full recovery.  However, given the latest wave of "fashionable" homosexuality in Western societies, and the propaganda machines behind that wave—Köhn works for George Soros' globally influential Open Society Foundations—many are the young people heading for significant degrees of harm along this route of deceit and irresponsibility, when all they are hoping for is entry into the broad society that will provide them with a sense of belonging and a balanced way of life. Each of us faces the challenge of accepting our personal responsibility in creating a society that protects our young people.

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Woke ideology poisons Western life

Wokeism's fabricated world of unreality. Photo by Kristina  Nor 

The belief that each person has the wherewithal to be autonomous—as opposed to being limited in intellectual capacity and moral insight—has blighted the West's ability to make progress in justice and peace. 

That belief has given rise over the past few centuries to a certain ideology that is now bearing the fruit of fractured societies and individual misery, even as it pushes itself deeper into the governing institutions and completes its capture of the social elite of academia, large parts of the political system and government, the mainstream media, and such leading sectors as education, and the corporate world. This ideology, based on Marxist concepts of a solely material world and dictatorship by an elite, is what we have come to refer to as wokeism—or wokeness, if you prefer. (See definitions at the end.)

An awareness of the character of this "ideology" that governs the West, and which is being promoted by Western evangelists around the world, is critical if societies are to regain the equilibrium that the West's Christian heritage had offered until the Reformation's doctrine of sola scriptura fomented the view that every Jack or Jill is as capable of interpreting God's word as any spiritual authority that the Church as a whole represented, creating a "subjective and individualistic" view of life.

All this is brought into focus by a well-reasoned essay titled "Ideology has poisoned the West" published in a refreshing source of countercultural thought, the online magazine Unherd.

In this essay, author and academic at the budding University of Austin (Texas), Jacob Howland, writes that "ideology" has earned itself a connotation of something distasteful within the political arena. He presents this contrast:

In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, primary models for English republicanism and the American Founders, politics was understood to be the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate. As Aristotle taught, politics consists in the citizenly exercise of logos, the uniquely human power of intelligent speech. 

[...] speech reveals what is good and bad, just and unjust, binding us together in the imperfect apprehension of realities greater than our individual selves.

But ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them [humans] only as groups to be acted upon.   

The origin of the term under scrutiny is revealing:

The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. 

The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

To Western victims of this spiritual virus, we can add countries elsewhere under dictatorships of a similarly materialistic and technocratic nature, such as China and Vietnam.

What is crucial at this period of post-history history is that Western populations—and those in rapidly adopting a Western style of economic and social development—realise that the political atmosphere is not unencumbered. This means, what societies are encountering is part of the intellectual and spiritual and political debt or liability of the recent past.    

The picture Howland presents of the state of affairs abroad in society is stunningly accurate:

The political philosopher Raymond Aron defined ideology quite precisely as “the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a programme of action toward a future predicted or hoped for”. In this synthesis, a theory about the historical origins of real or alleged social ills is pressed into the service of an imagined future in which those ills will be cured. The theory is not to be judged solely, or even primarily, by its adequacy in describing the historical record as it presents itself to an informed and inquiring mind. Rather, it is to be judged by the promised consequences of the programme of action it underwrites. Of course, ideological prophecy, appearing in times of organic or manufactured crisis when everything assumes an air of urgency, must be taken on faith.  

The roots of the intellectual and political regime societies are increasingly suffering under tells us a lot about the nature of the course being pursued by elites in Western societies:

Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideology’s focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern. Its closest analogue is the phenomenon of technology, the harnessing of significant social resources to achieve mastery over nature through mathematical and experimental science. Formulated by the early modern philosophers Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the programme of technology rejected inherited intellectual foundations, including the guidance of God or nature.

Descartes, a professed believer whose pencil-thin moustache gave him an unmistakable air of duplicity, reduced the natural or created world to the mathematical abstraction of spatial extension, which is perfectly accessible to algebraic geometry but bears no trace of implicit order or divine goodness. And he divided his profoundly skeptical Meditations and Discourse on Method into six parts, in rivalrous imitation, scholars tell us, of the first six days of God’s creation. Liberated by technology from dependence on God and history, man and world could be fashioned in the image of human desires.

