He is a stupid educator who does not know that a boy ashamed of his father will be a base man.
The line I chose as the epigraph to this article was extracted from a little book I read several years ago titled, The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War Between the States (c. 1907). If memory serves, the line itself was penned by none other than Dr. Hunter McGuire; and if you know much of anything about the leading men in the Confederate army, you probably already know that Dr. McGuire served under General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson as his personal surgeon. If you did not know that before, you do now.
Now, I have no intention herein to preach to anyone, much less to call anyone out by name. Don’t, therefore, get the wrong impression by what you are about to read. If, however, your ears start to heat up and little beads of sweat begin to form on your forehead as you read, it might well be that your conscience is trying to tell you it is high time that you get in your closet and on your knees and beg forgiveness of your maker, The Lord of Hosts, for violating one of His commands intended for your and your peoples’ greatest good, “that you may live long in the land the Lord your God has given you.“
As persons who know me well will most assuredly attest, I have been saying for many years that the commandment (written in stone, and reiterated numerous times throughout Holy Writ, both Old and New Testaments!) to honor your father and mother leaves no wiggle room to wriggle your way out of it. If you happen to be one of those persons so-inclined, and/or so-inclined to teach your children so (we all know such persons exist, and if you happen to be one of them, you certainly know who you are), I strongly urge you to resist the temptation at all costs henceforward, lest your lamp be put out in deep darkness. -Pr. 20:20
Christian tradition (which of course is two-thousand years old, and not some “Johnny-come-lately” innovation discovered by some silly woman who thinks Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman character is the greatest representation of “biblical womanhood” evah) and the Church Fathers have also always taught that the command to honor one’s father and mother extends beyond one’s biological parents, reaching to one’s grandparents, his great-grandparents, and so on up the line. You can find this teaching both in the Catholic and the Protestant traditions dating as far back as the Catholic and Protestant traditions began.
I repeat that I’m not here to preach to anyone, but the idea to write this article came to me when I recently had occasion to discuss this matter of honoring one’s forbears, in obedience to the first commandment with promise, with a couple of the writers over at the Orthosphere. Namely, Prof. Smith and Bonald. Below is copied and pasted what I initially wrote in the thread:
To Prof. Smith & Bonald
Prof. Smith wrote:
I cannot say that hard reaction is a winning strategy, but its refusal to apologize is a huge advantage over contrite conservatism. A reactionary never apologizes for his ancestors and is outraged by any penitent poltroon who tries to apologize for him. I mean outraged to the point where he seriously considers breaking the laws against duels of honor.
And,
I don’t think a sin is more egregious when that sin is very common. I might say it is less egregious. For example, individual abortions are not made worse because abortions are common and legal, and one might say that a young woman who obtains an abortion is less culpable because it is harder for her to understand what she is doing. If slaveholding is a sin, an individual slaveholder is not more reprehensible because many of his neighbors are also slaveholders.
Bonald wrote:
[R]enouncing one’s ancestors is the grossest imaginable act of impiety. It is also shockingly uncharitable to one’s own children, since it deprives them of a healthy reverence for their past and condemns them to live their whole lives as low moral status simply for being white. It is, therefore, a deeply evil thing to do.
Thank you gentlemen for expressing my own sentiments concerning this subject so precisely. Within the little circles I generally fly in and in which I have at least some small influence, the thoughts and opinions of you two men (as well as all the other contributors here) are highly respected. I can write, and have written on numerous occasions before, precisely (or, almost precisely) the sentiments contained in the quoted extracts above, but my ‘unilaterally’ doing so is never as ‘weighty’ as when I have the likes of you two gentlemen to back me up, even when your backing me up is unknowing and unintentional on your parts. So I thank y’all for that.
