#UniteTheClans Dammit

Michael Matt at The Remnant says it’s time to Unite The Clans. Fr Z agrees. I say it’s past time.

Z says:

What he is asking for is that Catholics who are on the traditional side of things should set aside small differences and work together — intelligently, strategically — to accomplish goals…

By contrast, conservatives and traditionalists tend to defend their own little wrinkle of turf to the point that they won’t unite and work with others. They couldn’t organize a bird-cage.

Matt says (his ellipsis) “We don’t have to like each other…but can we go to war together?”

Yes, we can. And must. Accepting, of course, that war takes many forms.

Yet no sooner did Matt make the necessary call to cease internecine bickering than people on the side of Reality and Tradition started recalling past squabbles among themselves. About who said what and when against the SSPX, or how they praised or ridiculed “sedes”, or what side they took about the status of the Pope, or some over obscure question of theology. Et cetera.

A counter argument against uniting sprang up. It ran like this: How can we work together until we have aired and righted all past grievances, made the necessary apologies, come to perfect agreement on a set of principles, and defined with precision the lineaments of our new organization?

The expected and true answer is that we cannot. The conclusion is that we should instead go on pissing on each other—in public loudly and endlessly—over petty disagreements, hurtful slights, minor interpretation and worship differences, and even salaries.

We sound like a busload of premenstrual high school cheerleaders who had their cell phone privileges revoked.

At the moment I write this, the New York Post has an article about a sodomite boasting of having busted the asses of over 20,000 men. Right next to it is one about Fr Sosa, the Devil, and the strange new orthodoxy in Rome, about the Jesuit’s refusing to recant his error that Satan is not a person.

Regular readers will have followed The Week In Doom series, which has cataloged each Saturday over a period of years the various ways humanity is going to Hell, both literally and figuratively.

There is no sense that things are getting better, not anywhere. There is a palpable fear that the leftist singularity, or something very like it, is imminent.

Here’s an eerie example. In the past two weeks I have come across, from entirely separate sources, the same lines of Lovecraft’s about the return of Chthulu’s reign on earth (best source):

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

Man “beyond good and evil” is man as god. We are not yet there; this total “freedom” is not yet global. The pace to the final destination only accelerates.

Enough bickering, brothers.

Next time you see somebody in the Reality and Tradition camp, whether the follow God or Nature’s god, say something which, to you, appears off—ignore it. Stop punching right!

And don’t punch to close to your left, either.

It is not necessary. We have the entire government, bureaucracy, entertainment, media, academic complex who will do it for you. Worse, we have a host of professional conservatives who are so eager to signal their virtue that you will be stampeded on your way to the mic. Imagine—just imagine!—sniffing that racism or “anti-Semitism” or “homophobia” is bad or that “white supremacists” and “literal” Nazis are secretly building forces and feeling like you have accomplished something for our side.

Keep quiet in public. Tamp down your ego, let someone be wrong on the internet, and keep your mouth shut.

But if thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone. If he shall hear thee, thou shalt gain thy brother. And if he will not hear thee, take with thee one or two more: that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may stand. And if he will not hear them: tell the church. And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican.

We always forget Step One: rebuke in private.

The next major concern is that we have to have some sort of official public organization, which means somebody has to be in charge, only not that guy who once dissed so-and-so about a novus ordo mass, or not etc. etc. etc..

We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

No (public) formal organization is necessary—or wanted. If we had something open and formal (and public), our enemies would use it to come after us. (Though small scale efforts like this school are fine and welcome.)

All we need is a truce among ourselves to keep personal disagreements out of the public eye. Arguing over obscure points is fine, but keep personalities out it.

And the points we love to fuss over are obscure. Good grief! We have a culture which believes two men can marry each other, that some women have penises, that killing the lives inside would-be mothers is great for the economy, that the economy is paramount, that we are slaves to our genes, that God Himself doesn’t exist, and that if He does He approves of sin.

Meanwhile we carp at each other over whether an altar boy tripping during an SSPX mass invalidates it (I saw that years ago on Eye of the Tiber). As important as that and many similar burning questions are, they all come in last in importance in our time.

We need a bit of policing for when tempers run hot, which they invariably will, given anybody who writes for the public routinely has to be part asshole part prima donna and part hysteric at least some of the time.

When that happens, see Step One above.

What else? There are a slew of articles and books from Reality and Tradition sources warning about the hard times that are coming. They all offer the same excellent advice: quietly build friends, get yourself and your family into shape, eschew offensive violence and protest, read old books. And don’t be a rat.

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