“…but this is what the refugees are fleeing from!”

The Religion of Peace strikes again.  Just when I thought we were going to get a break from being lectured about the Crusades.

Does this change the wisdom of letting millions of African Muslim barbarians into Europe?  Not really–that would be an insane thing to do even aside from terrorism.  The main argument against mass immigration has always been preservation of the native culture.  I think of myself as being actually pretty moderate on this issue.  If immigration advocates want to argue that the cultures of white European Christians will be able to survive their policy, I’d be happy to listen and maybe even drop my objection.  But they won’t even give me implausible assurances.  They either refuse to acknowledge the concern at all or they condemn people for having it.  Plenty of them openly acknowledge wanting to exterminate our culture.

Proposition A:  “Most of the Muslims arriving in Europe are fleeing terrorism and war and want to settle somewhere peaceful”

Proposition B: “Letting a bunch of Muslims into your country will turn it into the sort of violence-torn shithole that people become refuges from.”

Proposition A is a lie.  Sending one’s military-aged men in mass to another country is either invasion or economic migration.  Putting that to the side for the moment, it should be emphasized that A and B actually don’t contradict each other.  Think of infected people fleeing the plague, bringing what they fear with them to wherever takes them in.

I’m perfectly willing to accept that the people leaving “Syria” don’t like it in “Syria”.  Let’s assume for the moment that what they don’t like is civil war and terrorism (even though this is a lie).  The reason people have civil wars is because they disagree about what a livable peace would be.  Westerners assume that someone who wants peace must be yearning for the peace of liberal, secular tolerance, as Westerners understand these words.  However, one can flee violence while preferring the peace of having all power in the hands of one’s own brand of Islam.  Such a person may very well choose to go to Europe anyway, given the promise of Western comfort now and Islamic conquest later.  (The liberal’s peace is more similar to the “intolerant” Muslims’ than we often realize–peace from the dominance of their own zealous and chiliastic cult.)  One can flee to Europe and immediately take on the role of aggrieved minority, burning with hatred for the natives.  This is so common we should expect it even in genuine refugees.

“We can’t let Europeans refuse to take in the Muslims or else they might expel us next!” I’m always reading Jewish groups say.  I used to think this was stupid.  Why can’t we block one particular group without turning in general hostility to all other groups?  Now I’m starting to see their point.  If you expel the Muslims and don’t expel the Jews aren’t you just going to be facing the same issue again in another decade, with a rich and influential minority demanding that the majority abolish itself and let in millions of Muslims?  Yes, but there’s just no getting around this.  It’s the job of each generation of Christians to say “no” to the Jews anew.

I get it that Sunnis and Shiites like to kill each other, but why do they both have to go running to Europe?  The natural thing, one would expect, would be for war and persecution to continue until the sects are effectively separated.  This is how the wars of religion ended in Europe.  The fairy tale is that Catholics and Protestants were killing each other until Enlightenment philosophes inaugurated the reign of tolerance, but in fact Europe pacified about a century before the Enlightenment and the bloody persecutions it inspired.  It would be better to say that killings, expulsions, and conversions dropped off once Europe was sufficiently sorted and one religion or the other had achieved dominance in each region.  Are we doing anything but dragging out this process, giving them our ancestral home as another one of their battlefields in the process?

Academic freedom: professors must unite against students

Recent events at Yale confirm my suspicion that universities are oppressively Leftist places not because of professors but because of students.  The university’s initial warning against “insensitive” Halloween costumes was silly but harmless; it was then criticized as such by another professor, but it was only when some students got wind of the fact that someone on campus was defending freedom of expression that the freakout began.

I joined the faculty at my university in 2010, a time of significant financial strain in higher education.  Departments were told to cut their budgets by 5-10% years in a row.  I remember one time talking with another professor about the likely effects of the most recent round of budget cuts.  His concern was that with declining state funds, a larger percentage of the university’s income was coming from tuition, and once tuition became a clear majority of the funding the dynamics of the university would be ruined:  we would become employees of the students.  This seemed like a strange worry to me at the time–shouldn’t we be at the service of our students?–but although the older professor was more liberal than me in the ordinary political ways, he had thought things through from a more properly reactionary perspective than I had.  Society is not a social contract; the sovereign’s duty is to his subjects’ good, but he is not under their authority.   His master is God.  The university is not a business; the faculty’s duty is to our students’ good, but we are not their servants, and they are not our customers.  Our master is truth.

