Human history is defined by the clash between good and evil, not ‘right’ and ‘left’
Katherine Bennett• February 23, 2025
It is a truth universally acknowledged that people may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. If that wasn’t true for most of human history, it is certainly true now.
And so it was that at the ARC conference this week, packed with giants from the political, economic and scientific “right”, comedian Konstantin Kissin was the name on everyone’s lips by lunchtime on day three.
The boy done good. He made us laugh. But, he, like so many others, missed the fact (and it is a fact) that nothing builds civilisation up so well as adoring the crucified Christ.
“The success we enjoy,” he said, “was not created by a more advanced civilisation, it was achieved by our grandparents and their grandparents before them…”. At this he stops, as if old people popped into existence at some point with a set of broadly liberal values.
The battle is not between left vs right, woke vs not woke, capitalism vs communism – it is always and everywhere a battle between good and evil. But Christ won.
Jesus the Christ defeated sin and death, and it is only by His wounds that we are healed. Therefore, when Christ is rejected, civilisation crumbles. This is as clear and simple a fact as night follows day. Any “solution” which does not recognise this is bound to fail.
And for all the talk at ARC of Judaeo Christian Western culture it is the point of incarnation which separates Jews and Christians that matters. We are said to share 60 per cent of our DNA with a banana, just one chromosome separates males from females, and almost 99 per cent of our DNA is shared with chimps. The devil is in the details, and the details matter.
Rejecting the crucified Christ is unavoidably destructive. Evil is, as St Augustine proposed, a privation of good. It cannot create, it has no identity of its own. It can only parody, pervert, destroy, poison and pollute.
We have seen evil at work in destroying that which the Church builds up.
Marriage, given by God as the embryo of the family, from which is birthed a nation, is reduced to sexual gratification thus opening the way for homosexual “marriage” and murderous reproductive technologies.
Universities, created by the Church as places to seek truth, have become dangerous places to send a child, and where the privilege of indoctrination comes at the cost of a lifetime enslavement to debt. Add to this an oppressive tax burden and you have a perfect recipe for adult children unable to flourish. These are some of the myriad problems that arise when the role of the state is elevated above God.
“How is taxing a man more than God wants not defrauding the labour of his wage” asks exorcist Fr Chad Ripperger. “Where did the government get the idea that it was entitled to more than 10 per cent of your income? God doesn’t even want more than 10 per cent. Why do they think they’re better than God?”
It is a sign, Fr Ripperger concludes, that “they are doing too much and are into too many things…The state shouldn’t be having all these programmes…funding this and funding that, because every time they do that they have to take money from someone else to do it and that’s defrauding the labour of his wage”.
On education there were some signs of hope, with recognition that, if there is to be a better future, education must be recovered from the ideologues and placed under Christ.
What the ancients saw (baptised by the Church in the work of Aquinas) was that the world is the self-communication of the creator and that what sets us on a path of wisdom is a desire to respond.
But this vision has been distorted at the hands of the enemy who found a useful tool in Descartes. Cartesian rationalism which animates the French revolution, severs us from external reality and produces a different kind of inward looking man. The world – no longer the self communication of the creator – simply becomes a place of use. Before too long, people also become objects of use, and the purpose of education moves from an eternal telos to a worldly focus on learning skills which make us useful to our future masters.
The crisis we now face hundreds of years on is a fight for survival against the machine. Once you trade in utility and train a child for use, that child will not be able to keep up with technology and will find himself constantly competing in a game he cannot win. What the education panel at ARC saw was the paradox that if we form children to flourish in accordance with their created givenness, we end up with a very useful person.
Every problem discussed at ARC could be traced to its origin in the dethroning of Christ as King. Multiculturalism, Immigration, High Taxation, Environmentalism, scientism, loss of wonder and the supernatural.
Our attitude towards the Logos incarnate defines every man’s identity, the cosmic implications of rejecting Christ are the visible chaos with which the ARC grapples.
2000 years ago we were presented with a choice between two messianic figures. Barabbas (meaning son of the father) stood in opposition to Jesus. He figures as a sort of “alter ego”, making the same claim, but understood in a completely different way. The people chose Barrabas.
Today we are presented with two messianic vehicles, the ARC of responsible citizenship or the ARK of the Church. Which one will we choose today?
(Photo credit should read NOAH SEELAM/AFP via Getty Images)