Maverick Philosopher

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Trump Against the Multiculturalists

Excerpts (bolding and some subtitles added) from an outstanding essay by Thomas D. Klingenstein, Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America:

What is Multiculturalism?

Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.

Trump Exposes Multi-Culti as Existential Threat

During the 2016 campaign, Trump exposed multiculturalism as the revolutionary movement it is. He showed us that multiculturalism, like slavery in the 1850’s, is an existential threat. Trump exposed this threat by standing up to it and its enforcement arm, political correctness. Indeed, he made it his business to kick political correctness in the groin on a regular basis. In countless variations of crassness, he said over and over exactly what political correctness prohibits one from saying: “America does not want cultural diversity; we have our culture, it’s exceptional, and we want to keep it that way.” He also said, implicitly but distinctly: the plight of various “oppressed groups” is not the fault of white males. This too violates a sacred tenet of multiculturalism. Trump said these things at a time when they were the most needful things to say, and he said them as only he could, with enough New York “attitude” to jolt the entire country. Then, to add spicy mustard to the pretzel, he identified the media as not just anti-truth, but anti-American.

Some Countries are indeed Shitholes

His pungent assertion that there are “shithole” countries was an example of Trump asserting that there is truth. He was saying that some countries are better than others and America is one of the better ones, perhaps even the best. Multiculturalism says it is wrong to say this (as it was “wrong” for Reagan to call the Soviet Union “evil”). Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.

Why did Trump Win?

I think the explanation for Trump’s victory is actually quite straightforward and literal: Americans, plenty of whom still have common sense and are patriotic, voted for Trump for the very reason he said they should vote for him, to put America first or, as his campaign slogan had it, “to make America great again”—where “America” was not, as many conservatives imagine, code for “white people.” In other words, the impulse for electing Trump was patriotic, the defense of one’s own culture, rather than racist.

A Defense of America and her Meaning

Trump’s entire campaign was a defense of America. The election was fought not so much over policies, character, email servers, or James Comey, as it was over the meaning of America. Trump’s wall was not so much about keeping foreigners out as it was a commitment to a distinctive country; immigration, free trade, and foreign policy were about protecting our own. In all these policies, Trump was raising the question, “Who are we as a nation?” He answered by being Trump, a man made in America, unmistakably and unapologetically American, and like most of his fellow citizens, one who does not give a hoot what Europeans or intellectuals think.

Hillary Clinton the Cosmopolitan, Elitist Disdainer

Clinton, in the other corner, was the great disdainer, a citizen not of America but of the world: a postmodern, entitled elitist who was just more of Obama, the man who contemptuously dismissed America’s claim to being exceptional. What she called the “deplorables” were the “anti-multiculturalists.” She was saying, in effect, that she did not recognize the “deplorables” as fellow citizens, and they were, as far as she was concerned, not part of the regime she proposed to lead.

Perhaps Trump’s most effective answer to Clinton’s and the Democrats’ multiculturalism was his attacks on political correctness, both before and after the election. Trump scolded Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. He pointed out that on 9/11 some Muslims cheered the collapse of the twin towers. He said Mexico was sending us its dregs, suggested a boycott of Starbucks after employees were told to stop saying “Merry Xmas,” told NFL owners they should fire players who did not respect the flag, expressed the view that people from what he called “shitholes” (Haiti and African countries being his examples) should not be allowed to immigrate, exposed the danger of selecting judges based on ethnicity, and said Black Lives Matter should stop blaming others.

The core idea of each of these anti-P.C. blasts, when taken in aggregate, represent a commitment to America’s bourgeois culture, which is culturally “Judeo-Christian,” insists on having but one language and one set of laws, and values: among other things, loyalty, practical experience, self-reliance, and hard work. Trump was affirming the goodness of our culture. Odd as it may sound, he was telling us how to live a worthy life. Trump is hardly the ideal preacher, but in a society where people are thirsting for public confirmation of the values they hold dear, they do not require pure spring water. Even Trump’s crass statements objectifying women did not seem to rattle Trump women voters, perhaps because it did not come as news to them that men objectify women. In other words, Trump was being a man, albeit not the model man, but what mattered was that he was not the multicultural sexless man. A similar rejection of androgyny may have been at work in the Kavanaugh hearings.

The Importance of Assimilation

It was only a generation or so ago that our elite, liberals as well as conservatives, were willing to defend America’s bourgeois culture, American exceptionalism, and full assimilation for immigrants. Arthur Schlesinger expressed his view of assimilation this way: the “Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition … provides the standard to which other immigrant nationalities are expected to conform, the matrix into which they are to be assimilated.” That meant giving up one’s home culture, not necessarily every feature and not right away, but ultimately giving up its essential features in favor of American culture. In other words, there are no hyphenated Americans.

'Diversity is our Strength' is Orwellian Bullshit

Trump understands that “diversity is our greatest strength,” which is multiculturalism boiled down to an aphorism, is exactly backwards. America’s greatest strength is having transcended race, and the one major exception was very nearly our undoing. In light of this history, the history of the world (one “tribal” war after another), and the multicultural car wreck that is Europe today, to manufacture cultural diversity is nothing less than self-immolating idiocy. Trump might not put it in these words, but he gets it. The average American gets it too, because it is not very difficult to get: it is common sense.

Conservatives and Republicans are Complicit

Trump’s strengths are his courage, his common sense, and his rhetoric. He gets to the essential thing, the thing that no one else will say for fear of being called a “racist” or “fascist” or one of the other slurs that incite the virtue-signaling lynch mob.

His “shithole” remark was one example. Another occurred in 2015 when Trump, after a terrorist attack, proposed a ban on all Muslims until “we figure out what the hell is going on.” Virtually everyone, the Right included, screamed “racism” and “Islamophobia.” Of course, to have defended Trump would have violated the multicultural diktat that Islam be spoken of as a religion of peace. But like Trump, the average American does not care whether Islam is or is not a religion of peace; he can see with his own eyes that it is being used as an instrument of war. When Muslim terrorists say they are doing the will of Allah, Americans take them at their word. This is nothing but common sense.

Trump’s attempt to remove District Judge Gonzalo Curiel from a lawsuit in which Trump University was the defendant, in part because of the judge’s Mexican ancestry, was another instance where cries of “racism,” from the Right every bit as loud as from the Left, substituted for common sense. It was thought absurd for Trump to claim the judge was biased because of his ethnicity, yet it was the elite’s very insistence in making ethnicity a factor in the appointment of judges that invited Trump to respond in kind. We make ethnicity an essential consideration and then claim ethnicity should not matter. That is not common sense.

Getting to the essential, commonsensical heart of the matter is the most important element of Trump’s rhetoric, but even his often cringeworthy choice of words sometimes advances the conservative cause. This is a sad reflection of the times, but these are the times we live in, and we must judge political things accordingly. When, for example, Trump mocked Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser, he was doing something else that only he can: taking multiculturalism, and its “believe all women” narrative, head on. We should continue to cringe at Trump’s puerility, but we should appreciate when it has value.

In each of these instances, when conservatives joined liberals in excoriating Trump, conservatives were beating up our most important truth teller. Conservatives and Republicans should be using these instances to explain America and what is required for its perpetuation. In the examples listed above, they should have explained the importance of having one set of laws, full assimilation, and color blindness; the incompatibility of theocracy with the American way of life; that under certain circumstances we might rightly exclude some foreign immigrants, not because of their skin color but because they come from countries unfamiliar with republican government. Instead conservatives are doing the work of the multiculturalists for them: insinuating multiculturalism further into the public mind. Conservatives have, without quite realizing it, agreed to play by the multiculturalist’s rules and in so doing they have disarmed themselves; they have laid down on the ground their most powerful weapon: arguments that defend America.

The Kavanaugh Hearings: Multiculturalism at Work

In exposing the dangers of multiculturalism, Trump exposed its source: radical liberal intellectuals, most of whom hang about the humanities departments (and their modern day equivalents) at our best colleges and universities, where they teach the multicultural arts and set multicultural rules. And from the academy these ideas and rules are drained into the mostly liberal, mostly unthinking opinion-forming elite who then push for open borders, diversity requirements, racism (which somehow they get us to call its opposite), and other aspects of multiculturalism.

Multicultural rules were in full force in the Kavanaugh hearings. Armed with the chapter of the multicultural creed that covers “male oppression of women,” Democrats could attack Kavanaugh with accusations conjured out of nothing. At the same time, multicultural rules required Republicans to fight with one hand behind their backs: they were forced to allow a case with no basis to go forward, could not attack the accuser, and had to use a woman to question her. Republicans reflexively accepted their assigned role as misogynists (and would have been accepting the role of racists had the accuser been black). True, Republicans had no choice; still when one is being played one needs to notice.

Had Trump tweeted, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the sex or color of the questioner,” I suspect the majority of Americans would have applauded. After all, that is the American view of the matter. It’s not the average American who requires a woman questioner or a black one. We know that because Trumpsters have told us. It’s not typically the parents in our inner-city schools who demand teachers and administrators with skin color that matches that of their children. It’s not ordinary Mexican immigrants who are agitating to preserve their native culture. It’s the multiculturalists.

The Multi-Culti Understanding of Justice

Multicultural rules flow from multiculturalism’s understanding of justice, which is based not on the equality of individuals (the American understanding) but on the equality of identity groups oppressed by white males. In the Kavanaugh hearings, the multiculturalists did not see a contest between two individuals but rather between all women who are all oppressed and all white men who are all oppressors. Americans claimed the multiculturalists violated due process and conventional rules of evidence, but from the multiculturalists’ perspective what Americans saw as violations were actually multiculturalism’s understanding of due process and rules of evidence. Americans were seeing a revolution in action.

