LAST weekend I was invited on to GB News to explain why I thought that if you didn’t react with rage to the public murder of an 18-year-old boy then there must be something wrong with you. And that if you interpreted the expression of that anger as an incitement to violence then, again, there must be something wrong with you.
We are now in a situation where the institutions of government and even civil society are so shaped by the assumptions of critical race theory that these things need to be pointed out.
The Left has reacted with hot rage to a comment made by Nigel Farage that he had reacted with cold rage to the fatal stabbingof Henry Nowak. And most especially to the way he finessed the remark: that, given the circumstances of that murder, he expects the rest of us to react in the same way. Expects, not urges, straightforward empathynot being the same as incitement, save in the Left hive mind for which all distinctions in logic are transactional.
Farage is taken by many to be the villain here. Or so the architects, generals and worker bees of the vicious ‘culture of nice’ are requiring the rest of us to conclude.
I’m at a loss to know what for these people the correct response to footage of child sacrifice should look like? A full Rosary of ‘our thoughts and prayers are with the family; lessons must be learned. Amen’ perhaps? Before congratulating ourselves for not looking back in anger and moving on.
When, in truth, anger is not only justified here, but is quite likely the only Christian response to this mortal violation of the natural law. Anger at injustice or at offences against what is sacred is an obligation of faith. What is important is that it is directed at the right object, or person, and to a degree which does no violence to the soul of the person who feels or expresses it.
It is when anger is allowed to slip into hatred that things have gone wrong. I see very little kindness in Farage’s more exhibitionist detractors. Many of them were on display in the House of Commons last week, working themselves into a collective climax of outrage while at the same time making sure the cameras were getting what would have to pass as their ‘best side’. Contemporary Pharisees to a man, woman or (in a couple of cases) indeterminable.
Are our representatives really that unaware that there is a respectable history of righteous anger in the Christian moral tradition? Or are they aware but intent on just cutting out the bits of that tradition that don’t suit them? Like Jefferson with his Bible.
Do they think that Jesus had a point about the moneychangers but that, by the standards of the calendar, he went about things in the wrong way? Should he have referred them to an independent body? Started a ‘process’? Called for dialogue? Given some workable relativism can we say that Our Lord’s behaviour in the Temple was unacceptable?
This is what’s wrong with our political class and, for that matter, most of the people who report on them. They are priests without a deposit of faith and with no maturity of emotional or spiritual response. They are unable to feelfor themselves, and therefore default to grievance, to labels, and to aggressive denunciations of anyone who can see through them. They are spiritual cripples mysteriously addicted to homiletics and sermonising.
If Ed Davey or Lucy Powell had been around in the first century AD – and it’s beginning to feel as if they were – they’d have accused Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of spreading division while demanding to know where Joseph of Arimathea had got his money from.
There is a difference between hot and cold rage, both phenomenologically and in how these are expressed.
It was written up by Aristotle, modified by St Thomas Aquinas and integrated into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the final word on the shape and final destination of the human soul.
But our governing class is intellectually ordinary, at best. This differentiation is invisible to them because they work at the surface level of things, in the lanyard vernacular, and the deeper spiritual grammar just isn’t their thing. They pretend that the division is between people who are nice and people who are not. When the real battle is a supernatural one.
A young man is bound, sneered at, and left to die in public and the people who killed him look on and insist that they are the real victims here.
The Easter season has only recently come to an end. The Gospel resonance of that webcam footage should be alive in the soul of everybody who has seen it.
God draws straight lines with crooked instruments. Farage’s response was the Christian one. The people who get angry at the anger of other people are usually the ones who shout loudest and yet have the least to say.
