The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "Dear Landlord"

Bob Dylan, “Dear Landlord”:

Dear landlord
Please don’t put a price on my soul
My burden is heavy
My dreams are beyond control
When that steamboat whistle blows
I’m gonna give you all I got to give
And I do hope you receive it well
Dependin’ on the way you feel that you live

Dear landlord
Please heed these words that I speak
I know you’ve suffered much
But in this you are not so unique
All of us, at times, we might work too hard
To have it too fast and too much
And anyone can fill his life up
With things he can see but he just cannot touch

Dear landlord
Please don’t dismiss my case
I’m not about to argue
I’m not about to move to no other place
Now, each of us has his own special gift
And you know this was meant to be true
And if you don’t underestimate me
I won’t underestimate you

 

Copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music

Fairport Convention version: Fairport Convention - Dear Landlord - YouTube

Joe Cocker album version: Dear Landlord - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: Home

Dr. Peter King, from Here and Now:

We could define conservatism as the love of home. Conservatives place great store on the local and the familiar, on what we know and consequently have developed a great affection for. We are prepared to die for our home precisely because it gives us a purpose for living. What is important to us is the here and now, those palpable and ever-present things that give our lives meaning.

We are beings that dwell: we need to be settled and relish the permanence of our connection with our home. It gives us security and allows us the complacency we need to fulfil our chosen ends free from the concerns of mere subsistence and survival. Without a home we cannot function as individuals or as a society. It is what gives us a focus; home identifies us for what we are and so locates us. This is the key conservative insight: that we are located beings who have a natural affinity to what we already know. From this flows all that we understand about the conservative disposition: the love for the past, the ties to the land, the affection for a particular community of people and its institutions, and a love of our culture and the desire to maintain and protect it.

There is nothing cynical in our connection with home. We do not abuse our home and can only gain from it by using it as it is meant to be used. It is only by using it as a place of privacy and security that we can derive the meanings that turn a physical space into a home. It is only then that it becomes a familiar. And so a proper sense of home naturally develops out of a love for those people and things that are around us. It is through the openness of our faces that home allows us to see the truth in the faces of others and so share our lives honestly with them. Home is where we have no fear.

This is what makes conservatism so uniquely appealing. It is also what both annoys and frightens the progressives, who see this as a direct challenge to their desire for change and belief in human perfectibility. Conservatism has to be opposed and denigrated at all costs because it is a standing example of the wrongheadedness of progress and modernism.

Modernity is characterized by the state of homelessness. It replaces the fixed point with flux and posits change as the principle aim of any society. The purpose of a society, according to modernism, is to move on. As a result there is no permanence and no attention is paid to our need for roots and to be settled in one place.

Modernity is embarrassed by anything parochial. It cannot stand what it sees as insular and inward-looking. Modernity needs to always be searching out the new and the strange. It welcomes novelty and is easily distracted by anything new and shiny.

The result is that there is no center to the modern world. Everything is peripheral and in flux. It is always moving outwards, expanding and taking in all it finds to create an undifferentiated mass, a globalized homogeneity with no necessary connection to any of us. It replaces the dweller with the consumer: it takes away one’s home and leaves one in the midst of the indifferent crowd.

The modern world is a place where we have no control and where we cannot know the limits of our place. We become merely a part of a mass of unknown others who are denied any commonality by the speed at which we are forced to move. We bump into each other, making temporary and unwanted contact with those we know we will never see again. We have no center, no place that is uniquely ours. And so what we yearn for is to find some way home.

I Can See Real Clearly Now

{The title of today's post is a clever reference to the fact that I have once again mined RealClearPolitics and RealClearPolicy for items of interest.}

You can add Ryszard Legutko to the list of Eastern European intellectuals in vogue on the American Right, a list which already includes Zygmunt Bauman, Leszek Kolakowski, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among others. The allure of such thinkers is that they have lived under Communist totalitarianism, therefore, their insights about freedom and their warnings about the slippery slopes of liberalism must be taken seriously.

At American Greatness, Emina Melonic reviews Legutko’s The Cunning of Reason: Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols. She finds it invigorating, albeit imperfect. Ms. Melonic praises Legutko for teaching us that “Freedom does not exist in a collectivist society, and the only way that it can exist is if we reject collectivism and affirm the idea of community.” If that distinction—between “collectivism” and “community”—proves problematic, we can simply use the Russian term sobornost’ and nod our heads wisely.

