When the moral imagination is enriched, a people find themselves capable of great thing; when it is impoverished, they cannot act effectively even for their own survival, no matter how immense their material resources.
...Personal and social decadence are not the work of ineluctable forces, but are the consequences of defying normative truth: a failure of right reason, if you will, resulting in abnormality. ...An abnormity, in its Latin root, means a monstrosity, defying the norm, the nature of things. ...An abnormal generation is a generation of monsters, enslaved by will and appetite. To recover and apprehension of normality, then, is to acquire an understanding of one's real nature. The alternative to such recovery is not a piquant pose of "nonconformity," but monstrosity in the soul and in society. If normative art expires, the people perish.
Kirk goes on to say, "Normality is not what the average sensual man ordinarily possesses: it is what he ought to try to possess."
I was thinking of this today when I read Larry Auster's post about how the teachers and classmates of Cho had lost their normative reason by tolerating his sicko plays. Auster quotes classmates saying they were unnerved by the sadism and the violence in Cho's work, and wondered if he would end up a Klebold/Harris type. But they did nothing about it. Auster says a sane society would regard a young man who writes extremely violent and twisted plays as a potential menace, and would seek to remove him from that society until he can be examined psychiatrically and until it can be determined that he's no threat to that society. Auster:
That's what a society would do that values life and wants to live. But valuing life requires that people make moral distinctions between that which furthers life, and that which threatens it; it requires that they feel fear and indignation at the sight of that which threatens life, and that they instinctively take action against such a danger. Liberalism cuts out, at their moral and spiritual root, the very possibility of such normal and healthy reactions.
This is what you get too from a society that tolerates all manner of lurid, explicit violence in its visual art, and forbids nothing except the impulse to forbid. I don't think for a minute that everyone who watches slasher films, or who plays violent video games, or who reads sadistic novels, or who listens to violent music, will turn out to be Klebold, Harris or Cho. Clearly that's not the case, and it would be stupid to claim that. But when we have no taboos on the nihilistic and violent in our art, when we live in a culture in which hearts and minds marinate in this acid, we lose our ability to recognize the abnormal and the threatening. We become desensitized to the culture of death. By numbing our own collective moral imagination, we prepare the way for our own perishing.
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James Wolcott has it right about Rod and his buddies passing judgement: "Of course the advantage to judging the dead is that the dead can't answer back in their own defense, which makes them the perfect dummies for the ideological likes of Ledeen, Derbyshire, and this granola bar (links to you Rod)." http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott Yes its a terrible culture we live in where childern are taught to respect civil rights, human rights, and love one another. Not like the good old days huh Rod? Jim Crow, no rights for women, and white males ruled.
Vintage Dreher - all emotion and indignation and not a scintilla of reason or logical thought. Move on - absolutely nothing to see here.
Yes its a terrible culture we live in where childern are taught to respect civil rights, human rights, and love one another. Not like the good old days huh Rod? Jim Crow, no rights for women, and white males ruled. It is helpful, I think, to be reminded that there are a lot of flighty emotivists in this world who really do think like Dallas Christian. Anybody on the right who disagrees with them is ipso facto a racist and a sexist. I don't know whether to laugh or to feel pity, but I do know that in no case is this childish viewpoint worth taking seriously, except as a sociological curiosity.
What Wolcott didn't take the time to notice is that I actually agreed with him in another post criticizing Steyn and Derbyshire for blaming the victims at Virginia Tech. But who expects Wolcott to be fair or honestly observant?
Two questions Rod: #1) So Rod do you agree with your NRO pal Auster when he wrote: Has anyone ever added up the number of white Americans killed by non-white immigrants over the years ? He added that barely a week passes in which a white American is not killed by a non-white immigrant or illegal alien. ? (Yeah no racism there.) If you agree with his statement have you shared this idea with you coworkers at The Dallas Morning News about this terrible white holocaust that s sweeping the America? #2) When you wrote: "This is what you get too from a society that tolerates all manner of lurid, explicit violence in its visual art, and forbids nothing except the impulse to forbid." Were you referring to Mel Gibson's last two movies, 24, Fox Entertainment, ABC, Disney, the Left Behind Series (were Jesus kills millions) or just stuff from mean old liberals. Oh, wait, don't you get a pay check from a corporation that owns how many televesion stations? Told Belo Senior Management your view of their programming? Oops, went from preaching to meddling.
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