by Marc Hays

G. K. Chesterton thrived on the unexpected turn: that twist in the story that set all that seemed normal on its head, thus showing that true north may sometimes be upside down because we were facing south to begin with, but didn’t know it.  It comes as no surprise then, that Christianity’s paradoxes would bring him comfort and reassurance, rather than instilling angst and doubt. The following passage is from his book, Orthodoxy, Chapter VI, entitled “The Paradoxes of Christianity.”

“Granted that we all have to keep a balance, the real question comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity has solved and solved in a strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors and mountaineers. It might be printed in an alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly and quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea will may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water, and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is the disdain of death; not the Chinese courage which is the disdain of life.” (emphasis mine)

This excerpt is only one thought in a lengthy argument that Mr. Chesterton had with himself and was gracious enough to share with the world. We can all be forever thankful that Mr. G. S. Street issued Mr. Chesterton the challenge, and that Mr. Chesterton was prone to write a book with the slightest provocation.

Click on the cover for link to Amazon:

Why? Because he is fictional.

If you are afraid of wrathful, you should be running away from Jesus as much as from anyone you meet in the Old Testament.

Of course, even that comparison is fraught with falsehoods. To begin with, the Old Testament is not about “the Father” who gets supplemented by his much nicer Son in the New Testament.

(Oh, another falsehood is me using the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament,” but I don’t have the energy to include another issue in this post, so I’m just going to sin boldly.)

Quite the contrary, it was Jesus who met Moses on Mount Sinai. The New Testament is new more because it reveals the Father. Jesus declaring himself the Son doesn’t mean he’s a new character being introduced now. It means we learn more clearly that someone had sent Him from the beginning. He introduces His Father. All divisions of history that go from an age of the Father to an age of the Son are clearly backwards.

So it is Jesus who killed all those unfaithful Israelites in the wilderness.

Which comes back to that “wrathful” God. If by “Old Testament” people meant that single forty year period in the wilderness, then the idea would make more sense. But that’s a really narrow band of time. The whole point of that training ground was to prepare the nation of Israel for a long period of time (also in the Old Testament) when God would wait patiently and not intervene in sin and evil, entrusting Israel with the responsibility to do good and grow in righteousness.

Most of the time–the overwhelming majority of the years covered by the Old Testament–God sat back and did nothing while people sinned and sinned and sinned and sinned.

I thought of this while reading Psalm 106 this morning:

They did not destroy the peoples,
as the Lord commanded them,
but they mixed with the nations
and learned to do as they did.
They served their idols,
which became a snare to them.
They sacrificed their sons
and their daughters to the demons;
they poured out innocent blood,
the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
and the land was polluted with blood.
Thus they became unclean by their acts,
and played the whore in their deeds.

When we read about Sodom and Gomorrah, we see the wrath of God but forget that, in fact, that wickedness had continued for years, decades, and perhaps even more than a century (or more?). That bastion of rape and exploitation, every servant being abused, every child prostituted, every act of predatory violence piled up and God said nothing. He did nothing. He let it happen.

His eventual destruction of those cities in the circle of the Jordan was a picture of the future of the whole land of Canaan. When Israel returned as a great nation out of the land of Egypt, the whole culture of the Canaan was as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah. God had been patient and done nothing for more than two generations. The conquest of Canaan does show God’s wrath, but only after centuries of patience.

And Psalm 106 shows us how much God put up with before He stepped in and judged Israel. Generations of child sacrifice and false worship were tolerated by him.

Consider how easy it is for our government to claim they have the right to go overthrow a government for “attacking their own people.” The “God of the Old Testament” is obviously tolerant to a fault by American standards.

Yet, even while we are far more impatient and wrathful than God is, we have shamelessly slandered and libeled God as if he had anger management issues. The whole construct is false and blasphemous.

And, by the way, Jesus came at a point in time that was the end of another long stretch of patience. So, again, his own prophecies of judgment on his own generation are not at all inconsistent with the character he demonstrated throughout the Bible.

Naming is an essential part of the human experience. We all place names on things around us. That is a car. That is a Toyota Sienna minivan. That is a 2001 tan Toyota Sienna minivan with three dents in the hatch. And on and on it goes. We follow after our Creator who named the night, the day, the sun, the moon, and man. But he did not just name things as nouns, he also declared them to be good or very good. After the fall he named things good or bad, righteous or unrighteous. The Scriptures explicitly forbid us from calling good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20). The Christian life is one of naming things correctly.

