Antibodies v. Antigens

A tablet from the Urra=hubullu,
possibly the oldest dictionary.

Wiktionary has this:

Middle English

Adjective

woke (plural and weak singular woke, comparative wakker, superlative wakkest)

1. Weak or feeble; lacking, strength, might, or energy:
1. Weak or feeble due to illness, affliction or aging.
2. Lacking competency in combat or on the battlefield.
3. Helpless; lacking, power, authority, or control.
4. (rare) Fruitless, barren; agriculturally useless or unusable.
2. Lacking mental strength, force, power or endurance:
1. Weak religiously; in danger of sinning or moral failure.
2. (rare) Fearing, afraid; lacking bravery, heart, or courage.
3. (rare) Unintelligent; lacking intelligence or mental willpower.
4. (rare) Indecisive, flightly; unable to commit or take action.
5. (rare) Morally suspect or corrupt; selfish.
3. Unimportant, valueless; of little value or import.
4. (rare) Bendable; able to be plied or flexed.

Calling out the Churls

Bari Weiss quit the New Woke Times: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

Antibodies are forming in the veins of society. More truth-loving (or at least truth-seeking) people such as Weiss are calling out the false prophets, the antigens, those espousing:

• faux-journalism (leftist propaganda);
• Marxist activism (iconoclasm; presentism, barbarianism; left-wing fascism);
• extreme secularism.

A critic writes:

In reality, the left plays to win, at all cost, period. The left has no conscience. The left is not immoral, it is amoral. The value of the left is not in anything other than the very ability of being able to morph into anything at all that advances the cause.

Leftists cannot reason their way into societies. They abhor debate because honest debate exposes them for what they are. So, they terrorize people in an attempt to get them to accept their dangerous ideologies.

To be a socialist requires one to willfully ignore the atrocities committed by leftists in the 20th Century. Socialists agitate from the shadows; they lead from behind. The intellectual suicide they indulge sets cities on fire.

Under the yoke of the woke

There is no doubt that Bari Weiss is a victim in a severe hostile work environment made so by vicious coworkers, Twitterers (- or is that twits?), as so many others are made victims for daring to question the "cancel culture", the politics of fear and a host of malicious behaviours under the woke umbrella.

Fr. Paul D. Scalia diagnoses a disease:

Our culture celebrates impiety as liberation from outdated ideas or constraints. Our celebrities traffic in it for laughs and to burnish their “woke” credentials. The more dismissive of the past, the more woke you are.

In fact, all that impiety does is leave us vulnerable to whatever ideological virus is in the air. The impious are fickle – rootless, unprincipled, chasing after novelties.  Having nothing stable, they have nothing to give the descendants they will not have. They are history’s orphans: no patrimony to receive or to bestow.

It’s not the impious who are free but the pious.

He confirms a remedy:

Faithful people are pious people. Their piety extends, yes, to the goodness of their nation – but also and more importantly to the wisdom bestowed by the devotion of centuries and millennia. 

Their piety emancipates them from slavery to the ideas, trends, rulers, and mobs of the here and now.  The pious have the capacity to judge rightly even their own rulers because they have received the wisdom of the past.  Such people bear within themselves something of eternity itself. 

May we be a pious people that revere the best of our nation’s founding and principles – but more importantly that reveres the eternal truths to judge rightly here and now.

Fr. Scalia has identified an antidote to the virus plaguing western societies.

Randall Smith adds by asking:

Would that some university president somewhere in one of these dust-ups would simply release a statement that says:

I am sorry you are offended, but one of our fundamental principles is freedom of speech. We respect your right to protest and complain, but the same right that protects you also protects them. We will not shut down the free exchange of ideas. If you want to shut down the free exchange of ideas, then you want another institution – probably another country. Did you mistake this for East Germany circa the 1950s perhaps? So you can gather all the mobs you want, either on-line or out in front of our offices, but we’re not giving in to the demands of an irrational mob. Come and make your case with solid arguments. We promise to listen respectfully. But please understand: our policy is “Everyone has a voice; no one has a veto.” If you make a good case, we just might change our practices. But if you come with nothing but vilification and threats of violence, we will simply shut the door and go about our business. Oh, and please don’t misunderstand: we will defend the property and heritage handed down to us by our forebears. So if you come here to tear down and destroy and not to discuss, we will have you arrested. If you assume our will to defend what has been built here is weaker than your will to destroy it, you would be making a very big mistake.

The world and the Church need spiritual antibodies:

Antibody, also called immunoglobulin, a protective protein produced by the immune system in response to the presence of a foreign substance, called an antigen. Antibodies recognize and latch onto antigens in order to remove them from the body. A wide range of substances are regarded by the body as antigens, including disease-causing organisms and toxic materials. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

In other words, the Church needs saints - pious people - to protect the body from infection, disease and death. Spiritually healthy Catholics can create allegiances with people of goodwill in the world to overcome disease (i.e., diabolical ideologies that threaten the innocent and destroy order). They can assist their neighbors to break the yoke of socialist tyranny which, if unchallenged, grows into a cancer and inevitably leads to a slavery of the mind. Where the heart and mind go the body follows.

Sidebar: it wouldn't surprise if the wokesters soon abolish (or burn) dictionaries.

Marxists and anarchists are enemies of fact. They hate literacy, despise etymology and cancel history. This very hour, Marxists and anarchists are doing what all iconoclasts attempt to do: attack the true, the good and the beautiful. They attempt to break down the pillar of every society, the family, the forum in which the wisdom of the past is preserved. By breaking down the family, they have made it permissible for the offspring of their twisted ideologies to behave like beasts, because they have no identity other than their hatred, which makes them much like beasts. Perhaps their anger is justified to a degree because they have been robbed of their identity (by those who would exploit them). They are, however, being used to attack anything that stands for order and justice. Justice activists, whom some sarcastically refer to as "social justice warriors", who foment hatred, are not interested in justice. They are interested in accumulating power not to fuel service but to feed their own disordered desire to gain control. They have become so twisted by fear and anger and greed that their inversion of justice hardly causes a ripple of responsibility in their consciences. By their fruit ye shall know them.

Christians are or should be a leaven of truth, goodness, beauty and freedom in and for society, to offer people a way out of despair and misery. That is, to offer the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If civilization is to survive and thrive, there must be among the People of God a return to living the Gospel without compromise, a way like that of Francis or Dominic, i.e., in a way that Christians become the seed of love, hope, joy and faith, to drive out the twin diseases of anarchy and vengeance. A world of people deafened and made miserable by leftist ideologies needs the music of mercy, forgiveness, goodness and hope offered to them by right thinking (pious) people to restore them to their senses. Or, to restore their senses to them so they can hear and see and touch the transcendentals and become truth, goodness and beauty for others.

Pious people are people of prayer. Prayer is the armor that people need in order to be inoculated against infection. So, get vaccinated! Build up your immunity. Stay close to Jesus and His Church. Pray!