I don’t use this image because it is “great art”, although the composition bears some resemblance to some great art. (But it does seem to be fine folk art, perhaps of the Primitive genre.) I use it because conceptually, we can recognize four levels of the modern resurgence of the Tower of Babel.
Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us. — Ecclesiastes 1:10
A recent work of speculative fiction, reasonably predicts a voyage to our nearest star about a century hence. Upon arrival after years of travel, it is discovered that this latest voyage was preceded by 10,000s of years by travelers from earth from a now unknown civilization previously dominant across the earth, a scenario easily imaginable considering the great contrast between how little is known of the details, and yet the great extent of undeniably existing archeological ruins of the Indus Valley, Harappan civilization of Mohenjo-Daro, nearly as old as Sumeria. (In the story, the Alpha-Centauri, early voyagers’ elites worshiped a three-eyed snake-man god to which child sacrifices were made that would make those the the Canaanite god Moloch look like the work of rank amateurs.)
Given how we presently live on a hazardous technological edge while knowing so little about the lives even of our near ancestors 100 years ago–much less about what a normal way of life should aspire to look like–it’s worthwhile trying to get a view from far off afield, of the developments of civilization since the fall of the middle ages and the rise of the modern period. We could speculate on four distinct divisions of technological development:
Agricultural Revolution – Starvation Policy
Manufacturing Revolution – Keeping workers too poor to buy their own products
Information Revolution – Flooding common people with low quality, disinformation, from the irrelevant to the factually inaccurate
Un-named Revolution, possibly, Algorithmic Revolution – technology emulates human consciousness with the result of enslaving it.
Two characteristics of the Tower of Babel, are that 1) its fall greatly increased human confusion and 2) that fall was occasioned by humans trying to assert their own self-originated autonomy against the Providence of God.
The Agricultural Revolution is concerned with food. When satan tempted Jesus with the offer to turn stones into bread, Jesus cited the book of Deuteronomy, 8:3, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” The people of Jesus’ day wanted to make Him a secular king, not only to expel the Romans, but to give them bread, after He multiplied the loaves and fishes. “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.” John 6:26 But His offer of Himself as the bread that comes down from heaven, they didn’t want, instead they were scandalized, and many of His disciples no longer walked with Him.
The issue of world hunger is a political playing piece, a carom that is zoomed all around the playing board of the self-avowed masters of the universe. Jesus said, “the poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me.” Matthew 26:11. The issue of ending starvation, which was the main plot theme of the 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, revealed this continuing, strange anxiety about, not only feeding ourselves, but elaborate concern about the political economics of need while failing actually to feed the poor. Fifty years after the movie which influenced even the selection of Popes, no Pope himself has proposed to systematically eliminate world hunger, no American presidential ally of the Papacy has ever formulated a policy of using American military aircraft to food-bomb with excess American agricultural production, areas where deliberate starvation is used by local warlords as a political half-nelson against vulnerable populations.
1) Three Kings came riding from far away,
Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar;
Three Wise Men out of the East were they,
And they travelled by night and they slept by day,
For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star.
2) The star was so beautiful, large and clear,
That all the other stars of the sky
Became a white mist in the atmosphere,
And by this they knew that the coming was near
Of the Prince foretold in the prophecy.
3) Three caskets they bore on their saddle-bows,
Three caskets of gold with golden keys;
Their robes were of crimson silk with rows
Of bells, pomegranates and furbelows,
Their turbans like blossoming almond-trees.
4) And so the Three Kings rode into the West,
Through the dusk of the night, over hill & dell,
& sometimes they nodded with beard on breast,
And sometimes talked, as they paused to rest,
With the people they met at some wayside well.
5) “Of the child that is born,” said Baltasar,
“Good people, I pray you, tell us the news;
For we in the East have seen his star,
And have ridden fast, and have ridden far,
To find and worship the King of the Jews.”
6) And the people answered, “You ask in vain;
We know of no King but Herod the Great!”
They thought the Wise Men were men insane,
As they spurred their horses across the plain,
Like riders in haste, who cannot wait.
7) And when they came to Jerusalem, Herod the Great, who had heard this thing,
Sent for the Wise Men and questioned them;
And said, “Go down unto Bethlehem,
And bring me tidings of this new king.”