In our postmodern era, it is hard to hold this line. Our world is a complicated one. Things were simple once, back in the day. But now we have become more aware of the overwhelming complexity of this world. Names used to be so obvious. But we were deceived then. There used to be truth that we could name, but now there are only truths, socially constructed ideas that help us name our various realities.  We used to know a woman from a man. Now is it a woman or man? Who knows?

Here is an experiment. Read these sets of words and ask yourself what comes to mind with each word: other woman, adulterer, loose, whore, slut, fornicator.  Homosexual, alternative lifestyle, gay, sodomite, lesbian. Abortion, pro-choice, pro-life, woman’s rights, reproductive rights, murder. Alcoholic, drunk. Which of the above names are most commonly used? We can see how the shift in what something is named matters. Today alcoholism is seen as a disease. But it used to be that a man who drank too much was simply a drunk. That was his name. Ah, but complications have arisen due to the latest research from the university. A man who cheated on his spouse used to be an adulterer. But now we discretely call it an “affair” and don’t call him anything. When was the last time anyone was labeled an adulterer? We used to have a name for a woman who ran around sleeping with men. A child used to be disciplined. Now they are abused. A man used to be called lazy. Now he is underprivileged.

Richard Weaver wrote this next quote in 1948. It is a description of the way words were used during World War II.  He understood at the time that there must be a constant point of reference for us to be able to name things.

 A course of action, when taken by our side was “courageous”; when taken by the enemy, “desperate”; a policy instituted by our command was “stern,’ or in a delectable euphemism which became popular, “rugged”; the same thing instituted by the enemy was ‘brutal.’ Seizure by military might when committed by the enemy was ‘conquest”; but if committed by our side, it was “occupation” or even “liberation’ so transposed did poles become. Unity of spirit among people was a sign of virtue; among the enemy it was proof of incorrigible devotion to crime. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Weaver’s point is that we rename things so that the story makes us look good and gives us power. Why do we do this?  Sean Hannity is a great example. He excoriates President Obama for doing the same thing he praised President Bush for doing. And the conservatives still love him.

What we call things matters. Words matter. Semantics are rarely just semantics. It is odd that Christians of all people forget this so easily. We are people of the Word who are delivered by a living Word. Paul bases an argument on a word being singular instead of plural (Galatians 3:16).  Yet for some reason we are happy to toss out words in order to be relevant. We change our vocabulary so we don’t sound offensive. So we don’t look like fundamentalists stuck back in that time when the world was less complicated. Why be offensive, when we don’t have to be? But why did we exchange abortion for murder? Why did we stop calling homosexuality sodomy? Why do so many Christians side with the Republican Party when it lies just as much as the Democrats? Why when America spies on her people it is protection, but Russia sends agents around it is tyranny? The answer is not hard to see. Weaver saw it in 1948. We have lost transcendent truth. We are postmoderns. We have forgotten the One who names all things. He names the nouns and he attaches adjectives to actions. He calls good, good and evil, evil. We have forgotten God. Until we come back to the Triune God, who properly names all things, we have no point of reference.  Until we come back to God we will struggle to name the most basic things. And so we will continue to stare in glassy eyed wonder and say, “Is it a woman or a man?”

The United States Suggestitution

We seem not to know who we are, and we do not know who we are looking for. We have been surprised to find out whom we have already chosen. Most of us are under the impression that we can correctly identify political candidates and the promise they hold by an old idea we had about their parties.

I know many democrats who are supportive of their party, because they believe it will aid Americans. Despite their misgivings about abortion, they don’t think anyone will get out of poverty without assistance. If this were true that the choice were between assistance and exploitation, then it would be understandable that people would swallow the bitter democrat pill.

I also know many republicans who are supportive of their party, because they believe it will aid Americans. Despite their misgivings about the weak promise keeping of past candidates, they keep on voting (R), becuase they think America will never be free of hard times with all the enforced social assistance. If this were true that the choice were between a meddling government and freedom, then it would be understandable that people swallow the giant rotten elephant.

One of the most pressing problems when facing the future of America under the weight of her own political machine is the problem of the continuous stream of Statism. This means that regardless of party we have had constant centralization for many terms. The best moment we have had in generations was at the promises made by Reagan before he took office. In their hearts, Republicans know this, because they can’t ever get through the election cycle without having each candidate boast that the mantle of Reagan’s office rests most fittingly on his own shoulders.

But down on the practical, cycle by cyle voting level, if you want freedom from tyranny, which party will give it to you? Which party is against war? Traditionally, Christianity is opposed to agressive war, and traditionally conservatism is against war.

