The dissolute and the degraded

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 25 February 2006 00:31.

Speaking after the verdict Miss Baxter’s father Stephen said: “Katie was a lovely, happy girl with her whole life ahead of her.

“Katie was never homeless. She associated with people from the homeless community and although she often stayed in these circles, it was no reason for her to be murdered. She did not deserve to die.”

Miss Pennick’s father Kevin, who is from Derby, added: “The pain of losing my little girl in such a brutal way will always remain with me.

“Zoe was not homeless. She had a home to go to but chose to associate with other people who led the homeless lifestyle.”

These are the closing paragraphs of a BBC News article reporting the sentencing of the killers of three Nottingham women. It is not a pretty story, for sure. But it is one anybody who has had dealings, however brief or tenuous, with the homeless - or rough sleepers - and with addicts can credit all too easily. For these emiserated souls have crossed the moral Rubicon. They need not be killers to have done so. They need not be violent at all, though they will almost certainly know violence.

They cannot, however, be virtuous. At least, they cannot afford the virtue of ordinary men. They are “survivors”, and that is all they are. What Zoe Pennick’s father called “the homeless lifestyle” is an absolute. The pursuit of the next deal or the next drink rules over everything, is everything. It so distorts the moral compass that the preservation of human love and friendship, where it obtains, is a miraculous thing.

There were not many miracles, perhaps, in the lives of Katie Baxter, Ellen Frith and Zoe Pennick. What role their respective family lives played in their tastes and choices in adult life one cannot say. Doubtless it is a question that their parents will never cease to ask of themselves.

But one can certainly withdraw to an intellectual distance where the greater forces which move such disastrous lives are apparent. I remember well enough that the itinerants and alcoholics one saw in the London of my 1960’s youth were at least figures of some colour and familiarity. Many were ex-servicemen, others ex-cons. They were supposed to be gentlemen of the road. But that was only because we did not know them, nor wanted to. It was not very charitable of us, but I remember that we traded coins for distance. Even so, the world was a more certain place than today and not as fractured and dangerous, and these inhabitants of the margins were more tiresome than a source of fear.

I am frequently reminded of the wry irony of liberalism’s social achievements: freedom has wrought such destruction upon us any sane man would shout, “Stop. Go Back”. But there are no sane men. There are politically and culturally victimised white men who have scarcely any opportunity remaining to model virtue and masculinity to their sons, even if they knew how. There are “partners” rather than wives - and working ones at that, because the cost of housing has made us all slaves. Among ordinary people only a two-income family can afford to acquire all the essential gadgetry and gew-gaws of 21st century living. There are sexualised children because we can’t tell the difference between free speech and a semi-pornographic media culture. There are millions displaced by alien populations, their communities long dispersed, their sense of identity regurgitated as anomie. There are Marxian leftists throughout the public sector and liberals throughout the media and the political establishment. So there is anti-education, anti-culture and anti-white racism in politics. There are 24-hour boozers and watchful blacks on city street corners. There is no social glue to hold us together, nothing but more of liberalism’s freedom - and that only atomises. In a word, there is only modernity.

The homeless and the drug-addicted, the “survivors”, are supposed not to exist in our vibrant new paradise. But I’ll bet that in ten years time their will be more of them, and more again in another ten years. More people will suffer and some will even die because, ultimately, the pursuit of freedom leads to vice.

Tags: Social Conservatism

Comments:

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 25 Feb 2006 05:20 | #

“the pursuit of freedom leads to vice”

This little aphorism is worthy of the Ayatollah Khomenei and whilst it may contain some truth in respect of low average IQ Muslims, it has,thankfully, no resonance among White people.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sat, 25 Feb 2006 08:14 | #

Al, think about what freedom is thought to mean in the modern West. It is understood to mean doing what you want, being what you want - a state in which you are unimpeded in your will.

This modern Western concept of freedom does generally lead to vice. It means that any kind of moral restraint will seem to be an oppressive limitation on my freedom to do as I will.

This view is now so ingrained into Western man that we almost reflexively think of moral codes or taboos as something hostile to the individual, rather than something protective or dignifying.

Therefore, if you don’t like the concept of freedom being tarnished by association with vice, you need to argue for a better concept of freedom than the one prevailing now.

The alternative to this is to argue that something besides freedom should be our ultimate aim, with freedom being a kind of by product of achieving this primary aim.

Personally, I expect the latter choice is the better one. If we were to aim at a concept of the good in man and society, I expect we would consequently experience a more genuine kind of freedom than the socially destructive one now on offer.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 25 Feb 2006 10:54 | #

Al,

It was late or I would perhaps have finished: “freedom in simple leads to vice”. Pithiness has its attractions to tired brains.

But Mark is right. If you extrapolate on a theme of perpetually increasing liberty you will undercut your own foundations. This ought to be bloody obvious to everyone by now. But clearly it isn’t. It is why I am a Conservative before I am an English nationalist, for I don’t believe in the slightest that a life navigating a sea of freedom is adequately meaningful. Meaning is provided by having foundations.

Posted by Rick Darby on Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:29 | #

Freedom is the greatest of God’s gifts, but modern society promotes a very one-sided view of freedom, which often comes down to the idea of being free of external, or even internal, restraints. In popular culture and media, there is rarely any discussion of what freedom is for, beyond the capacity to choose between various forms of self-gratification or between products.

From the time that political freedom began to take root as an ideal in a few places in the 18th century until recently, it was implicitly understood that freedom was not an end in itself, but a means to greater individual and social good. The men who wrote the American Constitution differed on many issues, but I doubt that there was a single one who conceived of freedom as pure self-will. It was understood as a medium in which people could learn to make wise choices and in so doing build their own character.

Unless freedom is viewed in the light of morality—not a rigid, authoritarian code, but an ideal of the good and right and true—freedom can corrupt the soul more than oppression. Oppression often forces people to develop inner resources to cope with it and to develop a moral code to counterbalance the ideology of tyranny. Freedom without moral seriousness leads only to adults who behave like children ... who, in a real sense, are still children.

Yes, society should provide individuals with a large degree of freedom, but also insist on learning responsibility commensurate with it.

Posted by Voice on Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:08 | #

Nice post Rick..save that one as I fully agree

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 27 Feb 2006 22:39 | #

Rick,

I have set out my basic premise on freedom in this post. My position is that, ordinarily, we are insufficiently awake to grasp our own mechanicity. So talk of freedom is premature to say the least.

The greatest of God’s gifts, if He happens to be in a giving mood, is the realisation that there might be a bit more to this life than, ordinarily, we are told. The rest isn’t given at all, but has to be earned.