Southern Comfort

The codes of chivalry, so strong in the South, were originally formed in the Medieval Era. They were an attempt to place limits on the barbarity of war and began as a reaction to the breakdown of civilization and the excessive brutality of the Dark Ages. For many centuries wars were fought between kings by their opposing armies arrayed in uniform on battlefields with little or no civilian involvement aside from the tax burden armies required and the occasional siege of a city. Napoleon Bonaparte knocked one of the struts out from under the ancient rules of warfare by having his army feed off the land, that is to say, they were required to steel food and provisions from the civilian population. In that way, he could maneuver his men quickly because they were no longer dependant on cumbersome, slow moving supply lines. It also put enemy civilians under severe stress thereby increasing the pressure on them to force surrender.

The American Southerner held to chivalrous standards, both in private (codes of honor for gentlemen) and in war as a united political entity, the Confederacy. The South was utterly unprepared for the total war waged on her by Generals Grant and Sherman. The orders from General Lee were “no plunder at any cost.” Even while Confederate soldiers starved, they refused to take anything from the civilian populace. By contrast, Sherman plundered, burned and systematically reduced the South to penury. General Lee, on the other hand, is said to have apologized to a Pennsylvania farmwife for his men having trampled her flower beds. He had a nobler conception of war. This is not to imply that no atrocities were committed by Southerners, but in general, the further from the heart of Dixie, the more likely those things were to occur as they did in Kansas.

Today, warfare has completely reverted to the concept of total war. “Unconditional surrender,” so appalling to the sensibility of Winston Churchill, is now imposed on our enemies as a matter of course. In truth this denotes a marked failure of civilization, a failure to constrain war. Total, annihilationist wars loom large in our future.

In the end, the South was not so appalled by the fact that the North won the war, but by how it won. The word Yankee when used in the South is synonymous with barbarian to this day. It is ironic, then, that the South is regarded as backward, ignorant and uncivilized by what we think of as the intelligentsia of the world. Witness
Interviewer: I was speaking to Richard Dawkins and I asked him about the difference between Christianity and Islam and he said that “Islam hasn’t tamed its ways in the same way as Christianity has.” 

The ideal of equality under the law most certainly derives from the Judeo-Christian concept that all souls have equal standing before God. The fast encroaching evolutionary psychology movement would destroy that ideal completely. For if men are nothing more than their DNA-produced bodies, then certainly, men may be sorted and justice differentiated accordingly. The attempt by evolutionary theorists to distance themselves from the implications of their ideas reveals the true nature of those ideas. And despite claims made by various humanists, it is religionists who form the bulwark against the brave new world held in store for us by these men who claim to be portraying the cold, hard truth, but who, at the same time, take great pains to obscure the totalitarian nightmare they present (see Signorelli, “
For the Southern believer, the reality of God is so overwhelmingly apparent that perhaps he is less than convincing when attempting to counter the logical sophistries presented in objection. The numerous complex arguments unbelievers marshal today against the existence of God often overwhelm and sometimes succeed in confusing believers who feel no real need to defend what to them is a self-evident proposition.

Reverence for the “word of God” is a highly important aspect of Southern religious orthodoxy. Modern discussions of fundamentalism usually overlook the fact that belief in a revealed knowledge is the essence of religion in its older sense. The necessity of having some form of knowledge that will stand above the welter of earthly change and bear witness that God is superior to accident led Thomas Aquinas to establish his famous dichotomy, which teaches that whereas some things may be learned through investigation and the exercise of the reasoning powers, others must be given or “revealed” by God. Man cannot live under a settled dispensation if the postulates of his existence must be continually revised in accordance with knowledge furnished by a nature filled with contingencies. Nature is a vast unknown; in the science of nature there are constantly appearing emergencies which, if allowed to affect spiritual and moral verities, would destroy them by rendering them dubious, tentative and conflicting. It is therefore imperative in the eyes of the older religionists that man have for guidance in this life a body of knowledge to which the facts of natural discovery are either subordinate or irrelevant. This body is the “rock of ages,” firm in the vast sea of human passion and fallibility. Moral truth is not something which can be altered every time science widens its field of induction. If moral philosophy must wait upon natural philosophy, all moral judgments become temporary, relative, and lacking in those sanctions which alone make them effective, as the more perspicacious of Southern theologians pointed out. And though no people were more ignorant of the Summa Theologica than the little-read and inarticulate Southern rural population, the dualism of Aquinas supports their instinctive opposition to scientific monism, one of the last of the South’s medieval heritages. Both are responses to the same need. Ill-equipped intellectually, the South established a habit of being right in the wrong way, or correct with a poor set of reasons. Then, as now, this heritage explains its dogged adherence to what is taught “in the Book,” and its indifference to empirical disproofs.[1]

There is something very comforting in the knowledge that there remains a people, united not by race or nationality, but by faith; who believe in the truth revealed by the prophets of old and who know through experience what it is to love God and one’s neighbor; who walk humbly with the revealed verities of existence and who know that some things lay beyond argument. The South is a region of soft breezes and hard clay. Though she may be hated and reviled by those who know not what they do, I will continue to draw comfort from the both the hard and the soft of Southern sensibility.

 

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Rebecca Bynum contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.