Bush II made a big deal out of claiming that Kerry voted against body armor in 2004. Kerry was mainly voting to defund the war, but not against specific armaments. But later to defend his actions he stated, “I actually did vote for the 87 billion dollars, before I voted against it.”

Regardless of party, pretty much everyone was ready for war in the midst of Bush’s first term. Somehow, Democrats and Republicans alike all decided that it was not only time for war, but it was okay to hand over the power for declaration of war to the Commander in Cheif. This is not only illegal (remember, American law is expression of the Constitution), because only congress may declare war, but it is also representative of the centralizing attitude that pervades American politics. Push the responsibility and the power to the top.

Democrats and Republicans alike decided to fight war-s-plural, with money Americans couldn’t afford. We set vague and undefined standards of when we would fight and when we would leave. Our enemy was not a kingdom, or a man, or a government, it was the faceless and ENDLESS “terror.”

So we are still there. Eleven and a half years after 9/11, and we are still in some way in Iraq, at least at our embassy. This is in the country that didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, and which had no WMDs. And we are still in Afghanistan, the country whose impossible warfare bankrupted the USSR.

Well, the Democrat Savior came along to get us ouf of endless war. And now we’re in his second term. Which is the fourth presidential term for troops in Afghanistan. And at times, it seems we keep people in Iraq as well (See here.)

We might be tempted to call this the oldest trick in the book – you know – “never get involved with a land war in Asia.” But the trick is not that our military got sucked into a difficult battle. The trick is that the American public feels too guilty to quit funding military-industrial programs for the unscrupulous politicians that each cycle we call “our guy.” Our guy always changes his mind once inside the Oval. That’s when he gets the memo from the establishment that “All your policy are belong to us.”

And speaking of shadowy overlords, ummm…who is against surveillance?

When Bush was in office, Democrats were against this breach in civil liberties. As now that Obama has been in office, it is Republicans. But that also means, that even if your own side seems at one time or another to be against invasion of privacy, both parties are willing to use it when they get into office.

Who is actually for the constitution?

To take only one case in point (not to mention the deterioration of the 4th amendment under FISA actions by both Bush and Obama), there is the ubiquity of law by executive order, which is an imaginary way of writing laws.

Presidents are not capable of starting wars. And presidents are not capable of creating laws. These are both fictions that the electorate leaves alone, and the congress is happy to see thrive. Push the power to the top, and let top be responsible.

And the trick here is that Americans will do nothing about top leaders when they have to face up or ‘fess up. We have learned that you can’t impeach for immorality, and you can’t recall for imaginary wars run by imaginary laws. We can’t stop a president from being judge, jury and executioner with video game spy planes and we also know that citizenship is no reason not to be targeted by a president with a drone. But this same president who has no regard for law, for citizenship, for constitution or for life is the one we are to trust continuing the protection of the shadowy powers who want to listen to our phones and read our computers.

Have we lost our minds?

Yes. Slowly, slowly we have lost the soul of the constituted republic we think we are living in.

Now, as a Christian, I must explain that I don’t think there will be health in our politics until the Spirit of the Triune God of the Bible is pervasive in our policy making hearts. This means that worship in the Churches in our land is the primary means to changing and leading politics. But as a land is filled by God’s life altering grace, we will also influence our politics. So while the source of the answer is not political action, political action should be made by believers.

And to that point, what is the action that Christians must affect?

Among other changes, we need to change the vocabulary in our land. Democrats and Republicans have altogether become worthless. They have proven themselvs to lie about freedom, and to use office for the purpose of Statism. Statism is the enemy of freedom. When the Lord has seen fit to discipline the church in a land, he allows overbearing politicians to enslave our national society. This was true or the church under Assyria and later under Babylon.

If we continue to hate private property (thou shalt not steal), and if we continue to hate infants (thou shalt not kill), and if we continue to hate purity (thou shalt not commit adultery), we will be ruled by statists, and they will carry us away…farther than they already have.

We cannot save America by getting the definitions right, but we can get the definitions right while worshiping the savior who can save us from continuous destruction. And getting the definitions right means learning not to vote because a man is a Republican, or because a man is a Libertarian. We must ask if he is a statist or a constitutionalist. We vote with our imaginations for men who will rule with imaginary laws. We always choose the wrong president because we are always asking if he is like our imagined past, and not whether he is faithful to the constitution, and more importantly, to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Here’s a helpful definition of statism: the centralization of government power that happens by acting on the imagination that we have no constitutionally restrictive laws.

Once we know our definitions – we need to make a harder examination whether candidates are genuinely free from the tendancy to turn coat once he has hung his coat on the hook in the Oval Office.

