The Break for Evil
Sometime in the very recent past, something clicked to signal that the world had ceased to be run by the virtue of good authority, and its leaders had shifted tracks to the pursuit of a darker star
I had been struggling to find a phrase to capture a phenomenon that, I think, almost everybody, or at least every sentient human being, has begun to scent on the breeze. Put as succinctly as possible, that phenomenon is the sudden, almost abrupt manner in which the leaders and authorities of the Western world, from the crack of the Covid starting pistol in March, started and continued to act like the leaders and authorities of third world tinpot dictatorships.
I call it ‘The Break for Evil’. By ‘evil’ I mean that, as though in a single instant — perhaps precisely traceable in retrospect — the authorities of the Western world all at once began to shift from the right foot of good authority to the sinister hooves of wickedness, violence and coercion. I mean ‘break’ in the sense of ‘breaking for the border’: as though they had seen their opportunity and made a run for it. The first online dictionary I checked with offered this definition: ‘(break for something) to go somewhere quickly, especially in order to escape: We’re assuming they’ll break for the border.’
What I mean is that these people whom we trusted with the stewardship of our countries and our lives, suddenly, like a murder of crows in response to an inaudible signal, took off from the plain where they had been silently congregated and flew all at once in the same direction, with apparent determination and certainty as to where they were headed. As one man, they decided to make a dash for it, to abandon the restraint of good authority, statesmanship, public responsibility, goodness, virtue, and follow a different, entirely darker star. It is as though they sought belatedly to emulate the example one of those increasingly malevolent corporate entities which increasingly seem to — literally — dictate everything about our lives and societies; I have in mind the egregious Google, which began its corporate life and operated for 15 years under the motto ‘Don’t be evil’ but on October 2nd 2015 formally announced that it was changing this axiom to ‘Do the right thing’, when in reality it had merely flipped the original and decided to proceed under the slogan, ‘Let’s be evil!’
Perhaps these politicians, more or less all at once, had observed Google’s rampaging across the cultures of the world and decided that being good, even pretending to be good, was a mug’s game. Additionally, or, as the lawyers say, ‘in the alternative’, perhaps some lightbulb came on in what was left of their souls and they decided that their Maker was not watching them after all, that, contrary to what they had been taught, the eyes of the Lord were not, in fact, everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good.
For us, the merely led and ruled, this seemed to have happened unbeknownst to us. Then, one morning last spring, perhaps a penny dropped for us also. It was as if our society, travelling by train, had just recently cleared the 'Outer Home signal' of the spiritual-religious zone, and crossed a frontier that nobody had at the time noticed except maybe as a 'click' on the line. (For those who have never worked upon the railways, the Outer Home signal is the last a train passes having departed a station, heading on to open track, into open country.) That 'click' was a moment of seismic rupture: the moment when the dreams of secular-atheists came true and began the living nightmare of sane people. It's a bit like — to mix in another metaphor — the great oak tree Václav Havel used to talk about: it stood there for hundreds of years and didn't appear to change, but then, one day, a passer-by touched it with her little finger and it toppled, having rotted from the inside out. Maybe the residual influence of those thousands of years of religious understanding descending to us from Pagan times, through the glorious Christian era, had finally petered out, and man — or the few men of C.S. Lewis’s dark prognostications — suddenly understood that the world was his/theirs for the taking.
I sensed his change even before the declaration of the ‘pandemic’ by the WHO on March 11th 2020 — the same day, interestingly, as the first alleged Irish death from Covid-19. As early as the late days of February, there was this marked change of tone, of mood, in the relationships between Power and People. For example, on March 6th, in the first directional indicator in official pronouncements, the Garda Commissioner Drew Harass — otherwise, Drew Harris — announced that, in the coming pandemic, his force would soon acquire powers to arrest people suspected of carrying the virus but declining to be ‘quarantined’.
When I heard this, I looked up momentarily, but then dismissed my darker fears. It was true that we had had, in recent times, SARS, Bird Flu and Swine Flu, and no one in the course of any of those previous ‘pandemics’ had made such a bizarre proposal, even after quite a few people had died. In the average Irish flu season, between 600 and 1,000 people are likely to die, but no one proposes breaking into people’s homes to drag people from their beds and transport them to a concentration camp with some Orwellian name.
