SOME OF MY FAVOURITE PHOTOS FROM 2017
Bob Dylan Wins the 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature
Thursday, 28 December 2017
What explains the idiocy of the liberal elite? It’s their education
We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 6: James Bartholomew on the liberal elite’s reaction to Brexit and Trump:
Enough! Enough! For months, the so-called liberal elite has been writing articles, having radio and TV discussions, giving sermons (literally) and making speeches in which it has struggled to understand those strange creatures: ordinary people.
The elite is bemused by what drives these people to make perverse decisions about Brexit and Trump. Are they racist, narrow-minded or just stupid? Whatever the reason, ordinary people have frankly been a disappointment.
Time, ladies and gentlemen, please! Instead, let’s do the opposite. Let’s try to explain to ordinary people what drives the liberal elite. The elite persists with some very strange and disturbing views. Are its members brainwashed, snobbish or just so remote from real life that they do not understand how things work? What is the pathology of liberal eliteness?
Why would anyone support Hillary Clinton — a ruthless, charmless Washington insider with socialist tendencies? Why do lawyers, churchmen, the BBC and, indeed, most educated people support the EU — an organisation as saturated with smug self-righteousness as it is with corruption; one which created the euro, which in turn has caused millions of people to be unemployed; an organisation which combines a yawning democratic deficit with incompetence over immigration and economic growth?
The elite are supposed to be educated. So why are they so silly?
Ah! There is a clue. That word ‘educated’. What does ‘educated’ mean today? It doesn’t mean they know a lot about the world. It means they have been injected with the views and assumptions of their teachers. They have been taught by people who themselves have little experience of the real world. They have been indoctrinated with certain ideas. Here are some key ones.
They have been taught that capitalism is inherently bad. It is something to be controlled at every turn by an altruistic government or else reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile the pursuit of equality is good. These are truly astonishing things for educated people to believe when the past 100 years have been a brutal lesson instructing us that the opposite is the case. The pursuit of equality brought the world terror and tens of millions of deaths along with terrible economic failure. In the past 30 years, by contrast, since China and India adopted more pro-capitalist policies, capitalism has caused the biggest reduction in poverty the world has ever known. You may know that, but it is not taught in schools. Schools actually teach that Stalin’s five-year plans were a qualified success! The academic world is overwhelmingly left-wing and the textbooks spin to the left. They distort the facts or omit them.
What the elite have been led to believe is that governments make things better. ‘Market failure’ is taught; ‘public-sector failure’ is not. In my own area, they are taught that everything was awful in 19th-century Britain until governments came along to save the day with an ever-bigger welfare state. The importance of friendly societies, voluntary hospitals and so on is omitted. It is rubbish — left-wing propaganda. But misleading education of this and other kinds rubs off even on those who are not studying history or politics. It comes through in the Times, the Guardian or, in America, the Washington Post or New York Times. In Britain, BBC Radio 4 is the continuation of university propaganda by other means.
Meanwhile, from early on, environment-alism and recycling are taught as doctrine, rather than as subjects for discussion. My children had to report to their school whether they had arrived by public transport (good), bicycle (excellent) or car (evil). Children don’t escape the propaganda even when they study languages. My daughter studies French and has had to write essays on how marvellous recycling is. There is no analysis of counter-arguments. In fact, no data is offered on which a counter–argument could be based. This is not education. It is not teaching children to challenge ideas and think for themselves. This is anti-education: teaching them what they must think. It is as prescriptive as education in the Soviet Union. At least in the Soviet Union, many understood that they should not trust what they were being told. Here, because the propaganda is less obvious, students do not have their guard up.
One of the most important things schools and universities teach is that the students must never, under any circumstances, be suspected of racism. It is not enough to treat people of all races with respect. You must be even more above suspicion than Caesar’s wife. That is part of why the elite was against Brexit. They could not bear that someone might think they supported it for racist reasons. That, in the minds of the liberal elite, would be too awful. By extension, they also would hate to be thought of as insular or inward-looking. Yes, I know that many on the Brexit side were particularly global and outward-looking, but Remainers assumed that Brexit must equal insularity. It offended their view of themselves as internationalists.
