The Blackberry Walk

For a stranger to step foot into the priest's sacred perimeter in ancient Athens was a crime punishable by death. The stranger, or non-citizen, was not part of the city's hearth worship (which can be imagined as an extended family), so his entry to any holy or sacred spot would've been a grave indiscretion. But this factoid got me thinking, in a line of reasoning similar to Plato's Euthyphro dilemma: are laws sacred because they come from the gods, or do laws that exist make something sacred. To forbid and to permit, the sacred and the profane, or, as the Arabs call it, Halal and Haram: these are concepts common to every culture as far back as we can see. And the general trend of history is for these rules to liberalise over time, particularly during times of plenitude (and perhaps complacency) like the present day. Modern liberalism can be seen as a kind of assault on the profane. Through deconstructing superstitions through science, and bringing into the centre and permitting acts which were once seen as taboo, the purple-grassed corruption of the profane has systematically been purified into acceptable territory. But there is a catch. The profane and the sacred and intimately mingled, and as the West has gone on a crusade against the profane, the sacred has been sacrificed in the process. Somehow, without laws as to what is acceptable and what isn't - without having a concept of the profane - we can't experience the sacred. Liberalism is predicated on a certain conception of freedom, which is the freedom to do whatever one pleases, whether it be considered profane or not. But the freedom of old, the freedom preached by St. Augustine when he points out how the man who is a slave to his passions is not free, can only be obtained through boundaries, through the profane. In a sense, liberalism's conquering of the profane has left it blind to the sacred, denying us the freedom the sacred affords. Chesterton sees the phenomenon as being similar to the fairy tale, where there's always a catch to one's fortune. For example, Cinderella can go to the ball, but she must be home before midnight. The gifts of the sacred come with the catch that the rules regarding profanity be respected. He puts it best in a scathing comment on Oscar Wilde, writing: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." New movements attempting to bind society from atomisation exalt new profanities as culturally central, such as racism or sexism, in order to build a new virtual hearth/totem around which society can crystallise, but just as with the reformation, such new movements will cause friction. The Catholic church at the time of the reformation was revolted against because of their corruption and lack of law; the Calvinists, for instance, saw themselves as a revival of the law, and at once a startling new interpretation of the law of Christ. Out of corruptions of the law, and lax following of the law - in short, Liberal decline - a new law takes root in the masses lest otherwise access to the sacral be unobtainable. Such an abstract model risks becoming too relativistic, so I'll make a short point about the folly of relativism of this kind, and why that isn't the argument I'm making. Relativism doesn't work due to its own aloofness, from its pretension that it's taking a 'view from God'. Every perspective one can take takes a certain claim or thing as its highest value or its greatest force. For religious belief, our 'rationalistic' up-bringing has conditioned us to see through any claims regarding beings and personages wielding power upon forces and nature, so we automatically see any such claim as conditional and dependent when they historically wouldn't have been. Concepts, however, are the modernist's gods. Whilst claims of personages can be blown away, we are easy prey to ideas of abstract forces and concepts: we don't believe in laws from Moses, or laws from Solon, both of whom got their legal codes from divine personages; but we don't think too hard about human rights, or laws derived from processes. Similarly, divine providence has fallen out of favour for a kind of Hegelianism/Vitalism, where events are pushed onwards by innate environmental, social, or cosmic forces, rather than God's intent. The folly of the relativist therefore is to believe himself above and aloof from each system of laws and belief which came before him, tricking him through pride into thinking that his set of abstract belief sits beyond, a priori to all other beliefs, when in reality he believes in just the same patterns which a different lick of paint. As to why my argument is not relativist, I'll simply point out that truth is beyond man. The relativist like to think that truth is an earthly affair, with each group or tribe's belief has his own perception of truth (expect of course, his abstract pattern which he sees them all following is the greater truth). But truth is in fact a heavenly thing, not an earthly one; truth doesn't care what each man on earth thinks it to be, truth will be truth whether we believe it or not, for that is what is out there. That the Chinese worship ancestors in a similar fashion to the classical Athenian is no coincidence; it's human nature. That idol worship is independently common to all people's around the world is also no coincidence, but the nature of man and the nature of the beings they worship, and what they want. The fact that man falls into the same grooves and patterns is self-evident if you look at the past, but it doesn't mean that each iteration of that pattern is the right one. The picture I paint of legalistic societies with strict laws on profanity and, as a result, the sacred, declining into liberality birthing new legalistic societies from their decay is not one of aloofness and pattern worship, for I have a horse in the race which I believe to be the truth. I fully confess to having a reactionary bent. The pattern I see in society is one of constantly declining character and declining morality in contradistinction to many more Whiggish folk who see constant a improvement in people's well-being and greater acceptance of those who don't want to fit in and those who break traditions. And whilst it's hard to prevent the old ways from being abused, the past will always feel vaguely stale and decaying to the vast majority. In times of decay, a new movement of vitality and energy with a fresh sensation must be born, one with deeply held taboos to reawaken society's instinct for the sacred once again. To birth something new is the only way to defend the old, as paradoxical as that may sound. The past is gone, the past is dead, and the past ought to be buried. Haunting ghosts are not healthy for any society. The records, the works, and the example set by the past all still exist however, and these ought to inspire us rather than have us be inspired by the Long March to utopia. Our goals ought to be looking to real glories of the past rather than false flickers in the future. But such a specific ideal is too difficult, for the make-believe of utopia with no solid vision can be achieved on the leader's discretion. As Chesterton put it, "Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals." The past is not lost yet, and it is worth fighting for.