Is Everything Permitted Now Among Our Elites?

Ivan Was Right in The Brothers Karamazov

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich; 15th century angels in St. Wendreda’s, March; painting of a philosopher (by Rembrandt?); Bottom row: Chichester Cathedral; the King’s Head, Aylesbury, Cromwell’s Civil War base; John Clare’s cottage, Helpston, Cambs. All photos by Garry Craig Powell, except the Rembrandt (source unknown.)

In The Brothers Karamazov, which should be compulsory reading, Ivan famously declares, ‘If there is no God, then everything is permitted.’ As scientific materialism and atheism became respectable in intellectual circles in the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky understood that in such a world men would lose their moral compass, and that once morality became subjective, and relative, in effect it would cease to exist. Until quite recently, however imperfectly human beings behaved in the West, we did at least have a consensus about how we ought to behave: the New Testament provided us with clear ethical guidelines for our conduct. But in modernity, and particularly in the post-modern world, where most intellectuals agree that there is no such thing as objective truth—an intellectually incoherent point of view, since that is itself a truth statement—it all depends on your perspective, and morality is no more than a narrative imposed by those in power. I am in partial agreement with this. I disagree that there is no objective truth, but it is true that if you hold this position, as most people in our ruling elites do, then morality simply becomes a matter for our masters to decide, and inevitably, they have different standards for themselves and everyone else. Simply put, everything is permitted for them, and yet everyone else’s lives are tightly controlled. If we had any doubt about this, the release of the Epstein files demonstrates it very clearly. To the rich, the privileged, and the powerful, the most immoral behaviour was not merely permissible, but encouraged. As one British aristocrat said on the BBC, if you weren’t in the Epstein files, you were a loser.

I don’t propose to discuss the Epstein files and those named in them in detail, partly because others have done so, and partly because many of the allegations are uncorroborated, although they suggest guilt strongly, particularly for those who continued to be friendly with Epstein, and even fawn upon him, after his conviction for sex trafficking and paedophilia. Another reason not to become too focussed on the scandal is that because it involves world leaders and celebrities, it inevitably has a salacious and scurrilous interest, but we can be sure that once a few convenient scapegoats can be punished—Mandelson, Andrew, Bill Gates, and so on—it will all be forgotten, in the mainstream media, and maybe by the public too. And yet, if one delves deeper, one finds that far greater scandals are being ignored, and for the same reasons, namely that ‘everything is permitted’ to certain people. In Britain, despite the fact that Muslim ‘grooming gangs’ raped tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of underage English girls, and continue to do so, with impunity, and unquestionably with the collusion of the police force (who not only refused to press charges against many of these criminals, but actually apologised to them when requests were made by members of the public to do so) and civil servants and politicians, Rupert Lowe’s enquiry is not being covered by any of the major newspapers, or the so-called ‘national’ broadcaster, the BBC. Why not? Clearly because in the topsy-turvy world of the educated globalist elite, even to suggest that any Muslim may have committed a crime is to indict oneself as racist, and to suggest that there is a systematic and incredibly brutal exploitation of British children is simply anathema. Most of the Muslim rapists are still unpunished, not to mention the entire communities which knew about their crimes and were complicit them. Like the elite capitalist ‘aristocrats’ who visited Epstein’s island, they are immune to justice.

In Britain, Starmer, the prime minister, is known as ‘two-tier Keir’ for allowing different judicial treatment of Muslims and immigrants, on the one hand, and natives on the other (and perhaps for the first time in history, blatantly favouring the non-natives over his own people.) But in fact it’s clear that there are several tiers, with our royal and technocratic overlords enjoying privileges akin to those of the imperial family in Roman times. Ever since the New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens declared that religion was unnecessary for establishing ethics, and that humanism could take its place, we have heard the arguments that in the utopia the Left proclaim they will bring about, there will be justice, equality, compassion, care for the vulnerable, and freedom. (In fact, they co-opted Christian values, without acknowledging it.) But consider how the elites behave, as opposed to how they speak. Dawkins himself had an association with Epstein, though I am not suggesting that he himself committed any crimes. Still, like Chomsky, Larry Summers, and other intellectuals, he at least must have known what sort of man he was. Starmer may not have known Epstein but he knew very well that Mandelson was a close friend of his, and still appointed him as British ambassador to the US—not in spite of that knowledge, but because of it, because he understood that Mandelson’s ease in moving in that corrupt world would prove of benefit to the country. But at what price? Starmer himself visits China, a country with well-documented, barbaric human rights abuses, and not only kowtows to Xi Jinping (who treats him with contempt, by the way) but actually permits the Chinese to open a super-embassy in London, which will certainly be a headquarters for espionage and other nefarious influence. These are not the good men they claim to be: they are quite as amoral as any Homeric warrior king.

In fact, the mistaken belief (and might I add, the quasi-religious, irrational belief) that the universe is a mere mechanism, and that we are nothing but random conglomerates of atoms, leads inevitably to moral bankruptcy. If there is no design in the universe, and no meaning in our lives, then many people, particularly those powerful enough to escape scrutiny, will live purely for pleasure, as sociopaths do, without caring about what damage they inflict on other people or creatures. I am not saying that the Left has a monopoly of this attitude, by the way: it’s evident in many on the Right too, though I think the Left have been more hypocritical in hiding it. I can’t give an in-depth rationale for believing in God here—for that, I would refer you to the works of CS Lewis, as a starting point—but I will just mention, for the purposes of this essay, that Dostoyevsky has been proven right, over and over again, in the twentieth century and ours. Is there a way back to a moral centre? Of course there is, and at least for us, in the West, it has to be Christianity. My gallery of photos this week is meant to suggest a time when we were not so lost. Caspar David Friedrich, the great German Romantic painter, was a committed Christian, and frequently uses Christian symbolism in his paintings. Cromwell, a man I disapprove of in many ways, since he was a fanatical and joyless Puritan, and cruel, particularly in Ireland, was at least motivated by a genuine belief in Christ; John Clare, the farm labourer Romantic poet who lost his mind, was as much in awe of the divine as were the fifteenth century carpenters who carved the angels at St Wendreda’s Church in March, or the stonemasons who created the heaven-aspiring arches of Chichester Cathedral, or the medieval philosophers and alchemists. None of these men were atheists. Indeed, atheism would have seemed incomprehensible to them. Modern man thinks he is more ‘advanced’ than these—more advanced than Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, the geniuses who began the scientific revolution, who all believed in God—but how does he live? Are we more moral, are we better men and women? I think not.