“O brave new world that hath such people in it” – The Tempest, William Shakespeare
The ancient categories of boys and girls have been abolished and now gender is infinitely malleable. “He” and “she” replaced by the single pronoun “zie.”
Any registrar who in conscience refuses to officiate at a homosexual marriage will be dismissed from post.
Contraception is free and universally available and yet there are 200,000 legal abortions in the UK every year: abortion is being used as just one more form of contraception.
Man-made global warming is an article of faith which one may not question, on pain of being denounced as a “denier.” And this even though there has been no warming for seventeen years.
University students are given “safe spaces” to which they can retreat to avoid being challenged by points of view which they find offensive. Thus the university, formerly the place for intellectual challenge and debate, has lost all meaning.
We pull down the statues of great figures from the nation’s past when it is discovered that the heroes they commemorate transgressed our new-fangled nostrums of political correctness.
History is being rewritten and falsified and we are made to apologise for events which happened long before we were born. For example, we must say sorry for the slave trade, despite the fact that it was British Christian statesmen who abolished it and the Royal Navy which policed the ban.
Traditional and wholesome pastimes such as foxhunting have been banned because our flaky generation is sentimental and squeamish.
For decades Muslim fanatics have been slaughtering innocent people on four continents and yet we are obliged to insist that Islam is a religion of peace and love.
The Chief Constable of Northumbria police force has been castigated for using the evidence of an informer, a convicted rapist, to bring to justice a gang of Muslim paedophiles who systematically raped hundreds of underage girls.
Similar sexual abuse of minors by Muslims is still happening in a score of our towns and cities – because these crimes are being perpetrated in ghettos, no-go areas where the police make no arrests for fear of being arraigned for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”
A sizeable minority in Britain opposes the result of the referendum and wishes to overturn the clear vote for Brexit. Revealing a stupendous irony, most of these Remainers are left-liberals who claim to be strong supporters of democracy. But Brexit rep[resented the democratic principle in action as more people voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything in the whole history of our nation.
These “democrats” are determined that we should remain in the EU, as if that institution were some wonderful international participation in brotherly love. It is not: it is an inefficient, corrupt and unaccountable totalitarian tyranny whose controlling commissioners – commissars – cannot be removed from office by ballot. We celebrate this political cesspit by singing the Beethoven-Schiller “Ode to Joy.” And nobody laughs.
Our contemporary culture and civilisation boasts more loudly then all earlier epochs its love of freedom. Yet the three most influential dogmas of our age are all forms of – mutually contradictory – deterministic systems:
- Freudianism – more aptly “fraudianism” is a form of psychological determinism as it alleges that we are all products of ineluctable unconscious forces operating during our childhood. It is quite amusing to notice that Freud who believed that much of human will and motivation was determined by what went on in the last few inches of the infant’s alimentary canal should have a surname which in German means “joy.”
- Darwinism is psychological determinism. It is also false. No one has ever produced the missing links to demonstrate that the human species developed from an earlier species. Even Darwin himself was disappointed, saying, “There ought to have been a great many more fossils.” At the core of its doctrine, Darwinism teaches that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. But recently scientists observed in mice that they were able to pass on to the next generation a learned smell.
- Marxism – is economic determinism and claims that the laws of economics are fixed forever, like the laws of planetary motion. It claims also that the Communist revolution is inevitable. This is nonsense on stilts as nothing in the empirical, historical world can be described as inevitable.
I have offered a snapshot of the insane asylum which forms our contemporary culture and in which we are obliged to live. The exercise has left me shell-shocked. (Sorry, political correctness forbids the use of that phrase and I must say I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder instead). Words fail me. I shall have to turn to Milton:
“With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded” – Paradise Lost, John Milton
Thanks Gaurav -you’ve opened up useful territory for me. Best, Harry.
For me it would be very useful to consider Peter Mullen’s views on the ingredients of the The Spiritual Life.
And also the views of other Christians who have made their way in the world. Paul Johnson and Lord (Conrad) Black, come to mind.
There are many.
Editor Harris, can SR publish such items, regularly?
Sincerely, Harry Black
My heart sank reading yet another Peter Mullen article in which he yet again succeeds in suggesting that Conservatives should be both ignorant and stupid. Rather than spend time taking ill informed swipes at science, or investing energy in praising those Liberals who devoted their political careers to undermining Conservative ideas (e.g. Margaret Thatcher), wouldn’t Peter Mullen’s effort be better spent generating explanations for the Church’s embrace of the new gender agenda, or showing how Christ’s prescriptions (e.g. Luke 6:29-30) endorse both the whole hearted acceptance of the folly that is mass immigration (no matter how damaging to this country) and an unflinching acceptance of Islamic terrorism?