Melonic approvingly notes, “Legutko points out that liberalism has enacted tyranny as opposed to freedom.” How so? In part, at least, by advocating for so-called “rights” that in fact impose liberalism’s decadent values on the society. “As Legutko points out: ‘The most notorious examples of the liberties gained in Western societies in recent decades [are] the public use of vulgar language, public media’s public broadcasting of explicit sex and violence, euthanasia, same-sex marriage and the right for homosexuals to adopt children, [and] almost unlimited rights to abortion.’”

That seems a fair assessment of liberalism’s recent “accomplishments”. Legutko could have added other examples of liberalism’s tyranny: e.g., biological men are allowed to pose as “women,” to use women’s bathrooms, and to compete in women’s sports; marijuana has been effectively legalized; all white people are suspect; academia is in thrall to Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory; and Big Tech has dropped its mask and has revealed itself to be Big Brother.

Ms. Melonic concludes, “Ryszard Legutko succeeds in dismantling current ideologies that seek to destroy the order of things. He thoughtfully and elegantly provides a critique of our own society through a prism that is both philosophical and historical and is genuinely calling on the reader to consider both the possibilities and limits of freedom.” 

Does the experience of living under totalitarianism qualify Legutko et al to critique liberalism, or does it predispose them to see tyranny lurking everywhere? That, I suggest, would make for an interesting essay.   

Free and Captive Minds › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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At RealClearPolitics, Charles Lipson offers a modest suggestion of his own: we should eliminate “women’s sports” and let men and women compete against each other on equal terms, because “separate but equal” arrangements are inherently unjust. Lipson’s real purpose, of course, is to belittle the idea of allowing trans women to compete against cis women: “Put simply, if there are good reasons for holding separate competitions at all, then transgender women should not compete against other women.”

The issue seems very important to Charles Lipson, who probably was up in arms decades ago when the trans woman Rene Richards dominated women’s tennis. ¹ Or perhaps he was traumatized by Billie Jean King's thrashing of tennis legend and "male chauvinist pig" Bobby Riggs. I await Lipson's polemic against the use of "weight classes" in boxing and wrestling, handicaps in bowling and golf, and other attempts to even competitive playing fields. 

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¹ Rene Richards did not dominate women’s tennis, even though conservatives at the time insisted she would.

A Gold Medal Question: Should Women's Sports Even Exist? | RealClearPolitics

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Finally, at Persuasion, Zaid Jilani sees signs that the woke tyrants may be on their way out the door and that Cancel Culture may be coming to an end. “Young Americans may return us to a culture of compassion and forgiveness,” Jilani writes; such a “return” would be quite a trick, given that no such culture ever existed in America (or, likely, anywhere else).

Jilani, mind you, is writing about the same America that has the flimsiest social safety net of any advanced nation, that has more people in prison and keeps them there longer, that has retained the death penalty, and that spends more on its military than its major rivals combined; where, in all that, does Jilani find any hint of “compassion and forgiveness”? We do not pledge allegiance to a flag representing "compassion and forgiveness for all," and any suggestion we do so would be defeated overwhelmingly if put to a national plebiscite.

Regardless, Jilani thinks that Cancel Culture is the modern-day equivalent of the Salem witch trials (also an outstanding example of traditional American compassion and forgiveness), and he welcomes its demise. According to him, “Hypersensitivity may simply be a fad that is starting to burn itself out. Moral panics about such pressing topics as Halloween costumes may have consumed students at America’s most elite campuses during the mid-2010s, but no social or political trend lasts forever.”  Ah yes, the great “Halloween costumes moral panic” of the mid-2010s: it definitely happened, and it was all-consuming! I believe Halloween was cancelled on campuses for several years because of the all-consuming panic.

Jilani continues:

Gen Z, on the other hand, has grown up immersed in the internet and social media. To them, the barrier between what’s personal and what’s public is fluid, and many Americans of this age don’t find it particularly unusual to broadcast everyday life and thoughts to the entire world. A puritanical mindset that seeks to persecute people over the expression of their beliefs is hard to reconcile with a world where so much of what was once private is now public. The teens in this generation have also had to deal with the ever-present reality of their peers being dogpiled for their social media posts. Gen Z has first-hand knowledge of this Panopticon-like environment and how suffocating it can be.

As has always been the case, one’s attitude about all this depends, as they say, on whose ox is being gored; or, in this instance, on whose culture is being canceled. The entire “cancel culture” brouhaha has been cooked up by people who would go to court in a heartbeat to defend the right of private religious schools to fire teachers for “getting” pregnant (but not for “getting someone else” pregnant), for cohabitation, for being gay or lesbian, or for any number of moral “offenses”. They want professional athletes fired for kneeling during the national anthem. They are kindred spirits to the people who mercilessly hounded left-wing professors and screenwriters in the Fifties, prompting Arthur Miller to write The Crucible in response to the prevailing McCarthyite "cancel culture"; and I, for one, have not the slightest sympathy for them.

