Dystopia in Purple

High up on a hallowed hill sits a tall, silent chapel. Its bells were quieted long ago at the complaint of grumpy townspeople. They were replaced with a tiny music-box that plays every day, except Sundays, a soft, unassuming song that marks each hour that passes away into irrecoverable history. The tower’s woody exterior was lacquered with resin, mummified, and painted with thick white paint. It is the distant past preserved in fine detail for the goggle-eyed moderns, like an ancient mosquito or pharaoh.

What was once an American Alexandria, complete with lighthouse and library, now stands dumb and dull on a much slighter mound. Its only beauty is in its surrounds, still courageous enough to remain true to their nature. Ah, if the trees could tell this village’s story! Their dirge would surely lament the sad decline, the reckless dash toward empty mirages, the melting down of the bells.

The gown-clad men and boys who used to walk the gravel paths of this place were contemplative and humble. They were the products of their gilded age, to be sure: they dressed commonly, they spoke commonly, they lived as their fellow countrymen did elsewhere. They were not unique in their personality. No, their distinction was their poverty, their indigence; it was in their chance to gain a little of what the great men of history had affirmed in their heroic martyr’s deaths or inscribed in books. Opportunity and enlightenment, piety and moral probing, life lived with the passion of Thoreau and the restraint of the saints.

They spoke a common language, an English still alive with the simple, strong roots of a Saxon past. There was meaning in talk of right and of wrong, of justice and of mercy. It was agreed-upon, understood, and it was universal, covering the surface of the Earth just as certainly as the vacant expanses of outer space. Literature was for the enlarging of the imagination, science for the exploration of the natural. The telos of man was the glorification of that mysterious Power whose sovereignty bounded the soul but granted it liberty to seek and to love and to wander and drink deeply of creation. What descendants saw as repressive conformity was really the joy of common premises, of shared values.

But those generations, like the hours the bells welcomed into silent decease, like the bells themselves as they lay grounded on the muddy football field, eventually returned to the hush of nonexistence. With them went the virtuous mission of the cloistered college they’d loved and to which they’d owed their minds’ lives. Their descendants, little by little, dismantled the spirit of terras irradient that had animated life beyond the place and propelled the departed generations into the waiting world where they could educate and empower and pass on the gift they’d been given: sturdy knowledge and the humility of the lettered.

No one even learned Latin anymore. The incoming throngs of new pupils had to have the college motto translated for them, and even then it was understood as nothing more than a moralistic anachronism, a vestige—or maybe “light” could be recast to mean a sort of secular, worldly kindness after all. Teachers now struggled to explain the moral dilemmas found in the classics to students suddenly hostile to absolutes. Within sight of the whitewashed bell-tower were a few souls who still proclaimed, in the language of the dead, the unbending truths of the past and defended traditions long forsaken, but they were marked as the village fools and treated much like expired milk—avoided and then, eventually, thrown out.

Classes were still held in English, but it was now a language filled with grey and fuzzy, floating sense and populated by qualifiers and beaker-grown modifiers. Any claim to knowledge and any appeal to timelessness were met with furrowed brow and puzzlement. Premises had to be laid out anew every time anyone assembled to converse. In this domain of infinite logics new and outrageous conclusions were drawn out, and questions were posed that only the smart-alecky schoolboy of old would have been bold enough to pose. Do I exist? Well, that truth only applies to you and not to me. And then there were the teachers who had themselves become lost in the vast potential of boundlessness. Let’s say we reject the law of noncontradiction—now what do you think when I say that I exist yet do not exist? Oh, there can be no judging of the ancient Maya and their bloody human sacrifices—they were living a long time ago when that sort of thing was culturally acceptable—but we can of course judge the National Socialists for their abominable crimes. It’s simple, really. Or is it complicated? I’ve forgotten. Everywhere was the uncertainty of translation, of terrifying transfiguration sans radiance.

So was born a new Babel, a lifeless village where truth is a tool of oppression, where invisible, mystical forces pummel the downtrodden while authorizing the powerful, where the Greeks are taught as protosocialists and the Romans as protototalitarians, and where the learned life is not a bridge to humanity but rather an elevator out of it.

