# 3 - ENEMIES OF THE PERMANENT THINGS

 # 3 - ENEMIES OF THE PERMANENT THINGS

JUSTICE IS TRUTH IN ACTION - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - SUN. JAN. 31, 2021

 

Russell Kirk, "Enemies of Permanent Things" Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y. 1969, N.Y. 1967, 32

 

PREFACE:

    I am listening to EWTN's repeat of yesterday's 48th March for Life in Washington, D.C. Elections have consequences. We did not have a saint running for office. Not enough pro-life voters turned up in each precinct for Pro-Life to win.  And among Catholics, not Evangelical or Baptists, a large minority actually believed that President Biden was in some ways pro-life. Of all religions, the Catholic voter is the most misinformed and duped. The Catholic-in-name-only-politician has been an evil not only on the American Catholic Church but on our country itself. Pro-Life is a permanent Catholic belief.

 

    "The principle of elaborate restraints upon political power, for instance, is conspicuous in the political theory and practice of Britain... 

    Yet the third article in this common patrimony is more enduring, perhaps, than even political usage. Great works of literature join us in an intellectual movement, Humane literature teaches us to be a man. Homer and Hesiod; Herodotus and Thucydides, Sophocles and Plato, Virgil and Horace; Livy and Tacitus: Cicero and Seneca; Epitetus,  Marcus Aurelius; Dante, Petrarch, Erasmus. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and all the rest have formed the mind and character of Americans as well as Europeans. [ But not within the last 50 years for a huge majority of Americans.]... Whether this heritage is to survive the twentieth century must depend, in no small part, upon the re-invigoration of a popular normative consciousness.

 

The Doors of Normative Perception

    The answer, which is not simple, will be touched upon repeatedly in the following chapters. But for the moment, we may indicate three doors of normative perception: revelation, custom or common sense, and the insights of the seer...

    In morals and taste, says Hume, we govern ourselves by custom that is, by the habits of the human race. The standards of morality are shown to us by the study of the story of mankind, and the arbiters of those standards are the men of strong sense and delicate sentiment, whose impressions force themselves upon the wills of their fellow men... The good citizen, Virgil remarks, is a law-abiding traditionalist, that is, a man governed himself by custom, deferring to the habits formed , among their people through their painful process of trial and error, their encounters with gods and men over a great many years..

 

    Custom is closely allied with common sense, "those convictions which we receive from nature, which all men posses in common, and by which they test the truth of knowledge and morality of action; ... Common sense and custom, then, are the practical expressions of what mankind has learnt in the school of hard knocks...

     Moses and Solon were such seers for the Jews and for the Athenians. Through the moral perception of these law-givers, these half-symbolic figures who burst the bounds of pragmatic reasoning, their people's experienced what Eric Voegelin calls "a leap in being," a new and stronger apprehension of truth. What before had been mere cloudy surmises becomes norm: the law for man.

 

    Such seers were the unknown author of the book of Job, and the prophet called Isaiah: such were Heraclitus and Democritus, and such Sophocles and Plato, Such, in the Orient, were Confucius and Lao-tse, and Gautama. Such was Virgil for the Romans, and in the same sense, LIvy. In the Christian community such seers were St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante and Pascal. Yet other seers will appear in our midst, no doubt, unless we make it impossible for them to exist, or unless we close our eyes and ears to the very possibility of the transcendent. These are the giants, upon whose shoulders we stand.

 

    We are governed by the normative insights of the giants because we are incapable of inventing better rules for ourselves...Karl Marx had some of the qualities of a seer, and he postulated a new normative order. His moral system, nevertheless, was a caricature of Christian doctrine, combined with ideas from Bentham and Hegel (both of whom Marx reviled); and, once tested, Marxism turned out to be hideous, and quite contrary to its inventor's expectations.... George H. Kubeck