The End of "Cancel Culture"? - by Zaid Jilani - Persuasion

Introducing Professor Arguendo

{Because I find it difficult to resist the arguments of Raymond Tallis, whose book Enemies of Hope is a devastating critique of anti-modern pessimists, I have enlisted the assistance of a good friend, Professor Arguendo, in hopes of providing some balanced debate. I may call on him again in the future. His arguments contra Tallis are in the footnotes. I should add here a clarification: Professor Arguendo is in no way related to that notorious scoundrel, Professor Innuendo.} 

Raymond Tallis (from Enemies of Hope):

There exists a choir of Jeremiahs who find modern life spiritually and morally empty and who cannot link the word ‘civilization’ with the word ‘Western’ without putting the former in lip-curling inverted commas. They do not seem unduly concerned about the major difference between magic and science: that the latter works and the former does not. Mythological explanations may have had more expressive force than the rational and factually accurate accounts of scientists, but they did nothing for the health and happiness and the richness of people’s life-experience. Magic may be fun for the magician, but it is based upon error, leads to incompetence, and is fundamentally fraudulent. The magical and scientific accounts of reality are not equally valid, and it is utterly heartless and irresponsible to suggest that they are. ¹

For all their talk of ‘the recovery of wonder,’ [critics] seem exceptionally impervious to the wonder of modern scientific achievement. Their scornful, knowing, cynical attitude shows a striking lack of that very astonishment, reverence, and awe which they wish to restore to us. Anyone with the slightest hint of those ‘primitive’ virtues of wonder and piety would be too overwhelmed by the pace and magnitude of the achievements of science to be able simply to dismiss it. ² The mighty achievements of science and technology [serve to highlight] the great mystery of the partial intelligibility of the world and the almost equally great mystery of the peculiar status of man as a uniquely ‘explicit animal’ able to elaborate that partial intelligibility.

Science’s critics are unastonished at the mysterious fact that human abstractions can penetrate the opaqueness of the material world, permitting human beings to fly at 600 miles an hour, to send their voices tens of thousands of miles through space, to delineate the precise nature of the diseases that inflict their bodies, and so on. ³ Nor, finally, do they ask why science has achieved such an ascendancy over myths. Can it be that myths and magic declined because they did not achieve what people would like them to achieve? Could it be that science is more powerful than magic? If the answer to these questions is yes, we have to ask what it says about the relative truth of science and myth and about those who urge us to abandon the former in favor of the latter. ⁴

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Footnotes contra Tallis, by Professor Arguendo:

¹ Arguendo, the likes of Theodore Roszak would insist that magic was a more participatory practice (though the shaman/magician played the larger role) than modern scientific medicine. Does the value of actively participating in a fraudulent and too often futile practice (i.e., magic) constitute an argument against receiving effective treatment at the hands of a trained specialist (i.e. modern medicine)? That depends on the relative values you place on health and on active participation.

² Arguendo, from the standpoint of a traditional theist, all glory, reverence, and awe are properly directed to God: to the Creator, that is, rather than to the creation. Modern science leads man to worship himself and to believe himself self-sufficient; there is, therefore, a spiritual price to be paid for material (and medical) improvements, a price that may even be paid for all eternity. Unless, of course, there is no God; in which case, as even Pascal admitted, all bets are off.

³ Arguendo, what does it profit a man to fly through space at 600 miles per hour only to lose his immortal soul? I am not being flippant, though I concede that the existence of an "immortal soul" is unproven at best. 

⁴ A final arguendo: every magician knows that the craft depends on misdirection of the audience. A traditional theist might say that, to the extent modern science and technology, with all their dramatic effects, keep us focused on the things of this world, they are nothing but elaborate, albeit very impressive and undeniably effective, efforts at misdirection.

It is hard to argue with the successes (miracles, even) of modern science and technology or with the “rationalist” approach that undergirds them; unless, that is, one chooses to catalog not our medical breakthroughs but the various inhumane atrocities (e.g., aerial warfare, missiles, drones, chemical attacks, etc.) that science and technology did not invent but have helped to perfect and to perpetuate. Even at that, I suppose, one could acknowledge the atrocities, shrug, and say “Stuff happens.”

