LOTR 78 - When the Dust Settles, & then Arises Again - Warmongers & Peaceniks
(A Current Event Squire)
Note: Consider this an "artillery sermon" in the Spirit of '76
FF thought History had ended...perhaps it is only just now, begun in earnest...Link
Nothing changes, when it comes to War. It is eternal. It galvanizes humans as nothing else does, save perhaps for fitful or fleeting Love. People love war. (H/T Cologero at Gornahoor). When the peaceful economy fails, they take you to War. Even Trump is getting into the Missile Parade - we are menacing Russia with sanctions and perhaps "more" if they don't come to the table.
Does all of this remind you of Saruman yammering at the Company after they threw him out of the Tower? Booming threats, which sound empty because through them runs the hollow and reedy music of the lonely wind? Yet redolent with the eloquence of fallen genius? We've had these voices, in our history before. America is still very young, at heart. We will outlast them.
Link Saruman wants he wants, until he gets it. Then, he needs more
Because of our "newness", Americans are always shocked - shocked! - to learn that they are living inside of history, that it isn't dead or at an "end", and that although it may be a scroll sealed with seven seals to them, those scrolls will be oped. Spengler from the old Asia Times Online (Daniel Goldman) used to say that Americans would arrive to much fanfare and triumph in Act One, get nervous in Act Two, and pull up stakes and go home for Act Three. Act Four is the Tragedy (very un-American) and Act Five is Divine Comedy (positively medieval). The horror!
Yet we've actually learned quite a bit from the annals of History, even though most people think it's boring, and slept through it. Let's go through a couple of them.
#1 - Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy pointed out long ago that the great danger of having a decent chap on the throne is that, when they are elevated, and the system is even worse than ever, the dear people realize that it is The System Itself that is hopelessly corrupt, and past saving or even caring. The French and Russian Revolutions commenced when perfectly decent and popular monarchs rose to the throne - not stern autocrats, but the milk of human kindness were Louis XVI and Nicholas II. Joe Biden accomplished this in a sort of reverse negative during his term: people realized that The System Itself ran on its very own, and that a sock poppet or zombie or Weekend-at-Bernie's corpse could do the job. Now that Trump has been elevated in his supreme vindication, and begun to go right by the play book of the Neo-Con and Israeli warmongers, the dear people may conclude that The System Itself cannot be fixed, not even by the wrecking ball Trump. They may well be right.
#2 - A more recent writer is pointing this one out: foreign groups and powers are always useful to those looking to sit on a throne made of bayonets. It was the old CSA that represented old America in the Civil War, at least if you look at the army personnel. The Union employed any and everyone they could, not a few "furriners".
Self evident observation: America is in a dangerous pre-revolutionary phase.
Not-so-self-evident fact: All revolutions are well funded by interested parties. This would include both the French and Russian Revolutions. Foreigners will be involved - they make excellent mercenaries.
Conclusion: Time is, and is not, on our side. It is against us, in that the pre-revolutionary phase may deepen, and that foreign adversaries or internal enemies will better fund and equip their agents for change. Their "time is short" & they are "making hay". Time is for us, for we are on the side of "Deepest Time". That is, we look beyond and past, into Eternity. The Hobbits always win: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Who else lives, but those on the side of Life? Our Time includes their "time". Eternity encompasses Modernity.
The old phrase was sub specie aeternitatis.
Saruman in his younger, less evil, & less sclerotic days Link
Daniel Goldman highlights for us that Time is the deadliest enemy, for the polis, the nation-state, and even the individual. Link Vladimir Putin is grinding down the Ukraine and their proxy-master, NATO/The West. He is doing it by turning the war into a slow-motion wreck, with us as a willing crash-test dummy. Our elites are playing for sequential time, but appear oblivious to Deep Time.
“I expected better from you, Spengler, than to repeat the nonsense one reads in the newspapers,” Richelieu spat back. A glowing blob of ectoplasm stuck to my Oculus visor. “A quick victory, indeed? And what makes you think that Putin ever wanted a quick victory?”
That stumped me. “Pardon my effrontery, Eminence, but if Putin didn’t want a quick victory, what did he want?”
“Time,” said Richelieu, “is the ultimate weapon. I understood this, and Putin has learned his lesson well. Clausewitz was in general correct when he said that war was the continuation of policy by other means, but there are occasions when war itself is the policy."
Time, they say, is the Fire in which we burn. Link
This line was even ripped off by Hollywood.
