1. “How does God feel about it?”, or Feminine morality in dystopia

[This is a follow-up to my last thread. I respect the community in this reddit. I'm looking for feed-back from real men, not pat answers from stay-at-home dads or platitudes from frustrated divorced women.]

[edit: I broke it down into parts so it's more readable.]

[edit: Please disregard the title. This is a post about piracy, scrupulosity, the tyranny of Big State and Big Business and so on. The "feminine morality" thing is not the main thing at all. I wrote the text laboriously, but came up with the title when I was pasting it here on the spur of the moment. If mods could rename it to "Piracy and Scrupulosity Part 2" I'd appreciate it.]

 

Smuggling games from Paraguay

It is common for Brazilians to buy video games from semi-legal stores that bring the games illegally from neighboring Paraguay, where taxation is less heavy. And they buy these illegally smuggled games not because they are devious rascals bereft of all mercy and justice, but because normal humans have an instinct of thrift. They know the guy has brought them from Paraguay illegally, but they don’t make a big deal out of it. It is not generally seen as an immoral thing to do. Maybe this is the Latin American “anarchist ethos” Kuehnelt-Leddihn speaks of in one of his books. It seems that Catholicism promotes a more relaxed attitude towards certain matters. But I was raised in an Evangelical home, I attended an Evangelical church and studied at an Evangelical school. So I didn’t get to absorb this ethos very deeply, it would seem.

The vendor himself, the guy who brings the game from Paraguay and sells it in Brazil, is doing an eminently moral thing. He is working hard. He has a familly to provide for. He is travelling far in order to buy the games for cheaper, so that he can offer his wares at a more competitive price. He sells them at a competitive price not because of inordinate greed, but because he runs a small business and that is the only way he can stay afloat in the market. You can go to the big name stores, I mean franchises with hundreds of stores across the country, and buy the same game for a significantly higher price. These stores can afford to sell them for higher prices. They get massive benefits from the government. I’m talking those promiscuous, illegal, “behind the scenes” kinds of benefits.

I think this is a common thing in Big State, semi-Socialistic countries like Brazil. Small businesses are oppressed by heavy taxation and fiddly regulations, while big businessess strike unofficial deals with the government. I run a small business myself; I know what it’s like. What we have is rule by Big State and Big Business. Small businesses croak under taxes and regulations while the State lavishes big businesses with the money it extracts from the economy by force. To quote the old melodramatic adage, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. I think that is universally true; and it seems to be more true in semi-socialist countries like Brazil than in affluent, less regulated countries like America.

And yet I suppose that, at face value, it would be more “legal” of me, the Christian consumer, to buy the game for a higher price at the big name store than it would be to buy it for a more economical price from the guy who brought it illegally from Paraguay. The crimes the big name store is enmeshed in are distant, abstract, out of my sight; the cashiers working there certainly haven’t ilegally smuggled any of those products into the store. But if I go to the small, modest store, with its dingy facilities and its poor criminal owner at his desk, eager to sell his slightly cheaper wares, well I don’t know. Feels weird. I don’t feel at peace here. What would Jesus do?

 

"How does God feel about this?"

Let's say there are two way of looking at this.

The first is exemplified by the question “How does God feel about it?” That’s the sentimental perspective. That’s how a woman looks at things. And don’t women tend to think God’s feelings exactly mirror their own? Don’t they often fashion a “God” in their minds after their own womanly feelings? The woman looks at the dingy store and feels unease; whereas at the well-lit shopping mall store, with its prosperous middle-class customers and its resplendent impeccably scrubbed floors, with its clean-faced uniformed cashiers, none of them vicious criminal smugglers, it feels right. It just feels right. She feels at peace. And if that’s how she feels about it surely that is also how God feels about it? So this is the store where my hypothetical woman will buy the game. For her son, let’s say. She will pay an additional thirty dollars for the game, but hey, it’s just thirty dollars. (Do I need to point out that women also tend to be more irresponsible with budgets?)

