Angina Monologue 11

His Majesty was wearing a sour face when he came out to breakfast this morning.

Oh, I know: He always wears a sour face. It’s like how Great Danes wear a perpetually suspicious look, bulldogs look perpetually itching for a fight, and St. Bernards look perpetually hung over.  Of course, I mean that His Majesty was looking sour even for His Majesty.

I could tell it was particularly bad when he consumed most of his porridge and blueberry pancakes in a profound and sour silence. Breakfast with His Majesty normally means listening to a steady flow of snarky witticisms, which because of its one-sidedness is a lot like how one might imagine a stream-of-conscienceless novel, if there was such a thing.

I should have guessed last night that something was eating him. He seemed to be in a brooding mood as I fluffed his pillow and turned down his sheets, and I could see the reading light shining through the crack under his door well past the usual hour.

When the storm burst, it was so abrupt it made the cats scatter and the dog whine:

Just who in the hell do these Westboro Baptism people think they are?

(I remind the reader that I feel it my duty to reproduce His Majesty’s monologues as faithfully as possible, even when they become a bit colorful.)

Apparently the funeral of one of the cultural icons of our age, an actor who played a role so convincingly that it has become deeply entrenched in the popular consciousness, had to be kept small and private because the Westboro Baptist Church had made plans to picket it.

To be sure, Nimoy likely left instructions to keep his funeral small and private, because of the madhouse of adoring fans it would otherwise become. Regardless. You will seldom find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the Westboro Baptist Church.

I was a bit surprised. Westboro Baptist Church is notorious for homophobia and isolationism. His Majesty is opposed to gay marriage (because he is opposed to all marriage) and he is also opposed to U.S. foreign interventions, on the grounds that he finds watching the rest of the world go to hell entertaining.

I’m opposed to gay marriage, too, but I reject the label of “homophobe.” The assumption that opposition to government recognition of gay marriage can only be based on a deep-seated primitive animus defies reality, regardless of its judicial imprimatur, given the kind of reasoned arguments against gay marriage that have been published. In truth, I see more intellectual ugliness on the other side.* I’m no isolationist, either; I am of the view that that ship sailed in late 1941, at the latest.

So I find Westboro Baptist Church appalling, both because their hatred of the gay movement is a ugly caricature of my principled opposition to gay marriage, because I disagree strongly with their isolationism, and because their means of expressing their views are deeply vile. I’m just startled by the idea that His Majesty would so violently object to them.

Don’t be an [onager], Lord Vader. Westboro Baptist isn’t actually about any political philosophy. They’re the purest example of political theater of which I am aware, which is all the reason I need to despise them.  But I do have other reasons. Unless you think my opposition to Westboro Baptist is just based on primitive animus?

I have made a career of channeling hatred, of harnessing it for the achievement of important goals. Sublimating it, if you will.

(I daresay I will not.)

There is no discernible goal to Westboro Baptist’s activities other than theater; pure generation of hatred for hatred’s sake. It’s not the Sith way. It’s like going to the expense of proving an oil field, drilling wells, and building a refinery only because you like pouring gasoline on an ant pile and igniting it.

They are of a kind with Internet trolls.

His Majesty paused, stared for a long time at the reprint of Field with Poppies hanging on the wall, and seemed to gather his thoughts. His sour expression softened slightly, back to normal-His-Majesty-sour, and the wicked twinkle came back into his eyes. I thought: Now comes the monologue.

Westboro Baptist Church is a wonderful test of the American commitment to the mythology of rights. Their message is utterly without redeeming social importance. It is political pornography. But it is political, and thus squarely within the scope of what Americans amusingly call freedom of speech.

(And one of the things that is so amusing about it is that “freedom of speech” apparently protects pornography, gangster rap, and avante garde [crap]**, but does not preclude prohibitions on paying for political advertisements criticizing an incumbent with sixty days of an election.)

Of course, freedom of speech was not always so laughably corrupt an idea. The mythology of rights, like all mythology that matters, is closely connected with the mythology of God.

His Majesty is not a believer, but he seems to find religion fascinating.