From the beginning, we observe how "an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation":

The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartes’s infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives. 

In the United States, we are currently engaged in many such experiments simultaneously, all undertaken in the name of social justice. [...] But ideology is always and everywhere opposed to the moderate middle ground, not only of politics, but of the general opinion and sentiment that goes by the name of common sense.

Howland draws several conclusions:

Ideology’s most horrific social experiments illustrate several points that apply also to the “Totalitarianism Lite” of contemporary American life. First, while human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, ideology assumes that organic associations cannot support a good society, which must be engineered from the top down. This assumption, which no ideological experimentation has ever sustained, makes up in arrogance what it lacks in humility.

Second, ideology abjures persuasion, preferring what Hannah Arendt called “mute coercion”. We see this today in the insistence that certain widely-shared opinions that were uncontroversial only a few years ago are so morally illegitimate that they do not deserve a hearing. We see it in the fact that those who publicly voice such opinions are commonly smeared, hounded, denied financial services, investigated, and fired, even by institutions that are publicly committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Third, ideology always involves the scapegoating and purging of opponents. Today these primitive religious rituals, enacted within the framework of a secularised and apocalyptic Christianity, include the sanctification of “victims” and the (for now metaphorical) public crucifixion of “oppressors”. Those who are targeted by, or resist, the ideological programme — denounced variously as kulaks, capitalist roadsters, vermin, or white supremacists — must, with the exception of a few penitents who are mercifully spared, be decisively defeated in battle with the forces of good. For only then will the earthy salvation of a just and harmonious society be achievable.

Western societies are on the road to greater misery, Howland predicts, because the intellectual and spiritual regime that has gained sway lacks "an ongoing attentiveness to reality that is inconsistent with wilfulness and fantasy". 

The takeaway is that the fantasy world of wokeism must be opposed and rejected at every opportunity. The common good relies on individuals and groups who are willing to display conviction and courage in the face of the distorted values and manipulated standards of virtue promulgated by those seeking meaning and purpose in the power-hungry realm of the woke. 

💢 Read the full essay here 

💢 Read also:

                      Woke censorship in publishing, here, and here.

                      Success in battle against woke lawyers. See here.

💢 Definitions of "wokeness" from UrbanDictionary.com

[] The ability of someone to become outraged at imagined enemies and create ways to be the victim, even though you're insanely privileged.

[] If anyone disagrees or is not extreme enough, then they deserve to be cancelled. Wokeness or wokeism is a cult based on neo-Marxism and post-modernism.

[] Performative wokeness: People who more concerned with self-promotion, social media "likes", or selling books & lectures than they are about actual deliverables.

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Fathers are key: Two women testify

Fathers are important for the psychological and emotional balance of children. Their absence in many families is the part of the dis-ease that so many young people experience. Two instances where fathers have died, leaving a "lingering emptiness", bring out clearly just how essential their role is in shaping their children's life.

 In the weeks after her father's death Megan Blandford felt the need to "reflect and regather". She writes:

In the winter my dad died from cancer, focusing on work became incredibly difficult.

I took a few weeks to slow down, think, and follow a craving to get back to basics. I spring cleaned my house, went for long bushwalks, caught up on my own health checks, and took over the dinner table with a thousand-piece puzzle. After school hours, I read stories with my kids — huddling together and immersing ourselves in fantasy worlds filled with magic and problems that can be solved — and took them out for chai lattés. (Kids these days.)

That time made me reflect a lot on my purpose, and how to spend the next chunk of my time on earth. 

Megan Blandford, pictured with her father, is finding it hard to recover from her loss.

Blandford, an Australian, was proud of her work as a freelance writer: 

Yet, suddenly, I just couldn't bring myself to write one more word about things that don't mean anything.

I lost my purpose, and asked myself a number of questions about it.

What could I do that would give me back that sense of achievement? How could I put more good out into the world? And why did none of it seem to mean a thing?

Time has passed, providing salve to the feeling of being without purpose in life, but the experience of such a deep loss has been revealing:

I'd seen this impact on some friends who had lost a parent. They'd go a bit off the rails, questioning everything and feeling — very outwardly — like they'd somehow lost themselves. It seemed like more than grief, as though they were adrift and needed to search for a new anchor.

