The Art of Mockery

... in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King)

One of the crudest weapons in any age of sacrilege is mockery. It is no surprise then, in a society that has become inordinately profane, that the Sacred often finds itself the subject of vicious mockery.

The main purpose of mockery is domination. It is a means to forcefully bend favour towards one party at the expense of its opponent’s dignity. It is, in other words, the technique of the playground bully. In Britain, the media uses this technique to good effect by employing columnists and comedians who attempt to ridicule commonly held beliefs that oppose those of the liberal governing classes out of the minds of the people. This is why institutions such as the Royal Family and the Catholic Church are so frequently the subject of mockery on its vast array of tasteless ‘panel shows’ and opinion pieces. As unpleasant and domineering as this technique of bullying and mockery is, it is very effective in swaying the opinions of those who are rather too easily led by media and 'ethical' trends.

Mockery can also be used as a means of persuasion in less surreptitious circumstances, too. One of the most noticeable things about atheists and secularists, for instance, is that their arguments against religion often resort to mockery. In a sneering, aggressive manner, they frequently resort to openly and viciously attacking their opponents in a very personal and abusive manner, accusing them of low intelligence, or equating their beliefs in sophisticated philosophical tenets regarding the First Form and Truth to belief in childhood whimsies. What they wish to do here is make those who they disagree with them concede by bullying and intimidating them. Apart from highlighting a degree of arrogance and unpleasantness, this technique more than anything communicates how weak the central arguments of their cause must really be.

There is something about the approach of such people that is far too personal and derisive to be coming from the detached, ‘scientific’ and rational angle that is so widely claimed but so rarely demonstrated. The fact that such arguments so seldom come from a state of emotional clarity lead me to believe that there must be a certain degree of pain and frustration behind them. These people are, it seems, angry with the idea of God, which, in a dark world, they see as nothing more than wishful thinking. Their denial of His existence ultimately has its roots in despair, then. And despair very often turns into great anger. And this is why the denial of God so readily lends itself to mockery, sacrilege and desecration.

In his essay Beauty, Roger Scruton explains that the inability of man to possess the Beauty that he perceives in the world (of which God is the ultimate source) leads to his desire to defile it. Faced with something that he feels he has no ability to attain, man instead seeks to trample upon what is True and Beautiful. It is for such reasons that woman’s great beauty, for example, has become cheapened, becoming a tool used to sell products by reeling men in through their lust and women in through their envy. Related to this objectification is the objectification of sex. Our society has become one that views sex in the same way as it views money – as an end in its own right, in which sacrilege and abuse are permissible, rather than as a means of producing something more important and sacred for the good of mankind.

It is an increasing trend within secularism to treat anything that is Holy as an object of desecration, and the example of the desecration of sex reflects the sacrilege apparent in our society at many other levels. We see it not only in the persecution directed towards the cross by secularists of an iconoclastic persuasion, but also in the falling away of Christians into forms of faith that have been greatly diluted with the corrupt waters of the sacrilegious zeitgeist. In terms of religious tradition, men who turn their eyes away from Truth and alter the long standing tenets of orthodoxy in accordance to their own predilections and weaknesses come not to enlightenment but the darkness of heresy and apostasy. The liberalism and permissiveness of modern society, and all of the moral evils that have come with it, are ultimately the evolution of the heresy that began with the Protestant schism of the 16th Century.

The absence of society’s spiritual focus, which was shattered by the apostate sects of Protestantism, have led us, ultimately, to desolation. As a culture, we have followed Luther’s lead by completely altering our truths to suit ourselves, when we should be completely altering ourselves to become closer to the Truth. And this is why what is Sacred has become the subject of so much mockery in art, entertainment and society at large. With foundations of falsehood instead of Truth, society has become corrupt from the bottom up; and so, behaviours and beliefs once scorned as base and bestial are now lauded as perfectly acceptable. If our current rate of decay continues it may very well become the case that soon, the few taboos that we have left will, like so many others, become mere ‘issues of consent’ rather than issues of accordance with moral decency and natural law.

People cannot find peace or rest in their lonely godless worlds. All they find in the idols that they create, whether they be sexuality, wealth or fame, are gateways to their own unending private hells. This is why it is of grave importance that objective and universal standards of morality are restored in society. Left to his own devices man will pull the structure of the world down around his ears. And in the rubble of society he will, despite his increased material comfort, find himself lost in a greater darkness.