I have to confess that, as a child sports fan, I didn’t show the loyalty that Craig Chamberlain regularly shows with regard to his home team. That, for my own home of Toronto in Canada, makes me fairly abnormal, as the regular Torontonian shows up loyally to cheer for the hometown Maple Leafs hockey club.

A Laschian would cluck at this point and note that I was a child contibutant to a breakdown in local pride. By cheering for a nearby American team, I was encouraging footloose and opportunistic behavior in my own home city – turncoating.

But what that analysis omits is that that fannish flight over the border was really a protest directed against the owner of the team, a man who was later sent to jail (briefly) for tax evasion and, after, became notorious as a gossip- sheet fop. Obviously, “the parents” had had a hidden hand in this.

The above is an indication of how civility breaks down. If it were only a matter of concluding that the louts got loose, and that men of the better sort need only ride out the spitting put upon their foreheads for the time it takes to put the Skid Row element back in its place, then restoring civility would be easy. All you would need is patience and a thick skin.

It’s another matter when the loutish type gains authority. Then, complications arise.

To take from the above example: what do you do if you’re a prominent citizen and the kind of loyalty you show as a matter of course is publicly interpreted by a badger in a three-piece suit as “I know him; he knows me; we’re both in good with each other” – especially if such a supposed friendship is being invoked in preparation for a set-up? Every man with a head knows that a person deficient in ethics sees the opposite as a threat, and will eventually “deal” with them.

There are two basic responses to this that I’m familiar with, depending upon which side of the Reformation your ancestors were on. The Protestant type finds the issue relatively simple: “that man which claims to be a friend of mine is no good, so I have to step out of character and ‘deal with’ him first. God will be my judge in this matter.” This might have been the reasoning that G. Gordon Liddy used.

A Roman Catholic, the church to which I belong, has a different approach. The corrupt are seen as a kind of savage, so the usual RC missionary strategy comes into play. Just as Christ’s similarities with and differences to the crocodile god are discussed in the heathen part of Africa; just as the Holy Trinity was compared to the Druidic custom of “three-headed” gods and this comparison being sealed into place by the use of the shamrock by St. Patrick in old Ireland - so the corrupt are examined, taken seriously, their remaining virtues found, and are slowly and gently led to the path of Christ (meaning “pacified.”)

These two approaches differ sufficiently that (nowadays, anyway) you can treat them as two different models of community maintenance. The drawbacks of the RC model are obvious to any Protestant type, who would immediately point to the corruption running rampant – louts on stilts – during the time immediately preceding the Roman Church’s excommunication of Luther. It’s customary for the Roman Catholic to single out Machivel (and his followers’ conception of the State as a mechanism untouched by ethical reasoning) for blame, but the groundwork for such “Machiavellianism” in the homeland of the Church was well laid by a standard Catholic missionary trick being turned against the Roman Catholic Church itself.

The Catholic type sees him- or herself as an apostle of enlightenment against the darkness of heathenism; this is why the word “catholic” connotes a kind of intellectual eclecticism. It’s also why the Anglican Communion habitually refers to itself as Catholic, and the Church I belong to as the “church of Rome” or as the “Roman Catholic Church” when among members of it. From St. Patrick defying the Irish druids by lighting a fire when druidic law forbade such burning and surviving unharmed nonetheless, to the Jesuit exposing a sacred idol that was the awe of the tribe as a mere mechanism, bringing Reason into a community of superstition has long been a means of introducing the Roman Catholic faith.

But the Roman Catholic Church itself had been put in the position of ignorance and superstition in the Renaissance. This was in part due to the revitalization of interest in pre-Constantine Rome, a Rome where a Christian had to cower or else be thrown to the lions – the Rome of Tacitus, where Christianity (all forms) was nothing more than a “miserable superstition” itself. The old Roman Empire might have been the time and place when the doctrine of the “sinful thought” made its appearance – the belief that a malevolent wish was as good as an evil deed in the eyes of God. Repenting for a sinful thought does make you less of a threat under the watch of a somewhat hostile authority – Caesar - because it takes away those telltale bodily signs of aggression that a Roman provost would see as indication of secret rebellion.

The Church’s ambivalence in the sight of pagan- inspired scientific progress, combined with the either proven or logically-derived characterization of early Christianity by pagan Rome, meant that a kind of corruption spread among the ‘enlightened’ that harnessed their envy of a powerful Church to a belief now thinkable that Christianity was the result of a bunch of cunning misfits which lucked out. In a land which was politically controlled by the Church, this would have spread like wildfire among the peasantry.

This was why the Roman Catholic Church’s usual remedy for damping away corruption failed during the Renaissance: the pagans of that time had locked onto an earlier paganism which had nothing but contempt for the mighty Church – and those pagans were long gone, so a comparison to the typical child-rearing practices of a Roman patrician (rule-based cruelty as the norm) to the typical child-rearing practices of a peasant family living in the Papal States (more Christian) was not successfully brought up. What we had at the time was a game with rules but whose umpires were long dead – a not disadvantageous scenario for the opportunistic.

The Church was really boxed in at this point in history, a fate similar to what the Anglican Communion suffered when the theory of evolution by means of natural selection was published and built upon. You could say that Nietzsche dogs the Anglican just as Machiavelli dogs the Roman Catholic. In order to defend itself five hundred years ago, the priesthood had to act like those same superstition-ridden barbarians that they had bragged so often about saving from the darkness of ignorance. The trial of Galileo was both the capstone and symbol of it.

And this old battle has left a permanent residue of anti-clericalism in Catholic culture.

The Protestant stratagem of stepping outside of one’s character to stomp down on corruption has its drawbacks too, which are explicated by Goethe’s Faust. The Protestant driven to an activist spirit by the presence of deepening corruption will entertain the belief that the Deed, not the Word, predated the world, and will consider a bargain with the Devil himself to be an acceptable option. This type of man, in the cause of fighting evil, runs the real risk of being absorbed by it.

What the comparison adds up to is the assessment of the Protestant as the type that can deal with the corrupt swiftly and easily when corruption is not widespread, but is seriously weakened when such evil acquires a “critical mass” and begins swallowing the soldiers of Christ. The Roman Catholic is the type that tends to tolerate a certain amount of corruption but is good at damping that critical mass down to a sort of peaceful coexistence when in a corruption- ridden age. One type is excellent as advance guard; the other is the less efficient cleanup batter.

Since the Protestant approach normally depends upon isolation of the corrupt, it’s no surprise that the more easygoing Roman Catholic would be distrusted as “the Machiavellian sort,” and that the corresponding RC aversion would revolve around the term “self-righteous.”

But not in this age – the Protestant set seems to be encouraging self-isolation of the good. There is that bomb-shelter mentality evident.

If so, then here’s an extra tin of brain food for the shelter: corruption rampant does tend to spread by the louts linking themselves with an authority that the pious have to show unrequited deference to. That authority either lacks the power or the desire to clamp down on those who “successfully” borrow its clothes. The “Tacitus model” is not an isolated event of history, but is part of a regular pattern, which recurs in its most simple form every time a “false Christ” arises.