Another central tenet of the dogma is that women have been oppressed, are oppressed and, for the future, there is no limit to what we must do to ensure they get to be in the same situation as men — having as many directorships and military medals and anything else one can think of. Feminist doctrine has so permeated the elite that its members assumed that all women in the USA would vote against Trump after his vulgar, arrogant remarks about touching women were leaked. The elite thought that was ‘game over’ for Trump. Ordinary women took a different view. A majority of white women voted for Trump.
Ordinary people have been subjected to the same kind of indoctrination as the elite. They have just had less of it. They were in the hands of the propagandists for a shorter time and have been in the real world for longer. They do not read the ‘quality’ papers or listen to Radio 4. They watch Sky Sports and Strictly Come Dancing. For their understanding of the world, they rely more on what they see for themselves and experience.
The elite’s fuller education in the key beliefs explains why it was for Remain and Clinton. They voted for Remain because, in doing so, they demonstrated they were not racist but tolerant internationalists. They were not put off by the incompetence of the EU, because they have been taught an irrational respect for government — even EU government. They also perceived the EU as more likely to pursue environmentalism than an elected British government. You could say they were trained to vote for Remain. Clinton, too, ticked every box. Members of the elite could effortlessly show how feminist they were by wanting her to win. She was also the embodiment of the other key tenets: more equality, more government and anti-racism.
You may think, ‘Can’t they think for themselves?’ Unfortunately, formal education, while requiring thought, does tend to discourage too much independent thinking, especially on the key parts of the faith. If a member of the elite, for example, finds him or herself reflecting that it is usually quite difficult to interest little girls in train sets and guns, they must squash that thought. Some rebels do hold on to an ability to think, but it’s noticeable that quite a lot of the most original minds, such as George Orwell and Pascal, never went to university.
Let’s try to understand why members of the elite get so cross when others don’t take the same view of Brexit and Clinton as they do. It’s partly a sense of entitlement. People talk of a culture of entitlement among those who live on benefits. But the elite has its own entitlement culture. They think that because they studied English literature at Durham they understand the world better than a plumber in Croydon. They think they are superior and therefore their view should prevail. They also think they are morally superior because they hold to the views which they were told were virtuous. Anyone who appears not to subscribe to these views must, of necessity, be a sinner or else appallingly misled by the Daily Mail or some other evil force. It is outrageous to the elite that the work of the Devil should prevail.
They are virtuous. They know best. They are the chosen ones. They have only a token belief in democracy. They expect and intend to prevail.
Enough! Enough! For months, the so-called liberal elite has been writing articles, having radio and TV discussions, giving sermons (literally) and making speeches in which it has struggled to understand those strange creatures: ordinary people.
The elite is bemused by what drives these people to make perverse decisions about Brexit and Trump. Are they racist, narrow-minded or just stupid? Whatever the reason, ordinary people have frankly been a disappointment.
Time, ladies and gentlemen, please! Instead, let’s do the opposite. Let’s try to explain to ordinary people what drives the liberal elite. The elite persists with some very strange and disturbing views. Are its members brainwashed, snobbish or just so remote from real life that they do not understand how things work? What is the pathology of liberal eliteness?
Why would anyone support Hillary Clinton — a ruthless, charmless Washington insider with socialist tendencies? Why do lawyers, churchmen, the BBC and, indeed, most educated people support the EU — an organisation as saturated with smug self-righteousness as it is with corruption; one which created the euro, which in turn has caused millions of people to be unemployed; an organisation which combines a yawning democratic deficit with incompetence over immigration and economic growth?
The elite are supposed to be educated. So why are they so silly?
Ah! There is a clue. That word ‘educated’. What does ‘educated’ mean today? It doesn’t mean they know a lot about the world. It means they have been injected with the views and assumptions of their teachers. They have been taught by people who themselves have little experience of the real world. They have been indoctrinated with certain ideas. Here are some key ones.
They have been taught that capitalism is inherently bad. It is something to be controlled at every turn by an altruistic government or else reduced to a minimum. Meanwhile the pursuit of equality is good. These are truly astonishing things for educated people to believe when the past 100 years have been a brutal lesson instructing us that the opposite is the case. The pursuit of equality brought the world terror and tens of millions of deaths along with terrible economic failure. In the past 30 years, by contrast, since China and India adopted more pro-capitalist policies, capitalism has caused the biggest reduction in poverty the world has ever known. You may know that, but it is not taught in schools. Schools actually teach that Stalin’s five-year plans were a qualified success! The academic world is overwhelmingly left-wing and the textbooks spin to the left. They distort the facts or omit them.