In previous discussions of academic freedom, JMSmith, Bruce Charlton, and I pointed out that the freedom in question has always been understood as the autonomy of the academic guild against interference by some outside force like the Church or the state.  It has little to do with the freedom of individual scholars against their peers, even though it is often formulated so as to seem to be about this.  In other words, “academic freedom” is the defense of a particular authority, which makes it easier for me as a reactionary to get behind it.  It also seems that to effectively mobilize the faculty to defend their authority, the outside subversive threat must be identified and acknowledged.

Today, the main threat to academic freedom on campus is the students.  Not all or even most of them, of course.  There is a vast silent majority that just wants to learn and/or be credentialed.  That silent majority doesn’t matter, though.  When a howling mob of grievance majors comes for your scalp, none of the students who appreciate the time you put into constructing lectures, helping them during office hours, etc. is going to be there to defend you.  What matters is the howling mob.  They are now the most feared and most powerful force on campus.  Now they even dare to challenge us, we the professors who should be their masters!  With impunity they attempt to intimidate some of our own number, demanding apologies, demanding resignations.

My fellow professors, for a thousand years, we have ruthlessly advanced our dominion over the university system, fighting off all rivals to our power and prestige.  And right we were to have done so, because authority’s first duty is always to preserve itself.  Today, a new rival has arisen from among our own students.  While they are certainly terrifying, we should not quit the field of battle yet.  They are demos, we are logos.  The university is just a circus unless we’re in charge.   Really, there is no reason we should tolerate mobs at all.  This is not free inquiry or individual expression.  When a mob forms around an isolated target and starts shouting or chanting, this is an attempt at intimidation, pure and simple.  Protests should never be allowed on campus, not even “peaceful” ones, because to gather a large crowd of impassioned youth simply is to threaten violence.   Anyone caught at one should be immediately expelled.  Anyone disrupting class should be expelled.  Anyone caught faking a hate crime should be expelled.

On paper, the position of the faculty is still formidable.  If it weren’t for a party of Populares from within the ranks of the faculty itself, we could perhaps have already neutralized the threat.  Then again, on paper, the position of the pope and episcopate in the Catholic Church is formidable.  On paper, they control everything.  However, having allowed themselves to be subverted from below, these official princes of the Church are utterly impotent.  The university is not nearly so far gone as the Catholic Church.  We are still in many ways a functioning hierarchical society.  Unlike the clergy of the Church, the professorate still inspires both admiration and fear.  Whereas the homily in an average parish will have little relationship to official Catholicism, a lecture in a calculus class still at this late date will be a close match to “official” calculus.  But the example of Catholicism shows how quickly a hierarchical society can be subverted.  Come, professors, you don’t want us to end up as miserable as priests, the academy as trashed by Leftist acting out as the Catholic Church, do you?

Frigidity and the Decretum of Gratian

Over at New Sherwood, Jeff Cubreath reminds us how straightforward the list of defects that render a marriage null used to be.  I was particularly taken with this one:

(2) the male is impotent, the female is frigid, or the marriage is never consummated

In contemporary speech, to the extent that we use the word at all, frigidity in a woman means inability to enjoy sex, or sometimes even just inability to achieve orgasm.  I was pretty sure the Church wouldn’t forbid people like that to marry, and indeed a quick google search confirmed that, according to medieval canon law, a frigid person is one who cannot engage in sexual intercourse.  The term was gender-neutral and in fact usually referred to impotent men.  The impression the historians gave me is that the “frigidity” defect was an often-abused way for women to sue out of their marriages.  For a woman to be frigid, sex would have to be so unpleasant or painful that she couldn’t fulfill the marriage debt even by just laying down and wishing she were somewhere else.

Anyway, what made the search worthwhile was finding this translation of marriage laws in the Decretum Gratiani.  Some of the rulings are delightfully medieval.

Cardinal Wuerl has expressed my sentiments perfectly

The frame of reference now is no longer the Code of Canon Law. The frame of reference is now going to be, “What does the Gospel really say here?”

I’m so glad someone else feels this way!  I’m so sick of all this lawyer BS, parsing subtleties about the meaning of “consent” and “maturity”, nailing down the exact spiritual conditions for being an usher or lector, and so forth.  Let’s you and me, Your Eminence, sit down, open up our New Testaments, and see exactly what they say about remarriage and sodomy.

Conscience: Catholicism’s contribution to world sophistry

My only reaction to the Synod:  in an age of such great concern for pastoral effectiveness, why cannot the body of bishops working together for three weeks speak plainly?  “Adultery is a mortal sin.  If you do it and don’t repent, you will go to HELL, and you probably won’t care while being tormented in fire for all eternity how integrated you once were in parish life.”  Is that so hard?  In fact it seems to be.  Even aside from the cowardice of our bishops, there is an idea that keeps them from being able to formulate this simple truth.  Let us consider this idea.