Prof. Smith:
I sent you an item (an essay) via email that I wrote for my kids at their private blog some months back concerning this very subject of impiety towards one’s ancestors, and, as you rightly iterate, the righteous anger it should engender in us when some self-righteous lefty (or, “Compassionate Conservative” – same thing) presumes to apologize in our steads. First of all, I understand the history of antebellum slavery in this country better than most, and, as such, am not ashamed in the least of my ancestors (the Stewarts and the Pruitts) who were in fact slaveholders. Some writer at the Abbeville Institute wrote sometime back that (and I paraphrase) ‘lefties make a mistake in assuming we on the right don’t understand that slavery was evil; that we on the right in fact do understand that slavery was evil.’ Well, he can speak for himself; I certainly do not know that slavery was evil, and that my slaveholding ancestors were therefore evil men and women. With friends like that particular writer, who needs enemies, right?
Bonald:
Your quote above brought to mind something I read several years back in a little book titled, The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War Between the States (c. 1899). Here is a small excerpt from a longer passage in the book pertinent to what you wrote concerning the effect impiety towards one’s ancestors has on one’s children and grandchildren:
Wiser statesmen have known with Macaulay, that “a people not proud of the deeds of a noble ancestry will never do anything worthy to be remembered by posterity.” He is a stupid educator who does not know that a boy ashamed of his father will be a base man. …
I certainly agree that (s)he is a “stupid educator” who *does not know* that a boy ashamed of his father will be a base man, but I also believe there exists the smart set of teachers who are also malevolent actors/educators who in fact are wise to this, and teach the children under their charge to hate their ancestors and their deeds for this very reason and purpose. Indeed, the public schools (and more private schools than one might think as well) have been systematically turning the hearts of the children under their charge against their fathers for many decades as a matter of course. Which of course is a big part of the reason I would never *voluntarily* allow any of my kids to attend the public schools. Indeed, I’d be more likely to allow the state to use them as guinea pigs for testing the COVID vaccine than I would to destroy their souls in the public schools. But that ain’t ever going to happen either, not at least so long as I have a say in the matter. So there ya go.
When I wrote to Bonald that I would be more likely (much more likely, in point of fact) to allow the state to use my kids as guinea pigs to “test” the COVID vaccine for their age set(s), than to allow the public schools to destroy their souls, I was hinting around at another biblical principle and Christian tradition that seems to have gotten lost on Christians sometime in the last century and a half or so. Namely, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul? As others have noted before me, “education is useless without the Bible”; but as Dr. Dabney makes plain in several of his treatises, not only is education useless without the Bible, it is in fact dangerous.
I personally have never been one to *knowingly and with malice aforethought* dishonor my forbears, nor to teach men so. Quite the contrary, in point of fact. This does not mean I count myself better than anyone; I’m simply making the point that, while I have my own faults and shortcomings like everyone else, dishonoring my ancestors does not, and never has been, one of them. Again, the Holy Scriptures have a thing or two to say about that as well (see e.g., Romans chs. I & II, as well as Pr. ch. 6, etc.). As I wrote to Prof. Smith in an email this past weekend, “I should mention that I was never taught to hate my ancestors; what I was taught (by omission) concerning them was essentially to take a position of indifference towards them.” Indifference towards your ancestors is bordering on dishonoring their memories, however.
I further wrote to Prof. Smith that, “I am thankful that I was inspired 14 or 15 months ago to begin doing serious genealogy research up and down the various branches of our family tree; the more I learn about, and the better I thereby get to know, these people and the struggles they faced on a daily basis, the more I like and admire them, and, therefore, the more reason I have to honor their blessed memories.” It matters not to me that some of them were slaveholders. My goodness, why would it?! Indeed, I have explained numerous times before that the fact that some of them were tasked with the difficult job of owning and managing slaves is all the more reason they should be honored in my humble estimation.