Remember again: this was five days before the first death claimed as the consequence of the virus SARS-CoV-2. I remember casually remarking on Commissioner Harass’s undoubted exultation, and storing it away under a question mark. In due course I was to list it as the first of many signals that caused me by mid-March to rethink my early sense that there might well this time be a real and imminent health crisis. I mean to say: What public leader of good authority responds to an imminent health crisis by threatening to arrest ailing people and imprison them? By St. Patrick’s Day, the Commissioner’s all-too- buoyant pronouncement seemed to bespeak something unusual afoot at an entirely different level.
This first sign was soon reinforced by others: the hectoring tones of politicians and ‘health’ tsars, the mismatch between the facts of the problem and the scale of the ‘solution’; the sudden collapse into arbitrariness of street-level police behaviour, the way the law was first supplanted by roadside banter and, where that went down badly, by unadorned Nazi tactics; the way hitherto dopey politicians would menacingly muse out loud about whether to intensify or relax the restrictions.
The same tone was soon to be seen right across the former Free World: Johnson, Macron, Conte, Sanchez, Trudeau, Cuomo, Newsom, Andrews, and — for all those feminists who for decades told us the world would be a more human place if ruled by women — the horrendous Scottish PM, Nicola Sturgeon, and the appalling Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, whose talent for tyranny puts the boys in the shade. Ardern’s latest brainchild is the recent Food Bill, the first step in delivering to corporations their wet dream of banning private food production, turning what used to be a fundamental human right — to grow-your-own and share with others — into a government-authorised concession that can be summarily revoked.
The dark shadow of the overhead rooks accumulated and deepened. Our jaws dropped again and again as what initially seemed like a horror pageant became more and more real. In the escalating real-life dystopia of the Time of Covid, we have seen asthmatics incarcerated for not wearing face masks, parents arrested in public parks for playing with their children, old ladies getting citations for taking a drive. We have seen a pregnant Australian woman out for exercise told she was forbidden to rest on a park bench, and a priest in Ireland menaced with arrest and imprisonment for saying Mass, a first in 200 years. Blackest, most diabolical of all was that they did these things in the name of ‘saving lives’ as though a single thing they had publicly done in their lives might have been mistaken for a gratuitous act of kindness or generosity.
In the Time of Covid, New Zealand has been vying with the State of Victoria in nearby Australia for the title ‘Most Tyrannical Police State on Earth’, though both jurisdictions now risk being overshadowed by several policing regions of the UK, most shockingly — as exposed by the excellent YouTube channel The UK Column — in Cornwall, where police recently arrested a 19 year old woman for making a speech in the street — though admittedly it included the following incendiary passage: ‘I believe that we must live, we must live. In other words, to be human is to be creative. Without that, what are we?’ For uttering this out loud, this young woman was arrested, incarcerated in a cage the size of an upright coffin in the back of a police van, and held for 24 hours.
That same week, the heroic lockdown dissident Andy Heasman, was arrested in a SuperValu shop in Ballymun, in north Dublin, when he tried to buy some toothpaste. Andy suffers from a conditions which makes wearing a face mask impossible, and so claims an exemption under Statutory Instrument 296 of 2020 (Section 5, ‘Reasonable excuse’), which neither proposes not imposes any requirement or mechanism for providing medical proof of such exemption. And yet, summoned by a busybody floor manager, the cops showed up, dragged Andy out, took him to Ballymun Garda Station, strip-searched him, locked him in a filthy cell and, after a number of hours, took him to two different court houses before finally charging him with a Public Order offence plucked out of their vacuous arses.
First, he was taken to the Criminal Courts of Justice (CCJ), where he found himself in an underground area confronted by a scene worthy of Dante’s Inferno: a coven of nurses lined up testing prisoners for Covid. The judge, apparently, would not ‘see’ any prisoner who had not been tested. Andy declined this big-hearted offer and was taken back to Ballymun copshop, where he was strip-searched again before being transported to a court in Tallaght, where he was released on bail following a conversation between the guards and the judge, who did not invite Andy to speak on his own behalf. On the following Friday, I accompanied him as his McKenzie Friend to a hearing at the CCJ, where he faced aforesaid concocted Public Order charge. The judge asked him if he was pleading guilty, and when he replied in the negative, said she was adjourning the case until February. Both Andy and myself tried to acquaint the learned judge with the manifest unlawfulness of what was happening. I cited Statutory Instrument 296 and its provisions for certain categories of citizen to claim exemption from wearing face masks. Clearly lacking the faintest clue what the law provided for, she accused me of ‘flouting the law’ by not wearing a mask and instructed us both to leave what she seemed to think was her court. Since from her own mouth she had betrayed that she had prejudged out of ignorance the issues in front of her, and was therefore unfit for her office, Andy and I were only too happy to leave.
