Le Cirque du SoGay
On weirdness and normality
24 Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. 25 Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable garland, but we an imperishable one. 26 So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; 27 but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.
- 1 Corinthians 9: 24-27
So wrote the Apostle concerning athletics. For the most part, it reflected a sentiment the Greeks among whom he preached would have recognized; pace the notion of some inversion of values wrought by Christians, Paul and Aristotle would have agreed that sports, like all human undertakings, have a telos, an end for which it is proper to strive, and which is possible to pervert. For Christians this idea is developed most fully- there is but one ultimate end to which all others are subordinate and transitory. This is the heritage of Judaism, the notion of a God beyond finite existence who willed the universe into being, not an eternal craftsman giving shape to eternal matter, but a being transcendent beyond comprehension who is nonetheless immanent in all things.
The Greeks would have agreed with Paul that there was such a things as nature, phusis, and that behind the observable character of the mutable material world lay a reality comprehensible only to reason. “Come, let us reason together,” the Lord says to Isaiah (1: 18); the word chosen by the Septuagint translators was διελεγχθῶμεν- dialogue, dispute, investigate, prove, which can also be found in Plato. The passage in question relates to His mercy, which He invites those who read the words of Isaiah to accept, but more than that, the Lord invites men to understand. God’s mercy is as fundamental to His being as His justice- these things can be known, never fully, but ever more. The difference between the Jewish and Greek conception of the Divine was that for the former it could not be most fully approached by reason unaided, but through God making himself known- and the reconciliation of those two characteristics of His nature necessitates the sacrifice of His only begotten Son. What the Greeks strove to reach through their contemplation Paul revealed to them by way of revelation, the only way such a truth could be perceived.
God made the universe and put everything in its place for its season. He made men and women, and scattered the nations of the Earth into their many languages and ways, all of whose lives are bound up with plants and animals, land and waterscapes, beneath the heavenly bodies. This is nature, the proper place of things according to their end, a type of harmony that binds all things to God. The Epistle to the Romans posits a kind of falling away from a more primordial state of closeness with God, and a concurrent loss of an awareness of this nature. Men gave themselves over to the worship of lesser conceptions of the Divine and at the same time became disordered and unnatural.
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
All of this is prolegomena for understanding why the opening ceremony for the Olympics was so gay.
A few notes are in order though. The spectacle was very much intended to mock the Last Supper, and the post hoc gaslighting protestations that it was supposed to be a reference solely to a Dionysian banquet are given the lie by the star, who referenced the performance as “The New Gay Testament” before scrubbing the social media post and replacing it with a new one that reflected the current line. Yes, Dionysus was there; the point was to ridicule the Christian story, and they accomplished this through having the Greek god, inexplicably painted blue like a Hindu icon, dance around nearly naked in front of at least one child, while a chorus of “apostles” made of of men in women’s clothing joined in. They couldn’t even get an apropos reference; Apollo is the god associated with the Olympics, or Zeus, or Herakles. Hestia would have been a better choice. But since the point was to show that Paris is New Sodom, they apparently decided to get creative.
The scrubbing of the actress’ account was of a piece with the general backtracking occasioned by the backlash to the show. Rumors persist online that the act was called “La Cene sur La Scene sur La Seine” (The Last Supper Act on the River Seine- In French these words are homophones). I googled and googled, but could find no official confirmation of that. But then, I could find no official confirmation of what it was called, if not that. You would think it would have a name, being a big production for a world audience. But try to find it.
The embarrassment itself is surprising, but not the response. The latter is of a piece with the general tendency of our time for the powerful to attempt to purge the past like deworming a farm animal. “What can be, unburdened by what has been” is a far more potent slogan than MAGA, as it represents the founding principle of liberalism itself. It only sounds dumb when you think about it, which you’re not supposed to do. It’s intuitive, bound up with the nature of the society we live in, one which rejects that Classical understanding of nature and the limits of telos in favor of freedom understood as the absence of restraint and a sense of self as projection, a society centered around atomized and wholly sui generis individuals constructed according to consumer taste.
