How then shall we live?

At SOTAD, Foseti comments:

I also think civilization is coming to end, but perhaps my family experience has made me want to hang on to the last vestiges of civilizations for as long as possible. I certainly don’t fault you for riding the decline. I guess I’ll fight for what remains, even if it’s a hopeless cause. Better men than me had died fighting for lost causes.

Quite so. What family man worthy of the title, coming face-to-face with Evil embodied, lacks a seething desire to charge the enemy; to make a stand; to sally forth into righteous battle against the foes of Life, at the gates of Death, to lay down his life for his beloved ones? Stunned by the signs of cultural collapse, we, like Faramir, would gladly give our lives to defend the beauty, the memory and the wisdom of our received tradition if it means a hopeful future for our wives and children.

Yet, when we the film clip ends, and our hyper-masculine daydream falls to earth, we are confronted with at least one problem: Holy Crusades against villainous orcs may seem noble and inspiring, but real-life struggles are anything else. Let us leave aside the question of whether there is, in reality, any “glory” in physical combat – the fact is that in real-life, “fighting for what remains” consists not in glamorous set-piece battles, the sort that ripping yarns are made of. “Fighting for our culture” means, rather, a long, tedious, slog; a demoralizing, soul-crushing grind against the realities of modern decadence.

At Mark Shea’s blog, a commenter opines thusly:



I would just as soon not die a martyr. I doubt I have the courage. 
 
But I don’t think it’ll happen that way. No, things will just get harder and harder, more and more pressure will be brought to bear on us to shut up and go along to get along. 
 
Laws will be passed, taxes will be levied against Christians. It will be sooo much easier to just turn away and offer a pinch of incense to Caesar. 
 
Increasingly, I think martyrdom will take the form of impoverishment, public disgrace and opprobrium and even imprisonment. But I don’t think faithful Christians will be put to death. Yet. They might have medical treatment withheld, under a fiercely rationed future system… 
 
May Our Lord grant us and our children courage and steadfastness in the trials to come. Amen.



Well, where’s the glory in that? Charging into battle was easy to get excited about. Which of us has this in them?

Like Foseti, you want to “fight for what remains”? You won’t ride on horseback, in glittering armour, against the jaws of Hell. You’ll more likely – just for instance, of course – spend unrewarding hours attending schoolboard or other city meetings with dreadfully boring and boorish buffoons whose personalities you find nauseating and grating. You might also stand in the dismal rain at some forlorn protest, holding a homemade placard, being taunted as a “bigot”. Still up to the task?

A big problem for us would-be cultural heroes is that our real-life battles are not merely questions of physical courage. They are psychological. The Enemy jousts with our minds. We are besieged by mental warfare. We live in a world in which we are constantly told that “evil is good and good evil”. You can go onto any blog or website that allows dialogue and find a multitude of flame warriors spouting forth factoids that are Just. Not. True. Is anything more draining? Or demoralizing? Physical battle seemed easy in comparison. The hammer of nonsense strikes us again and again… and we begin to wonder whether, contrary to everything we know, they just… might… not… have a point. Maybe we should compromise. Just a little…?



Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

-Theodore Dalrymple



Tolkien has been roundly criticized on more than one occasion for presenting a world that is “Manichaean”: that is to say, in Middle-Earth pure good fights on one side, pure evil on the other, and we know which is which, and we know who we are supposed to root for. And we know this is unrealistic. Tolkien himself was aware of such criticisms, and in his personal letters, he admits that “of course, in real life, there are orcs on both sides.” Indeed there are. Are we emboldened to fight for our culture when we realize that half of “our culture” is on the Adversary’s side to begin with?

Well, then – do I sound discouraging or pessimistic? I don’t mean to. It’s just that in the face of the current social bonfire, I find the best way of maintaining hope is to approach our situation with a sense of realism about where we are going – we must identify what exactly the task before us is.

Pace Foseti, I don’t believe we fight a lost cause; it always seems darkest before the dawn. I hold it to be fairly self-evident – not merely a traditionalist cliche, but really a truism – that current symptoms indicate a society without much belief in its own foundations, like the value of strong families. Such a society cannot last; I take this to be axiomatic.

Here I might offer a word or two regarding “God’s judgment”. It’s popular – always has been – for Christians to mete out “God’s judgment”. I don’t deny that God can, has, and will actively judge evil peoples. But my view is that far more often, judgment of wicked societies occurs passively. God has designed human nature such that if we obey His commands, we collectively prosper, and if we disobey, the social fabric unravels. So, for example, if God’s sexual standards are not adhered to, you get what we have: family dysfunction in extremis. Hence, to destroy a wicked culture, God need not actively hurl fire from the heavens or whatnot. He need merely watch. Human societies are thus “self-judging”, in a sense.

I dare not prognosticate on specifics, but our culture, wherever it is heading, is heading somewhere much different than where it is currently. My despair reaches its zenith when I give in to shortsightedness, but its nadir when I consider that our current social bugbears are but mists that appear for a little while and then evaporate.

So, given the present climate, how shall we live?

I think we are now in the position of the Dwarves circa Sauron’s return. Driven from Moria, we must retreat to the Lonely Mountain, fortifying ourselves there and maintaining our traditions sight unseen. Our role is to simply persist, quietly preserving our values, passing them on to our children and grandchildren while awaiting the dawn. The analogy is not perfect (they never are): I don’t advocate total withdrawal. The marauding Flames of Udun must feel cold steel in their bodies hurled by those dwarves in Moria who still draw breath. Nevertheless, I believe our tactic must be watchful waiting, with the realization that the time is not yet ripe for full-scale assault. This way, at the appropriate moment of cultural eclipse, a “remnant of 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal” will be ready to venture forth and claim the land anew. Note that I purposely do not say re-claim, for, like the Shire, all good societies pass, never to be quite the same again. We may only go forward into uncharted waters, navigation manual in hand.

And after all, does every current trend forebode ill? Let us not be, as I suggested above, shortsighted. In all things God works for the good of those who love him. If the schools are failing, intellectually and morally, might good not come from this as we reject the assembly-line model of education in favour of, say, homeschooling? If Leviathan decrees that “marriage” can mean the 4-way union of two brothers, their mother, and a mangy burro, might we not finally realize that we made a mistake in ever believing that marriage was Leviathan’s domain in the first place?

I don’t expect to see total collapse within 10, or even 20 years. Civilisations like ours are reckoned in decades, if not centuries. But (owing to future medical advances as well as my health-conscious personal habits) I truly do expect to live long enough to observe a vast re-shaping of Western society. What form this will take I cannot say, but our job is to keep a torch alight in the darkness for those who will come after. The current arrangement cannot last, and we must be ready to fill the ensuing vacuum.

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