The piece of propaganda you see above is a good case in point of what I’m talking about. If you aren’t incensed by the message underlying the actual words contained in that meme, well, you are either completely ignorant of true history, and/or, you are one whose lamp is likely on the verge of being put out in deep darkness. The reason your forbears and mine were Democrats is because the Republican party in America – “The Party of Lincoln” – was, from its inception, the party of radicalism; of innovation for the sake of it, and with no concern whatever of the long-term implications of adopting radical positions and imposing them on the whole country, in direct violation of the principles of the Constitution. The Democrat Party was, by contrast, the Conservative party in the country at that time in the nation’s history. We live in an era when there is no “conservative” party; there is only radicalism (Democrat Party), and its lesser cousin, liberalism (Republican Party).
But, the problem you should have with the meme above-posted in any case is that it is subtly encouraging you to dishonor the memory of your honorable, God-fearing ancestors. It’s doing the Devil’s work, in other words; it is encouraging all who see it to, as I said above, violate one of God’s direct commands to his people, written in stone as it is, and with no way out of it other than sin against your people and their God. And lest we forget, the Devil always comes to us disguised as an angel of light, as in that despicable meme.
My advice to you if you happen to be one of those persons who think there is some justification or other for dishonoring the memory of your ancestors, whether it be by way of passing around that infamous meme with a favorable nod and such like, or of more openly condemning them, is to humble thyself before the God of all creation and beg forgiveness for the wrong you’ve done the memory of your people, without whom you would not exist. And, get off your self-righteous high-horse; try to put yourself in their shoes if you dare and ask yourself whether you could have, or would have, done any better than they did under similar circumstances. I’ve asked myself many times that question over the years, and especially since I got into the hard-core genealogy stuff; and the answer that invariably imposes itself upon me is that I could *not* have done better, and very likely would have done worse.
I promised early on in this little article that I had no intention of preaching to anyone. The sermon has nevertheless now come to a close, to your great relief, I’m sure. It’s ‘back to the old grind’ for yours truly, specifically the genealogy grind, wherein I will, no doubt, find more cause to revere and honor my honorable ancestors. I would advise that you too seriously consider taking up the same vocation, and for the several reasons aforementioned. Indifference towards your ancestors is sin against their memories and disobedience to the God of all Creation.
Righteousness exalts a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people.
See y’all on the flipside.
What if your parents are degenerate boomers… or even worse shitlib degenerate boomers? Are you supposed to grit your teeth and honor them? As for slavery, well obviously that is evil. Not in a Marxist (((ORIGINAL WHITE SIN))) way but in the sense that greedy farmers have caused the European peoples alot of trouble because of greed. They are the reason why blacks lurk in the Caribbean, why America has a black problem, even to this day they use mestizos as a cheap form of labor whilst virtue signalling at church… a great way to plant a dagger in your kins back whilst also getting rich.
As I’ve pointed out many many times, it was the African *slave trade* that was evil, not slavery itself. And our Southern forbears had nothing to do with the African slave trade business. And, again, I challenge you to come up with a better alternative than our forbears were faced with as per enslaving these poor unfortunates on these shores. You think they could have, in good conscience, simply refused to “land” and cast them into the sea as the Bostonians did with the tea? Moreover, you think they could have *safely* set them free on these shores? C’mon, man, surely you are smarter than that!
As to your initial question: a good rule to follow is, as my mother used to teach me during my formative years, “if you ain’t got anything good to say about somebody, best not say anything at all. The principle applies doubly for your blood ancestors!
P.S. Apparently I’m not currently receiving email notifications for comments added to my articles, as per the usual. That being the case, I did not see your comment until just a few minutes ago. My sincere apologies for the delay in responding, but *never* on behalf of my honorable ancestors.
“…in the sense that greedy farmers have caused the European peoples alot of trouble because of greed.”
How about “…in the sense that hysterical abolitionists have caused the European peoples alot of trouble because of their hyper-righteous hysteria.”
Assume you eat meat and drink milk. Assume an animal rights group like PETA holds all the beef and dairy farmers at gunpoint while turning their cows loose. Are you going to blame the “greedy capitalist” farmers for brining those pesky cows to North America?