Professor Arguendo holding forth, as he is wont to do

Books Report

I have previously mentioned Raymond Tallis’ Enemies of Hope, but I would now like to offer an unqualified (and unpaid) endorsement of the book: it is the best takedown I have read of various anti-modernists, postmodernists, and pessimistic cultural critics (mostly, though not entirely, on the Left). Tallis makes a devastating case in favor of the Enlightenment project, based as it was on Reason, science, and realistic optimism regarding the possibility of progress. He embarrasses the purveyors and practitioners of unreason, the denigrators of civilization, the believers in magic, the advocates of myth, the neo-medievalists, the paleo-conservatives, and all those other intellectuals who make their living (or just amuse themselves) biting the hand that feeds them—i.e., the hand of the world that Enlightenment values have made.

As someone who is more than a little attracted by anti-modern critiques and by the allures of a more “spiritual” approach to life, I admit that Tallis leaves me both chagrined and pretty much without a leg to stand on. I imagine I will regroup, because I cannot imagine actually changing my mind; but I will be sure to avoid Raymond Tallis in the future, as he makes my beliefs very hard to hold, much less to justify. 

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Books on Tap:

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City is about Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac. A justification of Christianity against its modern cultured despisers, Smith’s book calls attention to what he sees as the tenuous status of Christians in today’s America. Early Christianity, he says, was the counterculture that stood against the pagan world; in today’s neo-pagan culture, Christians are called again to defend their faith and its place in society.

From the publisher’s blurb:

Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in this book that today’s culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.

From the book itself:

There exists a widespread conviction, pervasive and influential in the academy, of human beings as bearers of ‘interests’ who live and act primarily to further those interests (and who, accordingly, need to be understood and explained as ‘ration interest-seekers’.) In contrast to this conception (though not necessarily in contradiction to it) is the possibility that humans—or many humans—have an essential religious dimension, and that without appreciating this religious dimension we will not understand what people are or why they behave in the ways they do.

The book includes a predictably annoying Introduction by Robert P. George. I am giving Steven Smith the benefit of the doubt, hoping his book will be better than George’s contribution.

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Finally, I await Keith Hopkins’ A World Full of Gods, which chronicles what he calls The Strange Triumph of Christianity. Reviewers and critics have called the book “a rollicking work of historical revisionism” and “a magnificent, rollicking failure”; I assume, therefore, that whatever else it may be, the book will be rollicking. Although Hopkins was (is?) a Cambridge classicist scholar, he departed in this case from sober tradition and freely mixed fact with fiction: “He opens with a pair of time travelers poking around ancient Pompeii, remarking on everything from the all-too-public toilets to the astonishingly libidinous artwork. Later, Hopkins has a television crew interviewing a survivor of the Qumran sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. Throughout, he includes invented letters from academics offering criticism of the work as it unfolds.”

The book, critics advise, disappoints in two major ways. First, it fails to explain the mystery at its heart—how did such a minor sectarian offspring of Judaism become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire? Second, it spends little time on the historical Jesus, a “failing” that may be mitigated if one recalls that the apostle Paul was equally neglectful of Jesus' life. Hopkins wanted readers to understand the “sensibilities” of the pagan world, a world as strange to us as an alien civilization, and, one hopes, to recognize the strangeness of the early Christians, both by our standards and by the conventional standards of their own time. It is a point that has been made, albeit without Hopkins’ literary devices, by David Bentley Hart; the early Christians were nothing like us, and modern Christians are nothing like them.

Sunday Sermon: "Dogville"

Dogville is a 2003 film written and directed by Lars von Trier and starring Nicole Kidman, with John Hurd doing yeoman duty as the story’s unseen narrator. It is either a masterpiece or a pretentious disaster; who am I to judge? Moreover, while von Trier was content to say that Dogville was about the tragic fact that “evil can arise anywhere, as long as the situation is right,” others have interpreted the film as either a veiled critique of American democracy/history or a veiled critique of capitalism. The movie’s title, however, the fact that the main character’s name is “Grace,” and the themes with which the film grapples—trust, love, betrayal, punishment, mercy, justice, and forgiveness—all signal to me a theological/metaphysical sub-text: the people of Dogville welcome Grace, albeit somewhat reluctantly, only to struggle with her presence in their lives.

The film is three hours long. I have watched it twice and am ready for a third viewing. These four clips, however, add up to only about 15 minutes:  

Dogville Prologue - YouTube

Dogville - Set - YouTube

Dogville (7/10) Movie CLIP - Chained (2003) HD - YouTube

Dogville (2003) - Grace's Revelation - YouTube

For additional information:

Dogville - Wikipedia and Dogville (2003) - IMDb

Saturday Lecture: Our Animal Nature?