In the state of nature, you have the “right” to do precisely what you have the strength and wit to do. This is liberty, of a sort, but as Burke sagely noted: “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.” Rousseau, that putrid little toad, assumed against all evidence (including his own example) that men in a state of nature would be naturally virtuous. Max Boot has pointed out that, on the contrary, primitive tribal societies lived in a state of unending internecine warfare, in which perhaps 0.5% of their populations were killed by other tribes each year. No, one ought not to risk congratulations on those who exercise natural liberty.

Civil liberty is another thing, a mythical thing. Oh, I don’t mean in the tired popular sense of “not true”, but in the strict anthropological sense of “stories that are told and retold because they make sense of the world.” A myth of this kind may, in fact, be scientifically accurate (though only if you think scientifically accurate reality makes any sense.) Authentic myths are closely tied to the rise of religion. They represent the stage in human intellectual development at which the notion of the ideal takes hold. And while the terms for Plato’s opposite worlds are usually translated “ideal” and “real”, the whole concept of the ideal world is that it is, if anything, more “real” than the real world. No rational number has 2 as its square; this is transcendent truth, and while you may dismiss it as unimportant, you cannot rationally dismiss it as false or as a mere social construct.

Rights are such a thing. They may perhaps have some basis in evolutionary psychology, but they are ultimately tied to the rise of law, on which they are a governor; and law is itself a myth, representing the notion that there are absolute realities about right and wrong that transcend the human will and constrain the rule of might. Law and rights are God-given, to use the language of natural rights advocates (how’s that for muddled terminology!) but even from my Sithist perspective that description is not wrong. God is an abstraction created by the human mind to personify transcendent truth; is is from this transcendent truth that transcendent rights emanate.

I am myself quite agnostic regarding the nature of God, but I do believe there are transcendent truths. I must. The alternative is to accept only as real what is perceived by the senses, which leads logically to an unconstructive retreat to solipsism. Each of C.S. Lewis’ devils had the perfectly understandable goal of transforming all reality to an extension of his personal self; solipsism is an infantilized version of the same thing, in which one asserts that all reality is already merely an extension of one’s personal self. It trivializes the work of the devils.

Hence, the insistence even by some of those most naturally opposed to Westboro Baptist Church that their street theater deserves protection under the right to freedom of speech. The speech is utterly undeserving of protection on its own merits. I suppose one can make a pragmatic slippery slope argument for protecting it, but we already have crafted exceptions to freedom of speech (time, place, and manner; fraud; defamation; official secrets; and so on) and we could probably craft an exception that would cover Westboro Baptist. The real reason anyone respects their freedom of speech is because the mythology of rights tells us that freedom of speech is sacred.

And here we come to the rub for you, Lord Vader. Your rights are hanging by a thread. Kooky religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good attorney at your side. At present, the conflict between the religious and the perverse is being cast as a matter of balancing conflicting rights: freedom to practice religion versus equal protection. And this notwithstanding that religious rights are the first mentioned in the Constitution, while gay rights appear nowhere in that scrap of paper. But it will not rest there. It is already accepted as a truism on the Left that rights are granted by man, not God, which eliminates their transcendence; which ultimately makes their reality unsustainable.  As Doestoevski noted, if there is no God, then anything is possible.

On reflection, I think I see Westboro Baptist’s program, after all. They are deliberately making a laughing stock of the mythology of rights, in order to hasten their abolition.

I doubt that even I can protect you then.

I wasn’t actually looking for His Majesty’s protection. And I think he has misidentified the rub.

I have personally experienced the divine in my life. I have discovered that we are separated from transcendent reality by a veil that at times grows uncomfortably thin. You cannot go on ignoring that reality, because it is real. Gay marriage advocates are insisting that there is a rational number whose square is two if we want it badly enough, because there is no transcendent truth. As a civilization, we are playing games with the secret fire, and it cannot turn out well.

It all boils down to: Is there a God? Yes. Then what else matters?

* I don’t actually recommend clicking through that link. It’s included purely to document my point.

** I really wouldn’t recommend clicking through that link, except that it so effectively makes the point. You have been warned.