Meanwhile, from early on, environment-alism and recycling are taught as doctrine, rather than as subjects for discussion. My children had to report to their school whether they had arrived by public transport (good), bicycle (excellent) or car (evil). Children don’t escape the propaganda even when they study languages. My daughter studies French and has had to write essays on how marvellous recycling is. There is no analysis of counter-arguments. In fact, no data is offered on which a counter–argument could be based. This is not education. It is not teaching children to challenge ideas and think for themselves. This is anti-education: teaching them what they must think. It is as prescriptive as education in the Soviet Union. At least in the Soviet Union, many understood that they should not trust what they were being told. Here, because the propaganda is less obvious, students do not have their guard up.
One of the most important things schools and universities teach is that the students must never, under any circumstances, be suspected of racism. It is not enough to treat people of all races with respect. You must be even more above suspicion than Caesar’s wife. That is part of why the elite was against Brexit. They could not bear that someone might think they supported it for racist reasons. That, in the minds of the liberal elite, would be too awful. By extension, they also would hate to be thought of as insular or inward-looking. Yes, I know that many on the Brexit side were particularly global and outward-looking, but Remainers assumed that Brexit must equal insularity. It offended their view of themselves as internationalists.
Another central tenet of the dogma is that women have been oppressed, are oppressed and, for the future, there is no limit to what we must do to ensure they get to be in the same situation as men — having as many directorships and military medals and anything else one can think of. Feminist doctrine has so permeated the elite that its members assumed that all women in the USA would vote against Trump after his vulgar, arrogant remarks about touching women were leaked. The elite thought that was ‘game over’ for Trump. Ordinary women took a different view. A majority of white women voted for Trump.
Ordinary people have been subjected to the same kind of indoctrination as the elite. They have just had less of it. They were in the hands of the propagandists for a shorter time and have been in the real world for longer. They do not read the ‘quality’ papers or listen to Radio 4. They watch Sky Sports and Strictly Come Dancing. For their understanding of the world, they rely more on what they see for themselves and experience.
The elite’s fuller education in the key beliefs explains why it was for Remain and Clinton. They voted for Remain because, in doing so, they demonstrated they were not racist but tolerant internationalists. They were not put off by the incompetence of the EU, because they have been taught an irrational respect for government — even EU government. They also perceived the EU as more likely to pursue environmentalism than an elected British government. You could say they were trained to vote for Remain. Clinton, too, ticked every box. Members of the elite could effortlessly show how feminist they were by wanting her to win. She was also the embodiment of the other key tenets: more equality, more government and anti-racism.
You may think, ‘Can’t they think for themselves?’ Unfortunately, formal education, while requiring thought, does tend to discourage too much independent thinking, especially on the key parts of the faith. If a member of the elite, for example, finds him or herself reflecting that it is usually quite difficult to interest little girls in train sets and guns, they must squash that thought. Some rebels do hold on to an ability to think, but it’s noticeable that quite a lot of the most original minds, such as George Orwell and Pascal, never went to university.
Let’s try to understand why members of the elite get so cross when others don’t take the same view of Brexit and Clinton as they do. It’s partly a sense of entitlement. People talk of a culture of entitlement among those who live on benefits. But the elite has its own entitlement culture. They think that because they studied English literature at Durham they understand the world better than a plumber in Croydon. They think they are superior and therefore their view should prevail. They also think they are morally superior because they hold to the views which they were told were virtuous. Anyone who appears not to subscribe to these views must, of necessity, be a sinner or else appallingly misled by the Daily Mail or some other evil force. It is outrageous to the elite that the work of the Devil should prevail.
They are virtuous. They know best. They are the chosen ones. They have only a token belief in democracy. They expect and intend to prevail.