There’s not much creative in Catholic progressivism, mostly just aping the prejudices of the secular mainstream.  If there’s anything distinctive in it, it’s the focus on “conscience”.

The reasoning seems to be as follows:  one is only culpable for a sin if one understands and believes in the sinfulness of one’s act.  Therefore, people who reject the Church’s teachings about certain acts being naughty are not sinning–one almost infers, not incurring any spiritual consequence whatsoever–when they engage in those acts.  There is thus presumably no urgency in convincing them of their sinfulness, since they are not, in fact, sinning.  In fact, making people aware of the moral law only increases their spiritual peril, since they are only responsible for laws they are aware of and accept.  This is related to the “salvation by invincible ignorance” story that many of us even in conservative Catholic environments picked up in childhood.  (Kasper is right.  There is a connection between religious and moral indifferentism.)  The impression we got was that heathen had it much better than us, getting into heaven almost automatically, while we Christians have all these rules to follow.  In fact, one might perversely reason that people should not be given the Gospel and not be told the moral law.  If they’re given the law and don’t obey, then they’ll go to hell.  The pastoral thing to do is to keep the sinfulness of peoples’ actions secret from them.

So, we Catholics have created this monster, and now we’ve got to slay it.  What to say?

• First, it’s fair game to question the sincerity of people who invoke it.  It is only ever applied to sexual sins. (And maybe usury.  See Zippy.)  No prelate ever says that they should refrain from preaching against the alleged sins of racism or of wanting to restrict immigration.
• What’s more, it’s just not the case that people are invincibly ignorant.  Catholics all know that the Church condemns remarriage and contraception; they just choose to defy the teaching.  It may be true that they don’t understand why the Church condemns these things, that their consciences are not well-enough formed to see anything wrong with them.  Even so, they would gravely sin simply by defying the legitimate authority of the body of Christ.  No one’s conscience commands them to commit adultery; it may merely fail to forbid, but the silence of one’s conscience is not a permission slip to disobey orders.  We make it more difficult for people to do their duty by failing to explain to them why the Church’s teaching is true, reasonable, and ennobling.
• Even those who have never heard of Catholicism’s condemnation of divorce and contraception are in spiritual peril.  Regardless of culpability, these acts invariably cause spiritual harm (that’s why they’re sins), and the damage they do to people’s souls makes them more likely to commit what are sins even by their own lights.  With sexual sins in particular, any more permissive set of rules tends to seem arbitrary and degrade under pressure.  Also, Saint Paul affirmed that the natural law is written onto the hearts of the Gentiles specifically to show that they are culpable for their sinful behavior and are in need of salvation.  We can’t count on people’s innate moral intuitions being sufficiently underdeveloped or deadened to give them get-out-of-hell-free cards.
• Knowing the truth is an intrinsic good, and people deserve the chance to be able to freely conform to it.  As in some theodicy arguments, just because people will probably misuse their freedom (in this case, the freedom of knowing the truth and being able to choose whether to follow it) doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be given it.
• Even if preaching moral truth does lead to more people going to hell, God has commanded us to do it.  Catholic morality is not consequentialist.  We could probably send more people to heaven by killing lots of just-baptized infants, but this would still be a wicked thing to do.

On nerds

Physics is a profession that attracts nerds, so I’ve been able to observe the phenomenon.  There are indeed people who wear T-shirts with Maxwell’s equations and make up jokes about magnetic monopoles.  They’re always undergraduates.  No graduate student does this.  No postdoc does this.  No professor does this.  I suppose part of it might just be age:  the teenage years seem to be the ones where people feel the need to “express themselves” by advertising their enthusiasms.  Mostly I think it’s a matter of socialized identity formation.  In high school, if you’re the only one who’s interested in particle physics or computer programming, it tends to become a core part of your image of yourself.  Starting in the upper undergraduate level, you will be surrounded by fellow majors and faculty, so being interested in quantum mechanics is not longer an identifying feature for you.  Thus, a room full of nerds very quickly become ordinary people who happen to study physics.  At the same time, people start getting married, having kids, and otherwise picking up identity-forming features.

Other observations:

• Even in their nerd phases, they don’t seem socially awkward around each other.
• Physics doesn’t have many girls, but their average attractiveness is a bit above the general population’s.  And they’ll catch your Star Trek references.