Check voting records. We should allow people to change their philosophies, but we need to see that the trend is not back and forth. If they made the mistake of voting for Fisa in the past have the consistently repented in voting records since then? Did they get converted overnight?

And in their worship of some God or another, did they suddenly get converted to active Christianity overnight? Did they become devout right before the election? The Bible tells us not to put a new convert into the office of pastor. We should be as wise in the President’s race.

I guess I could say that we already see at least one voting office holder who already has a philisophical bent against statism, and who votes consistently. One who throws himself out into the fray against statist policy whether his enemy is socialism, or conservative war-myth mongering. I could name him. But you should already know who he is.

—

Luke Welch has a master’s degree from Covenant Seminary and preaches regularly in a conservative Anglican church in Maryland. He blogs about Bible structure at SUBTEXT.

Luke’s previous political post: Putin, Manning, the NSA’s Verizon, Pop Tarts, Drones, and Me
Lukes’s most recent theological post at Kuyperian: Sex, Magic, Power, and Christ

by Marc Hays

I have a friend named Gary, whom everyone calls “Bubba”.  Someone from somewhere else may snicker at the stereotypical baggage of this nickname, but around here it is not altogether uncommon for this childhood nickname to stick and become your “handle” for life. Bubba was born 29 years ago and born again 3 years ago. When he was born the first time, he was born with spina bifida. It has negatively affected his gait, his speech, his balance, his sight, his height, and a myriad other less obvious things.  When he was born the second time, Bubba gave all his broken parts to Jesus Christ, his faithful Savior redeemed them, and has been building a kingdom with every one of those broken parts ever since.

So, what do you do when your friend, who is already afflicted with spina bifida, develops a tumor on his pituitary gland that could have severe, adverse effects on his already partially crippled body? What do you do when you find out that the surgery can create as many problems as it solves? What do you do when you’re overwhelmed by your inability to do anything to help?

What do you do? You remember that your inability to cure diseases does not mean that there’s nothing you can do. You remember some men who brought their friend to lay him before Jesus, and you remember the Savior who saw their faith and forgave the man’s sins. You remember the “blasphemous” Messiah, who said “your sins are forgiven,” as well as “rise up, pick up your bed and go home.” (Mt. 9, Lk. 5) You remember that those friends were men like Elijah, who was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.   Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” (Js. 5:17-18)  You remember that this passage in James is in the context of “Is anyone among you sick?” (Js. 5:14)

What do you do? You cry out in your distress. “In my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.” (Ps. 18:6) You cry out in distress to the One who cried out in His distress, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”  The One who was poured out like water and whose bones were out of joint, whose heart was melted within His chest (Ps 22:14), cried out forsaken, knowing that God has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” (Ps. 22:24) On a bed flooded with tears and a couch drenched with weeping (Ps. 6:6) you cry out on behalf of your friend. You cry out to the One who himself cried out at the tomb of his dead friend (Jn. 11:35) and whose soul was exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death, while asking that that cup would pass from him. (Mt. 26:36)

What do you do? In your distress, you bring your friend to Jesus, remembering that the Great Physician did not come to the healthy and whole, but to the sick and broken. You bring your friend to Jesus remembering that the Great Physician is also the Judge of all the earth, who does not become angry at His people asking, “just one more request Lord.” (Gen 18:32) You remember that when Jesus, the Judge of all the earth, was praying at a certain place, one of his disciples said to him,

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” And he said to them, “When you pray, say:

‘Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread,

and forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

And lead us not into temptation.’

And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:1-13, ESV)

So, what do you do? You pray. You ask friends to pray, knowing there’s multitudes of Christians around the globe who are also righteous men like Elijah, whose effectual, fervent prayers avail much. You may even use your blog to take this prayer request global.

Bubba’s surgery is at the end of June. Please pray.

Kuyperian Commentary exists to provide what Abraham Kuyper referred to as the principle of antithesis. Those in his day who opposed the mixing of religion and politics were his natural ideological enemies. Kuyper is considered the father of Neo-Calvinism. His influence has shaped the minds of many of the greatest thinkers in this last century, including Herman Dooyeweerd. Others that have been influenced by Kuyper include Francis Schaeffer, Cornelius Van Til, Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff.

We do not claim that Kuyper’s sphere sovereignty took the correct direction at every stage, nor that his political endeavors were always successful, but we do claim that his theology of antithesis is the clearest philosophical basis for rejecting political neutrality. For this reason and many others, we dedicate these articles to his name and legacy.

It appears that God always delights in bringing good news to his children. In whatever season, in whatever phase of human history, God is always actively changing, transforming, re-creating the world by His word. And good news is here. Since the Ascension of our blessed Lord God has taken the few and the humble and transformed them into a multitude. This is the trajectory of the kingdom.