Verity, I do not think the Gospels were designed to pre-empt, or suggest responses to, the challenges of large-scale life-on-Earth in C21, or many centuries actually.
The difficulties -cruelties and ill-use of resources- bought on by mass immigration, mixing of races, Islamic invasion and insurrection, global socialism and “justice”, climate-tosh, Big Govt and all, require responses designed by a broader and deeper appreciation of humans and their Earthly conditions than that provided by the words of Jesus.
Now, many of the observations and teachings by Jesus and his editors are very helpful to people in this day. Some, not so much.
Now, if we are to move towards a more workable, less dysfunctional society than we have now, it will take the concerted efforts of several generations of very heavy-hitting Spiritual-and-advisedly-Secular politicians, generals, educators, mass-media performers, judges and lawyers, police and prison/punishment managers, and some others too, I imagine.
Who’s up for that sort of work?
All best wishes, Harry.
I for one am up for this sort of work, though I fear it may already be too late to unmix the Celt from the Roman from the Saxon and the Dane (and let us not mention the Norman). Of course, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and any attempt to fold back into the Sanskritic Arya of circa 2000 B.C. – I’m for.
Funny, Guarav.
But I believe you know what we are actually referring to here.
Any time you wish to claim that living in the Sanskritic Arya c. 2000 BC, while not a member of a royal family, would be better than living anywhere in the Anglosphere, at median econ level between 1900 and 1970, I am all ears, old chap.
I won’t argue the point Harry, but to note that the Arya are inside the envelope of the joke. (The bottom of those waters is too remote to cast anchor in.)
V good, what Peter Mullen has unleashed here.
Now, I take his brief article as a call for more of The Spiritual and less of The Materialistic in the ways we seek to understand life-on-Earth and its purpose.
And for Peter, The Spiritual would be Christian in its nature.
I take guidance from scholars who have spent their lives studying the world’s religions, spiritual traditions and systems of belief and who observe that all/most of these systems offer views/dogma on “Where humans come from, What they can and should do during their lives, How they should conduct their relations with others, and What they can expect after death”.
Let’s broaden beyond Freud, Darwin and Marx and appreciate what psychology, evolutionary thinking and economics have contributed to human understanding of the conditions pertaining to life-on-Earth, the challenges we face, the potential responses we have to these challenges, and choices we do not have -pretty darn great contributions, really.
OK yes, far too many people are acting badly.
Their responses to life’s challenges are destructive. Too much:
Pop music and drugs, football and alcohol, getting and spending money, porn and gambling, ingratitude and violence…
All that materialism, all that physicality.
Where’s The Spiritual?
Sad to say, but Christianity works for but a very few folk, these days.
Yes, things in the West have gotten very bad indeed since the Christian View ceased to animate most Western people.
Let us remember how Christianity got its start:
A great many of its believers were willing give their lives for their faith.
I do not think that a new cadre of Christian martyrs would bring back Christianity.
But I do believe that the costs of establishing a new workable society, which exhibits many Christian principles and behaviour, will include the lives and fortunes of a critical mass of folk who will devote themselves to The Work –
-The Work involved in using the systems of politics, education (mass and elite) and mass media messaging to shift resources -money and human time- into more constructive, and yes, more Christian channels.
The three villains trotted out have some blood on their hands certainly but can not carry the whole weight of the charge. Vessels of truth, beauty, and justice that they picked up and filled with false fluids (intoxicating everyone) – these vessels had been previously abandoned. That’s the only explanation. Culture has to forget certain things for a Freud to appear truthful or a Marx to appear just.
A brilliant and concise summary of all our contemporary ills. But God is yet to speak in all of this, I sense He`s having one big laugh.
A Barney Rubble cartoon character with only a Twitter account wins the US Presidency.
A barfly with one testicle gets us out of the E.U.
And now we find that the lefts “democracy” is but a lazy, nasty little flypaper that they themselves have trashed for perpetuity.
The beauty of the bible and the prophets is that none of this is new-from IS to man-made Babels, mixing Galileans blood and crashing infrastructure projects?…it`s all been said or seen, and the scriptures prove it.