Wednesday, 27 December 2017
Mince pies amid persecution
Mince pies amid persecution
Puritans denounced mince pies as ‘papistical devices of the enemy of mankind’
The harried English Catholic community stuck to its Christmas traditions, from carols to wild merry-making
Thomas Hodgson had trouble sleeping on Christmas Eve in 1599. He was a man of Catholic sympathies, well-connected in recusant circles and teaching children in the household of Elizabeth Vaux. For all that, he had continued to conform to the Protestant religious settlement of late Tudor England. “On the very night of Christmas,” as the Jesuit missionary priest John Gerard reported, Hodgson had listened to the Catholic liturgy echoing through the halls with everyone but him “celebrating the birth of the Lord”. He “began to feel a sense of shame stealing over him”, “a trembling overwhelmed him” and, as Hodgson himself later recalled, “I went over my sins and my ingratitude with tears, sobs and sighs.”
Action was required, so Hodgson rushed to the chapel, demanding Confession, and we are informed that “after a few days spent in a careful examination of conscience he became a Catholic and joined us in celebrating the last days of the feast”.
Such was the power of Christmas within the much-harried English Catholic community. There was no better time to assert identity through outlawed rituals and devotions. Carols that blended late-medieval piety and the demands of post-Tridentine theologising were sung. Gifts that encapsulated a besieged faith were exchanged. Lucky John Gerard, who witnessed Hodgson’s return from the schismatic life, once received “a precious ornament with the Holy Name engraved on it” from one of his aristocratic protectors: it was “twice the size of a sheet of paper”, decked out with solid gold pins and pearls. As an early 17th-century ballad put it: “The Catholic, good deeds will not scorn / Nor will he see poor Christmas forlorn.”
Christmas also carried risks, of course. A few years later, in 1609, Sir John Yorke of Gowlthwaite Hall in Yorkshire mounted his annual theatrical entertainments for an exclusively Catholic crowd. Unfortunately, the Protestant Marmaduke Dornebrook, on the hunt for Catholics behaving badly, “by private means got into the house” and witnessed a play that was to the “great scandal of true religion”. In the play, a Catholic priest squared off with a Protestant minister and, following the latter’s defeat and humiliation, “the devils came and fetched him … one of them taking him by the arm and carried him away on his shoulder.” The ensuing legal prosecution made it all the way to the Star Chamber.
Happily enough, most early modern English Catholics did not have to inhabit a country which detested Christmas. As every schoolchild used to know, the 1640s and 1650s saw the holiday being banned but, both earlier and subsequently, most level-headed Protestants managed to sustain the traditions of hospitality and merry-making. The sniping always came mainly from the puritanical extremes: the grumbles about the holiday’s pagan origins, the lack of biblical precedent and the supposed invitation to moral turpitude. As the endlessly censorious Philip Stubbes put it: “More mischief is at that time committed than in all the year besides… what masking and mumming, wherein robbery, whoredom, murder and what-not is committed.”
Thankfully, such strictures were broadly ignored. But this did not prevent Catholics from defining and curating their particular vision of Christmas. Admittedly, enthusiasm occasionally spiralled out of control. A regrettable example was set by the Catholic-minded servants and tenants of Brampton, Westmorland, in 1608. When Christmas came around they “most grossly disturbed the minister in time of divine service … some of them drank to the minister when he was at prayer … others fired guns and brought in flags and banners … others sported themselves with pies and puddings in the church.”
It was more elegant, perhaps, to adopt strategies that displayed a winning combination of magnanimity and mischief. The Countess of Arundel had once helped a priest escape from the clutches of the Elizabethan authorities by bribing one of his pursuers. A sizeable amount of money had been paid to the man on the spot but the countess “sent him every year as long as he lived a venison pasty to make merry with his friends at Christmas”.
The pie-eating rabble in Brampton did foreshadow one curious Christmas quarrel, however. Radically minded Protestants took exception to all manner of Catholic holiday enjoyments but, according to one 19th-century antiquarian, mince pies were particularly offensive. They “were things of horror to all good Puritans, who looked upon them as papistical devices of the enemy of mankind”.
This did not spell disaster. On the contrary, as our author continued, “we fancy it is to their energetic denunciations of it that the mince pie owed its reputation as the sovereign dainty of the great festival, for of course the more the one party railed against it, the more the other delighted in enjoying it.”
Mince pies are not what they used to be and confessional enmities are pleasingly in abeyance but, as a nod to less congenial times, be sure to serve some up if the local vicar pops round for his glass or two of Christmas sherry.
Jonathan Wright is an honorary fellow in the department of theology and religion at Durham University
This article first appeared in the December 22 2017 issue of the Catholic Herald. To read the magazine in full, from anywhere in the world, go here
GENE ATTACKED BY SNARLING NOBODY!