Bill Hill:
Precisely, sir. Thanks for the thoughtful comment! And, apologies to you as well for neglecting to attend to your comments.
I would hope I’d have been an abolitionist if I’d lived in antebellum times, but I likely wouldn’t have been. I live right now and although I try not to, sometimes I have little choice but to buy goods made in China, highly likely to have been made with slave labor.
My mother taught me that her father was wrong about segregation. She also taught me to honor her father for the good things he did. (He died before she ever thought of marrying.) My mother is still a great Southern lady and I honor her for teaching me to honor my ancestors.
My great great great grandfather lived in a border area of Southern Appalachia. While his sons were fighting the War Between the States, the Yankees invaded and actually marched across his farm. He was so outraged that he hid out in the woods to fight them guerilla style. I am descended from a man with the absolutely insane courage to take on the Union Army SINGLEHANDEDLY. I am not at all ashamed of him, or his sons. I disagree with them, disagree vehemently, but damn, I am so proud of them all for their courage and many, MANY other virtues, and if the left wants me to be ashamed, they’ll always disappointed and disapproving, period, end of story.
Dear “Jane”:
I’m in disagreemenr with your first thoughts in your comment, but I mostly agree with everything else you wrote. I know enough about wild-eyed abolitionism to know I would never have been a part of it in its day, nor would, in mine, have hoped to have been a part of it.
I have written a bunch of stuff as per my slave-holding ancestors for my kids at their private blog, particularly about my Pruitt ancestors, but also about the Stewarts. That is all really private, family stuff, but I will consider editing some of those essays for broader public consumption here at ID.
I tend to doubt, with all due respect to your honored mother that your grandfather was wrong about segregation; he might have been unable to cope with what was happening at the time, but he was very likely more far-seeing than your mom was, and therefore knew it was a bad idea all around.
Pure fire brother! When someone tells me they love the South, but our ancestors did not do everything right, I challenge them and make them defend the charges. The answers are always false. Our ancestors did nothing wrong, they were not evil.
There are a good many denominations in Dixie that are cracking apart for breaking the 5th, 9th and 1st Commandments.
Thoroughly enjoyed this article.
I take the point of Dr. McGuire’s statement, but what of boys who *should* be ashamed of their fathers? I myself was blessed with godly, devout Christian parents, but many of my friends, and a significant portion of my generation and the succeeding generation, were born to deadbeat dads who impregnated mom and the ran off because he knew she marry Uncle Sam through the welfare system and be more or less taken care of financially. What about people whose fathers are actively participating in our cultural genocide, Quislings and carpetbaggers? I must admit the question has some personal relevance to me, because my fiancee’s father has made a real mess of things parentally, at least as far as his two youngest go, and is himself advocating forcefully for me and my fiancee to just get the jab. Our conscience-based objections he dismisses as foolish idealism. When she refuses to work for Amazon because they hate us and want to destroy us, he insists she’s cherry-picking isolated incidents and should be willing to violate her conscience for the sake of mammon. He declares socialism and the welfare state to be “unideal,” but then in the next breath advises that we take advantage of public health clinics, WIC, and Obamacare because they exist and everybody else is using them – apparently “all my friends are doing it” is a legitimate excuse in such cases. He also used the word “charity” to describe the Federal welfare system, which means he fundamentally misunderstands or otherwise fails to comprehend the moral problem involved. I am trying to be patient with the man, but when every piece of advice out of his mouth is arrogant, foolish, or downright idiotic (to say nothing of downright immoral), I find it increasingly difficult to bite my tongue. My fiancee refrains from criticising him except in the mildest of terms, and then only immediately after he had attempted to browbeat her into doing what he wants, or chastising her for refusing to violate her conscience. And the man claims to be a follower of Christ!
