Yet all sad songs have this “remembering Zion” about them, this sense of how things might have been but were not. The Man of Sorrows’ love was and still is rejected by many. He did not abolish sadness. He redeemed us through it. It is not the greatest evil. This awareness of what is at stake is what we learn from listening to the sad songs of our kind, songs from the streams of Babylon to the waltzes danced in Tennessee.
“Climate change” has deftly been substituted for the notorious “earth-warming” theory, the facts of which proved so difficult to sustain on the grounds of evidence about whether warming was or was not actually happening. Thus, whether the temperature goes up or down, it is “climate change”; so we can have an ecological crisis with the temperature going either direction. In grammar school in Iowa in my day, much attention was given to the Ice Age, which had once covered the state and, in fact, was one of the reasons for the richness of its black soil. We left grammar school more concerned about freezing to death than of roasting in some future Iowa desert.
17. The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. Paradoxically, Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory—a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.
Where did this “hate language” business come from anyhow? Its origin was in the now largely successful endeavor to overturn the moral structure of civil society. Generally speaking, this transformation was accomplished through the deft usage of “rights talk.” What was once called, on rational grounds, a disorder or vice became first tolerated, then finally a “right.” Once it became a “right,” then for anyone to call it a sin or evil became a slander, an attack on transformed human dignity and pride.