Interview with Joseph Pearce on Ideology

Putting People Into Ideological Camps To Program Them

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “We are in for a very turbulent future.  Professor Joseph Pearce is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  I just read this in recent days here, that is the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum.  In it, Leo XIII declares that modernity is the sum total of all heresies.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  . . . the super-racist who went into the church and murdered the people in South Carolina as an ultimate act of hatred and racism, but somehow this has morphed into a campaign against a flag.  Instead of a campaign against the dehumanizing act of racism, right?

Joseph Pearce:  What we find now is the media and the liberal politicians are herding people into ideological camps.  They don’t want people to think.  You mentioned history.  Of course, they don’t want people to understand or know anything about history because a knowledge of the past empowers and liberates.  Without that, George Orwell’s 1984 made that perfectly clear.  Big brother wants history to be wiped out and rewritten.  So the more ignorant they can keep us about history and about the nuances that really govern these ideas, the more they like it.  They want us to have to be ideologically brainwashed and just follow the herd and follow the mob.  You used the word mob.  We’re descending from something which was a democracy into effectively mob rule, which is controlled by big government and big media.

Mike:  That is a great summary.  The first sentence was the politicians want people herded into ideological camps.  That is precisely correct.  I’m mad at myself now that I didn’t think of that.

Pearce:  I’m glad I added something else to your armory, anyway.

Mike:  That’s exactly it.  [mocking] “You’re in this ideological camp that says that’s a symbol of the Old South, therefore it must be racist, therefore you must be racist, therefore you want people to be racist and you want people to kill other people.”  The chain of events here – I don’t know if you’ve studied this, Professor Pearce.

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From what I have read of you, I would assume – again, that would probably be something stupid – that somewhere along the line you have taken courses in scholastic or Thomistic philosophy or philosophia perennis.  When I read your piece yesterday, I’m reading it going – as I said, with a little nod towards G K Chesterton, I’m thinking to myself: He’s logically destroying this argument.  There is no logic to it.  My friend, Brother André Marie from the St. Augustine Center put it like this last night.  He said: Mike, what’s basically happening here is you have people who are letting their emotions dictate the conditions that their reason is acting upon.  Do you think Brother André Marie was onto something there?

Pearce:  Absolutely.  One thing about the history of Catholicism is there’s always been the assistance of the inexplicable connection to faith and reason.  It’s an indissoluble bond.  The problem with relativism, which is really a product of the romanticism of the end of the 18^th century, is that now we allow our feelings, our emotions to actually govern our heads.  That’s very dangerous.  First, it’s very dangerous for us because we end up doing reckless things because we’re following our passions and not following our reason.  Also, it allows for the manipulators of the media and the manipulators in big government to herd us by playing with our emotions.  We’ve become mindless people that are just toyed with.  Our anger is stirred up or our pity is stirred up.  It’s all about emotion and reason is left out of the equation altogether.  We’re living in very irrational times.  Irrational times invariably end up with horrible things.  We’ve seen it with the French Revolution.  We’ve seen it with the Nazis.  We’ve seen it with the Communists.  Once reason is left behind and it’s all about ideology and feeling, we’re in for a very turbulent future.

Mike:  We are in for a very turbulent future.  Professor Joseph Pearce is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  I just read this in recent days here, that is the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum.  In it, Leo XIII declares that modernity is the sum total of all heresies.  We seem to be capable now, Professor, of resurrecting any and all manner of heresy and applying them to our daily lives and to situations like this tragedy that unfolded in Charleston, South Carolina.  You said that these things lead to horrible consequences.  Is it a concern that the Church and the ecclesiastical authority is probably, in this day and age, impotent to stop – you can’t stop all these heresies at once, I guess is my point.

Pearce:  First of all, I think we need to realize that we’re not going to make a Heaven on Earth.  The city of God is not to be found here amongst the city of man.  In many respects, the Church, and Christianity as an historical force, has always been impotent against the power of the world.  If you look at history, the important thing is that the Church and the presence of Christianity has always been the beacon of civilization in a world which otherwise would be completely and utterly barbaric.  Basically you can measure the health of any generation in the last 2,000 years of human history by the extent to which Christianity is listened to and is a force in society.  The less it’s listened to, the more barbaric we become.