That same day, I watched a speech by one of the UK Column regulars, David Scott, delivered in Hollyrood, Edinburgh, under the title ‘Fear Not’ about the connection between religious or transcendent understandings and the collapse of the rule of law. Scott referred to ‘our ancestors’, who he said had ‘rejected God because being ruled by a man and told what to do, was easier. They did not want the law of God, a law that they would need to place in their hearts and to defend. Instead, they wanted a ruler to think for them and fight their battles. Slaves they had been, and slaves they still were in their hearts.’
This powerful speech tapped into something that had been building in me through the Time of Covid. Scott was saying something not a million miles from what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said nearly 40 years ago about the old people continually saying when he was growing up that the reason terrible things were happening in their country was that man had 'forgotten about God'.
David’s message, like the great Russian’s, was straightforward: To overcome our two most mortal enemies — fear and pride — it is necessary to place our sovereignty in the hands of the Lord of History, Jesus Christ — ‘and say He is sovereign, we can choose His law, a law of love and a law of freedom.’
‘It is no accident,’ he observed, ‘that the state and its wars and oppression has grown as faith has ebbed.’
This declaration flirts with a short-circuit of the kind that perhaps afflicted also the old people of Solzhenitsyn’s recollection and from their mouths risked descending into an inscrutable pietism, the kind of thing you might hear a hundred times and not grasp its meaning. Although that line from Solzhenitsyn is legendary, the remainder of the speech is much less well-known. But Scott set up his argument in a way that allowed a deeper understanding to emerge into something like new light. It is a matter of mindset: we can place our faith in kings, politicians, popes, mobs, ideologies, but what we need is something to transcend these because they all come afflicted by the same risk of tyranny. The figure of Jesus stands as an alternative because He has the capacity to disable in men the power-lust they use to claim dominion over their fellows.
It is a related point to one I’ve made repeatedly concerning the Preamble of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, which begins: ‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, we, the people of Eire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial . . . . etc.
It is nowadays not immediately understood that this opening passage has also a secular interpretation, perhaps best demonstrated by reference to Lewis’s observation that when God is abolished by man, He is not replaced by all men but by a few men imposing their will on the rest. Thus, even for unbelievers, secularists, atheists, it is essential to see this formulation not purely as a Christian invocation, but as a mechanism that seeks and achieves something as vital to their own protection as it is to Christians. The ‘mechanism’ provided by the Holy Trinity does something that cannot be achieved otherwise: it places the fundamental rights of men out of the reach of men.
Rinsing this idea down to its simplest elements, we might say that, if we wish to ensure that the law remains in the realm of good, we need to attach it to absolute ideas of goodness. And here’s the rub: there is no ‘secular’ mechanism by which this can be achieved.
What has happened of late may be described as a sudden, lurching deviation from these ideas. It is as if those we have elected to lead us have simultaneously been hit by the insight that they only needed to treat their peoples as sovereign for as long as God could be said with certainty to exist. That was what required them to be ‘good’, to renounce evil and all its works and pomps, to maintain their authority in the cause of righteousness.
It may seem a stretch to suggest that these conditions remained in place until, say, March 6th 2020 — but I wonder. In a sense, I think, most of us imagined this moment had long since come and gone — and that we had, accordingly, seen and suffered the worst of its consequences. We in Ireland observed in the abortion referendum of 2018, a moral dissolution that ought to have warned us. Yet, even that did not seem to dismay us completely; to a large extent — and not to our credit — we were able to go on again afterwards, as though we had plumbed the bottom of what was possible in the degradation of our public life. We assumed, because people were saying that God was dead, and our societies were changing their formal arrangements to fit in with this new resolve, that the entire process of deabsolutisation had already been accomplished, but it might not grow any darker. The icons of Christianity were gradually being stripped from public view. The leaders of our churches were taking the knee to the new secular overlords. Religious-minded people had already reconciled themselves to the idea that they should no longer require their societies to reflect their beliefs. But none of this either greatly surprised us or alerted us to the idea that we might be witnessing merely the thin end of wickedness.
We ought to have been more mindful of Solzhenitsyn and his cautionary words: When man forgets about God — that is the beginning, not the end. It's strange that, living in a secularised society, although I've written and spoken about this question for years, I keep forgetting, or misconceiving, this simple but total insight; and, whenever things happen that might seem to bear it out once more, I discount their significance by looking for other explanations that, when I think about it, tend to be the kind of explanations that somehow fit with our normalised secular understandings. That's how it's set up so we keep bouncing off the question.
