by PAUL COLLITS – ONE of the trials of living in the early twenty-first century is the fact that it is the godless, cashed-up-bogan era. Such has been our great misfortune.
It is a time of ugliness, in art, architecture, in popular culture (anyone for Love Island on the tele?), in writing, in the way humans present their bodies to the world, in politics, in sport and, worst of all, in human behaviour.
- Our age as one of “madness”, of evil, of ignorance, of cluelessness, of godlessness.
- Meghan Markle is “graceless” personified. Graceless and under no pressure.
- This reality has been brought to the forefront by events of this past week.
Everywhere you look, there is hubris and anger. As Tony Abbott might say, we are not, as a society, living as our best selves.
It is a graceless age. An age where we have turned our backs on God’s abundant grace.
REJECTED
Not only have we rejected God’s grace, we have also drained our own from our mortal selves.
Look at the synonyms for grace. Poise. Elegance. Charm. Courtesy. Beauty. These virtues once described a way of being, of acting towards one’s fellow man, and encompassed an age very unlike our own.
The nineteenth century French philosopher Victor Cousin 1853 coined the phrase “the good, the true and the beautiful”, which sums up the ends for which Plato, Christ and their scholastic philosopher-followers claimed humans were configured to pursue.
This trifecta, so comprehensively dismantled in our age, is summed up perfectly in the divine trait of grace.
All this has been brought to our attention by certain events this week past in New York, and elsewhere. Specifically, on a tennis court. Professional tennis is where grace goes to die.
First, we had the gracelessness of American Serena Williams, who kind-of blamed God, and the fact that women are the child-bearing sex, for her not having won thirty major tournaments and so clearly beating the God-fearing Margaret Court of Australia to the record for winning the most majors.
It is passing strange that there were Russians and creeps welcomed at the US Open, but not an all-time great men’s player who happens not to have been vaccinated for COVID.
Russians, of course, are the current sworn enemy of the warmongering Biden gerontocracy, so you might have expected Russians to have been verboten.
This, of course, would have been a travesty. But an even bigger travesty is the exclusion of a perfectly healthy and therefore harmless tennis player for no real reason at all.
Enemies in the war on Russia are okay, but not enemies in the war on a middling virus with whom most governments in the world have now declared a cease-fire.
But creeps are okay. Perhaps even a drawcard at a tennis tournament in the corporatised world of sport.
Toys out of the cot merely adds to the atmosphere. Value for money for the experience-starved, graceless punters.
One of the creepiest of all happens to be an Australian. Beaten by a Russian of all people!
This brings us to the second graceless episode, witnessed not only by his family and supporters but by the rest of the globe.
As one commentator noted, the guy is meant to be an adult. A temper tantrum by a two-year old is embarrassing for all concerned.
What to make of the rampant petulance of one who has much to be humble about, and not a lot to be proud of, but who yet has been gifted with potentially awe-inspiring talent.
That he continues to prosper in life – notwithstanding an upcoming court case relating to alleged domestic abuse pending – brings us back to the rewards received by the ugly.
Rewarding the ugly coincides with, indeed prospers as a result of, the age of liberalism, where, as the late philosopher David Stove would have said, “anything goes”.
LIBERAL
The free-market liberal will say – so what? Just processes, not outcomes, are what matter.
If the punters wish to court and reward the ugly, whether the ugliness of boorish behaviour, of reality television, of the brutalist architecture of our cities, of the woke-and-ugly art included in our galleries, of bodies pock-marked with tattoos – good for them.
And with the instant reward and punishment system we now have via social media, the approval (or not) will be instantaneous.
But when the whole world fills with ugliness in all of its forms, one might well ask – what is freedom for? Why do we value it so?
That is why a higher, more transcendent version of freedom is that of “ordered liberty”.
Ordered to what, one may ask? Well, not ordered to ugly people doing ugly things in an ugly world.
Ordered liberty takes us back to Victor Cousin, to the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, and, ultimately, to Plato.
Platonic virtue now seems a galaxy away from Nick Kyrgios. The past, as they say, is another country.
What would Cousin make of the world we now inhabit? Not much, I think.
And it isn’t only sports celebrities who deliver graceless behaviour to those whom they are meant to serve and to whom they owe their living.