There’s always this give and take, this war basically between Christ and the world that Christ himself told us about.  Let’s not forget that the scene was set, if you like, the unfolding of [unintelligible] with the crucifixion of Christ.  The resurrection of Christ, Christ is not resurrected and then comes back as a ruler that smashes his enemies.  He points to the city of God beyond the world of man.  I think the big thing here is not so much that the Church does not have the power we might want it to have, but the Church, if you like, conforms to the world.  Many of these heresies, these varieties of heresies are modernism.  Basically each of us as individuals, and the Church, of course, has a choice between following the Holy Spirit or the spirit of the age.  Modernism has always basically followed the spirit of the age to the detriment of the Holy Spirit.  That’s the choice all of us have at all times, to be worldly or to be otherworldly, to follow the teachings of Christ or to follow the fads of our own particular ethos and time.

Mike:  The left is so good at this, the progressives.  I tend to think, as I get a little older and study these things a little more intently, especially with an ecclesiastical eye, that most of these activities are governed by the prince of the world, by Satan.  He’s getting his way.

Pearce:  Absolutely.  Up to a point, Mike, he always has.  He’s the prince of this world.  He’s the prince of light.  He’s the prince of darkness.  It’s all about pride.  Satan’s fall, Adam and Eve’s fall, our own fall – we all fall at various times – is when we put ourselves first before God.  That’s the sin of pride.  That’s basically what liberalism is doing.  It’s all about you and your life and your feelings and what makes you feel good today, even though what makes you feel good today is going to screw your life up next year, because it’s all about instant gratification.  Pride is always destructive and self-destructive.

Mike:  In the piece about neo-racism, of course, you write about neo-Nazis, but you also write about neo-nutzis.  What’s the difference between a neo-Nazi and a neo-nutzi?

Pearce:  None whatsoever.  The reason I used that phrase – I, as you may or may not know, have a past with a white supremacist organization in England before my conversion to Catholicism.  I understand where that young man is coming from.  It’s a dangerous place, and, of course, it’s had very disastrous, tragic ramifications there.  I know where he’s coming from.  I’m now living in South Carolina.  I fly the South Carolina flag outside my house.  I don’t fly the Confederate flag, and the reason I don’t fly the Confederate flag is because it is open to misunderstanding.  You fly the Confederate flag outside your house and people do think you’re a racist, even if you’re not.  I fly the South Carolina flag and that’s my way of stating my belief in states’ rights and my belief in power being devolved away from this big brother of a federal government in DC without any ramifications of racism.  I think we have to be creative in the way that we respond in insisting on effective states’ rights without playing the game where they can make use [unintelligible] on us to, if you like, make us pariahs.

Mike:  I responded to someone on my Facebook page who was accusing me of deflecting.  [mocking] “You don’t want to answer the question about the flag and how it can be used for this, that, and the other.”  I said: I’m not deflecting on the flag per se, because I never said and I would never claim that there aren’t nutjobs, or neo-nutzis as you call them, out there who have not, unfortunately, seized upon it and used it for their own vile, very selfish, and I would say diabolical purposes.  That’s not at issue here and never has been.  What I would say is, you better be very careful with your purge.  There are hundreds of thousands of markers that mark the graves of the dead that were shot, killed, bayoneted, died of malaria or whatever in battle from 1861 to 1865.  Those tombs, many of them, are adorned with that flag.  Are you going to go and chisel it off of there?  What does that say about your reverence for the dead, professor?

Pearce:  Let me say one thing as well.  We can all play that game.  Lots of bad things have been done under the present United States flag that we should be ashamed of.  Lots of things have been done under the Union Jack, the flag of the country I come from, that we should be ashamed of.  If we go and point the finger of scorn at something that has been done in the name of our country or in the name of a flag, we’d be putting all flags down.

Mike:  We certainly would be pulling the Old Glory flag down, that’s for certain.  There’s something else that’s going on here.  As people area being herded, as you term it, and I think that’s appropriate, into these ideological camps, young people are also being herded into ideological camps that just happen to be camps that do not pursue the intellectual life at all or even acknowledge that there is an intellectual life.  There is no truth.  You cannot know it.  Therefore, you shouldn’t tell anyone else.  This is the old philosophical heresy of bourgeois, one of the first sophist that was a philosopher.  I’m getting a little deep into the weeds here, but this is what results.  Shakespeare is gone.  You wrote about this woman who said, [mocking] “We need to get rid of Shakespeare.  He’s a white guy.  He has nothing to say to us.”  Yes, he does!

