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I Gotta Right to My Illusions

by Christopher Chantrill
September 26, 2005 at 12:02 am

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A FELLOW at work recently told how his relative was planning to sue her former employer, a well-known national retailer. Suffering from a particular affliction, she frequently absented herself from work up to, and sometimes over, the limit established for leave without a doctor’s note. So her employer had fired her, but not for unexcused absence. Instead it had acted on a complaint received a while back from a customer, who had been offended by her rudeness in telling the customer that the store was closed. The injustice of it!

It is to defend such people that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Judge Roberts to defend the peoples’ rights—fighting for the people against the powerful even when the people abuse their rights damnably. They couldn’t vote for Judge Roberts’s nomination to be Chief Justice if it seemed that he lacked a commitment to defend those rights.

So the great divide between the political parties does not turn ultimately upon the question of the right to an abortion or legislating from the bench. Those are just the topographic details of the chasm. One party believes in the sanctity of the rule of law as the arbitrator of disputes between equals. The other party believes in human rights as a defense against oppression, fighting for the people against the powerful.

Which is more important? The rule of law or the protection of the weak? It comes down to faith, not evidence. We live in a world of “events, dear boy, events,” but the events are mute, and tell us nothing until we weave them together with a narrative of theory and, when theory cannot serve, call for help from God, natural law, or history.

We cannot live a single instant without breathing meaning into the world, that is, breathing meaning for “myself” in the world. The head of the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, declares that Hurricane Rita is very likely evidence of global warming. Pastor Jerry Falwell declares that 9/11 is God’s punishment to New York for its dissipation. Composer Aaron Copland declares that “So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.”

Of course they do. For the environmental administrator the meaning of life is to fight environmental degradation, for the TV pastor it is to fight Satan, and for the composer it is to find meaning in music. Otherwise, what’s the point?

But suppose it is all an illusion? Suppose that the worship of the rule of law prevents society from responding in a healthy way to change? Suppose that raising human rights into a sacrament creates an underclass of shifty chiselers? Suppose that global warming is saving the planet from a new ice age? Suppose that the sinners of New York are saving us from the boredom of dull conformity? Suppose that music were a harmful aural narcotic? (No, no. Not that!)

Don’t talk about facts. It is narrative and faith that breathe meaning into human life.

We learned about the importance of illusion centuries ago in the adventures of Don Quixote, that good-natured consumer of medieval romances who believed and lived a preposterous illusion of knight-errantry. He drove his family and friends to despair as he and his servant stumbled across Spain leaving mayhem and disaster in their wake.

At last, after three grand adventures in illusion that gave entertainment to millions and livelihood to his creator, he succumbed to sickness and sanity. Suddenly emerging from years of hallucination, he charged his niece in his Will never to read a line of a book on knight-errantry, and promptly died. For after all, when illusion is dead, what’s the point?

For you avant-gardistes here’s an idea for a work of art that will surely challenge society and test the limits. A twenty-first century professor of political science builds a career researching the political tracts of the nineteenth century. Driven to madness by his obsession with extravagant nineteenth century political manifestos he determines to become a political activist and right the wrongs of the world: smite the robber barons and save the poor from starving.

But the robber barons were replaced by faceless corporate CEOs 50 years ago, his colleagues over at the Economics department insist, and today the poor are fatter than the rich. And all those manifestos were a narrative of power, his postmodernist friends in the English department waspishly sneer, an apology for the rule of the new class of educated experts.

Never mind. He would still have a grand old time tilting at windmills and mistaking sheep for vast armies.

After all, he has a right to his illusions. They might turn out to be true.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems... No more rules, no more models... Genius conjures up rather than learns... ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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