The second way of looking at it is logically. It’s looking at it from all possible angles, coldly measuring all the relevant facts. It’s how St. Thomas Aquinas would look at the matter. St. Thomas who, according to Chesterton, did not lose his virility in being a celibate monk. There’s a creepy femininity to the question “How does God feel about it?” It’s a femininity typical of Evangelicalism. The right question is “Is it objectively moral?” It is the logical question; it is the masculine question. In fact, post-modern philosophers would have us believe there is a relationship between the Logos and the phallus, and there might well be. These same philosophers also dream of a utopia where both reason and the patriarchy have been overthrown; I think many Evangelical ministers would eagerly join hands with these wonderful dreamers.

In short, my position is that it is less immoral to buy the game from the criminal smuggling vendor. His crime is of the type that results in a small fine at worst, and he does it to pay the bills and feed his family. He is not stealing, he is not cheating anyone, he is not maiming anyone. He is disobeying the law, yes; he is disobeying the law of a meddling and parasitic Big State so that he may compete with state-protected Big Business. In light of this, do you still think he is a very bad boy?

In fact, come to think of it, the father of a good friend owns a store very much like that. He has been bringing wares from Paraguay for decades, sometimes “illegally” smuggling them. He is a hard-working, church-going man; his is a church-going family. Do you think he is a very bad man for his “crimes”? Would you tell me so, straight-faced, without stuttering, without whimpering, looking me in the eye?

My point is that the sanctity of legality is a fiction. The sanctity of the government is a fiction.

 

Actual sins

If I sleep with the local greengrocer’s wife, that makes me a bad man. If I steal his oranges and he finds out about it, he will no longer be very fond of me. If in an inexplicable fit of rage I physically assault him, word will spread that I am a dangerous man.

If I steal and maim others, if I commit adultery, if I commit all the sins that are forbidden in all the old religious texts and in all advanced civilizations, I will be a bad Christian. I will have a bad reputation. I will tarnish the name of Christ. Because these are actual sins, sins that actually disrupt the social order, and that deservedly give a bad reputation to the one who commits them.

But if I tell the greengrocer that I’m reading a pirated copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on my Kindle, he will not think anything of it. If I tell him I have the full Beach Boys discography as illegally downloaded mp3s on my hard-drive, he will look quizzically at me, wondering why I am sharing my musical preferences with him, but I doubt very much that he will be gripped by the sinister sense that he is in the presence of a great sinner.

In fact, if I told him instead that I make a point of only buying legal copies of things, whether they be mp3 files or movies or digital books, and if I further share with him that this reduces the media that is available to me to 24% of what would otherwise be the case, I am quite sure he would regard me as a little soft in the head.

Nowhere in the Bible, or in any old sacred scripture or code of law, do we find anything like the words “Thou shalt not make for thyself unauthorized copies of texts, nor shalt thou perform a public rendition of a song without due authorization from the copyright holder”, etc. One does not find any semblance of this kind of thing in the Bible because those would be unnatural laws. And unnatural laws, contrary to natural laws, tend to thwart the natural functioning of an economy.

One of the key insights of philosopher Eric Voegelin was that once humanity does away with its inherited morality, the morality inscribed in the revelatory literature of its creeds (the Ten Commandments, for instance), chaos ensues. The sanctity of private property, implied by the commandment against theft (again, I mean actual theft), may seem like an arbitrary law. But do away with it and you get the tyrannical and limitless rule of the State. You get, worst case scenario, the well-known horrors of Stalinism.

The greengrocer himself knows how expensive things are in our country. And as the owner of a small business himself, he knows how high the taxes we pay are. Being a sane man, a man with a sense of proportions, he knows that piracy is more often than not a necessity, that it is a natural and understandable aspect of our “make do” culture, a culture that thrives under the shadow of Big State and its excessive and invasive regulations. (Indeed the metaphor of something blooming amidst the debris, the idea of life thriving in unlikely circumstances, keeps occurring to me when I think about piracy.)