We now find ourselves in a situation not unlike that which existed before the Civil War, where one side had an understanding of justice that rested on the principle of human equality, while the other side rested on the principle that all men are equal except black men. One side implied a contraction and ultimate extinction of slavery; the other, its expansion. It was a case of a ship being asked to go in two directions at once. Or to use Lincoln’s Biblical metaphor, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln did not mean that the country could not stand part free and part slave. It could, as long as there was agreement that slavery was bad and on the road to extinction. But once half the country thought slavery a good thing and the other thought it a bad thing the country could no longer stand. It was the different understandings of justice that were decisive because when there are two understandings of justice, as in the Civil War and now, law-abidingness breaks down. In the Civil War, this resulted in secession. Today, this results in sanctuary cities and the “resistance.” To get a sense of how close we are to a complete breakdown, imagine that the 2016 election, like the Bush-Gore election, had been decided by the Supreme Court. One shudders to think.

What is to be Done? Oppose Multiculturalism!

Conservatives have been dazed by Trumpism. Even those conservatives who now acknowledge that Trump has accomplished some good things are not certain what is to be learned from Trumpism that might inform the future of the conservative movement.

The lesson is this: get right with Lincoln. He made opposition to slavery the non-negotiable center of the Republican party, and he was prepared to compromise on all else. Conservatives should do likewise with multiculturalism. We should make our opposition to it the center of our movement. Multiculturalism should guide our rhetorical strategy, provide a conceptual frame for interpreting events, and tie together the domestic dangers we face. We must understand all these dangers as part of one overarching thing.

This approach, however, will not work unless conservatives begin to think about politics like Lincoln did. That they do not may explain why so many of them missed the meaning of the 2016 election. This topic is complex but I think it comes down to this: As compared to Lincoln’s thinking about politics, conservative thinking tends to be too narrow (i.e., excludes too much) and too rigid.

What for Lincoln was the single most important political thing—the public’s understanding of justice—many of today’s conservatives think not important at all. It should not then be surprising why they missed, or underappreciated, the political dangers of multiculturalism with its assault on the American understanding of justice. Having missed or underappreciated multiculturalism, conservatives could not see that those attributes of Trump that in conventional times would have been disqualifying were in these times just the ones needed to take on multiculturalism. Trump was not a conventional conservative, yet his entire campaign was about saving America. This is where conservatism begins.

Education is another area that conservatives believe is less politically important than Lincoln did. Conservatives must relearn what Lincoln knew, and what, until the mid-twentieth century, our universities and colleges also knew: the purpose of higher education, in particular elite higher education, is to train future citizens on behalf of the common good. If the elite universities are promoting multiculturalism, and if multiculturalism is undermining America, then the universities are violating their obligation to the common good no less than were they giving comfort to the enemy in time of war. In such a case, the government, the federal government if need be, can rightfully impose any remedy as long as it is commensurate with the risk posed to the country and is the least intrusive option available.

Reorienting the conservative movement is a formidable undertaking, but we have a few big things in our favor: for starters, most of the country, including many who are not Trumpsters, appear to object to multiculturalism and its accompanying speech codes. In addition, multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement. Conservatives, who are in the business of conserving things, come to life when there is something important to conserve because this allows them to stake out a very distinctive and morally powerful position with enough room to accommodate a broad coalition. In this case, that really important “something” is our country.

Thomas D. Klingenstein is a principal in the investment firm of Cohen, Klingenstein, LLC and the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute.

 

Elites & PopulistsFounders & LincolnMulticulturalism

How Close Are We to Civil War? A Pessimistic View

The following view is pessimistic, but current events give me no good reason to be optimistic.  A bad moon's rising and trouble's on the way. A house divided cannot stand. Don't say that Trump has divided us. The division was well-entrenched long before he came on the political scene. He merely gave voice to the conservative side in a way that the bow-tie boys of Conservatism, Inc. could not and would not. In so doing, he enraged the Left forcing them to show their true colors and reveal themselves for what they were all along. So, far from being the Great Divider, Trump has proven to be the Great Clarifier.  You will have to work out for yourself how best to weather the storm that's coming. The wise hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.  Emphases below are my addition.

E. M. Cadwaladr:

We and the Left are now two nations within one country.  This is undeniable.  We are now so different that we cannot even agree on what a country is, or on the merits of a country having a border.  The number of people who still say, "I just don't care about politics" dwindles.  It is still possible to hate both sides — but it is getting hard to be indifferent and still be breathing.  How many people can just take or leave infanticide?  How many people are entirely flexible about the idea of the government having authority over anything and everything, to experimenting with our fundamental demographics, or to giving up fossil fuels cold turkey?

The author is right. 

. . .  We have our breaking point, and they have theirs.  Our two nations hang suspended over war's abyss, kept in mid-air temporarily by a tug-of-war of pundits, politicians, and overpaid attorneys.  Our "leaders" are not quite ready to repudiate the only instruments of power they know how to wield, but in their cynical maneuvering, they have broken the very foundations of the rule of law itself.  We have seen the two-tiered legal system and found it unworthy of respect.  We have watched in quiet horror as a federal judge in Hawaii stuck his dainty legal foot in front of Trump's immigration order — but that's exactly how the game is played.  You and I hold our breath, waiting for the shambling Frankenstein's monster of formalities to eventually keel over and drop dead.  We wait for our side to finally draw a line and say, "Enough!" — or for their side to dig in and openly proclaim, "We won't be bound by a constitution written by old dead white men anymore!"

Consider the National Popular VoteInterstate Compact that a dozen states have now passed into law.  These states have agreed to sign their citizens' electoral votes over to whatever presidential candidate wins the popular vote.  In one sense, this may be constitutional.  The framers allowed each state to determine for itself how its electors would be assigned.  In another sense, such laws are clearly anti-constitutional.  The framers quite explicitly intended to preserve the sovereignty of the less populous states, and a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact accomplishes just the opposite end.  Such laws are nothing less than attempts by California and New York to nullify the interests of whole regions of the country.  If the National Popular VoteInterstate Compact movement succeeds in achieving its golden number of 270 votes, will the state of Oklahoma, or Alabama, or Alaska, be content to have its votes made moot?  At what point does such a clever lawyer's trick make secession less objectionable than the alternative?

The abyss looms large beneath us.  We are stretched closer and closer to our limits.

The people who are eager for a civil war are fools.  They don't understand the catastrophe they're begging for.  But the people who believe that a civil war is now a real possibility are neither fools nor wild-eyed alarmists. Moreover, the people who believe that, grim though the prospect may be, war might be the lesser of two evils have a daily strengthening case. The Left has shown itself to be dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization itself.  We have not been faced with such an existential threat since European armies threw the Turks back from Vienna in 1529.  The fascists of the mid–2oth century, for all their loathsome policies, were not the kind of threat to the fabric of our society that we face now.  Bad as they were, they did not seek the destruction of Europeans as a people, or of European culture as a living, breathing thing.  Progressivism does.  What could be more worthy of, if you will forgive the word, "resistance"?

We conservatives have let this ideological cancer metastasize for far too long for its excision to be simple or painless.  For too long, we have been patient with outrages we should have fought to reverse.  We have let our opponents secede incrementally from us for decades.  We have been tolerant and patient.  In our tolerance and patience, we have given up our civil society, our political representation, and our freedoms one by one.  Our maladies won't be fixed by delicate adjustments now — half-heartedly performed by yet another generation of narcissistic government planners and invisible elitist bureaucrats.  Intellectuals like George Will and think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation have done us little good.  Our condition demands a radical, unflinching surgery if we, as a nation, are to survive.  Either the cancer wins, and kills us all, or we defeat it — and we accept the scars.  Let us not pretend they would not be hideous scars.  And let us not pretend it would not be a deeply barbarous and bitter surgery.

Toleration is a high value, but it has limits. One cannot tolerate the intolerant. And let's be clear that only some are culturally equipped to appreciate the high value of toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, which is not to be confused with leftism or progressivism or contemporary 'liberalism.'  Muslims as a group are not so equipped, which is presumably why leftists encourage their immigration.  Leftists think that they can use sharia-supporting Muslims, whose values are antithetical to Western values, to undermine American values.

Virtues can vitiate when taken to extremes. Our toleration has weakened us.  The author is right about this.

Another strength that has weakened us is our understanding that the political does not exhaust the real and important. I call this The Conservative Disadvantage. If you care to know what I mean, bang on the hyperlink.

The truth is that we, as individuals, have rather few decisions left to make.  The titanic nations of the Left and right are rising en masse — flexing their muscles and snorting menacingly at one another.  We cannot get out of their way.  There is no safe part of the country, nor any genuinely safe haven left in any other country.  This is a global conflict.  We have run out of frontiers.  There is only so much "prepping" one can do for an upheaval of this magnitude.  We Americans have not seen such a calamity on our soil for six generations.  What our ancestors knew, we have forgotten.  The Civil War of our history has become a dim and comfortable myth.  A new war leers at us like the devil, but we talk about it like a football game.  We may learn as human beings have always learned — the hard way.

Let's hope that the author is overstating his case.  But hope is not enough.  Every sane, decent American has to do his bit to help defeat the destructive Left and to do so politically if possible. Resort to extra-political means is the last resort, not to be hoped for, but for which we must be prepared.