It all really does come down to what Scott and Solzhenitsyn, in their differing ways, have conveyed: the apparent 'break for evil' of our political classes (pride), the supine response of the people (fear), the corruption of the Fourth Estate, the endless lies, the unbelievable psychosis of the police, the gloating menace of a thousand overnight little Hitlers — all this comes from that original and prolonged amnesia.
And, yet, things did not seem to have gone as far as the dominant societal conversation might have led us to believe. Though conviction was gone, observance too, enthusiasm for certain, something remained: people, including people in authority, continued to believe, or to pretend to believe, if only in the negative sense that they were afraid of coming out as outright heathens. This was in part because they were unconsciously applying Pascal’s wager, and in part because such politicians did not want to risk losing votes by offending those who continued to hold to genuine religious beliefs. But it became more clear that this was merely a process of treading water during the final phase of the deabsolutisation process, which has recently, somewhat abruptly, achieved its culmination. Even after all the talking about ‘rational’ man, God still held sway over the mind of man, despite man's best efforts to shake Him off. But then, all of a sudden, this was no longer true. We crossed a line and went tumbling down a hill, with the brake pedal finding nothing but air.
So, what we have observed in the Time of Covid tells us that what we perhaps imagined had passed us by, relatively uneventfully, some time ago, actually had not occurred, and now it has we are beginning to find that it is nothing like as benign as we imagined it might be. The experience already suggests that we have somehow — and not that long ago — finally crossed the line around the perimeter of the God zone, heading in the wrong direction. That is the ‘border’ our former leaders — now, it seems, our self-ordained absolute rulers — have ‘broken’ for: the border between Good and Evil, the Outer Home on the line to Hell. They have rejected the idea of an absolute figure of Good Authority — in this case unequivocally Jesus Christ — and scampered into the embrace of some darker but as yet ill-defined entity.
What makes this all so strange is that, circumstantially, there's no particular reason it should be happening now, no special trigger or cue. Except actually, there is, and David Scott put his finger on it, and identified it as beginning a long time ago, but somehow culminating in our time. He is right in intimating that the seeds of this horrific moment lie way back in the past.
The failure of the major religions to keep pace with the deabsolutisation of culture was rendering the God idea terminally implausible for the generality of people. Thus, for a long time, the store of transcendent belief in the imagination of society has been eroding without anyone keeping score. Church leaderships, and indeed theologians in general, have proved intellectually inadequate to these drifts, resulting in a hollowing out in culture of long held-to religious understandings of reality. Those who have made a break for it include not just the political and scientific leaderships, but also the leaderships of the main churches, who have willingly surrendered to the looming agenda and tried to bully their flocks into going along
This is the meaning of this 'break for evil' by State forces currently observable worldwide. It is indeed a seismic change: the final phase in the process Solzhenitsyn spoke about when he accepted the Templeton Award for Progress in Religion in London on May 10, 1983 — the first time the prize had been awarded to an Orthodox Christian.
‘More than half a century ago,’ he said, ‘while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
‘Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”’
‘The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension,’ he expanded, ‘have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.’ Only in the battle against Hitler had the West shown genuine resolve — in the face of Russia’s agony and the ‘dismemberment’ of Eastern Europe, it had been crippled by impotence. ‘Faced with cannibalism, our godless age has discovered the perfect anesthetic — trade! Such is the pathetic pinnacle of contemporary wisdom.’
He quoted his countryman Dostoevsky, who warned that ‘great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared. . . . ‘the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.’
And later:
‘It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly go about carrying them out.’
His assessment of the West was comforting yet realistic, particular to its moment, now almost four decades since.
‘The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness.’
A central aspect of this new culture, he observed, was that awareness of good and evil have been supplanted by the ‘pursuit of happiness’, and evil was already worming its way into the culture.
‘It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make daily concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism.’
He spelt out some concrete symptoms: the Western young reared to hate their own societies; the defects of capitalism replicating the basic flaws in human nature; a loveless art; the disunity of religions; social theories collapsing into bankruptcy; the pursuit of ‘equality’ leading to the equality of slaves; the addiction to materialism at the expense of spiritual growth — all these were taking human society to the brink of disaster. And, all the while, the spectre of Communism, ‘breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which is unstable.’
Then, these chilling words: ‘[T]he noose around the neck of mankind draws tighter and more hopeless with every passing decade, and there seems to be no way out for anyone . . . We ourselves, in our daily unthinking selfishness, are pulling tight that noose.’ Only ‘the warm hand of God’ could save us from the consequences of our erroneous understandings of reality. ‘There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.’