 

White neuroticism and the law

The “make do” culture Brazilians are renowned for (the jeitinho brasileiro) exists because to comply with all the regulations would be insanity. Indeed, come to think of it, is the scrupulous law-abiding inclination of Swedes, an inclination that seems to a great degree “genetic”, doing them any favors? The way some Swedish men eagerly welcome the ominous swarms of Muslim refugees into their country — is that not a picture of the neurotically law-abiding Swede, heeding the law even as his lawfulness leads him into destruction?

There is much talk of “white pathological altruism”. But there also exists a thing we might call “white pathological legalism”. A friend of mine remarked that when he was in Austria he was struck by the sight of male pedestrians, in the middle of the night, refusing to cross the street when the light was red, even if there were no cars in sight. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, remarking on the sickly scrupulosity of German Lutherans, opined that a Catholic Italian mafia-boy probably has a greater chance of salvation than those Lutherans.

Back to the greengrocer. If I commit the actual sins I described, if I commit adultery and theft against him and if I physically assault him, I will be, to put it mildly, a “bad example”. I will be doing those things Paul advises us against in Romans 13. My unlawfulness will be notorious. Perhaps the police will be alerted, as it usually is when actual crimes, crimes of the kind that truly disrupt the social order, are committed. I will stand trial; and I’m pretty sure the jury of my peers will not have a very good opinion of me upon hearing about my adultery, my stealing, my act of violence. I will probably have to pay a fine or something of the sort. If to my crescendo of iniquity I had added the final and climactic sin of murdering the poor man, I would probably end up in prison. And if it was publicly known that I am Christian, if my Christianity was very much a part of my identity, then certainly, in doing these things, I would indeed, as I have said, be tarnishing the name of Christ.

 

Scrupulosity destroys talent

But I don’t know of a single Brazilian who has been fined or arrested for downloading illegal mp3s, movies, books or games, and all the best and brightest Brazilians I know pirate a lot. And they would not be among the best and brightest had they not pirated a lot.

Many a respectable musical erudition in my generation has only blossomed thanks to peer-to-peer softwares like Soulseek.

Our best literary authors, I’m talking guys whose ages range from 20 to 50, whose books are critically acclaimed, who have won respectable awards, have no qualms about pirating books. I know this because I read their blogs and I follow them on Twitter. They will sometimes, for instance, share links to torrents containing illegal copies of literary works. They will make tweets in favor of piracy. I’m not making this up. They are proud of their pirate ethos. And again, I am talking about our best writers. Indeed, if I may take this further, it would seem that there is a correlation between high IQ and a positive attitude towards piracy. It would seem that it is the people who are highly sane who do not succumb to a petty neurotic attitude.

Do you think these writers’ talents would have blossomed if they had been neurotically scrupulous about piracy? I am talking writers who are the pride of my nation. Writers whose books are reviewed on periodicals. Writers who win awards.

Is it not true, then, that a nation’s very laws, if neurotically heeded, can signify the death of its precious budding talents?

As for the musical eruditions that have blossomed thanks to Soulseek. I know this because I follow some Brazilian musicians on Twitter. I’m talking some of our best musicians. This group of guys I am talking about happen to be Catholic. And they use Soulseek copiously. And I don’t think there is a single living soul that thinks less of them because they pirate. I don’t think there is a single living soul that saw the Catholic Church in a positive light until they came upon these rascally Christian pirates, upon which this poor outside observer could no longer bear to think of the Church as a veritable community of saints. Because it’s just not a thing. Everyone pirates. No one makes a big deal out of it. And when all is considered I don’t see why they should. I’m sure it is no different in China or in Eastern Europe. Third worlders can’t afford the luxury of legal scrupulosity. It’s an American luxury, like McMansions and SUVs.