Joe Biden: Creep, Clown, Opportunist, and Ignoramus

As as all of those things, a 'worthy' representative of the contemporary hard-Left Democrat party. Ben Shapiro has his number:

More importantly, however, Biden's characterization of "English jurisprudential culture" as "white man's culture" is profoundly disturbing. English jurisprudential culture is rooted in the belief in the rule of law, due process of law, equal rights under law; English jurisprudential culture is responsible for preserving the natural rights we hold dear, rights which were imperfectly but increasingly extended over time to more and more human beings, particularly minorities. No less a leftist figure than Barack Obama explained just that in 2009, saying he sought a system at Guantanamo Bay that "adheres to the rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system."

Protection of individual rights -- and in particular, minority rights -- lies at the heart of English jurisprudence. Yet Biden boiled down those rights to racial privilege. And the attempt to reduce the fundamental principles of our civilization to a mask for racial hierarchical power is both false and frightening. It suggests that those principles ought to be undermined for purposes of disestablishing that supposed hierarchy. Get rid of English jurisprudential law, presumably, in order to fight racism.

townhall.com

 

When You Don't Appreciate Your Civilization

Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the Biden Courage…

Destructive Leftists Pose an Existential Threat

Peggy Noonan appreciates the threat, but remains a Never-Trumper:

Noonan, who's a NeverTrump, must feel the same way about having to state the obvious from such a superb description of the parallel events.  That missing conclusion in her piece is that the only one thing standing between this repulsive neo-Cultural Revolution and us is President Trump, someone she will never be able to bring herself to say good things about.  She's a NeverTrump, after all, and her NeverTrumpism signals she's probably still a something of a stylist after status, which is roughly speaking, how Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit argues the NeverTrump crowd rolls.

Yet Trump won because he defends us, the people, and our interests, favoring law and not just law, but the same set of laws for everyone.  He couldn't care less about niceties or even being polite to these Cultural Revolutionaries who are out to kill us, because he's not concerned with status or making any such weasels at war with law, history, or civility feel good.  He is the status. 

This is why we got Trump.

Glenn Reynolds nails it:

And as far as I can tell, although Never-Trumpers talk a lot about morality and principles, their actual beef seems to be a combination of aesthetic dislike of Trump’s messaging style, and resentment that he’s not hiring them, and never will hire them. I suppose a lot of people confuse their own social standing and economic prospects with morality, but color me unpersuaded.

Perhaps in 2016 you could imagine that Trump would be such an awful President that you had a moral duty to oppose him. But in 2019, it’s obvious that that’s not the case. In fact, he’s pretty darn successful. Instead of gay concentration camps, he’s trying to end discrimination against gays worldwide. Instead of being a warmonger he’s now ending wars — and getting grief about it from Never-Trumpers. The Russia-collusion thing was always twaddle, but nobody is even pretending otherwise anymore. And Trump’s background and personal life certainly don’t stand out as compared to many other occupants of the Oval Office whom the establishment deemed entirely acceptable.

Leftists Versus Common Sense

The Republic is in deep trouble.

CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA

nymag.com

 

Andrew Sullivan: The Corruption of the Vatican’s Gay Elite Has Been Exposed

Into the Late Sensate: Concupiscense Unconstrained

Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has proven to be remarkably prescient. From Pitirim Sorokin Revisited:

Sorokin’s critique of private life begins with the disintegration of the family. “Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears,” he predicted in the final volume of Social and Cultural Dynamics. [rev. ed. 1957] Children born out of wedlock and separated from parents would become unexceptional.

In the 1950s he foresaw the coming sexual anarchy of the West and its downside. Alfred Kinsey’s widely publicized research, the newly founded Playboy magazine’s explicit carnal appeal, the Elvis Presley delirium among adolescents, the runaway commercial success of Peyton Place, the critical success of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—all were parts of a piece at mid-century. In 1957 Sorokin wrote crabbily, “Americans are victims of a sex mania as malign as cancer and as socially menacing as communism.” This overreach got him ridiculed in the movie Gidget, cartooned in The San Francisco Chronicle, and called a publicity hound and prude.

What Sorokin saw dawning is now at full noon. The edgy and sordid are box office. Hot porn is just a click away. Casual sex is the norm. Ten or twenty sexualities clamor for a spotlight. Real or not, it doesn’t matter. Hopes and dreams crowd out what is possible and what can be done. The pursuit of pleasure—Neil Postman called it amusing ourselves to death—looks as if it might be a terminal social disease. In the Western world marriage loses its appeal. The idea of family formation changes shape, resulting in social conditions in which 40 percent of U.S. children today are born to unmarried women. These sexualities bear legal rights and popular favor perhaps unique in human history.  

Late Sensate license—if it feels good, do it—has become its own faith. Facts, reason, and logic are losing their universal public authority, even in academic life. Despite astonishing affluence and material ease, some one-sixth of Americans over the age of fifteen are taking prescribed anti-depressants. Others are reaching for whiskey, marijuana, opioids, and other palliatives. The Late Sensate does not appear to be working too well psychologically, and governability is at issue. Sorokin’s advice to perplexed or anxious individuals facing social turmoil was to focus on the transcendent through the humanities. Plant a garden. Go walking. Respect the natural environment. Practice yoga. Live simply. Turn off the television set and talk to others.

More than fifty years later, this is not unwise advice. “Only the power of unbounded love…can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet,” Sorokin expounded. “Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.” Sorokin’s prescriptions of altruism and universalism might seem painfully naïve and anodyne today. But this difficult, intuitive man’s clear-eyed premonitions, his studies of social dynamics, and his tough-minded benevolence remain remarkable guides to considering current events.

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.

Epitaph for a Dying Culture

The 'genius' of Donald Trump, if you want to call  it that, is that he is able successfully to bait Democrats  into showing the most deeply-dyed and color-fast of their true colors, colors that are not typically on display but hidden beneath layers of mendacity and obfuscation. They now stand exposed as the destructive hard-leftists that they are and were. Would it be too much to say that they have become enemies of civilization?

I don't think so, nor would Victor Davis Hanson. He mentions ten insidious assaults on hard-won wisdom and "a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age":

1. The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
2. Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
3. The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
4. Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
5. Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
6. Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
7. Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
8. Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
9. Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
10. The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.

The Cross Won, but the Battle Never Ends

I ended my European tour in June at Rome where all roads are said to lead.  After hours of prayer and meditation in Santa Maria Maggiore, I spent a long time in the vicinity of the Coliseum where I noticed something I had missed on previous visits:

The brutal Romans contributed mightily to civilization, but it took Christianity to civilize us truly. But now the Church of Rome is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. It will most likely survive as a remnant, stripped down to essentials and purified by suffering and worldly losses.  Such losses will do it good. The Church needs to spend a generation or two in the desert, there to examine its collective conscience and to ponder the mission it has abandoned.

All institutions require reform and renewal from time to time, as do their members. But it is not reform or renewal when an institution is diverted from its founding purpose. It is rather destruction. The whole point of the church founded by Christ was to stand against the world and point us, and indeed lead us, beyond it. "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) Betraying its mandate, the Roman church has become just another piece of cultural junk. Cozying up to secularity, the Church seeks to maintain itself as an organizational hustle for the clerics it serves while abandoning the deposit of faith it is supposed to be preserving.

The vast, ancient edifice needs fumigation. The termites, from Bergoglio on down, need to be sent scurrying. The rotten hierarchy needs to be defunded. My trenchant but  obviously figurative talk of termites and fumigation will elicit howls of protest from some. "Eliminationist rhetoric!"  But consider this report from a correspondent, Dr. Vito Caiati:

In its October 7th edition, Corriere della Sera offered excepts from  Pope Bergoglio’s just released book on the Virgin Mary , including the following paragraph, which well reveals his insidious method of undermining dogma and tradition. I provide the first paragraph of this longer reflection, followed by my translation.

Da quando è nata fino all’Annunciazione, al momento dell’incontro con l’angelo di Dio, me l’immagino come una ragazza normale, una ragazza di oggi, una ragazza non posso dire di città, perché Lei è di un paesino, ma normale, normale, educata normalmente, aperta a sposarsi, a fare una famiglia. Una cosa che immagino è che amasse le Scritture: conosceva le Scritture, aveva fatto la catechesi ma familiare, dal cuore. Poi, dopo il concepimento di Gesù, ancora una donna normale: Maria è la normalità, è una donna che qualsiasi donna di questo mondo può dire di poter imitare. Niente cose strane nella vita, una madre normale: anche nel suo matrimonio verginale, casto in quella cornice della verginità, Maria è stata normale. Lavorava, faceva la spesa, aiutava il Figlio, aiutava il marito: normale.

From her birth until the Annunciation, at the moment of the encounter with the angel of God, I imagine her [the Virgin Mary] as a normal girl, a girl of today, I cannot say a girl of the city, because she is from a hamlet, but normal, normal, educated normally, open to marrying, to having a family. One thing that I imagine is that she loved the Scriptures: she knew the Scriptures; she had carried out catechesis but informally, from the heart. Then, after the conception of Jesus, she was still a normal woman. Mary is normality, is a woman that almost any women in this world is able to imitate. No strange things in life, a normal mother: even in her virginal matrimony, chaste in that frame of virginity, Mary was normal. She worked, shopped, helped her Son, helped her husband: normal.

