The essay below is the fifth in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.
"Blind monks examining an elephant", Hanabusa Itchō, circa 1888
The Bee and the Lamb
Part 5
By Takuan Seiyo
Embracing the elephant (continued)
To regain the cognitive “top-10%,” traditional Christianity would have to give up its fundamentalism and obscurantism. Blaming “secularism” for the ills of the West is spurious when it’s “faith-based”, reason-defying religious assertions that on the one hand have eased the way for Socialism and xenophilia (aka Roger Scruton’s oikophobia) to corrode the West from within, and on the other have repelled born-into-the faith intellectual heavyweights and cognitive prodigies in droves since the early 18th century.
“It is this deep impression of supernatural truth, "wrote Edward Gibbon, another of those prodigious quintifectas that the British peoples used to produce in such profusion, “which
has been so much celebrated under the name of faith; a state of mind described as the surest pledge of divine favor and of future felicity, and recommended as the first or perhaps the only merit of a Christian.”
“Accordingly,” continued this 18th century British historian, polyglot scholar, parliamentarian, officer and gentleman, “to the more rigid doctors, the moral virtues, which may be equally practiced by infidels, are destitute of any value or efficacy in the work of our justification”.[1]
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from which these lines are excerpted took Gibbon 12 years to complete, beginning in 1776. The “conservative” voting into office any churchgoing moron who has good orthodontics framed in engaging smiles, is over 5’10” and married with children and not fornicating, will be outraged by the salvos Gibbon fired at Christianity in this multi-volume masterpiece. He would be only slightly less outraged by Gibbon’s dislike of Judaism and his wondering in horror what would have happened if Mussulmans won the battle of Poitiers and the Koran would now be taught by Oxford professors demonstrating to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.
As it were, the Saudi-financed Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is now in … well, I won’t tell you; it’s the kind of question that highschoolers flunk in countries run by multiculti space cadets. Oxford is as well where the aforementioned local bishop voices support for the amplified Muslim call to prayer, so congruent with the 14th century lanes of this once-Saxon town and the traditions that once made Great Britain great.
Returning to Gibbon, his treatise on the fall of Rome and the weaknesses of Christianity found its most ardent admirers among contemporary giants of the Anglo-Scottish-American Enlightenment like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, David Hume and Benjamin Franklin, and statesmen-philosophers like Horace Walpole (another Anglo quintifecta). It had a place of pride in the libraries of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Carlyle, Winston Churchill and countless other heavyweights. But what’s significant about the names iterated above is that almost all of them had an estimated IQ of at least 150. That’s not just Charles Murray’s top 10%, but the top 0.09%.
IQ, even genius, has no necessary bearing on wisdom, common sense, morality or character. That’s why a smart elite that’s not wise is worse than useless. Intellectual brilliance does not insure against the fancies of craziness, whether Martin Luther’s (est. IQ 170) ranting against reason, heretics, Jews or the abodes of the Devil (e.g. in a Swiss lake), or Ted Turner’s (I.Q. 128) donation of $1 billion to the U.N. Third-World cesspool and championing of every cause of the kooky Left, from Obama to global warming.
Luther’s dismissing Copernicus as “upstart astrologer” and citing on the authority of Moses that six thousand years ago the world did not exist, are well known. More significant is his reviling Reason in passionate terms as “poisonous beast with many dragon’s heads” or “the Devil’s greatest whore… eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed… [and have dung thrown in her face]”.[2]
Contrary to Luther, faith justifies nothing but itself. It’s a tautology. Old revelations had physical symptoms remarkably like modern migraines[3]. But a reasonable inference may be made as to the existence of God by observing the doings and ecological function of a bee [let’s call it Hypothesis A]. A reasonable inference may be drawn that except for the supernatural stuff, the basic story of the life and ministry of Jesus as told in the Gospels is true despite their mutual inconsistencies [Hypothesis B]. A reasonable hypothesis may be argued that if we posit A and B, inference C is that A and B are connected[4]. But no reasoned deduction can be made that B equals A, or that one knows and can define the precise nature of that connection. Therefore, it’s presumptuous to assert that every word that unknown and non-contemporaneous writers ascribed to Jesus — including all the lamb and turning of the cheek lines[5] — is the immutable Word of God, hovering in a supernatural dimension outside of time and space.
The 120+ IQ people still run things, and they have either abandoned Christianity (mainly in Europe) or are milquetoast Christians (mainly in the U.S. and U.K.) forever worrying about bigotry in Britain or “racial injustice” in America, but not about the survival of Britain or America. And that survival depends on attracting a large number of them to its cause, as well as turning Christianity itself from an agent of the West’s self-evisceration to an agent of the West’s self-revivication.
The situation is dire. The Muslim fanatic chased from his own Muzland finds refuge in England to preach the enslavement and mass murder of Anglicans while receiving lavish welfare from Anglican taxpayers and vocal support from the Anglican Primate and bishops. If that’s not crazy, what is? And the Muslim is not the crazy one.
In the United States, the Congregationalist Hartford Seminary (est. 1833) expounds on its website at length about its paving-of—the-road-for-Islam activities, including this 2011 study boasting that “the number of American mosques increased 74 percent since 2000” and — Hallelujah! — “Islamic houses of worship are ethnically-diverse,” which in current Duckspeak means that the culturally enriching dispensers of the magic of Strength in Diversity are not only Arabs but also North and West Africans, Pakistani and Talibani, Bosniac, Chechens and other cousins of Washington, Jefferson and, of late, Roosevelt and Truman. As if this glorious contribution were not enough, Hartford is also committed to “providing leadership education to marginalized communities,” which translated from Duckspeak means the Black, the mestizo tribe of La Raza, and women. No doubt, when generous patrons provide more funding, other marginalized categories will be added to this rainbow, though for sure not reactionary, churchgoing Polaks.
Not that the Catholic Church itself would care for such uncool ethnicities. Among others, it operates Catholic Charities USA that bills itself as “a professional association and social justice movement” committed to “Racial Equality and Diversity.”
Racial Equality is anathema to God, for if it weren’t, Poles would have been born with greater ability to shoot hoops, and Blacks would have been born with greater ability to solve differential equations. That part alone, equal outcomes for all, is enough to make of a former empire a dusty province fit for cubicle serfs toiling in the bowels of the Ministry of Truth and preyed upon by imported yahoos — all probably under the colonial administration of a people that has not yet ascended to Echelons Above Reality — say, the Chinese.
I have to be away from my desk for a few days. While I’m gone, there will be no news feeds of the usual type, although Dymphna may post her inimitable take on the news from time to time, when she’s up to it.
The news feed is very light tonight.
Meantime, we will read in the newspapers whether they turn up again as killers, perhaps with their German names to protect their identities.
