December 28, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
New REMNANT Essay: Remembering Who We Are: Our Hope and Challenge for
2019
Friends,
I hope
and pray that each of you and your families have had a joyous and blessed
Christmas, and I offer my very best wishes for 2019. This entire week through
January 1st is traditionally known as an “octave,” the eight days of
celebration in the ancient liturgy beginning with the Birth of Our Lord on December 25th, and culminating
in what for centuries was known as the commemoration of the Circumcision of Our
Lord. Not only is it a time of great joy—Our Blessed Lord came to us and
Salvation is given to the world—but it is also a time for reflection and
re-commitment. Indeed, in certain ways this is the origin of the common
practice of making those New Year’s resolutions, which should encompass
spiritual goals above all.
Today, to echo that
liturgy and the traditions of our faith, I pass along to you a recent column I
published in THE REMNANT newspaper
(December 15, 2018 print issue, volume 52, no. 21), which has now also been
published on The REMNANT’s Web site (December
21). It is based on an earlier installment that appeared in MY CORNER on
November 28, but has been edited a bit.
Here’s THE REMNANT
essay:
Friday, December 21,
2018 ONLINE EDITION
Remembering Who We Are…Hope in the Midst of the Ruins of Our
Culture
The
late scholar Mel Bradford once used the wording “remembering who we are” as a
title to a book of finely-honed essays about his beloved Southland. It seems to
me, as Bradford so artfully and gracefully suggested in his writings, that it
is memory, both individual and collective, which is essential not just to the
passed-on heritage of any culture, but to the very existence of that culture.
We remember the deeds, the sayings, the handed-down lore, the usages, and the
faith of our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers). Their
lessons, their admonitions, their successes (and failures), their examples,
even their everyday customs inform us and our actions, and, indeed, help shape
our lives and view of life. Historically, these are in many respects the very
same accoutrements that give definition and offer the earliest structure to our
existence, that define us, and that also provide an inheritance which we, in
turn, impart to our offspring and descendants.
It
is thus memory that is integral to the continuation of a culture and a people.
We inherit the wealth and the richness of the remembered past, and we are
impelled to both add to it in our own way and also pass it on. To quote the 12th century
theologian, John of Salisbury (a quote often favored by my mentor, the late
Russell Kirk): "We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of
giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not
because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because
they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours."
A
society—a culture—that discards memory, that cuts itself off from its
inheritance, whether purposefully or accidentally, deprives itself of the
accumulated wealth of that heritage. Of course, there are always those who
revile the past and its legacy, or at the very least, seek to modify or
transform it. And, no doubt, change and reform, in some degree, are always
necessary to any well-functioning society.
There
is a fascinating quote from Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous novel
detailing the turmoil of mid-19th century Italy, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo):
“Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.” There is a
wonderful film based on that novel starring, quite improbably, Burt Lancaster
which director Luchino Visconti directed (1963), in which the tensions between
the immemorial past and the circumstances created by change are vividly
explored.
No
society—no culture—can completely denude itself of its inheritance and its
history and actually survive. Such experiments in total revolutionary
transformation have inevitably ended in bloodshed and incredible
destructiveness—in the massacres of the French Revolution, and more recently,
in the Gulag and the concentration camp, or in blood-soaked Maoism.
Over
the past half century and more we have witnessed a different kind of
revolution; it does not employ as weapons of choice the tank and bayonet, nor
the Gulag as the final destination for unrepentant opponents—at least not yet.
It has been an unfolding, all-encompassing cultural movement spanning decades,
subverting and then incorporating in its service diverse radical revolutionary
elements injected into our educational system, into our entertainment industry,
into our politics, even into the very language we use to communicate with each
other. The “violence” it metes out is mostly of the cerebral nature, not of the
physical kind, but rather predicated on shame, humiliation, fear of the loss of
a job or reputation, and the playing on the natural human desire for
conformity, while steadily upping the ante in our laws—constantly moving the
goalposts of what is acceptable. It is the kind of intellectual “violence,” now
writ large, that once impelled people to look the other way when their
neighbors were hauled off to Siberia under Stalin, or to Dachau under Hitler.