GENE ATTACKED BY SNARLING NOBODY!
Detterling when you can write with such searing honesty about yourself as I do then come back and attack me.
In the meantime stay in your place as a nobody.
Detterling aged fifteen trainspotting in 1959Tuesday, 26 December 2017
Hooray! Gene's ' GENE ... a voice in the wilderness' returns today
Hooray! Gene's GENE ... a voice in the wilderness returns today
The deacon Stephen, stoned in Jerusalem two years after the death of Christ, has always been the object of very special veneration by the faithful. He is the first martyr. The account in the Acts of the Apostles relating his arrest and the accusations brought against him emphasize the parallel with our Saviour's trial; he was stoned outside the city wall and died, like his Master, praying for his executioners.
Sorry about the unfortunate hiatus folks but today Gene's blog is back - and back to stay! Today is the Feast Day of St
Stephen the First Martyr. Appropriate indeed as Gene has been a martyr
for the cause of freedom of speech.
St. Stephen
The deacon Stephen, stoned in Jerusalem two years after the death of Christ, has always been the object of very special veneration by the faithful. He is the first martyr. The account in the Acts of the Apostles relating his arrest and the accusations brought against him emphasize the parallel with our Saviour's trial; he was stoned outside the city wall and died, like his Master, praying for his executioners.
Stephen belongs to the group of seven deacons whom the Apostles associated with their work in order to lighten their load. He was "filled with faith and with the Holy Spirit," "full of grace and strength" he showed himself as a man of God, radiating divine grace and apostolic zeal. As the first witness to Christ he confronted his opponents with quiet courage and the promise made by Jesus (Mark 13.11) was fulfilled: ". . .Disputing with Stephen they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit that spoke."
In St. Stephen, the first martyr, the liturgy emphasizes the imitator of Christ even to the extent of the complete gift of self, to the extent of that great charity which made him pray in his suffering for his executioners. By establishing the feast on the day after Christmas the Church draws an even closer comparison between the disciple and the Master and thus extends his witness to the whole mission of the redeeming Messiah.
Professing the Christian Faith Demands the Heroism of the Martyrs
On the day after the solemnity of Christmas, we celebrate today the feast of St. Stephen, deacon and first martyr. At first glance, to join the memory of the "protomartyr" and the birth of the Redeemer might seem surprising because of the contrast between the peace and joy of Bethlehem and the tragedy of St. Stephen, stoned in Jerusalem during the first persecution against the nascent Church.
On the day after the solemnity of Christmas, we celebrate today the feast of St. Stephen, deacon and first martyr. At first glance, to join the memory of the "protomartyr" and the birth of the Redeemer might seem surprising because of the contrast between the peace and joy of Bethlehem and the tragedy of St. Stephen, stoned in Jerusalem during the first persecution against the nascent Church.
In reality, this apparent opposition is surmounted if we analyze in greater depth the mystery of Christmas. The Child Jesus, lying in the cave, is the only-begotten Son of God who became man. He will save humanity by dying on the cross.
Now we see Him in swaddling clothes in the manger; after His crucifixion, He will again be wrapped in bandages and placed in the sepulcher. It is no accident that the Christmas iconography sometimes represents the divine newborn Child lying in a small sarcophagus, to indicate that the Redeemer was born to die, He was born to give His life in ransom for all.
St. Stephen was the first to follow in the steps of Christ with martyrdom: like the divine Master, he died forgiving and praying for his executioners (cf. Acts 7:60). During the first four centuries of Christianity all the saints venerated by the Church were martyrs.
They are a countless multitude, which the liturgy calls "the white army of martyrs," (martyrum candidatus exercitus). Their death was not a reason for fear and sadness, but of spiritual enthusiasm, which always gave rise to new Christians. For believers, the day of death, and even more so, the day of martyrdom, is not the end of everything, but rather the "passage" to immortal life, it is the day of the final birth, the "dies natalis." Thus is understood the link that exists between the "dies natalis" of Christ and the "dies natalis" of St. Stephen. If Jesus had not been born on earth, men would not have been able to be born for heaven. Precisely because Christ was born, we are able to be "reborn."
