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I Gotta Right to My Illusions

by Christopher Chantrill
September 26, 2005 at 12:02 am

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A FELLOW at work recently told how his relative was planning to sue her former employer, a well-known national retailer. Suffering from a particular affliction, she frequently absented herself from work up to, and sometimes over, the limit established for leave without a doctor’s note. So her employer had fired her, but not for unexcused absence. Instead it had acted on a complaint received a while back from a customer, who had been offended by her rudeness in telling the customer that the store was closed. The injustice of it!

It is to defend such people that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Judge Roberts to defend the peoples’ rights—fighting for the people against the powerful even when the people abuse their rights damnably. They couldn’t vote for Judge Roberts’s nomination to be Chief Justice if it seemed that he lacked a commitment to defend those rights.

So the great divide between the political parties does not turn ultimately upon the question of the right to an abortion or legislating from the bench. Those are just the topographic details of the chasm. One party believes in the sanctity of the rule of law as the arbitrator of disputes between equals. The other party believes in human rights as a defense against oppression, fighting for the people against the powerful.

Which is more important? The rule of law or the protection of the weak? It comes down to faith, not evidence. We live in a world of “events, dear boy, events,” but the events are mute, and tell us nothing until we weave them together with a narrative of theory and, when theory cannot serve, call for help from God, natural law, or history.

We cannot live a single instant without breathing meaning into the world, that is, breathing meaning for “myself” in the world. The head of the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, declares that Hurricane Rita is very likely evidence of global warming. Pastor Jerry Falwell declares that 9/11 is God’s punishment to New York for its dissipation. Composer Aaron Copland declares that “So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.”

Of course they do. For the environmental administrator the meaning of life is to fight environmental degradation, for the TV pastor it is to fight Satan, and for the composer it is to find meaning in music. Otherwise, what’s the point?

But suppose it is all an illusion? Suppose that the worship of the rule of law prevents society from responding in a healthy way to change? Suppose that raising human rights into a sacrament creates an underclass of shifty chiselers? Suppose that global warming is saving the planet from a new ice age? Suppose that the sinners of New York are saving us from the boredom of dull conformity? Suppose that music were a harmful aural narcotic? (No, no. Not that!)

Don’t talk about facts. It is narrative and faith that breathe meaning into human life.

We learned about the importance of illusion centuries ago in the adventures of Don Quixote, that good-natured consumer of medieval romances who believed and lived a preposterous illusion of knight-errantry. He drove his family and friends to despair as he and his servant stumbled across Spain leaving mayhem and disaster in their wake.

At last, after three grand adventures in illusion that gave entertainment to millions and livelihood to his creator, he succumbed to sickness and sanity. Suddenly emerging from years of hallucination, he charged his niece in his Will never to read a line of a book on knight-errantry, and promptly died. For after all, when illusion is dead, what’s the point?

For you avant-gardistes here’s an idea for a work of art that will surely challenge society and test the limits. A twenty-first century professor of political science builds a career researching the political tracts of the nineteenth century. Driven to madness by his obsession with extravagant nineteenth century political manifestos he determines to become a political activist and right the wrongs of the world: smite the robber barons and save the poor from starving.

But the robber barons were replaced by faceless corporate CEOs 50 years ago, his colleagues over at the Economics department insist, and today the poor are fatter than the rich. And all those manifestos were a narrative of power, his postmodernist friends in the English department waspishly sneer, an apology for the rule of the new class of educated experts.

Never mind. He would still have a grand old time tilting at windmills and mistaking sheep for vast armies.

After all, he has a right to his illusions. They might turn out to be true.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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