THE WAR ON CHARACTER

They say that Solon, coming to Croesus at his request … saw a great many nobles richly dressed, and proudly attended … till he was brought to Croesus, who was decked with every possible rarity and curiosity, in ornaments of jewels, purple, and gold, that could make a grand and gorgeous spectacle of him. Now when Solon came before him, and seemed not at all surprised, nor gave Croesus those compliments he expected, but showed himself to all discerning eyes to be a man that despised the gaudiness and petty ostentation of it, [Croesus] commanded them to open all his treasure houses, and carry him to see his sumptuous furniture and luxuries, though he did not wish it; Solon could judge of him well enough by the first sight of him; and, when he returned from viewing all, Croesus asked him if he had [ever] known a happier man than he. [W]hen Solon answered that he had known one Tellus, a fellow-citizen of his own, and told him that this Tellus had been an honest man, had had good children, a competent estate, and died bravely in battle for his country, Croesus took him for an ill-bred fellow and a fool, for not measuring happiness by the abundance of gold and silver, and preferring the life and death of a private and mean man before so much power and empire.

The little country house of Manius Curius, who had been thrice carried in triumph, happened to be near [Cato’s] farm; so that often going thither, and contemplating the small compass of the place, and plainness of the dwelling, he formed an idea of the mind of the person, who being one of the greatest of the Romans, and having subdued the most warlike nations, nay, had driven Pyrrhus out of Italy, now, after three triumphs, was contented to dig in so small a piece of ground, and live in such a cottage. Here it was that the ambassadors of the Samnites, finding him boiling turnips in the chimney corner, offered him a present of gold; but he sent them away with this saying; that he, who was content with such a supper, had no need of gold; and that he thought it more honourable to conquer those who possessed the gold, than to possess the gold itself.

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. – Matthew 16:24

These past months I have been backing into an agrarian critique of modern society. For brevity’s sake, no writer can ever explain everything in one essay, but has to leave some crucial presuppositions unexplored until later opportunity presents.

To the amalgamation of business and government that rules us I have referred by various names: The Symbiosis, the Siamese twins, the oligarchy, the Establishment, or fascism. All these names and metaphors are struggling to explain and identify the organism that rules us. Its primary characteristic is the complete identification – simultaneity -- of business with government.

Why battle so hard over one little concept? Because long acquaintance had blinded us to its existence. We were taught it as children, have grown up with it, and live with it as adults, so that it seems natural. We can’t even see it, let alone question it.

Which makes defining it all that much more important, because before you can be cured, you must first admit you have a disease. We have been educated to believe that the disease is health. We only know “What’s good for GM is good for the country” and “The business of America is business.”

The symbiosis uses every branch of government to organise the whole of society to serve itself. Wherever you investigate – education, money, business, media, science, politics – The Symbiosis rules by stick and by carrot. Follow the approved path, win the carrot; make a fuss, get the stick. No word is spoken, but their line goes out through the whole earth.

How has The Symbiosis so thoroughly pervaded the minutest corner of society? As long as government has favours to sell, it will sell favours. Someone will contrive to get behind the favour counter, and others will present themselves in front of the counter. That’s what our constitution was supposed to prevent, but that’s the problem with institutions: they are no better than the men who run them. Corrupt men corrupt institutions.

That brings us to the essential element for republican government: self-restraint. Republican (small “r”, please!) government is founded on self-government, and in the end, this can only come from Christianity. Natural men can’t supply it.

True, in medieval times they used to talk about the seven cardinal virtues: the natural virtues common to all men and the theological virtues peculiar to Christians. Any man, even a pagan, might achieve prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, the natural virtues, while only Christians could reach faith, hope, and love, the theological virtues. In fact, the natural virtues were praised and inculcated in the pagan world of Greece and Rome from at least the time of Socrates.

Wait a minute -- if the natural virtues were esteemed and cultivated in pagan times, how can I assert that only Christianity can sustain republican government? First, from history. Read Plutarch, for example, and you will soon grow sick of the envy, ambition, greed, treachery, and power lust among the pagans. The pagans admired the natural virtues mainly from a distance.

Theologically that ought come as no surprise to Christians, since the Scriptures teach us that there “is none that doeth good, no, not one.” (Romans 3:9:18, quoting Psalm 14:1-3; 53:1-4). Certainly, all pagans were not as evil as they could have been, and many followed what dim light they possessed into a practical virtue greater than most we see around us today. (Romans 2:14-16). But in the end, without the grace of Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit natural men cannot persevere in virtue, and their governments will follow their own corruption.

John Adams implied that our constitution would work only for a Christian people. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly in adequate to the government of any other.”[3]

Patrick Henry made it even plainer. “It cannot be emphasised too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Once upon a time Western civilisation produced the idea of the “good man.” We might call him a “Christian gentleman” who preferred death to dishonour. Of course, this idea of virtue sounds quaint and immaterial to a people whose only interest is the bottom line, and who can only measure value in money.

The Greeks had an idea of character founded on sophrosyne, self-restraint. The Romans nurtured pietas, dutifulness. Christianity embodies and transcends both of those with self-denial. In the West “excellence” became the goal of education and life, not riches or power. Without this excellence of soul, any other accomplishment was meaningless.

Understanding first that all true virtue springs from Christian love alone, the key to this moral excellence is self-restraint, the foundation for all the natural virtues.

Today, however, self-denial is the only thing people are taught to deny themselves. “Go for the gusto” because “You deserve a break today.” Pop culture says it all with a single bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” There is no centeredness but self-centeredness. Moderation in anything is simply unheard of, alien, silly.

