On Remaining Silent in the Face of Lies

Many Christians will see through... lies today but will choose not to speak up. Their silence will not save them and will instead corrode them, according to Czesław Miłosz.

    In his writing about communism's insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them.

    As part of the plan to tale over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling "the pill of Murty-Bing," named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his "don't worry, be happy" philosophy in a tablet. Those who toll the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles.

    Only the peace didn't last. "But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities," writes Czesław Miłosz, "they became schizophrenic."

~ Live Not By Lives, Rod Dreher, pgs. 15–16.

    I'm currently reading Live Not By Lies. I've been eager to get my hands on it since it came out. I'm not a fan of reading things electronically, so I had to wait until I came to the US to get a hardback copy. One of the things I wonder about is whether I should keep reading the things that I read — the things that get me riled up — or whether I should just stick my head in the sand like so many others around me and imbibe on a diet of Netflix and cat videos. Those who do the latter somehow seem happier, but they also seem to be absolutely clueless to what's going on around them. I think I have no choice but to choose the former course of action.

    Dreher continues:

    What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and your find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?

    You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn't a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.

    What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be "on" all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society. 

    Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, "professional ketman" is when you convince yourself that it's okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that's what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. "Metaphysical ketman" is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against "total degradation." It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysocal ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual's soul.

    Under the emerging tyrany of workeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practive one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly comforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: "They swindle the devil who think he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied."

 

 

Blessing of Abraham as Direct Answer to the Curses of Genesis 3

Might the blessing of Abraham in Genesis 12:1–3 be a direct answer to the curses of Genesis 3:14–19? The curses of Genesis 3 introduce conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, conflict between the man and the woman, with difficulty in childbearing, and conflict between man and the ground, which is cursed for man's sin. God promises land, seed, and blessing to Abraham. The nations will be blessed through the seed of the woman, seed of Abraham, who crushes the serpent's head. The birth of this seed means that the conflict between the man and his wife is not final, nor will the difficulty in childbearing be fatal. And God promises and to Abraham and his seed, land that hints of a return to Eden.

"For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me." —Jesus of Nazareth (John 5:46)

The Seed of the Woman and the Blessing of Abraham, James Hamilton

On Henry James

James managed to seduce all but the most attentive readers into identifying initially with a point of view which seems sensible and ... sympathetic. It is only with the unfolding of the action that we ... come to understand that the original point of view was stupid, unimaginative, shabby, and evil.

~Joseph Summers, The Muse's Method

On Grief and Losing a Mother

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will be forever cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power… that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that will constantly remember her more and more.

~(1907) Letter from Proust to Georges de Lauris, whose mother had just died. Translated from the French by Richard Howard.

Chapter One of the Great Story

"You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be."

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

~ The last page of The Last Battle, The Chronicles of Narnia.

I read these lines to a friend tonight with tears my eyes. In the last novel, Susan is missing—she's not in Narnia with the other children. Susan is named as "no longer a friend of Narnia." The novel explains that she had chosen lipstick and nylons instead. And so, the books end, and her brothers and sisters have died in a train accident and are now in Narnia—in Heaven—forever. The Susan part of the story breaks my heart. I told a friend tonight not to be a Susan. And I read her this last chapter as something for her to look forward to. With tears in my eyes.