Lacking a sense for Deep Time (Eternity), the hubris (Adrastia, come quickly!) blossoms in florid delusions here among our elites. An acquaintance of mine via Internet makes the claim that "Reality is what you can get away with". I sort of see what he's saying, but am nonplussed. Of late, there has been birthed a uniquely American form of nihilism, with both left hand and right hand "turns". You can behold it in the techno-narcissism so abundant on the Internet, in the dreams of living forever in cyberspace, or using AI to attain omniscience. You also encounter it in the endless neopagan or anti-Christian screeds against our "Semitic" heritage of monotheism, as if we could amputate ourselves from 2000 years of learned spiritual experience. We agree with them, on some points. But the context is all wrong. They are enthusiasts.
The very short run belongs to these people. That is the burning heap of fiery Time. But Deep Time, true presence, beckons us through these temporary tribulations to an endless "Now" which encompasses all past, present, and future, in the Kingdom of God. The longer short run, on to the end, through "Middle Earth", belongs to the Hobbits, for Adrastia is punishing our Elites, who mistake the slot of the present "now" for the wholeness of living Time. Indeed, the hubris IS the vengeance. I know some of them, a few of them - I wish them well. But America's future is Christian, or nothing.
The Phoenix rises from ash...America rises from clods...link
Here at The Squire, we have defended a very explicit form of Christian Existentialism, where the subject does not consume the adjective. Christian, in that we acknowledge the Godhead of the man-God, incarnated in the flesh Who moved among us. Existential, in that each of is called, in their own unique way, to walk after him. As such, we have appealed to writers like Nicholas Berdyaev (who was arrested and questioned by the Bolshevik secret police, but let go when they found they could do nothing with him) as well as Ortega y Gasset (who did not claim to be a traditional Christian, but had deeply Christian bones).
We are compelled, with all civility, to vehemently refuse & refute this evolving form of American nihilism, in favor of a formula more in keeping with Christian Existentialism. This is a vision of "each man under his fig tree", cultivating his hobbit-garden, and dwelling in good faith, with good will towards all, but circumspection regarding where others are at in this same process, within the great Gymnasium of God. And we may need some higher walls to go with the two big oceans we have, protecting us. After all, the seed, in order to mature properly, needs healthy flesh. The hobbits are the seed of the New Epoch.
One must be definitively oriented towards The Good. The Good alone is aristocratic. The Good is elite, & I am not.
As such, the great threat to us comes, not from Sauron (whom we know well), but from Saruman, who appears as the angel of light with charming flattery and eloquence. It comes from our very own elite, possibly from within the MAGA movement itself, or The Deep Church. America will be saved through Christ, or she will perish (possibly both). We have no apologies to make. And CS Lewis was right - there is always "the deeper Law", to take away the old ordinances of death.
As regards what form a revival-reformation-renaissance takes in North America, we are
“Wandering between two worlds, one dead
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn."
The Hobbits are the "through line" on this. God has the agility, through-put, and purposiveness to triumph in the form of the little people, who will create the "new clothing" for "Old Christian Europe".
Recognizing that we are torn away from the roots of great European culture, and that a great deal of trouble emanates from a "Deep Church" alongside our "Deep State", we reject any form of Elitism whatsoever, while still seeking a connection through thinkers like Berdyaev and Ortega and George Parkin Grant, with our Christian heritage and past. The hope is to keep the flame alive, but in a new American form, which, since it is being born as we speak, is not capable of being categorized as "Elite" or "special" in any way, although it is the only form of specialness or eliteness that we can or should reach, or even care about. It recognizes that only God is Good, & the Good alone is aristocratic. This is what Faramir sees in Sam.
Time may be the fire in which we burn, but "our end is life":
Put out to sea, my broken comrades
Let the old seaweek crack, the surge
Burgeon, oblivious of the last
Embarkation of feckless men
Let every adverse force converge
Here we must needs embark again.
Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades,
Let each horizon tilt and lurch.
You know the worst, your wills are fickle
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past lives a ruined church
But let your poison be your cure.
Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose records shall be noble yet
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free
By a high star our course is set
Our end is life. Put out to sea. Link
Time is the form of Life which we are currently capable of dominantly experiencing, yet it is but a cross-slice of the Real, which we also begin to know. Do not despair. Do not be dismayed. As Solzhenitsyn says, don't even pay them any attention.
Our end is not War or Death. It is Eternal Life in the Lord.
Next: It is time to re-examine the confrontation with Saruman, at the Tower, on the way home to the Shire.