8) So they rode away; and the star stood still,
The only one in the grey of morn;
Yes, it stopped—it stood still of its own free will,
Right over Bethlehem on the hill,
The city of David, where Christ was born.
9) And the Three Kings rode through the gate and the guard,
Through the silent street, till their horses turned
And neighed as they entered the great inn-yard;
But the windows were closed, and the doors were barred,
And only a light in the stable burned.
10) And cradled there in the scented hay,
In the air made sweet by the breath of kine,
The little child in the manger lay,
The child, that would be king one day
Of a kingdom not human, but divine.
11) His mother Mary of Nazareth
Sat watching beside his place of rest, Watching the even flow of his breath,
For the joy of life and the terror of death
Were mingled together in her breast.
12) They laid their offerings at his feet:
The gold was their tribute to a King,
The frankincense, with its odor sweet,
Was for the Priest, the Paraclete,
The myrrh for the body’s burying.
13) And the mother wondered and bowed her head,
And sat as still as a statue of stone,
Her heart was troubled yet comforted,
Remembering what the Angel had said
Of an endless reign and of David’s throne.
14) Then the Kings rode out of the city gate,
With a clatter of hoofs in proud array;
But they went not back to Herod the Great,
For they knew his malice and feared his hate,
And returned to their homes by another way.
Short Literary Criticism (Click/Expand or Bypass)
Click ^ again to contract
THE WISE MEN
G.K. Chesterton
Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.
Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but truth.
We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.
The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.
Go humbly … it has hailed and snowed…
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.
The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.
The Child that was ere worlds begun
(… We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.
The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.
Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.
Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.
Catholic Laity of the 1960s were pre-conditioned to become victims of the cultural revolution of Hootenanny Masses by sexually compromised clerics, the laity softened-up for cultural corruption by their commercial captivation by the consumerism sector of the economy in which their own, active musical heritage had been outsourced to high-tech supported commercial interests. A free people who were actively exercising their own musical culture would never have fallen for the three-chord guitar twanging of the degraded Masses designed to dilute the practice of their faith, ultimately rendering it indistinguishable from the world. (Freudian-Marxist Wilhelm Reich, active in the U.S. from 1939-1957, noted the inverse proportionality between illicit sexual activity and prayer–you can choose self-abuse or a relationship with God, the one will destroy the other.)
Accurate account of an indisputable history documented in black & white, of planned cultural, intellectual and spiritual destruction, on the part of hidden elite forces.
The arenas are disparate, the one, Catholic liturgical music, the other, the curricula of public schools. The essential similarity is that powerful hidden interests have successfully acted to destroy the common weal.
We know why Catholic Liturgical Music was deliberately made ugly in the 1960s, deprecating the fine, vigorous, traditional Catholic choral tradition, breaching the walls of the ancient cultural edifice with the calculated philistinism of guitar Masses. It was an essential strategy of the movement to attack and destroy the Catholic Mass. This is documented history in the case of Archbishop Rembert Weakland, a highly educated and talented musician, yet a sexually corrupt priest, who knew exactly what he was doing fostering “Hootenany” Masses in the mid-1960s.
And we know why a similar process was planned and implemented in the period of 1880 to 1918, at the founding of mandatory, universal public education–with an unannounced agenda of propagating students’ educational failure–a design calculated to “crush the imagination” of school children at the behest of the better classes, natural supervisors of the lives of the great, unwashed masses. The complete set of base institutional features of public education–bells, attendance, location controls, intentional fostering of dependency rather than initiative, disorienting memorization of random, disconnected facts irrelevant to any vocational path but only as fodder for standardized testing itself a self-justifying dead-end, conscious disruption of students’ coherent attainment of authentic accomplishments in any specific field, fostering indifference, an arbitrary regime granting conditional esteem for those rated in the middle to fear elite rankers and despise the “dumb kids”–were all designed from the outset simply to regiment children for institutional efficiency, and precisely not to foster their individual development.
(Nineteenth century common people were oriented toward self-employment, guarantor with property ownership of independence from forced industrialization, as the Amish and the Catalan, Mondragon commune still do today. They generally enjoyed a fine, modest, middlebrow culture with high aspirations. Ordinary, common people often with little formal, institutional education, commonly only a few grades in school, were nevertheless possessed of a surprisingly high average culture level, based on primary education that looked for its model to the Christian acceptance of the classics of Western civilization, the good if not the great books prior to programmed curriculum deprecation 1915-1930. Their basic educational needs could easily be met in homeschools, and their extension in local community-controlled one-room schools, by an approximation of a mere 40 hours literacy instruction and 42 hours for basic numeracy. The common aspiration was to treat kids from 13 on under the expectation of self-reliant little adults rather than perpetually dependent children into middle age.)