C.Peter Wagner reports that the five gospel hot spots in the world are China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria. “Starting with China,” observes Wagner,  the largest nation in the world reports “the greatest national harvest of souls ever recorded in history, beginning in 1976. Although figures differ, I personally am comfortable agreeing with those who claim that 10 percent of the population is Christian, which would mean that there are around 140 million Christians in that country.” The numbers are staggering. The fields are being harvested.

KC contributor, Thomas Kidd, pointed me to a Christianity Today article detailing how despite persecution, the Iranian church marches on. Claiming 0.5% of Christians, the church has not given in to the political dark forces. Melissa Stefan observes:

Yet, there are two bright lights for Christians in the otherwise-dark Iranian context: Elam Ministries reported in its Summer 2013 magazine that 246 Iranian Christians were baptized on April 17—”probably the largest baptism service on record in the Iranian church since the fourth century.” In addition, Iran’s underground house churches—where freedom to attend Persian-language worship services is more likely to be found—do appear to be growing.

The Gospel presses on. After darkness, light.

Uri Brito is the Senior Pastor of Providence Church in Pensacola, Fl.

by Mark Horne

Politico.com reports:

As the story of the National Security Agency secret surveillance program exploded, sales of George Orwell’s “1984” – about a totalitarian state and government monitoring – have shot up on online book seller Amazon. As of Wednesday morning, four different editions of the book are in the top 40 of Amazon’s “Movers and Shakers” list with the highest ranking at 17. At one point, the Centennial Edition’s popularity was up nearly 10,000 percent and clocked in at third most popular on the list.

This is probably one of the best results one could hope to see from the warrantless monitoring scandal. Take this quotation, for insttance:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.–George Orwell,1984

The main reason 1984 is still an acknowledge masterpiece is because it can be used to immunize the reader against worrying about real totalitarianism. The novel describes one way Big Government could warp society. This makes it easy to manipulate the reader into misidentifying the warning contained in the novel.

But Orwell wasn’t describing what might happen in the future so much as describing what was happening in the open in the world in 1948. The fact that he merely turned around the last two digits of the year he was writing the novel to produce the title shows he was thinking of something nearer at hand. The other title he considered, The Last Man on Earth, reminds me of an earlier non-fiction work, Herbert Spencer’s The Man v. The State.
This other title choice would have also had the advantage of preparing the reader for a story without a happy ending.

The main features of Orwell’s dystopian society are:

• 24/7 awareness that one is probably being monitored.
• Everyone recruited to spy on everyone else.
• Justification for secret police, surveillance and propaganda base on a perpetual war.
• The enemy in the war can change (and sometimes did change) suddenly and for no discernible reason.
• A continual denial of reality by giving names that were the opposite of the truth. The Ministry of Peace, for example, was really a ministry of war, much like the US Department of Defense devotes most of its resources to aggression.
• A denigration of family relationships and husband-wife intimacy–so that one prominent youth movement was the Anti-Sex League, which wanted all human reproduction done by artificial insemination.
• Complete government control of the news.
• A psychological from of punishment not aimed at inflicting justice but in forcing people into compliant attitudes.

1984 is often twinned with the earlier work, Aldous Huxley’s Brave, New World. It two had all the same elements. Brave New World emphasized manipulation in a less scary way (didn’t use torture to “fix” individuals but conditioned everyone as children). It also focused on a much more complete version of ant-family policy, since it had technology that allowed babies to be made by machines. While the two books are commonly used to point to two alternative bad futures, this is not helpful. One could easily see a world developed that was more like both novels.

The biggest difference is found in the different perspective of the authors.

For Orwell, the despairing lesson was that either there was no true heroism, or that such nobility or heroism could not possibly conquer totalitarian government. Government not only had power over society, it also had the capacity, through torture and psychological manipulation, to destroy the mind of the individual. Orwell seems to have believed this while hating that fact.

Huxley, however, was advocating his future. He put himself into the book as an authority figure saying:

civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism

(via Brave New World – Wikiquote)

This is the voice of the new “modern” world.

When you read Brave New World you are entering a civilization that is based on compliance and consumption as the only path to prosperity. Other than a minimal workday nothing is demanded and everything is offered. No one must wait for sexual gratification nor associate with any exclusive relationship. There are no exclusive relationships (“Everyone belongs to everybody else” as all are conditioned to recite). There is no one to fight for. No one to protect. No one to care for. There are only virtual reality porn experiences and drugs. There is even a kind of religious ecstasy event in which sex and drugs are made into a ritual. Games are forbidden unless they involve expensive equipment to boost spending.

