COVID-19, Newspeak, & St Olympia the Deaconess

I tested positive for COVID-19 eight days ago. I wrote about this journey to keep me from going out of my mind while alone for ten days. I wanted to provide something for future generations to read. We are experiencing a world historic event and we should all be taking a few notes. I also wanted to take a dark moment and turn it into a gift for the people I know. In Oklahoma, we call it “burning manure.” You make heat, light, and something fertile out of the excrement dropped out of a beast’s anus.

It is fitting I should place my final journal entry on the eighth day. For the eighth day is a day that transcends the normal measure of a week. Eight is a number of infinity. Eight is an ancient symbol of resurrection. Eight reminds us that we can rise from any grave. It is also a number of balance, of giving back. On the eighth day, we envision a future—what is on the horizon by measuring the steps that fall below us.

A communal history of illness is really our only reliable map. We think of all the plagues of history and consider how impossible and unsuccessful humanity was without the knowledge of the germ theory. It is hard to imagine, but if it was 1650, or even 1890, I and almost all of the males reading this would have already been dead for many years. And some of our children would already be dead. The average age of an adult male’s death was 26 in some parts of Europe and the U.S. during those plagued times. In 1850, the male life expectancy was only 40 years old. Even up until 1950, a U.S. male died on average around the age of 68.

At the age of 57, walking for days down the dark path with COVID-19, it is humbling to simply consider being alive; to wonder at how lucky I am to have been given so many years to try and make my life have meaning.

In all my writings on Roger Scruton, I consistently identified him as a philosopher of love. His detractors often denounced him as a bigot or a fascist, thus proving that they have never truly read him. It is true that he could be controversial and that he was sometimes purposely provocative. But this was not because he wanted to be gratuitously offensive, but simply because he believed it is in the very nature of public debate to defend “uncomfortable truths” from those who would deny them. Against those who, in the name of “progress,” wish to “liberate” us from our past, our traditions and cultural heritage, Scruton showed us why it is important to love and cherish such things. We love them because they reveal to us who we are and where we came from. In them, we discover the roots of our common home and the story of how we came to settle there. To denounce them as “oppressive,” “patriarchal” or “exclusionary,” is to deny absent generations a say in how we live now. It is to silence our dead and to disenfranchise future generations from the inherited wisdom which is rightfully theirs. Restoring the love of existing things—of “community, home and settlement”—is the central theme of Roger Scruton’s social, cultural and political outlook. As such, his is a philosophy of consolation for people tired of repudiation and rejection, of nihilism and naysaying.

Social reality is malleable. How it is depends upon how it is perceived; and how it is perceived depends upon how it is described. Hence language is an important instrument in modern politics, and many of the political conflicts in our time are conflicts over words.

Perhaps the most obvious instance of this is provided by Soviet-style communism, and the invention of the language that we know, thanks to Orwell’s 1984, as Newspeak. Many of the terms of this language were taken from Marx; but they were grafted on to a native Russian habit of distinguishing things by their labels. […]

From the beginning, therefore, labels were required that would stigmatize the enemy within and justify his expulsion: he was a revisionist, a deviationist, an infantile leftist, a utopian socialist, a social fascist and so on. The original division between Menshevik and Bolshevik epitomized this process: those peculiar fabricated words, which were themselves crystallized lies, since the Mensheviks (minority) in fact composed the majority, were thereafter graven in the language of politics and in the motives of the communist elite. The success of these labels in marginalizing and condemning the opponent fortified the communist conviction that you could change reality by changing language. You could create a proletarian culture, just by inventing the word “proletcult.” You could bring about the downfall of the free economy, simply by shouting “crisis of capitalism” every time the subject arose. You could combine the absolute power of the Communist Party with the free consent of the people, by announcing communist rule as “democratic centralism.”

How easy it proved, to murder millions of innocents, when nothing worse was occurring than “the liquidation of the kulaks.” How simple a matter, to confine people for years in miserable camps, engaged in slave-labor until they sicken or die, if the only thing that language permits us to observe is “re-education.” The Nazis followed the example, and invented a Newspeak of their own. They. Learned that the silencing of opponents is not tyranny when described as Gleichschaltung [Synchronization], and that mass murder is no such thing when carried out as a “final solution.”

It is a great pity that we in the United States do not have our own Roger Scruton. As his new collection of essays reminds us, he is an accomplished philosopher who writes trenchantly about many important political, social and religious issues, who cares passionately about art and culture and who is also a brilliant conservative polemicist. A Cambridge-educated barrister and a professor of esthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, Mr. Scruton is also editor of The Salisbury Review, a quarterly journal of conservative thought. In addition to numerous technical works of philosophy, his previous books include a volume on the philosophy of architecture and a treatise on sexual desire.

A breath of fresh air, you say. Unfortunately, while Mr. Scruton is only barely tolerated in English academia, the climate of political correctness prevailing on American campuses makes him an impossibility here. Consider the dossier that could be assembled against him: apologist for Western civilization, defender of high culture, advocate of traditional sexual morality, believer in the worthiness of religion, champion of capitalism, exploder of academic jargon, implacable critic of Marxism, relativism, feminism, mushy environmentalism and all species of political utopianism. In other words, Mr. Scruton is a veritable compendium of politically incorrect attitudes and beliefs.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Because of thy spiritual inheritance thou wast rightly named Panteleimon. By lovingly caring for the souls of all men and healing their bodies, thou wast shown to be worthy of the wealth of thy name. By acquiring the reward of virtue and recompense of godliness, O martyr, thou wast revealed as a crown-bearing and invincible warrior of Christ our God. Implore Him to save and enlighten our souls!

Unceasingly thou didst draw the grace of divine healing from the spiritual fountains of the Savior, abundantly pouring them out upon those who came to thee, O blessed Panteleimon. Illumine by thy divine grace those who in faith keep thy glorious, all-holy and radiant feast! Pray that grace be given to all who sing praises to thee!

Thy fiery love towards Him Who is our true desire has now been tested by many punishments, for fiercely wast thou assaulted by sea and fire. Therefore, having overthrown the Author of Evil, thou didst receive in abundance the life-giving activity of the Comforter. Gloriously thou didst show a dead man to be alive, O wise in God, and didst perform various healings, O most blessed saint.

Freely didst thou dispense grace to men, O glorious martyr Panteleimon, driving away evil spirits and granting sight to the blind by thine intercession to Christ.

Implore the Physician, O holy one, since truly thou art pleasing to Him, to grant lasting peace to the world and great mercy to those who love thee!

despondency is for souls a grievous torture chamber, unspeakably painful, more fierce and bitter than every ferocity and torment. It imitates the poisonous worm that attacks not only the body but also the soul, and not only the bones but also the mind. It is a continual executioner that not only tears in pieces one’s torso but also mutilates the strength of one’s soul. It is a continuous night, darkness with no light, a tempest, a gale, an unseen fever burning more powerfully than any flame, a war having no relief, a disease which casts a shadow over nearly everything visible. For even the sun and the air seem to be oppressive to those who are suffering from these things, and midday seems to be as darkest night.