Also Mary, who took the Redeemer in her arms in Bethlehem, suffered an interior martyrdom. She shared His Passion and had to take Him, once again, in her arms when they took Him down from the cross. To this Mother, who felt the joy of the birth and the anguish of the death of her divine Son, we entrust those who are persecuted and those who are suffering, in different ways, for witnessing and serving the Gospel.
With special spiritual closeness, I am also thinking of the Catholics who maintain their fidelity to the See of Peter without giving in to compromises, at times even at the cost of grave sufferings. The whole Church admires their example and prays that they will have the strength to persevere, knowing that their tribulations are a source of victory, though for the moment they might seem to be a failure.
Angelus Message, Pope Benedict XVI, December 26, 2006
Patron: Casket makers; coffin makers; deacons; headaches; horses; masons; diocese of Owensboro, Kentucky; stone masons.
Symbols: Deacon carrying a pile of rocks; deacon with rocks gathered in his vestments; deacon with rocks on his head; deacon with rocks or a book at hand; stones; palm of martyrdom.
Saturday, 30 September 2017
Who’s funding Ireland’s abortion lobby?
Who’s funding Ireland’s abortion lobby?
Ireland's Prime Minister Leo Varadkar (Getty Images)
Numerous international groups are trying to influence Ireland into legalising abortion
Abortion is only permitted in Ireland when the life of the mother is at real and substantial risk. This amendment was inserted into the constitution following a referendum in 1983 which passed by a two-to-one margin.
Ever since then secular liberal opinion has been bent upon overturning that referendum. When liberals lose a referendum, they do not take no for an answer and Irish liberals have found plenty of allies abroad in their quest for change.
Among those allies is the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, various United Nations committees, including the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee against Torture (yes, torture), in addition to the billionaire George Soros.
Through his Open Society Foundations, the Hungarian-born Soros has already provided three pro-abortion groups in Ireland, including Amnesty International’s Irish branch, with a combined total of around $400,000 (£295,000). The other two groups are the Irish Family Planning Association and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
A leaked document from the Open Society Foundations revealed the reasons behind the funding. It said it was so that the three groups could “work collectively on a campaign to repeal Ireland’s constitutional amendment granting equal rights to an implanted embryo as the pregnant woman”.
It continued: “With one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, a win there could impact other strongly Catholic countries in Europe, such as Poland, and provide much needed proof that change is possible, even in highly conservative places.”
That pro-abortion groups in Ireland are receiving foreign funding has received very little media coverage and almost no political reaction. This is despite journalists and politicians showing a permanent interest in alleged foreign funding of Irish pro-life organisations. The lack of curiosity in foreign funding of pro-choice outfits says a lot about the double standards of the Irish media and many politicians.
In any event, the reason the Open Society Foundations gives for providing the funding – namely that turning a once strongly pro-life country into a pro-abortion country would serve as an example to other countries – is also the reason why Justin Trudeau and the UN see fit to comment on our pro-life law.
When Trudeau met the new Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, in Canada recently, he brought up the Eighth Amendment and indicated that Ireland should repeal it in the name of “human rights”. There is no indication that he met with any resistance from Varadkar or that the Taoiseach criticised Canada’s extremely permissive law, which allows abortion for any reason right up to birth and gives scant conscience protections to doctors and nurses.
Varadkar describes himself as “pro-life” but favours repeal of the Eighth Amendment where a woman’s health is considered to be at risk. This ground will be very familiar to British readers who know it has led to abortion on demand in their country and almost 200,000 terminations per annum.
The UN has regularly been putting its oar in, encouraged by Irish pro-abortion groups. Ireland, like Britain, is a signatory to numerous UN treaties, and again like Britain, must periodically appear before this or that UN committee to report on how well it is implementing various treaties.
Again and again we are told that we must permit abortion. These UN committees are very ideologically biased. They have long since been co-opted by the pro-abortion Left and they are more than happy to dance to whatever tune Irish abortion groups choose to play. The committees never consider the rights of the unborn child. They pretend that whatever UN treaty or convention they are charged with overseeing permits abortion. This is despite abortion getting no mention in any UN treaty or convention. These same committees then give the false impression that their opinions carry a legal weight they simply do not have.