Huxley was not warning against dystopia. He was spelling out his utopia and telling the reader, to borrow from later science fiction, that “resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.” Or else you can go commit suicide.

That is precisely the structure of the narrative of Brave New World. We are presented with a world in which there are a couple of discontents. These are entirely explained by problems with either the biological manufacturing or the fact that society still has a few, very few, needs that allow for the possibility of unhappiness among the “alphas.”

If you have been living in a literary hole: In Brave New World, no one is born and the word “mother” is the most disgusting term imaginable. Babies are mass produced and only Alphas and Betas are allowed to develop normally. Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are all deliberately brain damaged in their artificial wombs to do menial work.

[I consider it a Freudian slip that there is only one female alpha portrayed in the novel, and she is considered unattractive. But the alpha males (literally!) seem to have a lot of fun with Beta females. It even reaches the point where the "arch-songster" (later explicitly compared to an Arch-Bishop) basically orders a Beta female to service him against her desire or interest. She seems not to notice, but requires the help of the drug soma in order to "happily" participate. So without seeming to notice it, Huxley gives us an allegedly egalitarian society (in some ways, aside from the social caste) which actually is ruled by men for their own immediate needs.]

Eventually a real discontent is introduced–a “savage” from a native American reservation. He ends up so repulsed by “civilization” that he starts a riot trying to offer “freedom.” No one wants it. The riot police take the Savage and his two now contaminated friends to the office of the chief Alpha over that region of the global government. They talk. He is perfectly friendly. He is also pretty much free much of the conditioning that has kept down others. In fact, due to his love of “truth” (i.e. science) he was almost exiled to an island. But instead he took the offered alternative–world power over the civilization and the freedom in his own office to learn real history, read books from his safe, and in general be the intellectual that Aldous Huxley pretended to be. He tells the three that civilization is better off without personal autonomy and that he is a martyr for willingly dealing with his own unhappiness as a frustrated truth-seeking scientist in order to lovingly engineer the society. The two discontents must therefore be exiled and the savage must continue to live elsewhere (the actual decision didn’t make much sense to me).

The Savage runs away to live by himself, but he is eventually hounded by the news media and crowds show up. He is driven to commit suicide out of shame for his sins.

Thus fall all who oppose Huxley’s new world order.

Consider this:

In many ways, Huxley was the last of the great Victorian novelists. He was born in 1894, a grandson of the biologist T H Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”. Matthew Arnold was his great-uncle, and his aunt was the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. Secure in this intellectual aristocracy, he might have rebelled and become a great mid-century English eccentric, a liberally minded chairman of the board of film censors, or the first openly agnostic Archbishop of Canterbury.

However, at the age of 16, while an Eton schoolboy, he caught a serious eye infection that left him blind for a year and may have forced him into a more interior vision of himself. With his one good eye, he read English at Oxford, perhaps the best perspective to take on this dubious subject. He was immensely tall, six feet four-and-a-half inches. Christopher Isherwood said that he was “too tall. I felt an enormous zoological separation from him.” Huxley, curiously, disliked male homosexuality but had many homosexual friends, Isherwood among them.

The young Huxley must have had immense charm. He soon found himself at Garsington Manor, near Oxford, the legendary home of the literary hostess, Lady Ottoline Morrell, where he met Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and D H Lawrence. Years later, in the south of France, Lawrence died in the arms of Huxley’s wife. In the final minutes before his death, Lawrence suddenly panicked and cried out to Maria Huxley, begging her to keep him alive. She embraced him, and he died peacefully as her husband watched.

Maria was a wartime Belgian refugee whom Huxley met at Garsington and married in 1919. Murray describes their marriage as intensely close and happy, although Maria was an active bisexual. Huxley seems to have taken quickly to their special version of open marriage. They pursued the same lovers together, like a pair of sexual confidence tricksters: Maria encouraging Aldous, introducing him to the beautiful women he admired, preparing the amatory ground and saving him the fatigue of prolonged courtship. Jealousy and possessiveness, which so handicap the rest of us, seemed never to have touched Huxley, an emotional deficit that some readers have noticed in his novels. In the late 1930s, when they moved to Los Angeles, Maria became a member of the “sewing circle”, a club of prominent Hollywood lesbians reputed to include Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

Lets ignore the light whitewash and point out what is evident. Huxley had absolutely no sexual morality. Nothing going on in Brave New World bothered him. In fact, he portrays the life of a nuclear family as an inherently dangerous and neurotic affair. In his world, Ford and Freud are remembered as the same person and treated with great seriousness. In fact, if you don’t believe in Freud (with a dose of Pavlov) you would never imagine the kind of need for the non-family biological reproduction that monopolizes “Civilization.” Just as, if you didn’t believe in Keynsianism, you would recognize that a “civilization” that deliberately caused unnecessary spending would inevitably fall rather than be the most stable in history. And, of course, Keynes was well placed in Huxley’s intellectual social circle.

