By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
The subject in this essay is not immigration, but the barbarians who control big or corporate media. One does not have to be in New York City or Washington, D.C., to be influenced by it. Its tentacles are far reaching.
Call it what you may, it is the print and television media that speak with one voice, suppressing all others. Destruction seems to be its aim.
John Courtney Murray in his We Hold These Truths defined the barbarian as a threat to the life of reason embedded in the law and custom. “The perennial work of the barbarian,” he held, “is to undermine natural standards or judgments, to corrupt inherited wisdom by which people have always lived, and to do this not by spreading beliefs but by creating a climate of doubt and bewilderment in which clarity about the larger aims of life are dimmed and the self-confidence of the people destroyed.”
Those words, written in 1960, adequately describe the barbarians who control the media in Europe today, and to a lesser extent in the United States.
For mainstream media, truth is not an objective. Yesterday’s lie becomes today’s premise. It does not take an acute observer to recognize that Western media is permeated with like-minded, often malicious editors and reporters. They serve as yeomen in a philosophically rooted war against the Gospel and ethics of Christendom, often crudely, but nevertheless effectively.
A favorite technique is to raise a question in a headline. It may be only a question, but it implies a fact that is taken in the following days as a given. Opinion so dominates the pages of major newspapers that if one were to subtract opinion pieces from those pages, the news could be printed on a broadsheet.
To provide another egregious example, we find multiple pages in a single issue devoted to demonizing President Vladimir Putin and, almost daily, articles written without any evidence depicting Russia, or perhaps Iran, as an imminent threat to Europe. Ordinary business transactions between Russians and others are depicted as sinister. The list could go on. Bogus healthcare articles could provide a contemporary, health-conscious, H.L. Mencken with ample opportunity to display the Mencken wit.
One can follow the flow of metaphysical nihilism from Fichte to Bernie Sanders. The line runs straight. It can be traced through Hegel, Schlegel, and Nietzsche, to the Partisan Review and to other avant-garde “little magazines” of the early twentieth century. Unwittingly they were participants in what Aurel Kolnai has called “the war against the West.”
Don’t ask what can be done about it. It may by uncorrectable in the near future. At present we can only attend its origin.
In the early twentieth century, the Partisan Review and other magazines devoted to publication of literary, political, and cultural essays formed a politically left front. From their base in New York City, they promoted an atheistic anti-Christian attitude that bore fruit in the thought and activity of an elite governing class influential at their posts at state and national levels and in educational circles as well. It was not without reason that the Partisan Review was founded by the Communist Party.
As John Courtney Murray saw, to challenge inherited wisdom of a community is to deprive that community of its commonly accepted standards. Murray’s view was echoed by Jürgen Moltmann who was writing about the same time.
In his Theology of Hope (1967), Moltmann provided much the same insight:
“Traditions are alive and binding, current and familiar, where, and as long as, they are taken as a matter of course, and as such link fathers to sons in the course of generations and provide unity in time. When reflection sets in and the unquestioned and familiar and trustworthiness of tradition become problematical, the essential element of the inherited is lost.”
Lost also in the attack on Christianity is enthusiasm for the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, learning from the time of Christ that opens one to the faith.
The absence of classical education may be detected in the world of philanthropy, where many who have been successful in the technological or financial worlds are uncertain with respect to the employment of their resources.
One could wish that successful businessmen such as Bill Gates and George Soros would devote more of their resources to the promotion of the study of the classical and Christian sources of Western culture. It makes a difference to the health of society whether one supports the educational objectives of institutes such as the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute rather than trendy political movements in the interest of multiculturalism and sexual freedom.
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