Hark What Discord Follows
When the Lid Comes Off the Hidden Id
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! - Mat. 6:22-23
We have eyes to see. But we have minds to acknowledge what we see. We can, if we choose, blind them both.
For instance, David French describes here what anybody with eyes can see. He describes why the Evangelicals / Revivalist Catholics / pro-life crowd have lost the Culture Wars. They have followed their leader …
Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.
French follows this with an excellent paragraph …
I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic. Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.
But while that paragraph is good, here is a more concise meme version of it …
French continues …
This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022. Vaccine hesitancy was so concentrated in Republican America that political affiliation was more relevant than race and ethnicity as an indicator of willingness to take the vaccine. Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.
And this is the party that’s now going to tell American women that respect for human life requires personal sacrifice?
He ends with a quotable conclusion …
At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.
I have people who follow this Substack who are in the inner-circle of various organizations that I once worked with when I didn’t see the hypocrisy David French so succinctly points out. I beg you, former friends, take this to heart: There is no selfish path to a culture of life.
***
We have eyes to see. But we have minds to acknowledge what we see. We can, if we choose, blind them both.
Last fall, when some of GK Chesterton’s most antisemitic quotes were being shared and liked and applauded on Twitter, such as …
(a vile statement that got over 1300 likes) my former friends did not want to see the antisemitism of Chesterton and his admirers, nor did they want to admit what it was they were seeing.
Some of them really didn’t see it. One of my friends said, “But the right-wing Catholics I know are not antisemitic. They support Israel!”
I tried to explain that their support of Israel was most likely tied to their fundamentalist and literalist interpretation of the End Times, not to any regard for the Jews. Stuart Rojstaczer calls this “philosemitism”, but it’s just antisemitism hiding behind a kind of giant apocalyptic conspiracy theory.
This is Stuart Rojstaczer on Threads - telling us what he has seen and asking us to acknowledge that we see it too ...
A user replied and the conversation continued …
That’s harsh. But it’s true. It’s hard to see. It’s harder to admit that we see it.
***
I continue to wonder why I didn’t see these things (antisemitism, denial of science, refusal to sacrifice for the sake of the most vulnerable among us, contempt for the truth, fundamentalism, literalism, bottled up hatred, excitement over conspiracy theories) … I often wonder why I didn’t see these things in my long and emphatic involvement in the Revivalist Catholic cult (I mean, I hosted a series on EWTN, for God’s sake!). I continue to wonder why I didn’t see it; or if I did see it, why I didn’t admit what I was seeing.
Maybe it’s just that the past few years - COVID, the attempted coup, Putin’s aggression - simply put people to the test. Under the strain of fear, exposure to propaganda and bottled up “id” given a chance to burst out, people abandoned their pretense and the masks simply came down - lately with the “progressives”, revealing their antisemitism as well. Maybe we’re really seeing what’s behind the mask, as in this memorable scene from The Prisoner …
For me, it comes down to this. I think I blinded myself to who these people really were because I blinded myself to who I really was.
I wanted so badly to continue feeling the sense of mission, the superiority over the out-group, the drug-like intensity and the moral and existential certitude it all gave me. I wanted a massively possessive experience.
I got that - or it seemed as if I got that - but I rent the delicate fabric of reality in the process.
Here’s Eric Voegelin on the difference between Christianity as lived, awkwardly and imperfectly, day in and day out - and what our libido dominandi promises us …
The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty that if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.
“Massively possessive experience” is what the childish id wants. It’s Trump’s “simple declaration: I do what I want.” It’s scapegoating, blaming the out-group: the Jews, the libs, the transsexuals, the people we imagine are somehow keeping us locked out, oppressing us, not allowing us to do what we want.
It’s the worst of us, hidden and ignored until the past few years.
It’s anarchy let loose.
“Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too!
Then every thing include itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf
(So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”Troilus and Cressida, 1.03.109-124