The vaccines prevent the contraction and transmission of COVID-19, except that they don’t, and whoever said they did anyway? The ruble will be rubble in a month, but then, everyone knew the war would last a long time; Putin is after all both losing to Ukraine and a threat to the rest of Europe. To pull Joe Biden from his re-election bid would be undemocratic, almost as much so as questioning the ascent of Kamala Harris to replace him, and even though she was an excellent border czar she was also never the border czar and has nothing to do with the massive invasion currently taking place that she stopped years ago.
Shortly thereafter, he got COVID.
Some of the people who profess to believe and repeat the latest NPC updates are genuinely capable of making whatever mental adjustments are needed in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance in thinking themselves good people on the right side of a history that is being continually rewritten, but most just kind of make a mental bargain, accepting that those in power are lying in order to maintain said power, but wiling to go along with it with the understanding that their own, personal creative destruction and reimagining of self is acknowledged. Patrick Deneen defines liberalism as the acceptance of individual self-interest as the motive factor around which societies should organize, an ideology of individual emancipation from constraints imposed both by tradition and nature, and as methodologically characterized by the subjugation of nature in the interest of fulfilling self-interest and breaking down communal and cultural restraints. You can, and should, be whatever you want to be, whatever that is- this is the essence of the liber in liberalism.
But rather than freedom, all of this tends toward the construction of an ever-more intrusive and powerful state, the distant and abstracted ally of the individual in his or her quest for liberation from immediate obstacles. And rather than individualism, as de Tocqueville predicted, a stultifying conformity results from the contradictory needs of compelling others to recognize the individual’s construction of the self; that all must at once be free and equal can only be resolved by pursuing a freedom in sameness. An African can be British, a man can be a woman, Dionysus can be the Blood of Christ, a presidential candidate can be black, Indian, Canadian, and have a Southern accent somehow all at once. The lines between things are embarrassing holdovers from a time before one could dare to dream that the self was a project of pure will, untethered to anything.
By way of example, one can observe the campaign on the part of liberals and the left in the US to define traditional positions on family life and sexuality as “weird.” Believing as they do that there is no fixed nature, and that morality is a social construct imposed by the dominant, they see no contradiction in advancing ideas cooked up yesterday in a faculty seminar as normalcy, and ideas that extend through antiquity as somehow not merely wrong, but bizarre. The appeal is to emotion, which is why some have characterized it as effeminate; right or wrong matter less than that the idea in question is gross, and no one wants to be the kind of strong individual who doesn’t agree with everyone else. The point is not to convince so much as appeal to sentiments of appeal and revulsion as needed, the way toothpaste is sold.
They immediately fall into line, like ants, but without the productive labor.
All of this is liberalism in its current, purest iteration, neoliberalism. Its antecedents are varied, however. Many rivers apart from Locke and Mill flow into it. From Marxism comes the notion of base and superstructure, that if material conditions are such, certain results will ensue. In suitably mutated form, one can imagine that a checklist of parts acquired or lost through surgery make for a new whole. There is also postmodernism, the belief that meaning is an illusion, a construction of the powerful foisted on those weaker, the legacy of left-Nietzscheanism by way of Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, etc. There is the concurrent idea, formulated most succinctly by Baudrillard, that reality is mediated such that approaching truth is impossible, that only the simulacra of the real, if such can be said to exist, can be apprehended. The modern condition is anomie, the promise of the validity of whatever you happen to desire bound up with the notion that nothing is real in its own right and thus no grounds for choosing one thing over the other. Choice is both infinite reality and illusion all at once.
The people behind the Olympic opening show plainly believe some version of all of this. They created a spectacle that made sense only as a referent; it could not stand on its own as a cultural product without drawing meaning from something grounded in an older understanding of truth. Caught out and reeling from losing sponsorships (and the money to fund further degeneracy) they simple decided, without missing a beat, that their project now simply meant something else. Properly mediated, with the correct words and imagery to support the new story in place, the same work was recontextualized into something other than what it had been. And who is to say otherwise?
