Friday, August 25, 2006

Covenant Zone: exploring the sting of conscience

We survived our weekly gathering last night, and what a very illuminating meeting it was.

Interesting to compare notes about the recent controversy over liberal MP Wrzesnewskyj's pro-hezbollah remarks. It's Push Comes To Shove time for many on the left, in an interesting parallel to the stings of conscience that befell the European colonial powers in the 20th century. I think particularly of the manner in which Britain left India, since that nation's Independance Day is still fresh in our minds: an appeal to conscience, not economics, was the tipping point and the leverage found to budge the english.
Liberalism's citadel of steel turns out to be built on sand, as it now slowly sinks under the weight of recent events in the Middle East, increasingly stripped of its illusory justifications for moral relativism. Their shining city on a hill, turns out to be a mere sand castle, washed away by the arrival of the morning tide.

The left's ongoing attempts to prop up certain groups as victims worthy of ennoblement is a hard fantasy to maintain when videos of throats getting slit are being filmed or downloaded by members of those groups. Many on the left are finally being forced to confront the logical and moral consequences of the rhetoric they've been preaching for many years. How fitting that those who place such great stock in "gestures" and "appearances", now appear exposed by their gestures. What are feminists and homosexuals and and separatists and unions doing supporting hezbollah, and by tacit extention, Iran, for instance? How do the islamist groups the left endorse, interact with their cultural counterparts? The dishonesty of their stand is exposed for all to see, since in some instances, islamic culture doesn't even allow for a cultural counterpart to exist (any gay pride parades in Iran that I may have missed...?) and finally they themselves are starting to see it. We're starting to see who on the left is motivated by a sincere belief to do good, and who just wanted to look good in order to hide the defects they feared confronting in their mirror.

Dag had some striking comments on pacifism that I found very provocative; it got me to thinking, that some pacifists defer violence into a reluctantly undertaken last response to contact with the real world, while others, who profess to be the most pacifistic, end up using violence as their first response, as the necessary defence for a worldview that cannot withstand contact with the real world. I nominate the United States of America as an example of the former, and those who would march in protest against Israel, as examples of the latter.

Some people just cannot deal with the sting of their conscience, because such stimulus reveals to them that they actually have a consciousness, a piece of themselves existing outside the physical and material, and that it shines a light on the path that their physical and material selves should be following; conscience can be a hard taskmaster, in that it expects a constant series of judgements, not just one judgement one time. It is our conscience that reminds us of the possibility of changing circumstances: things do not remain frozen, "life goes on", and we must adapt to these changes if we are to continue to survive.
Ignoring one's conscience for but a moment can be a painful experience indeed, and the longer it is ignored the more the pain accumulates. What we're seeing with liberalism's current apocalypse, if I may borrow Truepeers' expression, is the price being paid for this lifetime of avoidance.
Above all else, the current war on civilization seems to reveal that some people are so incapable of living with change that they would prefer to be dead than proven wrong.

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