Depressingly, Irish governments tend to tip the hat to these committees and treat them with a wholly undeserved deference. This suits the present government, of course, because it wants to see our pro-life law overturned. It is therefore convenient for it to pretend to the Irish people that “we are letting ourselves down” in the eyes of the international community, led by the UN, and that the UN is somehow the unbiased and objective arbiter of morality. In fact, the UN acts as a sort of Magisterium to those of a secular liberal persuasion. It cannot be questioned. The UN has spoken, the matter is closed.
Why are these international figures really so determined to see us change our abortion law? The charitable explanation is that they genuinely believe in the right to abortion and that the child in the womb has few if any rights. Many do obviously believe this.
But the less charitable explanation is that they know that Ireland’s law, and Ireland’s still reasonably strong pro-life culture, is a standing rebuke to the abortion laws and the pro-choice culture that exists in practically every other Western country, including Britain.
In the UK, one pregnancy in every five ends in abortion. In Sweden, it is one in four. The Irish rate is about one in 18 pregnancies, even allowing for the roughly 3,500 Irish women who travel to Britain each year to have an abortion. In other words, Ireland shows that when a country has a highly restrictive abortion law, far fewer abortions take place even when a near neighbour permits abortion and women can easily travel there.
But surely, some say, our abortion law means that more women die in pregnancy? This is not the case. The Irish maternal death rate is somewhat lower than the British one.
Against this, you may have read about the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar who died in an Irish hospital in 2012 after being refused an abortion. But it transpired that she died of sepsis and the hospital had not spotted the deadly infection until it was too late. If it had known she had sepsis, it could have ended the pregnancy, which was miscarrying in any case. In British hospitals pregnant women also die from sepsis on rare occasions. Britain’s very permissive abortion law does not save them.
Given that the Irish law is such a challenge to the abortion regime in most Western countries, you can see why big international players want Ireland to change its law. The Irish law has saved the lives of countless unborn babies while also protecting the lives of pregnant women. That is a win-win. Ireland should be proud of its law. Other countries should be ashamed.
Will we be able to resist internal and external pressure to change our pro-life culture? We are likely to know by next summer because the referendum will have taken place by then.
David Quinn is a columnist with The Sunday Times and The Irish Catholic. He is the founder and director of The Iona Institute (ionainstitute.ie)
This article first appeared in the September 29 2017 issue of the Catholic Herald. To read the magazine in full, from anywhere in the world, go here
This is Why Bob Dylan’s Genius is Biblical
This is Why Bob Dylan’s Genius is Biblical
BOB DYLAN ... 1966
Blogs | Sep. 28, 2017
“I can hear a sweet voice gently calling
Must be the Mother of our Lord.”
—Bob Dylan, Duquesne Whistle (2012)
I first discovered Bob Dylan in 1976 while rummaging through a satchel of cassette tapes owned by my cousin, Peter Casella, who had inadvertently left it at my parents’ home. The album was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. I was 15 years old at the time, with my music listening habits dominated by the great pop acts of the late 1960s and mid-1970s: Wings, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, the Byrds, Elvis Presley. I was not prepared for Dylan.Must be the Mother of our Lord.”
—Bob Dylan, Duquesne Whistle (2012)
Because somebody had already listened through Side One, I plopped the cassette into the machine and began with side two, which starts with Mr. Tambourine Man. I had heard the Byrds’ Beatle-beat, Wrecking Crew, highly abridged version of the tune. So, I expected to hear from Dylan something similar. But it wasn’t even close. His performance just knocked my socks off. It had a sound I had never heard before, but yet it seemed as familiar as Happy Birthday or God Bless America. Or as Izzy Young would put it, by “writing about contemporary ideas in traditional forms” he sounded “current and old at the same time.” Central to Dylan’s “sound” were the words and his cadence while singing them. I could not believe that anyone could do something like that in popular music. I know that some of the old Tin Pan Alley lyricists were accomplished wordsmiths, but could any of them really have pulled off anything like this:
Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming
After returning the satchel to my cousin, I forgot about Dylan until late August 1978 when I was driving through Utah on my way to Pocatello, Idaho. I happened to be listening to a radio station that every weekday selected an entire album to be played during the lunch hour. On that day it was Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. As I listened, I recalled my initial hearing of the album two years earlier, and wondered why I had not explored Dylan’s larger body of work. That was quickly remedied.Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming
About a year later, Dylan released the album, Slow Train Coming (1979). It was evident from the songs’ lyrics that Dylan had undergone a profound religious conversion to evangelical Christianity. This caused quite a stir in popular culture and the entertainment press. Many were scandalized, largely because of what Dylan had represented to the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He had pretty much written the songs that would become the unofficial anthems for social change in America, even though Dylan himself bristles at the “spokesman of a generation” moniker. (These songs include Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Only a Pawn in the Game, Masters of War and Chimes of Freedom.) To embrace Evangelical Christianity, which by 1979 was beginning to be associated with the religious right, was a bridge too far for many of Dylan’s most devoted fans.
