There are three main concerns that might affect the way people vote in the coming election. My thoughts on the eve of the election include: fascism versus mafia rule; The Supreme Court’s abortion ban; and the question of how people who disagree with each other can live peacefully together.
Fascism, Mafia Rule, or Liberalism
In the 1924 general election in Italy, Mussolini won nationally, but the Popular and Liberal Parties won in Sicily, with the help of the mafia. So Mussolini launched an anti-mafia campaign to defeat them. He started with abolishing parliamentary elections–a main source of mafia currency. The end result was a 28 percent decrease in agricultural wages. “The fascists merely replaced the mafia as enforcers of the landowning class.”1
The Abortion Ban
On the Supreme Court’s new project of saving fetuses from their mothers, I think it’s amusing how young conservative men, as well as old men on the Supreme Court, assume that banning abortion will result in more babies. I think it’s more likely that single women and married couples will change their sexual habits. It’s not just the fact that they won’t be able to end an unwanted pregnancy. That will probably be a very small part of it. But thanks to the Supreme Court, the possibility of maternal death has become much greater.
A change of sexual habits will be much harder on men than on women. You might enjoy chapter three of Stefan Zweig’s book, The World of Yesterday. 2 The social expectations of his time were nothing like today. The middle class youth of that day were expected to be celibate until marriage.Zweig tries to empathize with the women of his time, but the trials of middle-class men as he describes them were much worse.
French Catholics and Rene Guenon
According to Peter Brooke, Guenon believed in a “great world tradition of which Christianity is simply a part. Guenon himself, in Cairo, became a Muslim, but he argued that the only two valid expressions of the tradition in Western Europe (for ‘Frenchmen and occidentals’) were Roman Catholicism (not any form of Protestantism) and Freemasonry. For other peoples other religions constitute the ‘religious reality and sole traditional spirituality’. But perhaps more obviously dangerous from an ordinary Catholic point of view is the idea that at a particular point in history, and a long time ago at that, Christianity ceased to radiate spirituality.” 3 (p. 221)
…[Albert] Gleizes had definite ideas about Thomas Aquinas. He saw him as the intellectual personification of a period, the thirteenth century, in which the primacy of spirit is giving way to the primacy of the senses…
Gleizes lost some valuable friendships over his adherence to these convictions, and much of the blame falls on his loyalty to Guenon. In his last letter to Gleizes, Pere Jerome apologizes for his part in the breakup of their friendship. But then he says,
On the other hand, you can’t be surprised that I react when I hear you say, for example, that ‘the whole of theology needs to be taken up again’, or certain ideas on the subject of the Person and of the reality of Christ which the Church does not and never will allow…
I read Peter Brooke’s biography of Albert Gleizes as history, but not as a historian. I was sympathetic to Gleizes’s discoveries in art but more so to his Catholic friends who disagreed with him and at the same time, commissioned work and gave him opportunities to teach. But I didn’t see it as a current debate. When I first mentioned Guenon I thought he was part of an old conversation that had been settled, but apparently not. I recently read that King Charles III has taken up Guenon’s ideas.
When you vote tomorrow, vote for a world where we have the time and the will to talk about such things.
- James Cockayne, Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organized Crime. Oxford University Press; 1st edition, October 1, 2016. ↩︎
- Cassell and Company LTD. London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney. ↩︎
- Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes For and Against the Twentieth Century. Hong Kong and Italy, 2001, p. 221. ↩︎
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