Leaving aside the triteness of these reflections, they constitute, first, a masked assault on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which proclaims that “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 494). While we cannot know the intimate effects of such “singular grace and privilege” on Mary’s being and consciousness, we are certainly bound to hold that she was no “normal girl.” Moreover, Bergoglio’s words can be taken to deny the perpetual virginity of Mary, in that while he speaks of her being “chaste in the frame of virginity,” he simultaneously regards her “after the birth of Jesus” as “a normal woman” since there are “no strange things in life.” Again, the Church affirms that although Jesus emerged from the body of the Theotokos, her virginity was not in any way altered. Now, if this is not a “strange thing,” that is, an absolutely unique miracle, what is? Bergoglio is constantly at work undermining the foundations of the faith to the benefit of post-modern skepticism and relativism.

Una ragazza normale? One could try to read this as an emphasis on Mary's humanity, or one might say that Bergoglio is a foolish man who doesn't understand the dogmas of the Church of which he is pope; but in the end I believe my learned correspondent is right:  this is an insidious undermining of dogma and tradition.  How could Bergoglio not know the doctrinal content in the Catechism?

 

For a man like me there are two main problems with the RCC, or rather two main impediments to my returning to it, as I would like to do, being a cradle Catholic. One is at the philosophical level: how is it possible that the dogmas including the Mariological dogmas (Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, Assumption) be true?  Suppose I solve this problem to my own satisfaction.  Then the second problem, that of the corruption of the institution, jumps out at me.  The church hierarchy and the rank-and-file priests are filled with unbelievers who apparently believe in the Church in precisely the way mafiosi believe in the mafia: it's their thing, a hustle that keeps them fat and happy in a worldly sense and allows free play to their concupiscence.  I am alluding, of course, to priestly pederasty, pedophilia, and ephebophilia. How can I in good conscience support such a church by attendance or monetary contributions? If the Church is now just another pile of secular-leftist junk, and a haven for homosexuals, then it ought to be defunded.

 

Am I suggesting that for every priest the Church is a fraud and a hustle? Of course not. But as Rod Dreher has forcefully documented over many, many entries at the American Conservative, the rot resides in the hierarchy itself from Bergoglio on down. This fact makes the problem very serious indeed.

Vote. Confirm.

A powerful statement by Malcolm Pollack, at once both personal and objective. I recommend in particular the penultimate paragraph:

We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how precarious, order and peace and safety are — how easily they are lost, and what sacrifices, and what sense of duty and gratitude, are necessary to sustain them. We just take it all for granted — this astonishing edifice of law and tradition and culture and trade and agriculture and innovation and justice and security — as if it was simply a pre-existing and eternal feature of the world. We imagine, lately, that we can just pick at it as we please, pull pieces out of it and burn them, hack away at its foundations, rip out its beams and joists, and crack its pillars without causing it, someday very soon, to come crashing down on our heads.

One does well to recall the wisdom at Hosea 8:7: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

And never forget who has the guns. Is that a threat? No, it's a warning. You do not want a civil war. You will not like it.

Please exercise your historically-informed imagination now so that you won't have to rely on perception later.

It's a War: The Democrats' Behavior Proves It

Let's begin with a very simple distinction between the behavior one would rightly demand of a judge who was adjudicating a dispute between two parties, and the behavior of a citizen defending himself against very serious but groundless accusations. From a judge one expects and demands impartiality.  The demand is reasonable and can be met because judges are not themselves parties to the disputes they mediate. A judge with an interest in the outcome must recuse himself.

But it is unreasonable in the extreme to expect a citizen who is defending himself from a scurrilous, potentially career-ending  attack to display a calm judicial temperament as if he were above the fray and not precisely being attacked. 

In fact, if Judge Kavanaugh had not defended himself with passion and righteous indignation, his enemies would have taken it as proof of his guilt. "You see, he is guilty! Any normal person would have vigorously contested the accusations brought against him!"

You can see from this just how vicious Senator Feinstein and her colleagues are. The simple distinction explained above is obvious and of course they understand it  They would deploy it themselves if it were to their advantage. They are not stupid; they are willing to play dirty if it  assures them of victory.  They are obviously out to stop the Kavanaugh confirmation by any means. Schumer has in fact said precisely that.

The hypocrisy is to preach the importance of impartiality while failing to practice it oneself. Feinstein and her gang are supposed to be impartially evaluating the nominee, not accusing him of impartiality in a matter in which it would be inappropriate for him to be impartial!

But it may be worse than hypocrisy. To preach impartiality is to have at least some  commitment to it. But there is increasingly little reason to think that the Dems are committed to the values we cherish. It certainly looks as if they want one thing only, power, any way thy can get it. And impartiality be damned.  If impartiality is to their power advantage, then they are impartial, if not, not.

They have one goal: power and total control. The Constitution, interpreted as written, stands in their way. That is why they will do anything to destroy the textualist/originalist Kavanaugh.

So it's a war. It's a war because there s no common ground.  One cannot compromise with people who will do anything to win and who reject such bedrock principles as the presumption of innocence.  

Obama Won

Victor Davis Hanson:

By traditional metrics, Barack Obama’s presidency was mostly a failure.

[. . .]

Yet in terms of culture, Obama clearly won.

“White Privilege” Goes Mainstream

He institutionalized radical cultural shifts by creating entirely new rubrics of privileging race and gender. The old idea of due process and the rule of law were subordinated to identity politics, whether in matters of sanctuary cities and non-enforcement of immigration law or campus charges of sexual assault. The larger culture made the necessary adjustments and followed suit.

Related:

Some Questions About White Privilege

What is White Supremacy?

More on Whether Non-Whites Can be Racist

'Nonconsensual Choking'

I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece:

I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002.

As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date and the girl consents to being choked, then it is morally acceptable? And what sort of girl wants to be choked? Next stop: erotic asphyxiation. Why not, if it is consensual? You might even try mutual erotic asphyxiation. That might not end well, however. David Carradine's auto-erotic adventure in auto-asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room proved to be his last.

From another source, I gather that the hitting mentioned in the quotation is punching a girl in the head against her will. So if she wants to be punched in the head,  there is nothing wrong with it?

I'd say we are living in sick times if the consent of the done to is sufficient for the moral acceptability of the doer's deed. 

I'll leave it to you to work out why.

Related entry: Real Enough to Debase, but not to Satisfy

UPDATE (9/16)

A reader expands our vocabulary of depravity with a link to donkey punch. Not for the easily shocked. But I think it is important to look human wretchedness hard in the face and realize what becomes of morality when it is untethered from a transcendent anchor. This is what is happening in the RCC under Bergoglio the Termite. 

Corruptio Optimi Pessima

The corruption of the best is the worst.

The evidence mounts. An Irish correspondent sends use here.

Following the dark revelations of the McCarrick scandal, former seminary formator, Father David Marsden, decided it was time to go public on the real reason he resigned from Maynooth and why he remains deeply concerned about the presence of a powerful gay subculture in the national seminary.

The Role of Concupiscence in the Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church

The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, such luminaries as Plato, Augustine, and Blaise Pascal:

There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God. (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110)

Has anyone pointed out that this is the real root of the rot in the Roman church? The depth of the corruption is hard to fathom, both in the sense of understand and in the sense of measure the depth of. R. R. Reno reports: 

From 1990 until 2010, I taught at a Jesuit University and was privy to insider gossip. The Irish philosopher William Desmond recounted some of his experiences as a young scholar visiting Fordham in the 1970s. The main debate in the Jesuit dining room concerned whether or not sodomy constituted a violation of the vow of celibacy. Some priests took the line that celibacy concerns the conjugal act, not sterile sex between men. A friend who spent time as a Jesuit novice during that slouching decade told me that novice masters regarded homo­sexual relations as healthy, even necessary for proper priestly formation. Sometimes the novice masters insisted that they be the agents of this “formation.”

This shows that the post-Vatican II church has become a thoroughly corrupt joke that deserves no support from the laity. Or am I being too harsh?

Imagine ordained priests -- not horny freshmen at a supposedly 'Catholic' college -- debating whether or not sodomy is a violation of celibacy. This is not something that can be reasonably debated among those who accept Church teaching.  Here:

The Code of Canon Law requires that “Clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are bound to celibacy which is a special gift of God by which sacred ministers can adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and are able to dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity” (No. 277).

The key word here is 'continence.' Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint).  One of the main reasons that celibacy is enjoined is because spiritual realities cannot be descried by those enslaved to their lusts. Can you imagine Begoglio talking like this or your parish priest?

Now ask yourself whether the practice of sodomy is an expression of continence.  The question answers itself. Not only is the act a violation of continence, but planning and entertaining the act in thought is also a violation of continence, even if the act is never committed. For either way there is a failure to contain the 'outward flow' even it is merely on the intentional plane.  Cf. MT 5:28: "But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." (KJV) That holds a fortiori if the object of lust is a man.  As I interpret the teaching, it is not the passing desire that is sinful, but its elaboration in thought, its hospitable entertainment, the scheming of a sodomite like McCarrick, for example, as he plans his seduction of an innocent and trusting boy.

Another form of "sterile sex" would be 'intercourse' with an inflatable doll or (nowadays) a sexbot. Certainly the rectories of the land should be supplied with such dolls and robots since 'intercourse' with them is surely no violation of celibacy.

And then there is that form of "sterile sex" called masturbation. If buggery is part of healthy priestly formation (see first quotation above), then there could be no objection to masturbation which is of course officially condemned, (See Catechism #2352 or, for that matter, something even worse, bestiality. (About which the disgraced former senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, joked.)