Belief in Nothing (i.e., Something)

It is fashionable in this modern age to take the posture of an agnostic or a near-agnostic. Not knowing is preferable to knowing, especially when the knowledge has to do with allegedly transcendent, universal matters. Morality, right and wrong, better and worse, all distinctions that many of the modern counter-enlightenment mindset (which I'll discuss later) cannot be sure of. "Yes, but that's your truth, isn't it?" they say. Or they cry, "Don't draw your moral lines on me!"

It's as if the trend toward DONT TREAD ON ME in the political sphere has been mistaken for a certain (but really uncertain) moral relativity, a kind of agnosticism. Professors, students, parents, children, everyone involved in the counter-enlightenment is conditioned this way, believing that they cannot believe, knowing that they cannot know, professing that they cannot profess.

The absurdity is twofold. One is found in the very act of pronouncing that one does not know, cannot know, etc. To know that one cannot know, for instance, is in fact to know. And to believe that one does not believe is to believe. "I believe in nothing" is to say that "I believe in something, but I'd rather call it nothing." Therein lies the second absurdity, that in claiming a kind of elevated, aloof objectivity on all matters moral, they are operating to self-deceive. Not only is believing nothing really believing something by virtue of simple logic, it is in fact believing something very particular. When a professor warns against judging those in the past with "cultural practices different from our own" (in a recent case, these "cultural practices" having to do with mothers committing outright infanticide), the professor is herself judging those with different cultural practices. She is in effect affirming those practices by proscribing any negative opinions about them--which is not to mention that those negative opinions are actually something much greater than mere sentiment and in most cases have a grounding in a universal morality, even if the person holding that view does not refer to it in those terms.

So, in short, beware of those who claim that they have no opinions, no beliefs, no moral views. To silence and chastise those who would decry the killing of innocent children for the sake of being, or rather seeming, objective and fashionably relativist is in reality to find little to no wrong in the act itself and thus to hold a belief. There is no such thing as believing in nothing.

In the wilds of this wild country. . .

Some of the thickest, deepest wilderness exists in the clearings between forests. In the open places, where saws have made room for chimneys and driveways, where finely trimmed shrubs have replaced the great oaks and the noble firs, where man has made his remorseless stamp upon the land, claimed it for himself, and made it tame and quiet and dumb.

Only the night wind's sharp whistle speaks; only the cackling leaves disturbed by rake or busy feet protest. The settlers do not hear the wind or the leaves, and they do not notice the foulness of their own waste. They live and think, cry and laugh, sing and shout, all as though the whims and confidence of their broken minds were enough to sustain them.

The most perfect order, the most imposing civilization, is not here. It is not there, beyond the chimneys. It is not in the image of Earth; nowhere can it be found. There are riches to be had, and more forests to set ablaze. There are other clearings where human prey may be found waiting for purpose just as the predators who sleep a mile's leap away dream one night of acquisition, of enlargement, of taking and wanting and setting up great sculptures of themselves in place of their brothers and sisters nearby.

And there are the vast in-betweens, where life itself springs up out of the land and exhales the precious air that men turn hot and useless with their angry tongues. It is here where the trees still dwell beneath the skies, communing in a natural harmony with the birds and the rain.

But all of it is wilderness, no matter how wild or tame, when we consider its utter powerlessness. Every part depends upon another. The trees' sweet fruit and sugary sap are of no use, no beauty, if they cannot be consumed by beings constituted with enough sense to enjoy them. Yet those same beings cannot breathe if not for the tireless work of the trees, the soil, the sky. Each part has its place, but only in relation to the others. None is of use, and indeed none has life, if left to itself, to exist in isolation. And for men this is also true.

But even the bonds which draw together the life on Earth, which make up such a timeless interdependency and community, are not in themselves valuable or powerful. They exert nothing beyond themselves. The Earth seems to be nothing but a well-organized sphere of water and soil and men and beasts. And it is all wild, all independent of meaning.

We all by our nature inhabit an unknown, a deeply disturbing darkness. Those with minds to think have thought, though they have not discovered the purpose that they are certain has to be. Surely there must be a power beyond the trees, beyond even the mind. Surely there must be civilization beyond the wilds of this wild country.