Pearce:  Right.  It’s only to do with him being white.  We read Shakespeare because he’s good.  He’s arguably the greatest writer that ever lived, not because he’s white.  That was my whole point about this neo-racism, to be racially obsessed that nothing should be taken seriously because it’s written by someone who happens to be white – bearing in mind by the way that the most pernicious thing about racism is to hate or show contempt for something for which they have no power or control, in other words the color of their skin.  That runs both ways.  To say that we shouldn’t read Shakespeare because he had the misfortune of being born with the wrong color of skin is absolutely outrageous.  You read Shakespeare because it teaches us priceless lessons about who we are as human beings.

Mike:  Shakespeare, as you pointed out, was a persecuted soul at the time.

Pearce:  He basically was a member, as a Catholic, and Queen Elizabeth I of England, was being persecuted.  He knew friends were being put to death and sent to prison and fined extortionately for the practice of their religion.  In other words, they were persecuted far worse than any ethnic minority in the United States today that is being persecuted.  Therefore, for someone to stand up and basically point the finger of scorn to him because he was born with the wrong color of skin adds racial insult to the injury he already suffered in his life.

Mike:  I ran across this in doing a little research for a movie that I’m writing.  In 1755, in order to assume command of the Virginia militia and the Virginia army, George Washington was asked to sign a pledge.  It was on a piece of parchment and it has survived.  You can actually buy it.  It’s for sale on a collector’s website.  I’ll read you what the pledge is.

[reading]

George Washington’s Rare Anti-Catholic Test Oath, Taken before being Appointed Colonel and Commander in Chief of all Virginia Forces . . .

. . . May 22, 1754 . . .

Most Roman Catholics in colonial America lived in Maryland, which had been founded by the Catholic Calvert family as a sanctuary for all Christians . . . [Mike: He goes into a little bit of the history behind this.]

On various occasions, Virginians were required to take the (anti-Catholic) “test oath” like this one to hold a state-related office. The signatures on the right hand column seem to belong to the early months of 1754 . . .

“there is no Transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lords supper or in the elements of Bread and wine…”

[end reading]

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Mike:  This was an anti-Catholic oath.  I as a Roman Catholic, and you as a Roman Catholic, we could say today – and with the actions that happened with the Catholics being chased out of Virginia, with them not being allowed to hold elected offices in Maryland, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, of course, being the first.  We could say that this was just ribald, unacceptable anti-Catholic bigotry.  It happened under the flag of the State of Virginia.  I remain outraged and offended by it today.  I think that flag is a symbol against my Lord and his transubstantiation in the Holy Eucharist.  I’m offended by it.  I’m going to say I’m not going to do that.  I’m going to forgive and say that Washington was just misguided, and is other actions – perhaps he was trying to make amends.  My point is, we all have something that we can be outraged about.

Pearce:  I think you’ve actually touched a very important point, Mike.  What we see is that our enemies, these heretical relativists and secular fundamentalists, are full of hatred.  You and I can make the same claims of historical persecution for our faith, for our religion.  We do forgive.  We do realize that history puts people in odd places and strange places and strange things happen in certain circumstances.  We understand history.  We’re not ignorant.  We’re not ruled by our emotions.  Of course, the root emotion at the heart of secular fundamentalism is hatred, which is why I talked about neo-racism.  Those people are full of hatred.  We are far more able to forgive those that have struck us on the cheek and turned the other cheek in history than they are, who basically insist on everybody being herded into an ideological camp, and if you disagree with them, you are demonized, or at the rate we’re going, imprisoned.

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Mike:  This is what the forces of darkness, as you said when they herd you into an ideological camp, this is what they want to do.  If they can make you hate someone else for something that you really have had nothing to do with – I had nothing to do with the flying of that particular flag.  I wasn’t around then.  I certainly didn’t fight under it.  I think I have an ancestor or two that fought under it and actually died from one of the Louisiana companies.  I didn’t have anything to do with it.  There’s really nothing I can do about it.  I will tell you this.  I’m not going to go chisel if off of their tombstones.

Pearce:  The whole idea that somehow you should feel guilty for the actions of those that say you have the wrong color skin, and that you should feel some collective guilt for every crime that’s allegedly done by people with that color of skin in the past before you were born, is quite frankly logically absurd.  Again, most of the so-called crimes that were done were not done because the people were white.  They were done for the good old-fashioned reason of seeking power and money and wealth and greed and selfishness.  That was why the bad things were done.  Slavery wasn’t done because the slaveholders were white and the people slaving and trading slaves were blacks and Arabs and white.  It was done for money.  It was done for profit.  It was done for power.  These are the issues.  Race is not the issue here.  They are racially obsessed.  Somehow or other, we should all feel guilty because we were unfortunate enough to be born with the wrong color of skin.

End Mike Church Show Transcript