I spoke above of what can and cannot be reasonably debated among those who accept Church teaching. Here may lie the nub of the problem. These so-called priests don't accept it. Maybe they did at first, but then they became secularized and the Unseen Order disappeared from view (to put it oxymoronically).  In plain English, God and the soul and the whole soteriological point of the Church became unreal to them. But they didn't have the courage to go out into the world and get a real job. So they 'reformed' the Church in their own corrupt image.   After all, their lifestyle is 'cushy' and you can dress up and parade around -- in a manner to gives new meaning to "don we now our gay apparel" -- and even earn or rather get some respect even if it is only from children, old ladies, and womanish men.  And then there there is that organizational ladder to climb and the power and perquisites that go with it. Hell, you may even get a red hat!

The 'reform' then, takes the form of a secularization, or a temporalization. The Church, which is supposed to mediate between Eternity and Time, analogously as Christ the God-Man mediates between God and Man, is reduced to a purely temporal power or rather a 'hustle' or ecclesial cosa nostra that yet mendaciously continues to promote itself as being true to its tradition with its ultimate anchor in the Eternal. Under Bergoglio the Leftist, the Church of Rome transmogrifies into a sort of environmental protection agency that attacks capitalism (the one economic system that actually works and improves the human lot) and that also advances the cause of 'migrants' no matter how destructive of civilization they might be, a civilization that the Church has built and maintained over the centuries, but is not willing to defend against Muslim iconoclasts and barbarians.

('Migrant' is a marvellously obfuscatory term since it manages to elide two important distinctions at once, the distinction between immigrants and emigrants and the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants.)

To sum up. I am pointing to a fact and offering an explanation, or at least part of one. The fact is that the Church hardly exists any longer as she was founded to be. The explanation is that the inordinate raging of our natural concupiscence which has been with us since the Fall and has been kept in check to some extent has now been unleashed and potentiated by our technology of life-extension, birth control, and world-wide communication.  Our 24-7, narcissistic, chit-chat connectivity is like a Faraday cage shielding us from influences from beyond the human horizon.  But the comparison breaks down: the influences from beyond are benign unlike the electrostatic and electromagnetic signals that threaten our 'devices.'

But the point is clear: our incredible technology leads to a super-secularization that makes it impossible except for a few to take seriously the idea that there could be anything beyond the human horizon. The Unseen Order (James) with the Unseen Warfare (Scupoli) that transpires there is no longer believable by modern man under his secularized, sex-saturated blanket, where with a few keystrokes he can bring before him an endless supply of the most vile pornography imaginable. 

Pederasty Primarily, not Pedophilia, and Bergoglio's Role

Damning:

Unfortunately, however, Benedict’s successor was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina – the man who calls himself Pope Francis. As a Belgian cardinal named Gottfried Daneels – who had been removed as an archbishop because he had covered up pederasty on the part of another Belgian cardinal and had come out in support of contraception, divorce, gay marriage, euthanasia, and abortion – revealed in his memoirs, Bergoglio’s candidacy was promoted by the St. Gallen Group, a part of what Catholics call “the Lavender Mafia.” This disgraced figure stood on the balcony with Bergoglio after he was elected Pope; he was chosen to say the prayer at the new Pope’s inauguration; and there was joy in the ranks of those inclined to break the vow of celibacy.

If you want to get a sense of what such people thought, I suggest that you read “The Vatican’s Secret Life,” an article that appeared in Vanity Fair in December 2013. It is an eye-opener. Its author, Michael Joseph Gross, is not scandalized by what he found. He celebrates it; and, tellingly, he never once mentions, even under the guise of pedophilia, the propensity of prominent priests to indulge in pederasty. 

Read it all, then read Marc Thiessen on his sudden understanding of the Reformation.

The Police Were Not Policed

Conclusion:

For some reason, many still in the current FBI, CIA, DOJ, NSC, and State Department are incapable of accepting that their agencies in the Obama years were weaponized to alter a U.S. election and were directed to do so by many top dogs in their Washington hierarchies.

Until we get the truth, an accounting, and some sort of justice, we will not quite become galvanized by those who rightly warn us of real Russian interference.

The reason?

We always expect Russian skullduggery, but we never anticipated election interference from those entrusted with protecting us and our institutions from our enemies.

The police were not policed — and so became like the enemies they warned us about.

The government and its police agencies, the Catholic Church under Bergoglio the Termite, the Fourth Estate, the universities in the grip of political correctness . . . institutions once respected no longer command respect and trust. 

 

What is to be done?

Another Leftist Assault on Merit

New York's Bozo de Blasio goes after a great high school,

Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of the New York City school system.

In a better world, we wouldn’t care about the racial and ethnic composition of the Stuyvesant student body. That it’s the strongest it can be, in academic terms, would be all that mattered.

Here, for purposes of the world we actually live in, is the breakdown of the entering freshman class at Stuyvesant:

Asian — 613
White — 151
Hispanic — 27
Black — 10

These numbers don’t sit well with Mayor Bill de Blasio. Interestingly, though, his son just graduated from Brooklyn Tech, another elite high school with a similar racial and ethnic balance.

De Blasio proposes to do away with the entrance exam altogether. As Richard Cohen, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post writes, this would destroy a system that “epitomized the American dream and — as [President] Trump might say — made America great.”

Like a Faraday Cage

Our 24-7, narcissistic, chit-chat connectivity is like a Faraday cage shielding us from influences from beyond the human horizon.  But the comparison breaks down: the influences from beyond are benign unlike the electrostatic and electromagnetic signals that threaten our 'devices.'

Jerking Towards Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has his direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

Image credit: Frank J. Attanucci

Revolution and Worse to Come

From the pen of an astute historian:

Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States. If all this fails to delegitimize Trump, fails to destroy his health, or fails to lead to a 2018 midterm Democratic sweep and subsequent impeachment, expect even greater threats of violence. The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion.

[. . .]

We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.

 

Bergoglio's Nefarious Machinations

Dr. Vito Caiati writes,

I have very much appreciated the apt title that you bestowed yesterday on the present pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, “Bergoglio the Benighted,” who is indeed the essence of a “leftist knucklehead.” What intrigues and angers me is the absence of any real opposition within the Church to this caudillo and the gang around him. The moral and cultural rot in the Church has indeed advanced very far.

 

The huge historical implications of Bergoglio’s nefarious machinations, all intensifiers and accelerators of this rot,  are succinctly elucidated in an essay by Roberto Pertrici, an historian at the University of Bergamo, which  appears today on Sandro Magister’s blog “Settimo Cielo,” in which Perticci argues that “[il] pontificato di Francesco, credo che si possa ragionevolmente sostenere che esso segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano.’” I think that the article is well worth reading, either in Italian or in the English translation that is available. One more sign that we are in big trouble in the West.

Roberto Petrici's essay "The End of Roman Catholicism?" is available in English here.  Read it, ragazzi.

The Age of Celebrity

The Age of Celebrity  helps explain the ascendancy of a political outsider like Donald J. Trump, but also the mindless focus on the man as opposed to his policies. 

But it is entertaining to watch the knuckleheaded pseudo-journalists of CNN and MSNBC make fools of themselves as they dig up dirt and avoid ideas.  Andrew Klavan is enjoying himself immensely.

On Being Prudent in a Post-Consensus, No-Trust Society

The young especially need to be very careful about what they say and to whom they say it.  The U. S. is becoming the S. U. To be on the safe side, never associate with leftists. (This is good advice even for leftists since they are famous for turning on their own for the 'sin' of not being sufficiently left.) Practice the political equivalent of divorce to the extent that it is possible. If you must associate with leftists, limit your contact with them and keep your mouth shut. Rod Dreher has some advice for you:

I told the professor that I try never to talk about anything controversial in personal company unless I’m sure that everyone around me already agrees with me. It’s not simply that I don’t want to get into it with a screaming SJW who wants to have it out with me at a cocktail party because I don’t share her view of some political issue. That’s part of it, but I am a public figure, and say lots of controversial things in this space. I try to leave work here on the blog, and not take it into private life. With me, it’s more the case that I don’t want to say something controversial that I wouldn’t say on the blog, and have someone overhear it, send it out on social media, and ruin me.

I can’t think offhand what kind of remark that might be, but these days, who knows? The word the professor in last night’s conversation used was completely ordinary, and not used by him in a racial context. But in our emotivist world, the student felt that it was racist, so the professor had to face something he never should have had to face.

So now you have a professor who has to see students as potential destroyers of his career on spurious grounds. You have to go to cocktail parties and social gatherings being very conscious of what you say and don’t say, because some angry person might put it on social media. Everybody is potentially working for the secret police.

I’m not being as hyperbolic with that remark as you think. When I was in Hungary recently, my friend A. told me that her country still hadn’t recovered the social capital plundered by the communists. That is, Hungarians — like everyone living under communism — had to learn not to trust anybody. You truly didn’t know who was a secret police information. An ill-considered word could cost you your job. A thoughtless joke overheard by the wrong set of ears could land you in prison. We don’t have a totalitarian state here, but we are creating that kind of society.

"But aren't you big on civil courage?"

I am; but I cannot in good conscience urge it on the young and naive. It is easy for me to display a modicum of civil courage: I've made mine. But if you are trying to find a foothold, and especially if you have dependents, be careful. Once you establish yourself you will be a position to punch back effectively.