As a writer, Blandford is able to find the words to explain what is going on in her life but she is surprised that even three years later she remains unsettled:

I underestimated that I would have sought Dad's advice on this career questioning that I was suddenly experiencing. I would never have followed his advice (I was never any good at doing as I was told), but I would have asked for his thoughts.

I underestimated the little things that would hit me with such a force of grief. The memory of the last time I had Christmas with my dad, when we'd ended up arguing; we were meant to have happier Christmases together after that. That the first time I'd walk into my parents' house without hearing Dad's voice call out, "Hi, Poppet!" would take my breath away.

I certainly didn't expect that, a couple of winters later, I would still be floating and searching for a new anchor.

Ruth Niemiec, who years later stood at her father's grave and said, 'I miss you'

For Ruth Niemiec, her father's life was taken in a road accident when she was nine years old. Writing as as an adult in Australia she notes how his death has had a profound effect on her:

My father's life was cut short, and it was unexpected, I didn't have time to say goodbye. It made the mourning prolonged and difficult.

For a few years, I remembered the sound of his laughter, his voice, how tall he was and his mannerisms. Twenty-four years on, I remember only his eyes and they are fading from my memory too. Dad wore his keys clipped onto a belt loop, left side. He wore brown leather shoes and was fond of light-yellow polo shirts. I know that from photographs. 

Joan Didion wrote in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that she thought her husband would come back after he had died. At nine years old, I felt my father would come back too.

I distinctly remember sitting in the passenger seat beside my mother just a few weeks after his passing, convinced that he would come and see us soon.

The impact of the loss of any parent when the child is young can be far-reaching, and this was certainly the case for Niemiec: 

Losing a parent is never easy. It changes you completely, no matter what age you are when it happens. So many unanswered questions, so many "I love you's" whispered to the memory of their face. A lingering emptiness.

What made my confusing childhood grief deeper and more mystifying was that before he died, I hadn't seen him for a year. Mum and Dad were separated, and he had remarried.

When I was eight he took me to Gumbaya Park [Melbourne], and we spent the whole day together. It was the last time I saw him in person and the last time I was in a vehicle with him travelling down the freeway.  

In order to feel in a space where she could get on with her life Niemiec had to travel to Poland:

Dad was buried in Poland. That was his wish. His ashes were placed beside his father's at the cemetery in the village he grew up in.

It took over 15 years for me to be done with school and university and save enough money to afford a ticket to Poland. It took that long to get a chance to stand at my father's grave and say "I miss you". 

I wanted Dad to know I was there. And that I knew the beauty of the fog in the valley in Tuchów, with the first morning light beaming through it. I walked the worn streets he, too, had walked before leaving for Australia. I spoke the language he spoke to people he had known.

Being in Poland made me feel close to him and I left feeling an enormous sense of closure.

Those two personal accounts of the role fathers can play in the emotional life of children, both when young or as an adult, illustrate how important it is for society to be proactive in protecting the family as a unit of mother and father.

Therefore, it's worth repeating a snippet of the research findings about the importance of fathers. The following information is from the Child and Family Research Partnership at the University of Texas:

Children who grow up with involved fathers are: 39% more likely to earn mostly A’s in school, 45% less likely to repeat a grade, 60% less likely to be suspended or expelled from school, twice as likely to go to college and find stable employment after high school, 75% less likely to have a teen birth, and 80% less likely to spend time in jail.

💢 See the info poster here. 

💢 From a pediatricians' viewpoint, go here.

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Gun deaths and nihilism go hand-in-hand

Kids flee the Uvalde killer, a distressing sign of the times

The Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, USA, on December 14, 2012, left 28 people dead and two injured. After murdering his mother at their home, Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and six adults before taking his own life. 

Katherine Dee writes:

In February 2021, a clue about Lanza’s psyche emerged. It was an abandoned YouTube channel under the name CulturalPhilistine. The videos painted a picture not of a deranged killer or a sadist but a lucid young man with a rich, complicated intellectual life. In these videos, all of which featured a black screen and a scratchy voiceover, Lanza laid out his philosophy. The most unsettling thing is the cogency with which Lanza presented his views.

