The Fiction of Tom Simon & the Lies of H. Smiggy McStudge
It is easier to rally a band of Visigoths, Arabs or Ivyleaguers with a streamlined creed that fits neatly on a banner. In politics as well, coherent philosophy frequently loses out in the short run to ideology – that is, a half-baked idea holding a fully loaded pistol.
—John Zmirak
(Hat tip to Margot St. Aubin.)
Certain famous and influential persons would have us believe, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, that one religion is exactly like another, and in particular, that Christianity is just as bad as Islam. The answer to this ought to be too obvious to need stating; except that in our times, it is precisely the obvious that always does need to be stated, over and over again. So once again, here is Chesterton on that very subject, with a hat tip to Mary Catelli for reminding me of this passage:
The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue. Here is a case.
There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: ‘the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.’ It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man were to say, ‘Do not be misled by the fact that the Church Times and the Freethinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing.’ The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don’t say the same thing.
An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they are divided.
So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.
—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
(Paragraph breaks added.)
In response to ‘Theyocracy: The argument’, Nancy Lebovitz writes:
I realize it’s unreasonable to expect a demon to supply links or evidence.
I looked up Cruz’s speech, and it seemed like a bunch of insults, and lacked a description of what Obama had done which was so awful.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/ted-cruz-confused-about-cicero/383066/
I found the above, which claimed that Cicero was pushing for insurrection, and Cruz quoted him with that in mind. This may or may not be true, but it’s certainly not a general attack on politicians using classical quotations.
What are your sources?
H. Smiggy McStudge answers for his own purposes, not for Ms. Lebovitz’s benefit, so you must excuse the whiff of brimstone. For my own part, I apologize to Ms. Lebovitz. It is not that Smiggy lacks manners; he understands them exquisitely, and when he is offensive, he always does it on purpose. But Smiggy will be Smiggy, and if I edited out his rudeness, half of his meaning would be lost along with it. If you took all the malice out of him, you could not see him without an electron microscope. I hold you in high regard, Ms. Lebovitz, whatever a McStudge may please himself to say.
My dear junior McStudges, field operatives, and propagandists,
Here follows, for your benefit, a short treatise on the Myth of Government. It does not describe, except incidentally, the so-called art of Government itself. What the humans believe about government, you can discover for yourself quite easily. They have an entire profession called Political Science, the practitioners of which are too weak-willed and scrupulous to be politicians, and too stupid to be scientists. If you want to know the fifteen prevalent superstitions about government and its alleged uses, you can go and waste your time with them; but I do not recommend it, except as a source of cheap laughter to help your digestion. What government is really about – the final end which we have in view when we spread this particular vice among the humans – is a secret kept, successfully so far, by wiser heads than yours. That information is distributed strictly on a need-to-know basis, and you do not need to know.
However, you do need to know what government is; and you also need to know the Myth. [Read more…]
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights, nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!
If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.
Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
—The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, no. 52
(to Christopher Tolkien, 29 November 1943)
(Paragraph breaks added.)
The infernal and redoubtable H. Smiggy McStudge has some things to say about all this, and has asked (or rather, peremptorily ordered) me to put some of it up here in the near future. Perhaps I shall oblige (or obey) him. He says it is to be a manual of advice for all the little McStudges, who, he says, have great zeal for their work but are in danger of believing their own propaganda. It will also be an ‘outline of history’, a form that was very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but is pretty well extinct now. Smiggy makes his pitch thus:
‘The average human now has nothing but contempt for history – contempt born of utter ignorance. The schools teach a kind of compost of outdated sociology and falsified anthropology under the name of Social Studies, and graduate chuckleheads who cannot tell you whether George III came before or after George II, and who, if given a globe, are exceptionally lucky if they can point a finger at the Earth. History has been abandoned to the history buffs, who have the characteristic stupidity of experts, the ant’s-eye view. There are people who can tell you in minute detail the costume and weaponry of a Pecheneg warrior of the eleventh century, but who cannot tell you what the Pechenegs did, or how they influenced other nations, or why anyone should bother to inform themselves about the God-rotted Pechenegs at all. And we McStudges are very content that this should be so.