Now, as Rod would say, read the whole thing.

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On the Folly of the Vatican II 'Reforms'

There was something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

The church should be a liberal-free zone.

Chaplain to the Queen: "It's Going to End in Blood"

My fear as well.  Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Did I Watch the Oscars?

Of course not. I don't watch garbage like that. Part of my motive, I suspect, is that I do not want to be reminded of how sick we are collectively becoming.

I now hand off to Rod Dreher, Triumph of the Freaks.

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School Shootings: It's the Culture, Stupid

It is not guns that are the problem, but the culture that liberals and leftists have created. We've got plenty of gun control; what we need now is liberal control. The contributors to the piss-poor pages of the NYT's Op-Ed section need to STFU and listen to someone with sense such as Andrew Klavan (emphasis added):

. . . rap music with its hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.

. . .  a culture in which those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness into murder.

[. . .]

The left wants to defend gangstas and "transgressive" art and antifa thugs — but when the shooting starts, they blame the guns.

The left wants to get rid of feminine modesty and masculine protectiveness and social restrictions on sex — but when the abuse and rape and harassment rise to the surface, they start whining about toxic manhood. Perhaps they should have listened to the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton, who wrote about the difference between reforming society and deforming it — a passage that was neatly paraphrased by John F. Kennedy: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

Now the left wants to legitimize disrespect for the flag and for Christianity. They want to ignore the rule of law at the border and silence protests against Islamic ideas that are antithetical to every good thing the west stands for. They should look to Europe where all that's been accomplished. And now, when European women are molested in the public square, the gormless authorities advise them to behave more modestly lest immigrants get the wrong idea. When Islamic knives come out and Islamic bombs go off, the police rush to harass — who? Those who question the dictates of the Koran.

[. . .]

For fifteen years and more, I have been complaining that the right is silenced in our culture — blacklisted and excluded and ignored in entertainment, mainstream news outlets, and the universities. But the flip side of that is this: the degradation of our culture is almost entirely a leftist achievement. Over the last fifty years, it's the left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.

The left owns the dismal tide. They don't like the results? They're looking for someone or something to blame? Maybe they should start by hunting up a mirror.

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'Porn Literacy' Class for Teens

We are one sick society getting sicker with every passing day. Rod Dreher registers an eloquent protest:

What they’re doing is “good” in the sense that a public health educator teaching teenage junkies how to shoot heroin without killing themselves is good. The whole thing is evil to the core. We live in a degenerate culture that believes it has to teach its children that despite what they’ve seen on their smartphones, not all women like to be sodomized, choked during sex, or to have men ejaculating on their faces.

He rightly points his finger at the authorities who abdicate:

You bishops, priests, and pastors who are so worried that we Christians might not “engage” the world? What, exactly, do you offer to protect parents and children in your flock from this scourge? What are you leading them to do? Or do you prefer to rest in your banal pieties, and to allow those in your spiritual care to believe the same comforting lies?

This is a time for choosing. Choose to “engage” the Culture of Death by accommodating it, and you will die, spiritually. Resist it, and your soul might live. Help others resist too. Do not collaborate with it!

Part of the accommodation is the refusal on the part of priests, pastors, and parents to warn against the unbridled concupiscence that is at the root of the mainstreaming of pornography and the widespread acceptance of unrestricted abortion on demand. 

See my Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.

The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger.  But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the  brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation.  

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs.  It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion.  But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature.  Religion is even less likely to "wither away" (V. I. Lenin) than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally  incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that  the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable. 

The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.')  In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags.  Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims.  They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and the divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad.  They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others.  See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.

The issue at present is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way.  My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point  that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion.  And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it.  Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture?  I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses. They cherish the foolish leftist belief that 'deep down' we are all the same and that Muslims want the same things that decadent Europeans want.

In nuce:  leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it  by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature.  Here is an even pithier formulation:

Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi.  This is cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.

Two quibbles with Finkielkraut.  

First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs.  You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it. 

Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau), though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well.  It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production.  So not everything  in the superstructure is "fantastic," as Finkelkraut implies above.  This Marxian notion that all is ideology leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.

Related:  Alain Finkielkraut vs. the End of Civility

'Diversity' is Not a Dirty Word

Contrary to what some alt-righties of my acquaintance seem to think, 'diversity' is not a dirty word. To quote from my old entry, Diversity and Divisiveness:

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. [. . .] Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

[. . .] 

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless one is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many liberals and leftists cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity.

Some of my interlocutors on the Alt-Right call themselves neo-reactionaries.  The trouble with reaction, however, is that it ties you to what you are reacting against in a merely oppositional way with the result that you tend toward the opposite extreme. So, recoiling from the absurdities of leftist 'inclusion,' the neo-reactionaries tend toward the view that all diversity is suspect.

References to the "widening gyre" of the William Butler Yeats poem  have become a little too common recently, but I won't let that stop me from one more reference. For centrifugal forces threaten to tear the body politic asunder, not that I have any solution. I am too busy trying to understand the problem. As a citizen, I am worried. As a philosopher, I accept with equanimity that "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." All things must pass, and if the passing brings wisdom, then therein  lies the compensation.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

 

 

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) 

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

But no reasonable person values diversity as such. [. . .] Only some sorts of diversity are valuable. Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

[. . .] 

Diversity unchecked by the competing value of unity leads to divisiveness. For this reason, one ought not ‘celebrate diversity’ unless one is also willing to ‘celebrate unity.’ And this is precisely what too many liberals and leftists cannot, or will not, comprehend. They unreasonably emphasize diversity at the expense of unity.

Some of my interlocutors on the Alt-Right call themselves neo-reactionaries.  The trouble with reaction, however, is that it ties you to what you are reacting against in a merely oppositional way with the result that you tend toward the opposite extreme. So, recoiling from the absurdities of leftist 'inclusion,' the neo-reactionaries tend toward the view that all diversity is suspect.

References to the "widening gyre" of the William Butler Yeats poem  have become a little too common recently, but I won't let that stop me from one more reference. For centrifugal forces threaten to tear the body politic asunder, not that I have any solution. I am too busy trying to understand the problem. As a citizen, I am worried. As a philosopher, I accept with equanimity that "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." All things must pass, and if the passing brings wisdom, then therein  lies the compensation.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

 

 

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) 

The Defining Issue of the Day: Immigration into the West of Unassimilable Elements

From Robert W. Merry's review of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray, Bloomsbury Continuum, 352 pages:

You should carefully study the whole piece. Here are some excerpts. Emphases added.

[. . .]

No, the defining issue of our day is mass immigration into the nations of Western heritage. This growing inflow threatens to remake those nations and overwhelm their cultural identity. This is the issue that played the largest role in getting Donald Trump elected. It drove Britain’s Brexit vote. It is roiling the European continent, mounting tensions inside the EU and driving a wedge between the elites of those nations and their general populations.

Indeed, the central battlefront in the immigration wars is Europe, which accepted a trickle of immigrants in the immediate postwar era due to labor shortages. But over the years the trickle became a stream, then a growing river, and finally a torrent—to the extent that ethnic Britons are now a minority in their own capital city, refugee flows into Germany went from 48,589 in 2010 to 1.5 million in 2015, and Italy, a key entry point, received at one point an average of 6,500 new arrivals a day.

[. . .]

A key point of the book, reinforced through anecdote and abundant documentation, is that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated into their European host countries to any meaningful extent. Indeed, there is a growing feeling among many of the new arrivals that these aren’t host countries at all but merely lands ripe for Islam’s inexorable expansion. An 18-year-old Syrian refugee to Germany, Aras Bacho, writing in Der Freitag and the Huffington Post Deutschland, reflected this attitude when he said German migrants were “fed up” with “angry” Germans—described as “unemployed racists”—who “insult and agitate.” He added, “We refugees…do not want to live in the same country with you. You can, and I think you should, leave Germany. Germany does not fit you, why do you live here?….Look for a new home.”

Consider also the significance of this fact: By 2015 more British Muslims were fighting for ISIS than for the British armed forces. There was nothing hidden about the resolve of many European Muslims to retain their own culture while overwhelming the European one. At a rally in Cologne in 2008, then-Turkish prime minister (later president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd of 20,000 Turks living in Germany, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands that assimilation in Europe would constitute “a crime against humanity.” He added, “I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate.” Yet he admonished the five million Turks living in Europe to pursue political influence through democratic means in order to wield a “constitutional element” in transforming the continent.

Reading Murray’s book, one gets an understanding of why he characterizes Europe’s demise as “strange.” The continent’s embrace of its own cultural death is indeed historically aberrational. Civilizations normally fight for the preservation of their cultures, unite to expel invaders, revere their identities and the fundamental elements of their heritage. But the West today is engaged in an extensive and progressive extravagance of civilizational self-abnegation. Murray calls this the “tyranny of guilt” and identifies it as a “pathology.” The concept of historical guilt, he writes, means that hereditary stains of guilt can be passed down through generations—much as Europeans themselves for generations held Jews responsible for the killing of Christ. Eventually this was seen as repugnant, and the Pope himself in 1965 formally lifted the historical burden.

[. . .]

America lags behind Europe in the magnitude of its immigration problem. But, with an estimated 11 million illegals in country and the same prevailing elite sensibility dominating our discourse, the United States eventually will hit a similar crisis point unless current trends are altered or reversed. It’s worth noting that the percentage of Americans born outside the country has approached a historical high of 14 percent—similar to what it was in the 1920s, the last time the country curtailed both the numbers of immigrants and the nations from which they were allowed to come. That may be what’s brewing here today with the election of Trump.