‘Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.’
The note of those words is precise and poetically coherent. Yet, it was, and remains, possible for them to short-circuit into some ‘convenient’ sense of a man clinging to religion as he entered the final phase of his life. This would be another grave error. We need to hear what he was saying: God is vital because God is the only being who is not man, and man on his own is deadly to himself. “Hatred of God’ means also dread of that which makes a human being most free.
We overlooked that the ‘God stuff’ was the 'glue' that held everything together, and continued to do so even after all the formal elements of religions, faith and piety had collapsed. Even atheists were still, in a way, driven and motivated by the fumes of residual beliefs. But of late, this quantity has fallen below critical load, and a change of consciousness has transmitted itself among the new man-gods that C.S. Lewis warned about. That's where the 'break for evil' has arisen from, and, if I am not wrong, it can only get worse.
I have in this essay deliberately avoided overtly ‘religious’ language. I have included no preachings or prophecies, no Biblical quotations, no mention of the Book of Revelations. This, for two reasons:
One, I do not want to stir up one of the problems I seek to explicate: the ‘short-circuiting’ of humanly-essential understandings on the circuit board of institutional religion. I do not wish to give the impression that I am talking only to people who consider themselves ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’. I take the view that all people, by virtue of being creatures incapable of providing themselves with fingernails or a destiny, are by definition spiritual, and by definition religious in the pure sense, i.e. spiritual beings on an infinite journey to the land of their Creator. I wish to transcend, so to speak, whatever self-definitions people may have arrived at, to liberate their imaginations from the burden of having to translate what I say from ‘Catholic’ or ‘Christian’ understandings, to say something that ought to be of interest to every living human being. For that reason, I have couched my thinking in words which are, perhaps paradoxically — but if so, so be it — ‘secular’ in that they may be interpreted by the logic of the street or the highway or the public house.
The second reason I have not employed explicitly ‘religious’ language is that, from an early stage in the Time of Covid, I began to feel uncertain that I could much longer go on describing myself as a Catholic in the sense of giving allegiance to a Church led by the current hierarchy of the Church in Ireland and the current Pope in Rome. As I write, on a Sunday morning in a country with the churches all closed and the news being trumpeted by the journaliars of the fake news media that the heroic Cavan priest Fr P.J. Hughes has been forced by his bishop to close his church, a friend, one of the most faithful Catholics I have ever met, texts me: ‘One would ask are our Catholic bishops in modern Ireland collaborating with a new form of penal laws against the faithful, now a minority in our beloved country.’
I say: Amen. For the past eight months, I have observed with growing nausea the dissembling, evasiveness, hunkersliding and silence of the Irish bishops as their people were menaced, threatened and terrorised, their relationships undermined and their most fundamental rights confiscated; as elderly people were allowed to die alone, without the comfort of priest or loved ones; as the dead were buried like criminals in a prison yard; as the Catholic sacraments were prohibited for the first time in two centuries; as Easter was cancelled and Christmas dangled like a carrot to a donkey; as politicians on almost a daily basis made contemptuous speeches in which they disrespected the very essence of the faith these bishops were supposed to defend, comparing it to yoga classes and the off-licence trade. I do not know whether all this slithering inaction and moral lockjaw arose mainly out of a deficiency of intellect — an inability to look squarely at the facts and see that what was happening was a massive, criminal confidence trick — or cowardice. I daresay both, but also possibly something more amorphous and more sinister.
I have listened, too, to the repellent pronouncements of such as the Association of Catholic Priests, which denounced as ‘selfish’ people who begged for their churches to be opened. How much longer can we continue to humiliate ourselves if, when we name ourselves as Catholics, this is what the listener associates us with?
Shame, shame, shame on these excuses for men. There will be no Church in Ireland until they have all taken off their vestments and departed. For what they have done is beyond forgiveness by mortal human beings.
I know people will be annoyed with me and write me sincere but, frankly, predictable communications telling me that ‘the bishops and not the Church, We are the Church’. That would have merit as an argument were there a significant complement of priests willing to stand up against this tyranny. There have indeed been a few, but we can easily count them on the fingers of one human hand.
Most of the personnel of the Church of Rome have nothing further to say to me, nor I to them. When they have all departed, I shall consider returning, but not before.
Meanwhile, I propose to go my own way, eyes still fixed on the horizon, heart still laid at the lotus feet of the Lord.