The signs of the times are all around us, we Christians need to know them, observe and get ready to let Gods anger flow through us and not the Socialislamic project we`re living in.
Jesus plus me=majority. Jesus is a Jew and Israel is spared.
It`s currently like living inside the mind of a media consumptive, mad cow that needs the islamic certainties at its throat-we as Gods gals have no intention of allowing our kids to go the way of theirs.
Jesus says it need not be so.
Freudianism has never been shown to have a therapeutic effect, and because his theories are not falsifiable they are not science but a religious belief.
In Freud’s theories unconscious forces act all our lives not just in childhood. As for much of human will & motivation being determined by anal eroticism, Freud’s main thesis, as everybody knows was the ‘Oedipus Complex’. Freud was so impressed by this idea that he made it central to his theory of human development & the origins of neurosis. Freud was one of the earliest pioneers to investigate the maternal relationship in the development of mental health & laid the groundwork for the later work of people like John Bowlby about whose work there is an interesting article by Niall McCrae in this quarters SR. Freud may not have got everything right, his work sometimes explained things rather torturously & many themes were not followed up or developed at all, such as a comprehensive theory of the components of the sexual instinct or even of the instincts themselves or the explanation of destructiveness for which he had to postulate a ‘Death Instinct’. Despite this he was a man who attempted to investigate the forces at work in human development, particularly where they went wrong as his main interest was as a doctor trying to relieve people of their neuroses not as a philosopher. As for anal eroticism, ever heard of ‘filthy lucre’ or being ‘filthy rich’?
Freud was a dishonest totalitarian who falsified the results of his research when they contradicted his dogmas. He organised his followers into something that resembled a totalitarian sect and ruled them with an iron rod. His teachings are not scientific but religious in nature. Freudianism is a powerful destructive cult in science’s clothing.
…Darwinism is psychological determinism. It is also false. No one has ever produced the missing links to demonstrate that the human species developed from an earlier species. Even Darwin himself was disappointed, saying, “There ought to have been a great many more fossils.” At the core of its doctrine, Darwinism teaches that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. But recently scientists observed in mice that they were able to pass on to the next generation a learned smell….
Um. Humanoid fossils were indeed hard to come by in Darwin’s day, but now we have a fair number of examples of earlier species of humanoid. Homo is the genus that comprises the species Homo sapiens, which includes modern humans, as well as several extinct species classified as ancestral to or closely related to modern humans, most notably Homo Erectus. The genus is between 2 and 3 million years old, taken to emerge with the appearance of Homo Habilis and possibly that of Homo Gautengensis. Homo is derived from the genus Australopithecus, which itself had previously split from the lineage of Pan, the chimpanzees.
And I don’t think Darwin taught that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. His transmission process shows that change can happen with random mutations being selected by the environment, but he didn’t do much work on the genetic mechanism for this. This was a lively later argument, but its truth or not does not affect the main theory…
Peter Mullen is referring to epigenesis. Mice are exposed to a smell they are repelled by and this is passed down to subsequent generations.
http://www.nature.com/news/epigenetics-the-sins-of-the-father-1.14816
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5866001/lamarcks-bizarre-theory-of-evolution-may-turn-out-to-be-right-after-all
Darwinism like all theories has to be potentially falsifiable otherwise is its not a theory but a religion. It has become a religion especially among the left, who on many occasions have tried to shut down Darwinism’s scientific critics. At present it seems that both Lamarck and Darwin are both correct in their own way, something which has caused a great deal of gagging among the fiercer preachers of Darwinism such as Archbishop Dawkins. There are of course major societal implications if learned behaviour can be passed from one generation to another. These discoveries remind us that even the most sacred of theories is only that, a theory. Scientists do not seek the truth only experimental verification of their theories which are by their nature born to die.
Yes, Mr Mullen continues in the SR tradition of describing the pathologies of our times, and their likely causes. And does so in excellent manner.
Now, what to do?
We have the example of early Christians who willingly and joyfully died to demonstrate their faith that spiritual good is superior to material good.
We have the example of the generations which fought (on our side) in the Long, Great War of 1914 to 1945.
What can we do?
It seems we (I guess that includes me) must devote our wealth and our lives in a demonstration/war against the evils of these days.
My further suggestion: Let’s do it in secret, so as not to alert the current regimes that we are re-taking the powers of parliament, local government, the courts, the police, the education systems and the BBC.