Josef Pieper, German philosopher in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, 1904 — 1997.

How Josef Pieper prepared me for the Age of Covid.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

Just a few days back, I was lunching with a friend.  Over a plate of meatballs and spaghetti, he remarked how radically his professional direction and political orientation had changed over the years 2020 to 2022, the Covid ‘pandemic’ era.

He went on to say, “There are people I once trusted and respected who I can no longer trust and respect; and there are people I once distrusted who I have learned to respect.”

I know what he meant – and there are a great many others who today could say much the same of their own experiences, sharpened (or shattered) by the Covid time.

People who once eyed one another across great divides – measured by politics or philosophy, culture or religion, much education or little, profession or trade — have been drawn unexpectedly together by the force of events revolutionary in character.

There should be no need to restate these but, to provide my present remarks with a firmer context, I’ll quote an earlier summation of the crisis as I saw it:

“ ..  the mass destruction of Australian small business; the vast increase in the debt incurred by Federal and State governments; de facto compulsory vaccination with an experimental drug; the refusal of effective early treatments to those infected by the Wuhan virus; the abandonment of national health decision-making to an unelected, globalist health bureaucracy; the failure of the federal government to exercise its responsibility for quarantine and to uphold the free movement of our people across state borders; and, finally, and most dishonestly, enabling, via its vaccine certification system, the imposition of vaccine passports by the State and Territory governments.”

As it happened, the “imposition of vaccine passports” within Australia broke down in practice. We cannot, however, be confident that, with the same political class in power today that gave us the Covid ‘crisis’ back then, another emergency of whatever kind might not be used to enforce similar measures of social control.

So it was late last year (November 18 — 19), that I attended in Sydney the inaugural conference of Australians for Science and Freedom – an initiative whose first movers were a Melbourne GP, Dr Arief Farid, and a Sydney Professor of Economics (UNSW), Gigi Foster.

The event was a striking illustration of the phenomenon that my lunch companion described.  People who had been — to hijack a phrase – ‘mugged by the Covid reality’ had converged to try to make sense of what had happened and to consider what might be done to counter in the future the forces that had driven us over the Covid brink.

There were at the conference Labor voters and Liberal; socialists, libertarians and conservatives; religious believers and agnostics: a remarkable collection of people who, without The Virus, might not have crossed the (sometimes real, often imagined) no man’s lands between them.

Whether the mutual respect and courteous argument displayed over those few days (and subsequently) will weather the “storm of events” remains to be seen.  Should it do so, then we could be witnessing the green shoots of a new (and unusual) vanguard movement with potentially significant, if by no means immediate, political implications.

The storm

Speaking of a “storm of events”, the convulsions of our time are not limited to the Covid Thing.  Its importance, nevertheless, lies in that it has alerted and crystallised out networks of potential new leaders ready to contemplate insights into our roiling days of a deeper than usual kind.

Apropos of which, the American émigré writer now living in Hungary, Rod Dreher, has painted an incandescent image of the present American moment and its place in the frame of near events. Dreher was commenting upon the June 27 debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump and its implications.  To give you the ‘feel’ of Dreher’s burning words the better, I’ll quote him at length:

“The June 27 Atlanta debate with Donald Trump destroyed the lie told by the White House, the Democrats, and their lackeys in the news media: that ageing, enfeebled Joe Biden was fit for office. …

“Among the lessons learned is that the White House and its media lapdogs lied to the American people for the entirety of the Biden presidency, about the president’s mental and physical state. Anything to stop Trump, right?

“This did not happen in a vacuum. We all know how the Establishment lied about Russiagate. We know how they misled the nation about Covid. We know about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which they all said was Russian disinformation, though that was a lie. We know that they pretended to be on the side of science, while privately pushing for throwing science aside to reform medical standards, for the sake of permitting the sexual mutilation, via chemicals and surgery, of little children. We know their disgusting double standards on the “mostly peaceful” BLM riots, and January 6, as well. We know they punish with cancellation conservatives whom they call bigots, while tolerating open antisemitic, anti-Asian, and anti-white bigotry on college campuses. On and on the list goes.