The Symbiosis long ago hijacked education. Today it aims only at a technical proficiency needed to secure a “good job.” Most of all, the great goal of life is the bottom line. Of making money and getting rich there can never be enough. The story of Manius Curius in the epigraph would simply be an unfathomable riddle to most modern Americans.

Oddly enough, all the striving to get rich actually claims to have the goal of leisure, either now or in retirement. Never before have so many enjoyed so much leisure time with so little leisure. The jaded and bored can pursue every distraction, from video games to TV to professional interstellar kickboxing. Yet the boredom always threatens to lap the distractions, so that every day more and more new distractions must be invented. Only this steady stream of novelties can forestall the victims from suspecting that none of these confers even one hour of true leisure.

Before our time Western civilisation had always understood that the object of “leisure” was never to distract and entertain, but precisely to develop excellence in men. To be freed from the drudgery of day-long labour, to have time to contemplate anything higher than “how will I get my next meal,” could only be justified by putting it to use in developing “good” men. Leisure was as much a duty as a privilege.

The hallmark of American society today (modernism) is not restraint but the throwing off of all restraint, and certainly not voluntarily accepting it. No monkish pleasures for us! This is the Revolutionary, not the biblical, idea of “freedom” which is actually autonomy, dissolving all restraint and obligation, whether to God or man.[4]

As children of the Revolution, trained to think as Revolutionaries, we think freedom is the panacea for everything – well, maybe we would go so far as to say freedom and education, but you get the point. However, for what ails us, just the opposite is the cure: restraint, and chief of all, voluntary restraint. Lacking that there is no freedom, only the anarchy of self-seeking.

The issue is not freedom, but a choice of slaveries. If God is benevolent – and the universe shouts he is – then we can choose nothing but his slavery, however alien it feels from our cultural viewpoint.

The Revolution (Siamese twin of The Symbiosis, to push the metaphor to its outer bounds) has taught us to consider all restraint evil, yet God in love says to us, “There are places you cannot go, and things you must not do, or else you will lose your humanity.” Andrew Lytle wrote,

“This question and answer exposes the other attitude towards man’s predicament. Candlelight is metaphorically the Agrarian admonition. The body of the world will remain mysterious and fearful, no blaring searchlights to make it seem immediate and reducible to man’s will, for beyond the glare lies the dark velvet of space, which the great light barely pricks. The body is frail, the mystery irreducible; therefore the feet must be nimble and quick as well.

“This is the riddle, old when it was first made, older now. It makes a more modest assumption about man’s capacity, but the man it considers is more a man. He is both good and evil, and he has a soul to win or lose. The defense against the evil within and without begins in a structure of a stable society. He must have location, which means property, which means family and the communion of families which is the state. Otherwise, as now, the individual is at the mercy of his ego. He understands that awareness of limitation is as near as he can come to freedom. Without control of space he is lost in time. The discrete objects of nature make a treadmill. Lest he mount it again he must engage and restrain himself by ritual, manners, conventions, and institutions (as opposed to organisation). He may explore and enjoy but at his peril possess beyond the flare of the candle light.”[5]

A people who can rule themselves will be vexed by a government that tries to rule them. They want to be free, but they cannot content themselves with counterfeit freedom. A free people recognise that The Symbiosis offers not freedom but license, precisely because license corrupts a people. The Symbiosis sincerely wants you to “Go for the gusto,” because that people who cannot rule themselves will be easy to rule – by another. Once enslaved to their appetites, they are already slaves.

“License” immediately calls to our minds Hollywood, movies and TV, of course, but they don’t deserve all the blame. Government and business promote licence and covetousness as well. Think about the role of the US government in promoting degeneracy through tax laws (punishing the married and those with children), bastardy (AFDC, welfare, etc.), sodomy (the entire gay agenda from gays in the military to hate crimes to special treatment for AIDS), and I could go on till I puked. For business, the word “advertising” says it all.

However, the most bizarre and obvious case of government promoting license that I ever saw occurred in Central America. In 1989 I visited Nicaragua. The Sandinistas published not one but two newspapers. One, Barricada offered pretty much the standard party line communism. The other, however, was very strange. It was called “Sex & Violence.” It seemed weird to call a Spanish language newspaper by an English name, and stranger still was what you found inside: pornography. Why? Whatever they may have been like on the inside, from what I could see on the outside the Nicaraguans were a chaste and discreet family people. To sell the people on communism, they first went for their sexual and familial morals Later study revealed that this sort of corruption always precedes the Revolution.

Although self-restraint underlies all character, our present commercial government – The Symbiosis -- undermines it from all directions. What then is the way back from Babylon to Eden?

Self-control. To learn to say no to ourselves. To learn self-restraint, the essence of both Christianity and Christian freedom. To take up our cross and deny ourselves. To teach it to our children. To practice it. To understand it. To love it.

[1] Dryden translation. New York: Modern Library, 1992, Vol. 1, p. 124.

[2] Ibid, p. 458.

[3] In an address to the military, Oct. 11, 1798. Thanks to Bob Renaud of Vision Forum for the quotation.

[4] “Revolution” and “Revolutionary” are used here to mean “embodying all the ideas of the French and subsequent revolutions.’ “Revolutionary” is generally the antithesis of the biblical, and aims at overthrowing Christianity.

[5] “How Many Miles to Babylon” in From Eden to Babylon: The social & Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle, Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1990, page 156.

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