The really satanic thing about all of this is not so much the direct blasphemy (which is awful) but the pretense to control over truth itself evinced by those in power. The crudity and vacuousness of the project unwisely focuses the attention of those who might otherwise shrug at lies from above, but the lies are the greater evil, the real blasphemy that no reality exists beyond constructs and illusions. They stand before the King of Kings, and like Pilate ask mockingly, “what is truth?” By dismissing the possibility outright, or worse, presuming to be its authors, they deny themselves, and those who follow them, the reality of an authentic encounter with Truth itself, or rather Himself.
The result of ignoring nature, or denying it, or attempting to do away with it, or to control it beyond reason, is, in the end, paradoxically to invite its power to most fully assert itself. A society that makes its law “do as thou wilt” must necessarily ask, “well, what ought I wilt?” Without any end in mind, without any telos for life, with no proper object upon which to fix reason, one must necessarily devolve to the satisfaction of emotion and appetite. That is to say, one must live like an animal. As C. S. Lewis put it, “man’s final conquest of nature is the abolition of man.”
So what should the Christian response be to all of this? Much was written in light of these provocations along the lines of “Christians have gotten weak for these people to be doing this.” It must be borne in mind that for all the talk of laicism, for all the hand-wringing about the collapse of faith in the West, for all the triumphalism of the tricoleur, they still have to fight. Their ancestors thought they had buried the Church in the Revolution. They did what they always do, what their descendants still do- they murdered clergy, burned churches, banned the cross, and promulgated their new, rational faith to create the new, rational man they planned on the ruin of the old. They lost, and they rot in hell, and their great-grandchildren- no longer austere lawyers and bull-necked Napoleonic field marshals, but mincing, obese degenerates- have to carry on the struggle, while simultaneously burdened with both diabetes and social diseases.
“But they would never do that to the Muslims!” That’s true. The Islamic community the liberals and leftists invited into France to help dismantle Christendom are prone to react with violence to outrages visited upon their faith. But then, that’s part of the charm. The left especially loves and fetishizes violence, especially getting a masochistic thrill at the spectacle of the Third World lashing out. It’s not really fear that stays their mockery; the left likes Islam. Not the doctrines or the lifestyle so much, but the idea that they are a force of undoing, that they serve as a cultural acid bath dissolving the West around them. A church is a reminder of the power of their own past. A mosque is a symbol of that hold being broken. The liberals and the left know who their real enemy is, and it’s not the people who vote for their parties.
No Christian should react to any of this with violence. Yes, I’m aware of the quote from St. John Chrysostom, but the overall tendency among the Church Fathers is to rebuke evil by bearing witness to the truth. We should bear witness to this truth firstly in our own lives before we demand others comply with it. Many people are eager to make others suffer who would not themselves bear inconvenience, much less suffer themselves. If France has fallen away from Christianity, it’s not the fault of gays or Muslims or pretentious philosophers, but rather the community of the faithful who have not been lights to the world. I take the blame for this to the extent that those around me are not compelled by my own example, and I hope to be better so as to inspire the same in others.
A more permanent solution, one more in keeping with tradition, would involve abandoning the liberalism that now characterizes the West in favor of returning to the political and social structures under which Christianity flourished. France abandoned its king, which led to a horrible war, then abandoned another king, which led to another horrible war, then got rid of kings altogether, which led to the two worst wars it ever faced and the current cultural wasteland. Perhaps on those grounds the people would reconsider. King Louis XX waits in exile in Spain. Deus Vult?
as a Christian, I must admit that I wasn’t really offended by these latest pranks. as an artist, I found the greater sin to be one of the actual presentation. Tacky, boring, pretentious and entirely predictable. the only aspect that was remotely controversial was the setting. if this display had passed by on a gay pride float in San Fransisco, would anyone have even noticed? perhaps the worst part was they couldn’t even defend their original intent once called out. cowards.
you would think that with all the balls on that stage, that someone could have actually used them in the end.
Kudos for tracking down the smoking gun social media post. These days things like that get memory-holed aggressively, so bookmarking them is important.
Beyond that, the Gell-Mann Amnesia of the people who take these people at their word is matched only by the cognitive dissonance of believing in Noble Lying, but also believing every ideologically-flattering claim from your fellow ideologues.