The historian who ‘aspires to be a judge ... should not try a case by a code unknown to the defendant’. (P 601)
Censuring predecessors puts us at the like mercy of posterity. ‘The future has no right to rehear past judgments in the light of altered morality. To deny our ancestors autonomy in the judgments they reached is to cede our own moral authority to our successors.’ (P 602)
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Revised Ed, Cambridge, 2015)
This article is about a nihilistic and intellectual bind that the Woke corporate and Woke individual have succumbed to. It is illustrated by looking at the Church of England in the UK. First, how the Woke Church of England has succumbed to Neo Marxist critical race theory is reviewing monuments, artefacts; and secondly, the annihilation of the past on its own terms and principles which is substituted by a fixed present- the past as the present; and thirdly how its Archbishop while excelling at performative woke privilege mea culpa has abdicated his personal human agency by in gratitude. All three reveal a woeful intellectual poverty.
Overarching Wokedom’s present onslaught on the past is a double-headed bind of an immutable Sphinx: the past is the present and the present makes the past. Wokeness imposes the present zeitgeist as a moral and righteously framed judgment.
Folding the past into the present is the present making the past. It then leads to an arbitrary application, typically, of human rights ideas and norms to periods when these did not exist. The late William Pfaff‘s view is that this is to make “every figure [and institutions] from the past accountable for not thinking and acting as right-minded people do today” (W Pfaff 1998)
David Lowenthal argues that the “past and present are increasingly spoken of alike in the present tense…the false ‘nowness’ presages the extinction of the past tense.” (Lowenthal 2012). That extinction foretells an extinction of time, change and choice.
The corporate
Anglican Chruch’s have collected over time monuments and artefacts but now its view on the past has morally changed. The Church is to:
“…review of thousands of historical monuments which reference the British Empire or the slave trade, as the Church continues with its Black Lives Matter-inspired agenda.”
(Breitbart 9/5/2021)
.
What is most curious is the Church following the philosophical paradigm of a Marxist organisation’s materialistic doctrine and not its own. BLM’s desire to overthrow and obliterate the present political system, it is anti the nuclear family, pro-abortion and LGBTQ has held a central place. That not altogether reconcilable with Christian doctrine. For the Church of England to follow these ideas has to lead the Queen’s former chaplain, Bishop Gavin Ashenden, to hold that this is apostasy.
The major point to note about the Church’s review is the critical intellectual one about time and the past. The church by this review is in fact the folding the past into the present and judging the past by present moral Zeitgeist in an eternal and adamantine ever fixed now. Simply an ever looping ‘Ground Hog Day”. It is akin to Limbo or John Bunyan’s “slough of despond” without escape and having its sequel in the Marxist fixed deterministic underworld. An underworld characterised by an uncompromising unyielding place of irredeemable, unforgiving, guilt shame. A present-day analogue of Original Sin.
The “nowness” has to be continually satiated. Consciences and souls of the Woke Clerisy self-flagellate and are, to use Milton’s Paradise Lost, raked over the coals of oppression and privilege for eternity. And the errant non-woke- present-day heretics- are either excluded or sneered at as deplorables or cancelled and cast out.
There are no milestones, there is no point of departure, no endpoint and there is no escape or liberation or hope. How could there be when the past has been folded into the present? It is an ever regressing nihilistic, dystopic anti-utopian present.
All of which is theologically at odds with repentance, forgiveness, redemption and choice in trying to do better, t staunch evil and malevolance and aspiring to improve on yesterday. Christian theology has a linear sense of time: past time and present. The church in short has been colonised and succumbed to a philosophy of material determinism, utilising cultural Marxism’s trite paradigms is alarming and astonishing. The simple-minded credulity of certain Churchmen and women demonstrates serious poverty of mind.
The author “of the guidance and director of the Church of England’s churches and cathedrals, Becky Clark” says:
…racism and the legacy of slavery are still part of many people’s lives today. Responding to those in the right way is a Christian duty.”
