Prince Caspian's Fleet.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Anyone who has read 'The Dawn Treader' will know the situation.
Price Caspian of Narnia has heard that the Lord of the Lone Isles, a long way from the Royal capital on the main land, is tyrannising the local people, who are Caspian's subjects.

But Caspian is a long way from home, and he only has a small ship's company to fight against the local lord's minions. How can he go in and sort things out?

Caspian decided to sail within sight of the Lone Islands and then raise the flags to send the signal "I shall go on alone. Lord X will take his ships and wait to the west, Lord Y will take his squadron to the east and wait there. The rest of the fleet will stay where they are and all ships will stay out of sight of the Lone Isles. If I am not back tomorrow, all ships will go in and and investigate. If I do not meet you on the quay, storm the stronghold!"

It therefore appeared to the baddies that they were vastly outnumbered by foes that they could not see, and they surrendered to Prince Caspian without a fight.

But this is not a book review. C S Lewis, did however set me thinking about things.
It is not so much what people actually see, as what they ~think~ they are seeing that dictates their behaviour.

So long as people have confidence in the bank, there is no rush to take out funds. the minute people think the bank is in trouble, or the stock market is about to collapse, well lo and behold - it happens!

And political systems as well as Society itself is bound by the same law it seems. It must have belief in itself, or it will collapse. London was a peaceful city one minute, but when people saw the police outnumbered in Tottenham, Croydon was ablaze within hours, and then trouble broke out in Manchester and other places.

Credibility = stability, and stability is needed for progress and a comfortable way of life.

The priests of everry religion knew from Time immemorial that as long as they could appeal to The Gods, and put the right people in power on the thrones, that all would be well for them.
And if their was plague and famine or defeat in battle, it was easy to blame the victims and demand more obedience.

When Josiah came to the throne of Israel, he was just 8 years old, and the priests of Yahweh sid that they had found an old book in the temple that was being restored. The book was largely a chronicle, written in the 3rd person, with a lot about a person called Moses, who led the nation out of slavery in Egypt to their present homeland.

This story also told how Yahweh had promised to look after His people , if they were good, but calamity would come upon them if they were bad. Cynics may point out that the priests could have written this 'old' book and then 'found' it themselves. But that is mere conjecture...

What is more certain is that in the book, which we today call the Torah, a lot of supernatural events occurred. The Red Sea was opened and the people walked across on dry land, food fell from the skies to feed them and when they approached a great city, the walls fell flat that they might take it.

And yet, to the people of Josiah's day, the prophets of Yahweh did not go calling down fire from heaven, or smiting men dead on the spot if they disagreed. instead, the prophets went in fear of their lives if they upset their wicked kings. The later prophets were big on moral pronouncements, but short on awesome miracles, it seems to me.

Yet the priests who came after them and took up the same moral standards made a good case - thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, for the Lord thy God has got an eye on you and will see to it that you get what is coming...

Alas, there were fewer miracles being done to shore up crumbling belief, and as men learned more about the natural world, the less they needed God to explain things like thunderstorms.

Now, the guys who wrote books like Hosea and Amos wrote in the first person, and they were a lot more humane and tolerant - enlightened, even, than the guys who had written the Torah. But their tolerant and more loving deity still needed good guys with a good sword arm to keep order here below. Most of the time, they got lucky, and we got Civilisation as a result. With a good king on the throne and a good God in heaven, we did ok. The Americans swapped our King for a President, but they made sure that their nation was still under God, and even said so on their most Holy of religious relics, the US dollar.

But God is not about these days, it seems. He certainly does not smite the Heathen like He used to, neither the Chav nor the Gangsta, it seems. Some liberal and cultural Christians will say that 'God is love', and that virtue is it's own reward, that what goes around will come around, and that God has no hands but ours to work His will in the world.

And maybe they are right, but this isn't going to prevent any rioting next summer. Nor will it keep Western Civilisation safe in a world being run by the Chinese and the Indians. It may be that our generation will see the eclipse of Western civilisation - gone, because we, as a society, were smart enough to see through the priestly tales, but not spiritually aware enough to see the greater truths that the old myths were pointing us to.

We need to have a belief in something just beyond the horizon, something bigger than ourselves, in order not to implode as a society. And most people do not have that any longer.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It has also been the standard bearer of totalitarianism, thoughtcrime, rule of the Party/divinely sanctioned monarch, "hardness is kindess towards the future", "our cornerstone is laid, our very foundation rests on the great moral truth that the black man is inferior to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition", and the idea of starving millions to pay for wars not started by those millions or even relevant to them. Let's not delude ourselves that Western civilization blazes and forges the stars anew, it simply exorcises the demons of its past by neglecting how those demons are of the very same hue and color they are.

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

You can nitpick over the perceived shortcomings of the West, most of which occurred centuries ago, all you want, but it all amounts to a flawed argument. Maybe the West isn't perfect, but it is better than any available alternatives. And it's still the only champion of progressive values.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Totalitarianism occurred centuries ago? I thought that 1917-1991 was less than a century ago. But never let reality intrude into a good story.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

And, like the UK and the USA were so totally down with Hitler, Mussolini and the rest of the Axis crew, amirite?

Reality does have some semblance of a balanced point of view, and I think that , on balance, you are better off living in Britain or Continental Europe than a lot of other places - hey, in places like Australia or the USA, they only speak a European language, bur even these places have got human rights, trial by jury, running water, electricity and proper drains. They don't seem too bad compared to all them other places like Burma and Somalia...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No more so than the USSR which helped Germany re-arm and went to war with it in Eastern Europe to try to reverse verdicts of the Russian Civil War. At a point in history where plenty of people in the democracies supported both totalitarianisms and felt that the end of democracy was inevitable. And the other side of that coin is that Burma and Somalia have something in common....

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

If you consider the Soviets to be part of "the West", knock yourself out. Just remember that it was the West that opposed and ultimately defeated Soviet tyranny.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They turned Russia into an urban state with a powerful, mobile, professional army following an ideology invented by a German Christian. Any definition where they are not West must exclude the entirety of Western history prior to the French Revolution and the entire West that fought the French Revolutionary armies as Eastern.

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

No, it must not.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, it must. The idea that the West favors democracy by direct logic excludes any form of the West not democratic, meaning that the Hellenistic age, the Roman Empire, Medieval anarchy, and age of absolutism are not Western, thus Europe went from West to East to West whenever convenient.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

And China and Russia haven't done likewise, in many cases, I suppose you want to tell me ?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Of course not, Russia was able to do things in the 20th Century nobody else could and its totalitarianism beating the other totalitarianism and weakening itself just so enabled democracy to survive by default.