“I want to adopt a disabled child...”
Thus Jordan, or Katie Price as the best-selling authoress is nowadays
known, on Richard & Judy - 17. July.
Now, a couple of things strike you about this, because they so
vividly expose the sensibilities of human charity. To begin with, there is the ruthless pursuit of publicity for image and self-promotion by people of celebrity status, such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit or Madonna etc. For on the reverse of such philanthropy is usually an astute media operator whose self-sacrifice is a form of reverse exhibitionism that draws attention to itself. In Western society altruism is accorded the highest value. Celebrities
no longer exist as human beings, but as politically correct personas whose behaviour is motivated by comprehensive popular expectations. Public demand and a sense of personal insecurity creates in them an almost insatiable craving for unlimited approbation. The interest of humanity, as determined by their altruistic conception of the life of others, is defined solely in terms of
preserving their own. So, is Jordan driven purely by rational, cynical
self-interest? Or does she have some of Mother Theresa’s saintly Christian
abnormalities? One way to look at this is to call it psycho-pathetic morality.
It is a potent, if altruistic, condition and bound to magnetize the tabloids
that have long been feeding on the intermittent complications of the once
harmonious union between Jordan and Andre.
Many people think this is something that applies to celebrities, but
more usually ordinary people are its purveyors. One measure of the increase in
such philanthropic activities can be seen at the most extreme end of the
psycho-pathetic disorder known as political correctness. This to me is the worst
legacy of the Judeo-Christian enlightenment. And I am here thinking of a
four-year old who’s expressed wished for a Christmas present was “peace in the
Middle East”. How are we to explain this abject little parrot? The world of the
toddler is, after all, a world where moral values and democratic humanism play
no role.
Or do they?
I adore much about the Judeo-Christian morality of the West, confirmed
apostate though I am. And the calculation of how much political correctness a
society can endure and how many acts of self-immolation it can sustain before
its framework buckles and we all turn into sentimental limpets is a fine one,
and a peculiar combination of callousness and compassion is needed to judge it
accurately. Its significance in other words, lies in the enormous psychological
transformation post-modern morality wrought upon a society which is congenitally
senescent and as deeply demoralized as the people it accommodates. And nowhere
is this lesson better taught than in our own imperial history. First of all, it
is as well to remember that our philosophy of post-modernism is static rather
than evolutionary. In actual fact, if the politically correct revolution can
absorb the central power of the state, the problem of decline is coming close to
the attrition of something that ultimately exists in the inner constitution of
unconditional moral submission. And in this respect the post-modern West is
clearly unrepresentative of the spirit of evolutionary vitality and masculine
virility such as the rise of the British Empire exhibited in the course of its
irresistible progression.
There is, moreover, an instructive contrast here,
with the Third World as an developing, forthcoming entity that has not yet found
a stable social form and, hence, is still in a process towards an enormous
historical evolution. As a matter of fact, nothing is more characteristic of the
fundamental difference between the great senescent nations of the West, and the
nations of untapped virility which the decline of the Occident has thrown up,
than that the latter is a succession of quintessentially virile, and in many
ways almost objectionable, nations, who populate and ravage the world on a truly
expansive scale. Whereas the momentous issue foremost among the former is the
struggle for democratic authority in a stagnant and monolithic framework
characterised chiefly by its maudlin, apologetic and self-pitying
bigotry.
Still, it’s nice to know there are instants of psychopathology that
do have a happy ending....
Dreamy
