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Cries in the Wilderness: Volume One

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Richard Alfred Marschall

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“It is perhaps surprising that in eighteenth century travellers' accounts Glasgow is most often compared with Oxford for the beauty of its prospect and the excellence of its ambience. It was post-industrial Revolution accounts of the city that began to articulate the 'Glasgow discourse' which was to become hegenomic. Initially signalled in urban planning and public health reports of the nineteenth century, this discourse was powerfully accelerated by tabloid journalistic accounts of gang warfare in interwar Glasgow and by folkloric embellishments of these. The result was that a monstrous Ur-narrative comes into play when anyone (not least, it should be said, Glaswegians themselves) seeks to describe or deal imaginatively with that city. In this archetypal narrative, Glasgow is the City of Dreadful Night with the worst slums in Europe, its citizens living out lives which are nasty, brutish and short. The milieu of Glasgow is so stark, so the narrative runs, that it breeds a particular social type, the Hard Man, a figure whose universe is bounded by football, heavy drinking and (often sectarian) violence. The image of Glasgow, which beckons, Circe-like, to any who would speak or write of that city, is one of men celebrating, coming to terms with or (rarely) transcending their bleak milieu. An order of marginalisation, if not exclusion, is served on women.”

“The Oxford Movement, however, brought a new element into the religious life of the nineteenth century. It stood above all for the preservation of the spiritual identity of Christianity, and represents an attempt to restore the Catholic conception of an objective supernatural order and the Catholic idea of divine authority within the boundaries of the Established Church of Protestant England. It was by Newman that these principles were most clearly realized, and through him that they received their full intellectual formulation, but in spite of the differences of character and mentality between the leaders of the Movement, Newman, Keble, Froude and Pusey were all in complete agreement on this fundamental issue. They all stood for Authority and Tradition against Liberalism, for Supematuralism against Rationalism and Naturalism. The fundamental note of the Oxford Movement was its anti-modernism. It is true that they began on the political ground — in a protest against the secularization of the modem State and its claim to interfere with the rights of the Church. But almost at once the conflict became an internal one between the opposing forces in the Church of England — not, however, between High Church and Low Church, between Catholic and Evangelical, but between religious Traditionalism and religious Liberalism. In fact, the first great battle that the Tractarians fought — that against Dr. Hampden — was one in which they had the support of the Evangelicals.”

“But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.”

“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students “free to engage one another as human beings.” “I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,” another said. “This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.” The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.”

“Some of those watching believed answers like this (eg. "I don't recall", "I don't think so.") - which dominated Pell's evidence as well as [former Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane Brian] Finnigan's and many of the other priests - to be a form of 'mental reservation' or mentalis restrictio in the Latin. It's a theological strategy dating back centuries, which involves the idea of truths 'expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind'. As the theory goes, lying is considered a sin. But a Christian's ethical duty is to tell truth to God - reserving or restricting part of that truth from human ears is ethically sound if it serves the greater good. (p.185)”

“[Is it] Lying when a person uses his considerable reputation and his mastery of public communications to thrash his opponents by redirecting the attention of the general populace, thus infecting the people with the tiniest sliver of doubt, which, widely propagated, becomes a sizable wedge of doubt? said G. Doesn't every idea, said R., even those judged by some standards to be fallacious or those which have been disproven outright, deserve to be honored with the public's attention? Doesn't the public have the right to know? said G. And decide for itself? said R. Are you calling the public stupid? said G. Do you not believe in democracy? said R. R. turned to me. We were, in life, eminent scientists, he said.”