Huxley’s portrayal of religion is unrecognizable to most Evangelical Christians. It consists of a mixture of paganism and monkish medievalism. All religious believers practice self-torment and vision quests, self-flegellations and induced vomitings. This is the only form of religion that Huxley can recognize because it keeps at bay the truth. His novel is a lie in every way, unless you read it as an accurate guide to his personal utopia (where he rules the world as a free intellectual among the slaves) and an act of psychological warfare against everyone else.

His book, Brave New World Revisited continues to hide in plain sight. We must avoid the future portrayed in Brave New World! How? Well, mostly by imposing radical population control. Like war leaders claiming that the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms” and then demand we give them all up to fight the terrorists, Huxley wants to save us from Brave New World by implementing its agenda. If we do so, we are to believe that it won’t be quite as “bad” as BNW but will end in a compromise. Huxley claims that in 1932, when he wrote it,

Ours was a nightmare of too little order; theirs.. of too much. In the passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds–the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room ofr freedom or personal initiative.

Yet, that “world of liberalism” is not dying soon enough, decided Huxley in 1958. There are now “impersonal forces” that are “making the world extremely unsafe for democracy” and “so very inhospitable to individual freedoms.” What are these dire armies of Hell, you ask?

Mainly, browner people having babies.

Here are the causes of our curse:

Penicillin, DDT [! - MH], and clean water are cheap commodities whose effect on public health are out of all proportion to their cost. Even the poorest government is rich enough to provide its subjects with a substantial measure of death control. Birth control is a very different matter…

Huxley goes on cursing the lowering of death rates for pages. It is almost poetic.  Jumping in again:

…This is especially true of those underdeveloped regions where a sudden lowering of the death rate by means of DDT [again! --MH], penicillin and clean water has not been accompanied by a corresponding fall in teh birth rate. In parts of Asian and in most of Central and South America populations are increasing so fast that they will double themselves in little more than twenty years…. the population of some of these underdeveloped countries is increasing at the rate of 3 per cent per annum.

All of this is accompanied by a great deal of Malthusian nonsense that these countries will never support themselves. This was all wrong in the 1930s as it was in the 1950s and then in the 1970s during the “populatino bomb” propaganda. It is still false today. Everyone’s living standards have risen with the population–the local exceptions are due to political problems, usually the attempt to impose order.

I could spend all day typing this in, but lets cut to the chase. As he discusses the alleged impossibility of supporting the populations we liberate from death (again, “with the aid of DDT”!), he writes against the problem that we might actually save lives:

And what about the congenitally insufficient organisms, whom our medicine and our social services now preserve so that they may propagate their kind? To help the unfortunate is obviously good. But the wholesale transmission to our descendants of the results of unfavorable mutations, and the progressive contamination of the genetic pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, are no less obviously bad. We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will.

Yeah, keep your “good will” to yourself you Nazi pervert!

Darwin’s bulldog is still on the attack against all the insufficients saved from malaria by “our” DDT (which, we conveniently took away, didn’t we?). Why is this piece of human trash (not genetically, but his own ethical character) given so much glory in our day? How could he get away with writing such eugenicist propaganda as late as 1958?  And yet he is still upheld as the great friend of freedom against totalitarianism. This has got to be one of the most amazing bait and switches in the history of propaganda

A simple summary of what has happened: The government has secretly provided itself with a secret interpretation of the laws passed by Congress that it then secretly applies and used laws of secrecy to bind all who knew the truth about what the government was doing to secrecy.

I leave aside what might or might not be the full scope of the PRISM program and simply point out that the collection of phone data from Verizon is patently illegal, an obvious violation of the Fourth Amendment.

This Administration, and surely the Bush Administration as well, arrogated to itself the right to defecate on the Fourth Amendment and threaten anyone who told the American people about what it was doing with severe penalties.

The full depth of this arrogance comes out in James Woolsey’s projection of his own sin onto Edward Snowden’s character.