‘But let us not be fooled because we make fools of others. We need a clear eye for the prize. History is a game that we have played, using the humans as pawns and fodder. Let us not be dazzled by the lies and distractions we design for them. Our workers in the field need a clear understanding of what the game is, and what the stakes are, and which tactics are most likely to be successful. There is, of course, some risk in making this information widely available. Some of the humans are likely to read it. Fortunately, few of them have (thanks to our efforts) the mental equipment to take notice of the truth; fewer still have the gumption to act on it. These perishing few may safely be ignored. The risk is nothing compared to the risk of letting our own people wallow in the ignorance they have created. Ink is a wonderful poison. Let us cover the world with it, let us use it to drown human wit and human reason, such as they are, once and for all. But let us take care not to drink it ourselves.’
A follow-up to my recent squib, ‘A case of vengeance’:
No doubt one reason why Flyspeck Flivverpuff was so happy to hear suicide recommended as a sure ticket to Hell was that, in fact, this was a lie. It may be – it probably is – that anyone who is absolutely Hell-bent on going to Hell will find a way to get there; and the Spanish swordsman of the story probably got what he had coming to him. But it is not, in fact, and never has been the teaching of the Church, (that is, of the Ordinary Magisterium), that suicides go to Hell automatically. The unnamed interloper was badly misrepresenting the teaching of the Church, as you would expect from someone that Flivverpuff himself suspected of having had words put in his mouth by one of his fellow devils.
Paragraph 2283 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
Paragraph 2281 makes it clear that suicide is a grave sin, and indeed combines several sins in one:
Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.
But this does not make it unforgivable or beyond the range of God’s mercy. Jimmy Akin, the well-known Catholic apologist, speaks eloquently on the issue in this video:
(Why Salazar went to Hell, on the other hand, we shall probably never know. We may suspect that it had little to do with whatever offence caused the swordsman to seek infinitely repeated revenge upon him. So extreme and disordered a desire is not usually bestowed upon an appropriate object. Of course, if Salazar had not been in Hell, Flivverpuff’s ‘customer’ would have had an entirely different punishment laid out for him: the doom of knowing that he had made an irreparable blunder, and his quarry was beyond his grasp for ever.)
Hope that helps. A merry Third Day of Christmas to all.
Thanks to that minor but inconvenient new malady that I mentioned earlier, I got less sleep last night, and less work done today, than I intended; but I did manage this much between about 10 p.m. last night and 10 p.m. tonight:
1 silly short story (‘A case of vengeance’), 3,239 words
1 vignette related to The Eye of the Maker (‘Droll’s audition’), 2,756 words
1 scene for the ‘Orchard’ (‘Fox and Lory’), 1,138 words
22 lines of verse (‘Out of the cage’), 185 words
The original ‘Christmas letter’ post, 2,541 words
Total for the 24 hours: 9,859 words
Plus various little odds and sods not worth counting. (I had a rough draft of about half the lines in ‘Out of the cage’ kicking around on my iPhone, so I did not, strictly speaking, write it all today; so let the pre-existing draft stand in the balance against the odds and sods, and call it even.)
I do not believe I could do that much every day, and would not wish to. But I think it is sufficiently established now that I can still write. The next thing is to write well, and to finish what I write, and to finish something that people will want to buy.
Wish me luck; I shall have sore need of it.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
A beast with tawny fur and wistful eyes
stares down the world through bars of serried steel.
He knows not why his life is held in prize;
all else is guesswork, but the cage is real.
The keeper brings him food, but not release;
the metal is for burnishing, not breaking.
Each passing day, the doubt and fear increase;
each night brings dreams uncaged, and bitter waking.
Why is a mouse in such a prison pent,
as vermin, pet, or cold experiment?
Or was it fear forged this accursed place,
fear of a vengeance fatal if set free?
Is it a king that frets his futile pace,
shorn of his mane as of his liberty?
He tries his strength, but cannot take its measure:
greater or less, the bars are stronger still.
No purpose, no escape, but deathly leisure,
a wasted wrath, an ever thwarted will.
Did He Who made the lion make the cage,
and make him strong for naught but useless rage?
* * * *
The lock is sprung:— the beast escapes its house.
Which is it, then: the lion or the mouse?
Not mine, but very very different:
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