In what way is it a part of people’s lives is not stated nor why nor what the consequences are nor what is the data is for the proposition? She adds:
“Our church buildings and cathedrals are the most visible part of the C of E, a Christian presence in every community. The responsibility to ensure they include, welcome and provide safe spaces for all is a vitally important part of addressing the way historic racism and slavery still impacts people today.”
It can equally be said- as a part of freedom of conscience- that challenging and confronting erroneous attitudes, evil and malevolence, and seeking the truth about the world takes courage and commitment to see it through. The therapeutic haven of the “safe space” is to avoid, sanitise, deceive and abdicate courage and responsibility. That is to have a half-life and to be inchoate.
Local parishes will make decisions about contextualisation, removal or disposal of artefacts and monuments. The objective is “to empower not shut down conversations …” but “Doing nothing is not an option. There has to be engagement with this…” Is guidance then guidance or an interdict, an obligatory rule? “Seek and you shall find” takes on the meaning of ‘you must find.’ Pre-determination had to follow by virtue of the Marxian paradigmatic underpinnings. Faux conversations are intellectually dishonest Pablum. Parishes are “to figure out how this impacts our communities today.” How? Who does this an anthropologist, historian or a psychologist or visceral opinion?
The Personal: The Ungrateful Archbishop’s malaise.
What is true for the Church, as it is for the parishioners, so it is for its head where The Archbishop of Canterbury is in the same self-consigned hell.
The Breitbart article (9 May 2021) has a panel referencing an article about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s privileges and his overwrought mea culpa and self-flagellation (16 February 2020.) He said:
“I have white advantage. Educational advantage. Straight advantage. Male advantage… I’m not ashamed of those advantages; I’m ashamed of not knowing I had them,” Welby said.”
…
“I am almost beyond words. Personally, I am sorry and ashamed. I’m ashamed of our history and I’m ashamed of our failure,” Welby said of his Church’s “conscious and unconscious racism”.
“It’s shaming as well as shocking. It is shocking, but it’s profoundly shaming”, he continued, somewhat redundantly, in a speech which even he described as “incoherent.”
It is disturbing to note the Cri de Coeur of the head of a Church Communion. The profession of personal distressing angst of shame and guilt has the unpleasant flavour of an egocentric, self-hating performative neurosis that is bizarrely rationalised as “an excess of white people in England’s established church.”
His Grace’s hypersensitive ideological radar fails to detect the implicit racism in his own words about the Church having an “excess of white people.” At which point the Archbishop has haplessly abandoned his vocation's calling by having a concern for the colour of his flock’s skin and not the state of their souls. Is a pogrom to be launched from Lambeth palace? By saying there is an excess has as its corollary we must get rid of: racial discrimination to genocide is rather a disturbing thing for a Prelate to espouse.
This muddle headedness is not leadership: nor does it have any semblance of compassion or forgiveness related to his job, which the highly educated Roman, Saint Augustine, well understood, which is foremost to see to the Cure of Souls. His Grace clamours for the Zeitgeist instead.
He is in a position of status and influence. Being grateful and showing gratitude for all his advantages would enhance and empower his human agency giving it great efficacy, to lift people up, to make people whole, to promote forgiveness and redemption, to surmount human suffering and malevolence so as to strive onward and upward each day despite all our frailties and to avoid and transcend the horrors of the past.
Repentance and faith in human Redemption are what he and the Church should be advocating not plummeting into the chaos, fog and darkness of nihilism.
A more universal approach to humanity is sought rather than lazily scapegoating on colour within a Marxian paradigm. As one Tweet cited by Beitbart states:
“Archbishop of Canterbury apologising for ‘white advantage’. Tell that to white lads from former pit villages and the like, statistically way more likely to underperform against boys in other groups. Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?”
The Archbishop has shown with absolute clarity what it is to choose to wallow in the myopic Limbo of Marxist nihilism.
Links to source articles:
https://www.breitbart.com/euro...
https://www.breitbart.com/euro...
Graham Hill
Nelson
21 May 2021