This, of course, was not the only time he had ticked people off (or, at least, surprised them).
In the mid-1960s, after releasing two albums that included several folk songs that were appropriated by the civil rights and anti-war movements (clumsily labeled “protest songs”), Dylan moved on to pen more abstract, surreal and “stream of consciousness” compositions, among them Mr. Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, My Back Pages and It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).
He showed up at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and “went electric,” much to the chagrin of the folk music purists in the audience who booed him. A year after releasing the double-album masterpiece, Blonde and Blonde (1966), for which Dylan used some of the finest studio musicians to help create what he would call that “thin, wild mercury sound,” he released John Wesley Harding (1967), an album that seems pared-down and basic in comparison to its predecessor. It includes many biblical and religious allusions that Dylan biographers speculate were the result of regular Bible reading he had taken up at the time.
Although often considered a man of the political left, Dylan wrote in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, that in the 1960s his favorite politician was Barry Goldwater. In 1969, he gravitated to country-western music and released Nashville Skyline. And in the past of couple of years he has released albums consisting exclusively of standards from what some call The Great American Songbook.
Behind these (and other) seemingly inscrutable transformations is a consistent theme, which I like to call, “Bob Dylan’s biblical genius.” I think Izzy Young caught a glimpse of it when he first heard Dylan’s first compositions and said that they sounded both “current and old at the same time.”
There is in Dylan’s artistic journey a continual return to the sources: Scripture, the folk tradition, American standards, Great Books, etc. For Dylan, these are not merely museum pieces to be dusted off so that we can appreciate (and perhaps admire) our primitive ancestors. Rather, they are, as he said of St. Augustine, “alive as you or me.” They serve as both guidelines and raw material from which one can compose new lessons from perennial truths. This requires that one deny the modern fetishes of moral innovation and cultural debunking while at the same time rejecting the traditionalist reflex to be skeptical of all change and dissent. This is precisely what I believe Dylan is doing in his so-called “protest songs.”
In his early days, he clearly connected the progressive cause of civil rights to a return to those biblical ideals of justice and fairness that everyone, down deep, knows are true. So much so that they are “blowin’ in the wind,” “the first one now will later be last,” and for those who suppress the truth, “like Pharaoh's tribe they'll be drownded in the tide, and like Goliath, they'll be conquered.”
Dylan’s most recent album of original material, Tempest (2012), takes its name from Shakespeare’s play and includes a song about the sinking of the Titanic (“Tempest”) that serves as a metaphor for the hubris of the modern world and the divine judgment that is sure to follow:
The captain, barely breathing
Kneeling at the wheel
Above him and beneath him
Fifty thousand tons of steel
He looked over at his compass
And he gazed into its face
Needle pointing downward
He knew he lost the race
In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears
Dylan’s genius is biblical, not simply because his art is often informed by Scripture, but because the idea of returning to the sources as a necessary condition for insight and progress is itself a biblical idea: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matthew 5: 17). “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15)Kneeling at the wheel
Above him and beneath him
Fifty thousand tons of steel
He looked over at his compass
And he gazed into its face
Needle pointing downward
He knew he lost the race
In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears
On Nov. 3, Columbia Records is releasing, Trouble No More (2017), a boxed set of live recordings and studio outtakes from Dylan’s so-called ‘Christian era” (1979-1981), the period that included Slow Train Coming and two subsequent albums in which he sings explicitly of his newfound faith. This extraordinary collection will no doubt revive questions about Dylan’s personal journey, whether or not he still identifies as a Christian.
As a Catholic, I certainly hope he does. But as a fan, I am content with sitting back and listening to his biblical genius.
Francis J. Beckwith is a professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. His most recent book is Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2015), winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2016 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Constructive-Reflective Studies.
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