Exactly right. Stupid 'liberals' are still in shock over Trump's election and still cannot understand how he could have won. The main factor responsible for his election is easy to understand. We decent Americans who love our country and stand for the rule of law are sick of illegal immigration and  are very reasonably opposed to the legal immigration of those who do not accept our values.

Those who oppose Trump's immigration proposals are either destructive leftist scum or else pollyannish bleeding-hearts who do not understand the issues.  The lines are clearly drawn and the battle is on for the soul of America. 2018 should prove to be very interesting indeed.  

We are lucky in that we are not Europe or the U. K. We can learn from their experiment in self-destruction. We have a little time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.

But will learn? And will we fight?  Some of you have children and grandchildren. Do you care at all what country they will inherit?

An Issue To Bring Us All Together

Story here.

London: Caracas on the Thames?

Rod Dreher quotes the reliably insightful Theodore Dalrymple and then applies his insights to our not-so-different situation.

No Distinctions Allowed in the Age of Unthinking GroupThink

Actor Matt Damon said this:

We’re going to have to figure - you know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?

The bit "eradicated without question" throws a sizable sop to the dragons of matriarchal political correctness, but they are not satisfied. They cannot abide his entirely reasonable point that one must distinguish between the relatively innocuous, though no doubt offensive and to-be-avoided, butt pat on the one hand and rape and child molestation on the other.

And so a petition against his participation in an upcoming movie now bears 200,000 signatures.

Welcome to the Age of Unthinking GroupThink.

Story here.

Time is Not on Europe's Side

Another warning from William Kilpatrick.  Excerpt:

The Importance of Will

Just as conversions can accelerate after a tipping point has been reached, so can emigration. But there’s also a third factor that seems to have been left out of the Pew Center’s calculations. It’s difficult to measure, but it may be the prime factor in determining which culture predominates in Europe. The crucial factor is will. If they want their culture to survive, people must be willing to defend it, and they must be willing to bring children into the world who will carry on the culture.

You can call it “will,” or “cultural confidence,” or “fighting spirit,” but whatever you call it, Europeans seem to be losing it. The problem begins in school. As Melanie Phillips noted eleven years ago in Londonistan:

The British education system simply ceased transmitting either the values or the story of the nation to successive generations, delivering instead the message that truth was an illusion and that the nation and its values were whatever anyone wanted them to be.

It's probably too late for Europe and the UK.  But we still have a little  time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance.  Hillary, you will recall, refused even to name the threat.

Is Anal Bleaching Racist?

It would have to be, right?

Logically prior question: what is anal bleaching?

Filed under: Decline of the West

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Latest Georgetown University Outrage

More proof that leftists are termites:

Georgetown’s website proclaims it is “the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institute of higher learning in the United States” and is “deeply rooted in the Catholic faith.” One campus group is learning, however, Georgetown’s roots might not be deep enough.

Love Saxa is a recognized student group on the Georgetown campus, and it exists “to promote healthy relationships on campus through cultivating a proper understanding of sex, gender, marriage, and family among Georgetown students.” Given the emphasis the Catholic Church puts on these issues (for example, see here and here), and Love Saxa’s alignment with church doctrine, one might believe it safe to assume Love Saxa is squarely within safe territory at a Catholic university.

But, oh, the perils of assumption. Love Saxa is in danger of being stripped of its status as an official student group. Its offense: holding to a Catholic view of human sexuality.

What can you do? Well, if you are a GU alumnus or alumna, make sure GU does not get one penny from you. When they call for a contribution, explain why you are withholding your donation.

You can't reason with termites, but money will get their attention.

Is Canada Committing Cultural Suicide?

William Kilpatrick is always good on the Islamist threat:

The good news is that ISIS has been defeated in Mosul and Raqqa, and may soon be driven entirely out of Iraq and Syria. The bad news is that Islamists continue to pile up victory after victory on the home front.

The home front war is basically a culture war. Islamists are winning it because they understand the nature of the war. The West is losing because its leaders have only the vaguest awareness that they are under attack. Let’s take Canada as a case in point. 

Read it all.

And please read my anti-Trudeau post, Diversity Can Be Our Weakness.

Why is Canada so hopelessly P. C.? Are their lakes and streams filled with leftist Kool-Aid? 

Filed under: Decline of the West

Should There be University Courses on Beat Generation Authors?

From a longer essay:

I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

Kerouac alone of the Beat Triumvirate [Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs] moves me, though I surely don't consider him a great writer.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that there really shouldn't be any university courses on Kerouac or Dylan or other culturally influential recent figures since their material is easily accessible and easily understandable.  Universities ought not pander. They should remain -- or rather return to being -- institutions whose sacred task is the preservation and transmission of HIGH culture, great culture, culture which is not easily understood and requires expert guidance to penetrate and appreciate. 

The thought is extended in Inheritance and Appropriation.

I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. You will be forgiven for thinking me a superannuated idealistic sermonizer out of touch with current events and trends. The West may be finished, and my preaching useless.   The barbarians are at the gates and the destructive Left is eager to let them in. The authorities are in abdication. The Pope is a fool: a leftist first, a Catholic second. Leftist termites have rotted out the foundations of the universities.

On the other hand, it ain't over til it's over.  So we battle on.  

The Suicide of American Liberalism

Robert Tracinski:

The far left, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, is protesting a campus speaker again. Who is it this time? Some neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer? An unscrupulous provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos? Just a garden-variety scary conservative like Ben Shapiro? Nope, it’s the American Civil Liberties Union as represented by Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.

Read it all.

I have never hid my contempt for the ACLU. But at least we share some sliver of ground with that bunch of shysters. For they have at least some, albeit highly selective, respect for portions of the Constitution.  The absurdly self-appellated Antifa thugs, however, will not abide the Constitution at all and absurdly opine that liberalism is white supremacy.

Here is one of my fulminations against the ACLU together with links to two other rather more measured pieces. 

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Will the Culture War Issue in Civil War?

John Davidson:

[. . .]

For all their shortcomings, conservatives at least have a limiting principle for politics. Most of them believe, for example, in the principles enshrined in the Constitution and maintain that no matter how bad things are, the Bill of Rights is a necessary bulwark, sometimes the only bulwark, against tyranny and violence. In contrast, here’s Timothy Egan of The New York Times arguing unabashedly for the repeal of the Second and Fifth Amendments.

The rapid radicalization of Democrats along these lines follows a ruthless logic about the entire premise of the American constitutional order. If you believe, as progressives increasingly do, that America was founded under false pretenses and built on racial oppression, then why bother conserving it? And why bother trying to compromise with those on the other side, especially if they reject progressives’ unifying theory that America is forever cursed by its original sin of slavery, which nothing can expiate?

Before you scoff, understand that this view of race and America is increasingly mainstream on the American Left. To read someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose recent article in The Atlantic is a manifesto of racial identity politics that argues Trump’s presidency is based on white supremacy, is to realize that progressive elites no longer believe they can share a republic with conservatives, or really anyone with whom they disagree.

Coates has attained near god-like status among progressives with his oracular writings on race and politics, which take for granted the immutability of race and racial animus. So it’s deeply disturbing when he writes, as he does in a new collection of essays, that “should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.”

What does Coates mean by that? It isn’t hard to guess, and lately Coates isn’t trying too hard to disguise it. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, Coates expanded on this idea. Writes Klein:

When he tries to describe the events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully.’

This is the circuitous, stumbling language of man who knows precisely what he wants to say but isn’t sure if he should come right out and say it. Coates isn’t alone in feinting toward violence as a means—perhaps the only means, if Coates is to be taken at his word—of achieving social justice. On college campuses, progressive activists increasingly don’t even bother mincing words, they just forcibly silence anyone who disagrees with them, as a Black Lives Matter group did recently during an event featuring the American Civil Liberties Union at the College of William and Mary. (Ironically, the talk was supposed to be about students and the First Amendment.)

For a sincere progressive, almost everything that happened in the past is a crime against the present, and the only greatness America can attain is by repudiating its past and shaming—or silencing, if possible—all those who believe preserving our constitutional order is the best way for all of us to get along.

Seen in that light, the radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans. It means, among other things, that the culture war is now going to encompass everything, and that it will never end.

Hugh Hefner's Legacy

Here:

Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.

Read it all.  I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.

The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 2012 to help stem the tsunami of folderol washing over us from the orifices of the mindless gun-grabbing Left in the wake of the Las Vegas rampage.  'Liberal' is elliptical for 'contemporary liberal.'  I am not speaking of classical, 19th century liberals or JFK-liberals. It is not 1960 anymore.

................

Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the so-called red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture.  Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence.  So if you want to do something, work against each of the following. But first look in the mirror to see if you are part of the problem.

1. Liberals tend to have a casual attitude toward crime. 

This is well-documented by Theodore Dalrymple.  No Contrition, No Penalty is a short piece by him.  See also my Crime and Punishment category.

It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.

One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.

The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.

The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.

Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this  deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse.  But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are intellectually obtuse in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle.  If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime,"  which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye."  Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals.  Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened.  Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.

2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion. 

Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them.  We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making  us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media.  Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted.  Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage.  But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.