And
it has been highly effective, utilizing as its major weaponry the terrifying
twins, the ineradicable accusations of “racism” and “sexism,” and a whole
panoply of sub-terms that accompany such charges: “white supremacy,” “historic
white oppression,” “colonialist imperialism,” “misogyny,” “toxic masculinity,”
and increasingly expanded to incorporate terms like “anti-migrant” or
“anti-transgender” bigotry.
The
overarching desire of this Progressivist Revolution is, in fact, not reform—not
what Lampedusa’s character the Prince of Salina says consolingly about some
things changing so that other things can remain the same. No, it is incredibly
“post-Marxian,” making the older Communist and Marxist revolutionary dreams
seem tame in comparison. It invokes and demands a total reversal, a complete
transformation in which nearly all, if not all, of those institutions, those
traditions, and that inheritance vouchsafed to us from our ancestors is rudely
discarded, rejected, and vilely condemned as racist, sexist, fascist—in other
words, our remembered past is cut off from us.
And
we are then naked before history, isolated individuals, without a heritage,
without a past, without family, and without memory: neutralized and bland
“tabula rasa” vessels to be filled with the “new” Progressivist ideology that
will convert us all into the model obedient automatons only hinted at in
Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four or by Russian film director Nikita
Mikhalkov’s deeply disturbing 1994 film of Stalin’s Russia, Burnt By the
Sun.
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Such
attempts have always run aground when eventually confronted by human nature
itself, those God-given natural characteristics ingrained in the human being
and psyche that desperately seek belonging, family, a usable history, and
memory. In the past all putative totalitarian systems have been impelled to
offer substitutes in an attempt to satisfy those natural longings.
Verifiably, none of those ersatz replacements has worked, whether the Goddess
of Reason enthroned in Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, or the deification of the
Worker and Party (or of Chairman Mao) under Communism, or modern appeals to a
debauched and poisonous corruption of Christianity.
Yet
such efforts continue, and in our day with increased feverish and fanatical
determination. Just take a look at the Web sites of such zealous groups as the
Workers World Party (centered in Durham, NC), Redneck Revolt, Black Lives
Matter, or various Antifa-related outfits. The chiliastic vision of some future
Utopia bleeds through nearly every line, it is right around the corner, if
only—if only—all those white supremacists and racists, all those male
misogynists, all that historic, European-originated and colonialist bigotry and
oppression, could be swept from the scene, and, of course, if only those
monuments to Confederate veterans or to Christopher Columbus, and maybe to Fr.
Junipero Serra, too, could be secreted safely away in some remote museum (just
a small first step, of course, in the continuing revolution).
And
our timorous and pusillanimous elites, those cowardly “guardians” of our
culture, those globalists and “deep state” denizens, and those political
prostitutes, give way in fearful obeisance and run, cowering, to hide in the
tall grass.
It
is the lunacy—the sickness—of the madman, but unlike the outbreaks of such
contagions in the past, its modern roots are far more demonic, and it is far
closer to apparent success. It is best described perhaps in the words of the
great Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his visionary poem written almost 100
years ago, “The Second Coming,” an intimation of the final emergence of the
“Rough Beast,” an incarnation of what can only be described as the
“anti-Christ,”
“Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
[….]
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
This,
then, is the ultimate challenge and the multifaceted Enemy—the Legion—we face,
which appears to have victory and domination within its grasp. And it is why we
must never lose hope, for Our Creator is still Master of the Universe, and His
promises are as valid and true now as ever before.
Our
watchword—our abiding confidence—may be summed up in the words of early 20th century
Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno in his volume, The Tragic Sense
of Life: “Our life is a hope which is continually converting
itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”
Read 2318 times Last
modified on Friday, December 21, 2018
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
Boyd D.
Cathey, a native North Carolina, received an MA in history at the
University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and served as
assistant to conservative author, Dr. Russell Kirk, in Mecosta, Michigan.
Recipient of a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, he completed his doctoral studies
at the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Then, after additional
studies in philosophy and theology, he taught in both Connecticut and in
Argentina, before returning to the United States. He served as State
Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives, retiring in 2011. He is the
author of the new book, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, and various articles and studies
published in several different languages about political matters,
religion, and culture and the arts.
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