I think Mr. Snowden had no right to arrogate to himself the right to decide where to strike the balance between liberty and security. As President Obama pointed out a couple of days ago this balance has to be struck, and the court system, particularly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, the Executive Branch, the President, the Attorney General, and the Congress with the Reviews by the Congressional Committees every few months… this has been a very precisely crafted system for making the decision about where to strike the balance between liberty and security. And Snowden arrogated that entire decision to himself.

No he didn’t. Snowden didn’t arrogate any decision to himself. He simply took it from Woolsey’s small group of friends and gave it back to the American people to decide.

The precisely crafted system was the Fourth Amendment. It is clear and precise in its wording. That system was over thrown by a small group of people who were all compelled by threats of laws if they allowed anyone else to know what was going on. The members of the Congressional Committees were not able to exert any leverage on policy because they were required not to talk about it. They simply were drafted into a pseudo-democratic rubber stamp system. The FISA court is even more of a joke, long known as a system that rubber stamps whatever the regime wants. But the Verizon phone records obviously far exceed any authority of the FISA court.

And all talk of democracy is pure deception in such a context. No politician can campaign on issues he is not permitted to talk about. No politician can be held accountable for practices that he demands be kept secret.

The bottom line is that Woolsy’s oligarchy were the ones to arrogate to themselves the right to cancel the Constitution and decide where they wanted to “strike the balance.” They are a criminal conspiracy and they deserve to be exposed and prosecuted as enemies of the American people. If the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms,” we can add the charge of aiding and abetting the enemy. For these oligarchs have obviously pursued a campaign of appeasement.

Snowden didn’t arrogate any decision for himeslf. He, rather, exposed to daylight those who had arrogated the power to themselves in darkness.

So, naturally, Woolsey wishes life imprisonment upon Snowden. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Either most of our present (and past?) executive branch are no less than pirate raiders, criminals who need to be prosecuted; or Snowden is guilty of a crime. Woolsey wants his native oligarchy to remain in power. Snowden must be sacrificed for that to happen.

Republicans are the party of small government. Democrats are the party of big government. These distinctions no longer hold true. Reagan’s first term, perhaps, in recent history, is the last to come close to the type of small government Republicans say they envision. But for too long the scenery of the political landscape is replete with big government towers. We, the people, stare hopelessly at those babel-like towers wondering if any of them have read Genesis 11. We are Tolkien’s hobbits wanting to be left alone smoking our tobacco and drinking the finest beer, but alone they will not let us be.

David Shipler’s The Rights of the People: How our Search for Safety Invades our Privacy (2011) detailed some of these abuses. Shipler wrote that the Bill of Rights were “embedded in the first ten amendments to the Constitution…to climb and counter the might state, to keep their speech free, their confessions true, their trial fair, their homes and files sealed from cavalier invasion by police.” We are losing that right as speedily as the government (NSA) is tracking your e-mail or Verizon phone call right now.

What we are seeing today is more than the undermining of the Constitution; we are seeing the undermining of morality. And this implies that we need the objectivity of Christendom. We can no longer amen the actions of any party, because both major parties do not care about the shire. They will make deals with anyone. We need the boldness to assert the foolish actions of our party and then condemn them each election.

Obama’s promise to secrecy and the respecting of civil liberties in 2007 has quickly derailed into a Mordor-like crystal ball. They have looked and accessed every conceivable file. They have found what they wanted and used that information for their own purposes. “We cannot have 100% safety without inconvenience,” the president argues. Inconvenience? An absurdly burdensome tax system,  the waste of our taxpayer money, TSA, a destructive economic policy, reckless wars led by reckless leaders, the murder of the unborn? This is more than inconvenience; this is abuse; and all in the name of an agenda.

What we are witnessing is not the era of inconvenience; those days were relatively comfortable. At least we knew when the inconveniences would come. We are entering the era of abuse. We are in an era where the words “abuse of power” have become redundant. In an abusive society, led by abusive leaders, we do not know what to expect. Power corrupts, but absolute power in the hands of fools leads to abuse.

We are not claiming that this is a distinctly Obama problem. Bush’s Patriot Act opened the doors to this type of infringement. The tyranny of technology began long ago. And we are now recipients of a president who is continuing those policies.

The Economist observed in 2007, that in the past, information was gathered by drawing conclusions about citizens from fragmented reports by party loyalists. They would tap phones, send informers to workplaces, and follow people around. Today, “data about people’s whereabouts, purchases, behavior, and personal lives are gathered, stored, and shared on a scale that no dictator of the old school ever thought possible.”

We are living in a new era. This is an era where privacy is becoming extinct. The security of e-mail exchanges, counselor to counselee phone calls, and a host of other matters are sacrificed at the altar of safety. But are we safe? The answer to that is an inconvenient truth to our president.