An analysis of those views shows Lanza appears to think of culture as a “delusion” and a “disease”. It seems he targeted schools because that is where, in his thinking, American culture—American values—is transmitted. A key person who analysed Lanza's videos believes he killed children because they represent the propagation of life. In brief: “In his worldview, death was salvation and enlightenment.” 

Dee finds such an outlook beyond "bone-chilling". But the worst of it is that such a mindset is typical among young American mass killers:

While Lanza was bookish beyond his years—he was only 20 when Sandy Hook happened—he was hardly alone in his alienation, in his rejection of the principle of life. A survey of shooters’ manifestos, blog posts, forum posts, and other bits and pieces of their online footprints suggests that they oppose life in its most literal sense. This includes not only “intellectual” mass shooters like Lanza but those who appear to be motivated by white supremacy and misogyny.   

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the United States—although it seems to be most prevalent here. Kimveer Gill, who killed one person and wounded 19 in 2006 before committing suicide in Montreal, believed that the whole of society needed to be eradicated. Pekka Eric Auvinen, who killed eight in a high school a little north of Helsinki, Finland, called for “the death of the entire human race”. Marc Lépine, also in Montreal, in 1989, shrouded his anti-life philosophy in anti-feminist rhetoric—anticipating, by a quarter-century, Elliot Rodger, who, in 2014, killed six people near the University of California-Santa Barbara. 

But everyone in a society that produces such nihilism is, according to Dee, implicated in the horrible outcomes:

We imagine that these killers have nothing to do with everyone else—that they are like a leper colony set apart from the rest of us, and every so often, one escapes and spreads his disease. We want to believe that because it makes us feel good. But the reality is that the smudge of nihilism’s fingerprints stains all things, everywhere.

It’s in the half-joking, half-serious proclamations of millennials who say they don’t want children because of the climate—because the world is beyond repair. It’s in the ubiquity of an even darker humor, the kind that was popularized by 4chan in the mid-2010s and captured the public imagination—the sort of things that can only be funny if life has lost any value. 

It’s in the commingling of our leisure and anesthesia—we drink to escape, we exercise until we can’t feel anything, we propel ourselves into fantasy lives with fandom. It’s even, paradoxically, in our insistence on living “in the moment.” Nothing matters, so we may as well be happy with where we are. The darker side of “YOLO” [You only live once] is how it forecloses on the possibility that our lives matter in any grander sense, that we can be a part of a tradition that started long before we were born and will extend for ages after we die. 

Now for Dee's sad and humbling conclusion:

As I interviewed people about Lanza, a common theme emerged. Yes, there was something obviously wrong with the material circumstances of America in the early 21st Century—an economy that seemed incapable of providing for the many, decaying institutions, the ubiquity of our screens. But there was something else. Something more abstract. It was that we now lived in a world where everything revolved around the individual. We had morphed from a universe of moral absolutes to broad social and communal forces to an all-consuming solipsism—a terrifying oneness, a “culture of narcissism”, as Christopher Lasch put it, where the self is central. [Solipsism is a a theory holding that the self can know nothing but what it does itself and that the self is the only existent thing.]

This narcissism is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary “true self” keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond. Our shared inability to commit to anything that might make life meaningful, like children or a partner or putting down roots in a single place. It pervades Western humor, which is dominated by a sense that the world is ending, so we may as well drink and smoke ourselves to death because nothing really matters.

In this world, the individual was everything and nothing, architect of the future and hapless cog in a vast and deafening black. In this place, one murdered wantonly with the knowledge that all of us were just accidental bits of flesh bookended by eternities, that we meant nothing, that the possibility of meaning was a ruse. 

Therefore—and the ramifications that Dee lays out are huge—Western society must take stock of what it has created by wilful neglect of what history provides by way of a healthy social and moral human environment:

The debate over more guns or fewer guns completely misses the horrifying heart of the matter: the world built by modern liberalism, which took for its telos the maximization of individual autonomy, and thus guaranteed total alienation, breeds the nihilism behind these shootings. Ultimately, these killers could not cope, the way the rest of us do every day, with the crushing weight of the existential angst that is the promise of liberalism. Even the more thoughtful takes on fatherlessness and mental illness are only still addressing the symptoms of the disease. Until we see this, the ground of the problem, we will be no closer to answers, let alone solutions for these 21st Century horrors.

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