The shysters of the American Civil Liberties Union, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical tradition from the public square.  I can't begin to catalog all of their antics.  But recently there was the Mojave Memorial Cross incident. It is absurd  that there has been any fight at all over it.  The ACLU,  whose radical lawyers  brought the original law suit, deserve contempt   and resolute opposition.  Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of  that very old memorial cross on a hill  in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion.  I consider anyone who  believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent.  One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.

And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed.   I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.

3. Liberals tend to have low standards, glorify the worthless, and fail to present exemplary human types.

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of  defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching.  And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy.  Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world.  See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.

This is connected with point (2) above, leftist hostility to religion.  Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God.  Central to this image is that mysterious power in us called free will.  The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.

This is a large topic.  Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

Camille Paglia in Conversation with Jordan Peterson

Long but good.  HT: Paul Craddick.

Should We Discuss Our Differences? Pessimism versus Optimism about Disagreement

Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and though philosophers are ever shooting down one anothers' arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent.  A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it gets.

Some say we need more 'conversations' with  our political opponents about the hot-button issues that divide us.  The older I get the more pessimistic I become about the prospects of such 'conversations.'  I believe we need fewer conversations, less interaction, and the political equivalent of divorce.  Here is an extremely pessimistic view:

I believe the time for measured debate on national topics has passed. There are many erudite books now decorating the tweed-jacket pipe-rooms of avuncular conservative theorists. And none as effective at convincing our opponents as a shovel to the face. But setting that means aside, there is no utility in good-faith debate with a side whose core principle is your destruction. The “middle ground” is a chasm. It is instead our duty to scathe, to ridicule, to scorn, and encourage the same in others. But perhaps foremost it is our duty to hate what is being done. A healthy virile hate. For those of you not yet so animated, I can assure its effects are invigorating.

Bret Stephens offers us an optimistic view in The Dying Art of Disagreement.

Unfortunately, Stephens says things that are quite stupid. He says, for example, that disagreement is "the most vital ingredient of any decent society." That is as foolish as to say, as we repeatedly hear from liberals, that our strength lies in diversity.  That is an absurdity bordering on such Orwellianisms as "War is peace" and 'Slavery is freedom."  Our strength lies not in our diversity, but in our unity. Likewise, the most vital ingredient in any decent society is agreement on values and principles and purposes.  Only on the basis of broad agreement can disagreement be fruitful.

This is not to say that diversity is not a value at all; it is a value in competition with the value of unity, a value which must remain subordinated to the value of unity. Diversity within limits enriches a society; but what makes it viable is common ground. "United we stand,' divided we fall."  "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Stephens goes on to create a problem for himself. Having gushed about how wonderful disagreement is, he then wonders why contemporary disagreement is so bitter, so unproductive, and so polarizing. If disagreement is the lifeblood of successful societies, why is blood being shed?

Stephens naively thinks that if we just listen to  one another with open minds and mutual respect and the willingness to alter our views that our conversations will converge on agreement. He speaks of the "disagreements we need to have" that are "banished from the public square before they are settled."  Settled?  What hot button issue ever gets settled?  What does Stephens mean by 'settled'?  Does he mean: get the other side to shut up and acquiesce in what you are saying?  Or does he mean: resolve the dispute in a manner acceptable to all parties to it?  The latter is what he has to mean. But then no hot-button issue is going to get settled.

Stephens fails to see that the disagreements are now so deep that there can be no reasonable talk of settling any dispute.  Does anyone in his right mind think that liberals will one day 'come around' and grasp that abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings and that it ought be illegal in most cases?  And that is just one of many hot-button issues. 

We don't agree on things that a few years ago all would have agreed on, e.g., that the national borders need to be secured.

According to Stephens, "Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society."  Again, this is just foolish.  To see this, consider the opposite:

Agreement as to fundamental values, principles and purposes is the lifeblood of any thriving society.

Now ask yourself: which of these statements is closer to the truth? Obviously  mine, not Stephens'. He will disagree with me about the role of disagreement.  How likely do you think it is that we will settle this meta-disagreement?  It is blindingly evident to me that I am right and that he is wrong.  Will he come to see the light? Don't count on it.

It is naive to suppose that conversations will converge upon agreement, especially when the parties to the conversations are such a diverse bunch made even more diverse by destrutive immigration policies.  For example, you cannot allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to immigrate into Western societies and then expect to have mutually respectful conversations with them that converge upon agreement.

I am not saying that there is no place for intelligent disagreement. There is, and it ought to be conducted with mutual respect, open-mindedness and all the rest.  The crucial point Stephens misses is that fruitful disagreement can take place only under the umbrella of shared principles, values, and purposes.  To invert the metaphor: fruitful disagreement presupposes common ground.

And here is the problem:  lack of common ground.  I have nothing in common with the Black Lives Matters activists whose movement is based on lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the police.  I have nothing in common with Antifa thugs who have no respect for the classical traditions and values of the university.  I could go on: people who see nothing wrong with sanctuary jurisdictions, with open borders, with using the power to the state to force florists and caterers to violate their consciences; the gun grabbers; the fools who speak of 'systemic racism'; the appeasers of rogue regimes . . . .

There is no comity without commonality, and the latter is on the wane.  A bad moon is rising, and trouble's on the way.  Let's hope we can avoid civil war. 

Cultural Confidence

What we lack is not military might, but cultural confidence. The Left's long march through the institutions has been remarkably successful. 

I now hand off to Mark Steyn, Statue of Limitations.

Jordan Peterson and the Transgender Wars

Things in Canada are worse than I thought. Their Pee-Cee brigades are even more insane than ours. Quotable (and quoted):

At the University of Toronto, after receiving two written warnings, he [Jordan Peterson] has been in danger of losing his job following his announcement that he would refuse to use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty who don’t identify with their biological gender, to the fury of radical transgender activists. The use of such pronouns is mandatory under a recently instituted Canadian law, Bill C-16. Peterson rejects the injunction on free speech grounds. ‘I’m not going to cede linguistic territory to post-modernist neo-Marxists,’ he says. He has expressed the view that he might use the preferred gender pronoun of a particular person, if asked by that individual, rather than having the decision foisted on him by the state.

Well, at least one Canadian has a pair of balls. The C-16 law is fucking insane if you will excuse my French. 

Free speech is a core value for him — the core value — and one that is becoming increasingly pressing, most recently (as I write this) with the resignation of the Labour shadow minister Sarah Champion after she made remarks in the Sun about Pakistani sex gangs and ran foul of what was considered acceptable by the Labour leadership. That elements of the left have begun to label free speech as somehow a ‘right-wing’ value is particularly rattling (although such censorious thinking has a long history in radical left ideology).

Free speech a right-wing value? It's classically liberal.

‘If I can’t say what I think, then I don’t get to think, and if I can’t think then I can’t orient myself in the world, and if I can’t do that, then I’m going to fall into a pit and take everyone else with me,’ Peterson says.

Peterson has been saddled by some of his critics with the label ‘alt-right’, which he views as a ridiculous slander. He describes himself as a ‘classic British liberal’ who makes those on both the left and right uncomfortable. He supports socialised health care and the liberalisation of drug use, and is libertarian on most social issues.

‘Alt-right’ is certainly one of the most inaccurate pigeonholes you could imagine cramming him into. His heroes include Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. He is a Christian, but more on the pattern of existential Christians such as Søren Kierkegaard or Paul Tillich than anything to be found in the Midwest Bible belt.

Peterson’s thought-crime is that he disagrees with the view of transgender activists that gender is a social construct and has no grounding in biology (although he is not opposed to transgender rights in general).

It is reasonable to hold that gender roles are in part socially contructed as long as you also hold that they are influenced by underlying biological realities. But if you say that gender is a social construct with no grounding in biology then you show that your contact with reality is minimal if not nonexistent. If your stupidity is a willed stupidity than I condemn you morally. People have a moral obligation to use their intellects properly.

There is a curious paradox here. Lefties who accuse global warming skeptics of denying reality and being anti-science themselves deny reality and are anti-science in their constructivist views of gender and race.  The difference, of course, is that there is good reason to be skeptical of the global warming theses of the climate alarmists, but no good reason to doubt that gender and race differences are ultimately rooted in biological differences.

So why does his right to free speech trump a transgender activist’s right not to be offended? Why not just keep his thoughts to himself?

‘Because thoughts aren’t like that,’ he says. ‘People mostly think by talking. Not only do they think by talking, but they correct their thoughts by talking. If you deprive people of the right to think, then you doom them to suffering. You doom their stupidity of its right to die. You should allow your thoughts to be cast away into the fire — instead of you.’

His claims about gender — that women consistently differ, cross-culturally, from men on many of the Big Five personality traits identified by psychometric researchers — are, in psychology circles at least, not particularly controversial. These traits are Openness, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Agreeableness (each of these are technical definitions that are somewhat more precise and different in meaning to their casual usage as terms).

‘These traits are not social-cultural,’ says Peterson. ‘The evidence is crystal clear. As you make a country more egalitarian, the gender differences get larger. Most particularly, women are higher when it comes to Agreeableness — wanting everyone to get along, not liking conflict, compassionate, polite, self-sacrificing — and Neuroticism — higher in negative emotion and more responsive to grief and threat and punishment and isolation.’

Anyone with any experience of life knows that women as a group are more agreeable than men as a group. Why the hell do you think they are 'over-represented' among realtors?  And anyone who is not stupid, or a leftist, knows that the statement two sentences back cannot be refuted by uncovering a covey of prickly, jack-booted dykes, or a convention of Walter Mitties.

Is There Any Stopping the Insanity Now?

The Joy of Destruction