No less than the US President, once recognised as the leader of the “free world”, in one of his few lucid moments, has insulted and berated around half the American adult population for having the temerity to have a different world view to his own. In a now infamous and creepy diatribe.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave his own speech prior to Biden’s, where he blasted the president as someone who has “chosen to divide, demean and disparage his fellow Americans”
He called on Biden to apologize for his recent remark equating “MAGA” beliefs with “semi-fascism”.
McCarthy is being way too polite. One commentator noted that the President had declared war on his own people.
Biden himself is a barely coherent, divisive, totalitarian demagogue and usurper. An economic vandal. An enemy of the people.
No grace there, I’m afraid, and all this from a head of state, whose role is to unify the republic, to represent all Americans.
Biden’s graceless Democratic Party predecessor called the same people “deplorables”.
How dare people want to make their country great again, to become its best self. Whatever words appear on Biden’s headstone, do not expect to find “grace”.
All is not lost, however. Ironically, it took the sad passing this week of one whose life of grace (in every sense) blessed us all.
No leader could be further from the American President in carriage of the cardinal virtues.
MOURNED
As Tony Abbott (again) noted, Elizabeth II will be, without doubt, the most widely mourned person in history.
The Spectator’s Matt Purple suggested that the Queen had “lived her best life”. Sure-footed, with endless poise, effortless style and bucket-loads of substance.
Still in humble service of her people up to the last, she only this week greeted her fifteenth British Prime Minister, the most recent in an entirely graceless conga-line of Tory ne’er-do-wells who have butchered Albion and have created a nation not remotely recognisable as the country that greeted the late Sovereign in the early 1950s.
Her Majesty, then a mere princess, stated in 1947: “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” And so it was.
What stands out most about that quote, and about the Queen generally, was her absolute submission of the self.
There was no exemption for love, as her uncle had made, or cloying need for me time, as Meghan Markle seems to constantly require.
Her surrender to her duty was total. Much of her life would be planned down to the minute; the needs of Britain had to come first.
Ah, Meghan Markle. Speaking of princesses. Now there is “graceless” personified. Graceless and under no pressure.
TASTELESS
Along with Biden, Kyrgios, Serena Williams, Adam Bandt (the first Republican out of the blocks with his predictable, and predictably tasteless, talking points), Bandt’s wife, with her stylish “coal kills” dress, and all the rest.
All of them blissfully ignorant in a lost, tasteless, directionless, deluded, superficially ideological world that chases empty utopias and recognises nothing of true and lasting value.
The latter notion is, for them, not even a thing. They are people for whom “grace” is entirely a foreign concept. Google it.
The endlessly troubled American songwriter John Murry, a relation by adoption and forever-fan of the peerless novelist William Faulkner, produced an extraordinary album in 2012 called The Graceless Age.
John Murry’s would be a compelling story had he never made a record … an addict who lost his wife and child and home, and almost his life, before cleaning up.
And then you get to the record. The Graceless Age is extraordinary, a profound and moving meditation – the kind of album that answers questions you didn’t realise you were asking.
UNSPEAKABLE
Murry’s reported experiences growing up were unspeakable. A graceless age, indeed.
Then there was The Eagles’ Don Henley, who penned the words in 1989: “These times are so uncertain. There’s a yearning undefined. And people filled with rage. We all need a little tenderness. How can love survive. In such a graceless age?”
How can goodness survive? Or truth? Or beauty?
These are anthems of our times, and we are suffering purgatorially for them.
Various writers have categorised our age as one of “madness” (as in crowds, the madness thereof), of evil, of ignorance, of cluelessness, of godlessness.
All true enough. But, surely, graceless is a contender. You might even think the grace-seekers could do with a “voice”.PC
A vacuous moron, and Prince Harry is lino….. (Lino… if you lay it right, you can walk over it happily for years)
Actually it was 1947, on her 21st birthday, when Princess Elizabeth made her famous speech committing herself to the service of her people. In 1932 she was just 6 years old.
We need to see more of your ‘big gun’ Erica Betz. Lots more, please.
Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this. At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said. Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.” The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled. Figueres is perhaps the perfect person for the job of transforming “the economic development model” because she’s really never seen it work. “If you look at Ms. Figueres’ Wikipedia page,” notes Cato economist Dan Mitchell: Making the world look at their right hand while they choke developed economies with their left.
The Left has decided never to be happy. They enjoy misery. And are determined to enforce their crazy miserable crap on everyone else.