By DEXTER DUGGAN
The Virtues That Build Us Up: More Life Lessons From Great Literature, by Mitchell Kalpakgian, Crossroad Publishing Co., crosswordpublishing.com, New York, ISBN 978-0-8245-2075-5, 283 pages paperback; $19.95, 2016.
In Rasselas, an allegory by 18th-century literary giant Samuel Johnson, a “projector” — a thinker who spins out theories — fantasizes that men can learn to fly like birds just as they can swim like fish.
Of course, people can’t swim exactly like fish or as successfully, but at least they have the appendages to get about in the water that they lack for flight. Every fish navigates better without our long arms and legs, and not burdened with human lungs, but at least people can do a little of what the submersibles with fins and scales do.
But no matter how hard we flap our arms or try to sail off cliffs, people never can approximate flight without at least some glider contrivance, if not propeller power. The ancients looking up at the sky while they floated on their backs by the beach, with their crude wooden boats perhaps tethered nearby, didn’t vainly yearn to swim as they futilely dreamed to fly.
Everything in nature or life isn’t exactly comparable. America’s Founders’ revered concept of equality has been twisted beyond recognition by our own Rasselasian “projectors.” What did they make one of their burning complaints as the 20th century moved along? It’s not fair that only women get pregnant!
In The Virtues that Build Us Up, Mitchell Kalpakgian cites Rasselas as one of many examples from literature enlightening us how to live morally, and the temptations to avoid, no matter our time or culture. There’s only one road upward to God, the source of truth and wisdom, but evil is legion, he writes.
This book is a collection of essays both new and previously published in some form. It’s not simply about virtues that build us up, but also about multiplying evils that attack not just the individual but his entire society in increasingly technocratic times.
Here’s George Orwell’s 1984 knocking on everyone’s door. The speech codes and thought police of Orwell’s novel, published in 1949, are around us now and send out tendrils to twine their constrictions more firmly about everyone, as our “progressive” “projectors” and their kin avert their eyes from the evils or even smile benignly.
Himself a socialist, Orwell set this tale amid the totalitarian rule of English Socialism, or Ingsoc.
Citing 1984, Kalpakgian writes early on: “Throughout the novel, all the beautiful images of the past…have to be banned and censored to purge the mind of this wholesome content so that the empty mind can be fed with the lies, nonsense, and the propaganda of ideology.”
Today we shudder at campus riots, foreclosed guest speakers, forbidden truthful — and usually conservative — words, a dominant media with aggressive values at odds with the populace and tradition. These are the knife-like waves in which we swim, and definitely can’t fly away from.
A little later, Kalpakgian notes that ancient truths are swept out as the trash of racism and bigotry, while new doctrines rush in to fill the void.
Left-wing impositions aren’t the flowering of organic development, Kalpakgian writes, but are “violent, cataclysmic dislocations that resemble the chaos and destruction of war — a cultural war.” That’s where control of language comes in, censoring “any deviations from the slogans that propagate the new doctrines.”
Honest conversation, he notes later, offers an exchange of thoughts that communicates the interior life of another person. Without this give and take, “a person easily becomes prey for propaganda, ideology, and brainwashing.”
The devils’ strategy in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, he says, is to inhibit conversation or argument, because to engage in them is to awake the power to reason. One might add that not only devils but also dominant campus and media leaders seek to constrict thought and language.
The term “pro-abortion,” we know, must be avoided at all costs, because pro-abortionists know it’s all too accurate about the carnage they crave.
Younger pro-lifers may not realize it, but the term “pro-choice” didn’t spring onto the scene as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court invented the mandated federal right to permissive abortion in January 1973. It took a while for this lexicological diversion to be birthed.
What could be better than “choice”? Where you get your selection of 50 cheeses and 60 types of flavored yogurt at the food store, whose parking lot has 40 styles of vehicles, what could be more all-American than “choice”?
Somehow, though, “pro-choice” never was about whether to pay your federal taxes, or how many Christian values you choose for your children to be taught at public college. “Pro-choice” was understood as a weaselly word for “pro-abortion.” So now we get “reproductive health” to supplant “choice.” Why, killing the healthy babies of healthy mothers by the millions is only the pursuit of good health!
Everyone knows why pro-abortionists are ashamed of that accurate description.
By comparison at a different level, baseball fans would be ashamed to say they follow baseball, and instead say they go to the stadium only to enjoy watching grass grow in the outfield. Or barbecue fans would deny their taste for meat and say they only like to look at clean napkins on tables. Or religious people say they don’t care anything about worship but simply like to be in old buildings with steeples.
But I digress.
Kalpakgian notes how much was lost when the wisdom of Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 was ignored by those who howled their opposition.
“All the prophetic statements of that encyclical are incontrovertible” about the serious moral decline that resulted, Kalpakgian writes, going on to note:
“While social planners, eugenicists, and alarmists are obsessed with population control, small families, and sterilization, the Church proclaims the fruitfulness of love and the virtue of generosity with life.”
Only look about us at the serious evils that were unthinkable as widespread a few decades ago. Unthinkable then, but ruling over entire nations now.
Fittingly, Kalpakgian’s final chapter is on C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, the final book, in 1945, of the Christian apologist’s “space trilogy.” With typical evil inversion of words and meaning, the shadowy N.I.C.E. (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments) is out to reconstruct humanity “in the direction of increased efficiency,” with today’s familiar eugenic tools of sterilization, liquidation, and selective breeding.
The cell of the “objective room” is where the religion-hating N.I.C.E. puts people needing thought conditioning.
Painting The Gutter
N.I.C.E.’s evil empire finally collapses, but there was a harrowing journey first, much like the one we undergo now. Is our being suppressed about finished?
The conservative Washington Free Beacon website posted on June 10 that the District of Columbia government plans to spend $20,000 to have artists paint LGBTQ murals on storm drains to “celebrate the LGBTQ identity.”
A way of living that widely was recognized as morally wrong throughout cultures now is honored for public display with tax dollars.
But, wait! Honoring this “lifestyle” by painting the gutter? Moral conservatives couldn’t have said it better.
Powerful government tastemakers who have so lost touch with the implications of their own actions may not be upon their thrones to dictate to the populace much longer.
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