“And now we are supposed to believe the defenestration of Joe Biden, who as late as last week was angrily protesting his intention to stay in the race, was legitimate? It’s absurd. This lot are the defenders of democracy? It’s a sick joke. And if America’s foreign allies and enemies don’t know this, they are fools.

“I don’t believe they are fools …

“It is sometimes said that God loves drunks, fools, and the United States of America. It had better be true. The most powerful nation in the world has a ruling class that fewer and fewer Americans believe in. The “shining city on a hill” is a Potemkin village. If it had been otherwise, Donald Trump would never have been elected in 2016. Whatever one thinks of Trump, he has exposed the hypocrisies, the weaknesses, and the self-serving phoniness of the ruling class, both Democrats and Republicans.”  (‘Biden Drama Reveals Ruling Class With Power, but No Authority,” by Rod Dreher , The European Conservative, July 22, 2024.)

An American writer living in Budapest doesn’t suddenly become an Hungarian.  He writes about the country that is deep within him — and fittingly so at this astonishing juncture in which a curiously fractured, agonised USA exercises over its empire an increasingly baleful influence.

As an eager part of this imperium, Australia lies under the same glooming cloud and many of the forces at work within American society create translated effects here within our own.

In the case of Covid, we even surpassed America with our internationally recognised fanaticism about masking up, locking down and vaxing. Honourable street protesters aside, we proved a people more gullible, less sturdy and more compliant than the Americans to whom we have long imagined ourselves superior. So, I think we need to take Dreher’s point seriously.  Which is?

Well, Dreher’s message boils down to a noun, a verb and a phrase: “lie”;
“lied”; “Potemkin village”.

Maybe we should think about them and what they mean.

Pieper prep

I am unsure now of the timing, but it was a few years before Covid, that I re-read, after a lapse of some 20 years, the German philosopher Josef Pieper’s essay Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power. (Translated by Lothar Krauth; Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992; 54 pp.)

It was not that, as a result, I entered our “Time of Troubles” armed with Pieper’s most striking sentences at the forefront of my memory. What I gained, however, from that re-encounter was a forewarning: a singular percept of falsehood as an enduring and adversarial presence within our public life.

What was it that Pieper had written that so impressed me?  As I look back over his text, these words now strike me as pivotal:  “ … we can only talk about reality, nothing else.”

“ … we can only talk about reality, nothing else.”

Pieper moves from this arresting Platonic insight to argue that, if one does not speak about what is real, then one is speaking (in the sense of communicating) about nothing at all.  And, if one persists in speaking about this nothing, then others will be obliged, ultimately, to ask, what is the motive behind it?

Pieper answers that the person to whom such speech is directed “… ceases to be my partner [in communication]; he is no longer a fellow subject. Rather, he has become for me an object to be manipulated, possibly to be dominated, to be handled and controlled.”

And, developing this thought, he goes on to point out how …

“Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralised with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes.  Public discourse itself, separated from the standard of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of endemic proneness and vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant.”

Well, we have all been living through precisely that:

“ … an atmosphere of endemic […] vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant.”

What is more, this heavily weighted “atmosphere” lowers over us still and, as Dreher points out, exercises a menacing pressure at every point where discernment of the good and the true is called for.

Whether it be over wars abroad or “culture wars” at home, questions of public order or civil disobedience, the family traditionally understood or the claimed fluidity of sexual identity, the primacy of the individual or the State in health care, the fitness of national leaders for office or the merit of their policies: whatever great questions are engaged, the scope for free discussion is compassed about by “false narratives” (lies, in other words) to which submission is demanded.

Which brings me back to those “green shoots” and the possible emergence of a countervailing “vanguard”.

To survive and to be of good effect, any such movement needs less an organisation and a reform agenda than it does a resolute decision for virtue: that is, for a great deal of patience and mutual forbearance – and, as importantly, for a copy of Pieper’s essay pocketed close over the heart.

This blog is a revised version of an article originally published by “Australians for Science & Freedom” here.