Hello Earl. Please believe me when I say that I fully understand the dilemma you face concerning your misinformed and misguided future FiL. My wife and I have been married 35 years this past June, and her parents (and mine) were/are of the Boomer generation. Which is probably enough said if you harbored any doubts as to my veracity on the point of fully understanding your dilemma. However, you wrote:
Or, how about this one:
“The way I look at it is this – I’m a better person than most who receive it, therefore I deserve it more.”
I’ve gotten that one a hundred times or more during the course of my adult life. Which of course, and as you iterate, isn’t the point even if it is true that you are “better” and therefore “more deserving” than the common ‘riff raff’ who receive various forms of public assistance. As I’ve been at pains to explain at least as many times and probably more, human beings seem uniquely capable of justifying (to their own minds and satisfaction) any and all actions on their parts given enough time and “thought.” Your future FiL seems to be no exception to that rule.
I have a close female relative who used to try to shame me for refusing to even consider taking “public assistance” by way of exclaiming, especially in the presence of fellow ‘welfare cases,’ “wait!, I almost forgot, you’re *too good* to take public assistance!” To which I would always reply, “yes, you are right, I am ‘too good’. And, moreover, so long as I am able-bodied and of a sound mind, I will remain ‘too good’ in your words to receive public assistance. But by “too good,” what you really mean is “too faithful” to the biblical mandate, “by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread all the days of thy life,” and, “if a man will not work, neither shall he eat,” etc. I should mention that we’re also speaking of someone who soaked up all the bullshit like a sponge during her formative years implying, when not explicitly stating, e.g. that American blacks got their (White) surnames by way of Southern slave-holders raping their female slaves and having (mulatto) babies by them. Which of course is utter nonsense; it took me years to finally convince her that the post-war Yankee “Freedman’s Bureau” saw to it that blacks took the surnames of their former masters; that it had nothing whatever to do with assumptions of illicit sexual trysts between slave-holder and slave. And this has always, since they initiated that process during the first “Reconstruction,” served their malevolent purposes well, as witnessed by the decades’-long belief of my female relative and millions of others like her who have yet to be otherwise informed.
One of my (female) cousins was explaining to me why she initiated divorce proceedings against her husband some years back. The context was that her entire family of origin (brothers, sisters, parents) disagreed vehemently with her because of course they all understood the broader implications (how it would affect the children, her future and so on). Her justification to me was that “I don’t care what they say or think; they have no idea what I had to put up with married to him.” Which I assume is true as far as it goes, but it is also and simply one more case of a person justifying the unjustifiable to her own mind and personal satisfaction. Anyone with half a brain knows her ex-husband could just as licitly make the same claim about being married to her, but he wasn’t the one who wanted a divorce. You know of course what the Bible has to say about that as well – she has her reward, and God is not mocked in any case.
All of that said, I reckon you will always, so long as the both of you live, find cause and good reason to disagree with your future FiL. While he yet lived, my FiL and I were often in disagreement with one another, especially on subjects like public assistance programs, so called “social workers” in the system, public schooling and those sorts of things. I nevertheless always respected him, and even greatly admired him in certain respects (and still do) because he managed, as one example among several I could share with you, to raise four well-adjusted girls who adored him and continue to adore his memory. My wife knows now that her father was misinformed and misguided (at times, severely so) on certain subjects, but she nevertheless honors his memory and the fact that he was, overall, a good and loving father to his girls, a good provider for their family, a good husband to her mother and well-liked and well-respected by all who knew him. In other words, she chooses, as do I, to place emphasis on his good qualities, and to recognize the fact that, while he was certainly misguided in certain respects, he was also a product of his times and not quite discerning enough to realize that “uncle Sam” is not the benevolent caregiver he makes himself out to be. In a very real sense, I am glad he (my FiL) is no longer with us; if he were yet living, there is no doubt to my mind that “uncle Sam” and his demonic minions would be doing all in their power to use COVID Madness to drive a wedge between us and destroy our family unity, as he and his minions have done for decades with regard to the slavery question, successfully driving a wedge between our generations and those of our honorable, God-fearing forbears.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!