It was for the purposes of handicapping the ordinary populations of Europe and America, to render them helpless, to ensure easy control, to regiment them for mass military service and factory employment, to eliminate small innovators’ perceived competition to financial capitalists for the accumulation of investment money, competition posed to the great financial families by average farmers, practical engineers and small entrepreneurs.
John Taylor Gatto documents this very long term process of deprecating curricula–colloquially termed “dumbing-down“–advocated and planned over an unimaginably long stretch of time, hundreds, indeed, thousands of years, beginning with of philosophical writings of Plato, Baruch Spinoza and the Kantian, Prussian philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Queue to 1:09:42 – Napoleon remarked that “each corporal has a field marshal’s baton tucked in his rucksack”; that is, his explicit expectations were that, against the institutional inertia of the upper military officer hierarchy, small squads of line soldiers isolated on the battlefield were expected to violate orders and seize the situational initiative. This policy was credited by Fichte with causing the institutionally top-heavy Prussians’ defeat by the French in the Battle of Jena, 1806, and served as the philosophical basis for the total revolutionizing of the Prussian state, the retrenchment of institutional hierarchization over all lower classes, and Prussia’s remarkable rise dominance from 1870 until 1920. It would be difficult to overemphasize the far-reaching influence of the Prussian model on the educational planing of all nations of the world during the period of industrialization 1880-1930.
The Barbed Dagger in the Heart of Harmony
A similar process of deliberate spiritual and intellectual destruction was implemented in another wave in the 1960s, targeted against dedicated Catholic religious culture. Bismarck’s 19th century, atheist-Protestant kulturkampf against the Catholic Church had failed because Catholics stuck together; the enemy of souls’ solution was to attack the Church from within. Without the capitulation of the Church, the horrible wars of the 20th century would not have been possible.
“All the trouble in the world is caused by things people know aren’t true.” Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen spoke about a man converted on his death-bed, a man named William whose face was half-eaten away with cancer. William’s sister related his life history, that he delighted in deliberately corrupting young people, writing and distributing to them, pamphlets of poisonous ideas.
Dolos, daemon of trickery. Apate, personification of deceit.
Archbishop Rembert Weakland, heresiarch of the decimation of culture, was centrally placed in this position, perfect to corrupt Catholic Liturgical music, as an expert in Gregorian plainchant, never-the-less, implacably opposed to its use in the Divine Liturgy. It requires someone who most precisely knows the truth, to most effectively devise and propagate lies which will be unknowingly repeated by the unwitting. And an essential element in this highly articulated, planned corruption, is that the proto-dolos, this founding Apate, personification of deceit, be able to find hidden weaknesses in the uninformed, weak places in their flesh with which to hook them.
One of the motives in telling his story, Weakland wrote [in his 2009 biography A Pilgrim in A Pilgrim Church], is that he is concerned about “revisionism,” and wants to tell the true story about his amazing career, where he was front and center at some of the most important events in the life of the Church in the latter half of the 20th century. He was most disastrously part of the liturgical “reform” that followed Vatican II.
Weakland’s admission that he is, and has been since his teenage years, a homosexual, is yet another indication that homosexual liturgical revolutionaries were the driving force behind the demolition of the Roman Rite of the Mass.
That process began more than five years before the revised Missal of Pope Paul VI, the Novus Ordo.
The late Msgr. Richard Schuler of St. Agnes Church in St. Paul, Minn., had the misfortune of observing Weakland closely as he led the liturgical wrecking crew that had commandeered the newly formed Church Music Association of America in 1964. Msgr. Schuler wrote in A Chronicle of the Reform: Catholic Music in the 20th Century (Sacred Music: 1990) that Weakland and his co-conspirators around the world were united in their opposition to the liturgical renewal called for by Vatican II. They routinely ignored appeals from the Holy See to stop their “useless and harmful” innovations. They carried on a massive public relations and propaganda campaign in both the secular and Catholic press, as well as in deceptive, official- sounding communications to priests and religious, distorting what the Church desired in terms of sacred art and music.