“It is only through real understanding of the ways in which chimpanzees and men show similarities of behavior that we can reflect, with meaning, on the ways in which men and chimpanzees differ. And only then can we really begin to appreciate, in a biological and spiritual manner, the full extent of man’s uniqueness.” (Jane Goodall)

Raymond Tallis (from Enemies of Hope):

Critics of civilization believe that where we come from is the Animal Kingdom and that consequently many of the discontents of civilization arise from the conflicts between the demands, values, and beliefs of civilized society and our animal instincts. We are animals, yes, but we are sick animals, because life in human society denies expression to our animal nature and, worse, even prevents us from acknowledging that nature. We are possessed by instincts that we can neither express nor even admit to. The result is that, at best, we suffer in secret the consequences of inner division between our civic and our instinctual beings and that, at worst, we give distorted external expression to our denied instincts, so that others suffer—in, for example, the gratuitous violence and petty tyrannies of domestic life and the oppressions, wars, etc. of public life.

This story of human beings as frustrated animals—or as frustrated primitives (who once enjoyed a closer relationship to our common animal nature—seems to have received a huge boost from the recent advances in life-sciences: Darwinian evolutionary theory, ethology, and molecular biology all seem to point to a closer kinship between mankind and animal-kind than [we are] comfortable with. The message from the biologists has inspired many twentieth-century novelists, who see the truth about character as being located in those immemorial primitive tropisms and animal instincts that really regulate behavior and belief. They believe, as D.H. Lawrence did, that underneath personality there is something much more important and powerful and true than personality—the impersonal inheritance from the primitive and animal past. For such writers, civilization is always assumed to be a ‘thin veneer’ over a seething, pullulating mass of uncivilized appetites, instincts, and emotions.

There is hardly a schoolchild who has not learned from a compulsory study of Lord of the Flies that, left to themselves, human beings will naturally revert to a condition of primitives and wild beasts, creating a lawless society in which the strongest rule and the weakest are exploited or become the object of arbitrary cruelty or the unwilling victim of a blood sacrifice. The influence of the novelists has, in its turn, greatly amplified the influence of the biologists. And biologism has also been mediated to the wider public by quasi-scientific writers such as Freud, who in their turn have had an incalculable impact on the literary imagination.

[For these critics] the assumption is that there is no sharp break between humans and other animals [and that] the enormous distance between animal origin and contemporary human destination that has accrued over millions of years since a distinctively human species appeared amounts to nothing. Man may remove himself from within the animal kingdom but the animal kingdom cannot be removed from within mankind. However the fundamental opposition between (animal) Nature and (human) Culture may dominate human experience, discourse, attitudes, and behavior, this opposition is simply the master-myth by which humans organize their pictures of the world and make the world over into their thing. Our human nature remains rooted in our animal origins; we are up to our leaves in our roots. 

According, then, to biologists, anthropologists, and others, the stories we tell ourselves about our origins exaggerate the sharpness of the distinction between man and the infra-human animals. In contrast, I contend that eliding the absolutely fundamental difference requires us to overlook, indeed traduce, humankind and to deny the central mystery of what we are. Understanding humanity in terms of animality, and seeing men as beasts self-deceived by a surface rationality as to their true nature, prevents us from thinking about our own natures in a helpful and constructive way. It is a crucial factor in the emptiness of much contemporary social thought and cultural criticism.

"Food for Thought" Friday

{Some thought-morsels on which to chew going into the weekend...}

In his essay “The Standoff Over Women’s Ordination,” for reasons known only to him and to his God, Paul Baumann writes at length about the Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women without once quoting this, which would seem to settle the issue: “All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:27-28)

Unwilling to parse Paul's meaning, Baumann instead quotes anthropologist Mary Douglas, who wrote in 1996, “If we respect a religious institution, we cannot dismiss out of hand its claim to honor its continuity with its own past. Telling its members to forget their common past and make new myths of present reality is the same as telling them to get lost, die off, and disappear.”  “Sadly,” Baumann adds, “that is what some of the women [demanding ordination] actually say.”  Do the feelings of traditionalists matter more than the feelings of the women and men who believe the Church has been persistently and stubbornly wrong on this issue? Apparently, for Baumann, they do. 

Rehearsing the arguments against women priests, Baumann notes the historical gendering of the Church as "the bride of Christ". It does not occur to him that the Church could just as easily proclaim itself  "the spouse of Christ," any more than it occurs to him that "Christ," as Paul made clear, is genderless--the Church is not "the bride of Jesus," the cismale first-century rabbi--and so therefore is the Church. Moreover, Baumann should not push too far with his "the priest is a stand-in for Jesus" explanation, as that would raise troubling questions about whether Church doctrine has enabled priestly abuses (quick answer: yes, of course it has, and will continue to do so). The all-male celibate Catholic priesthood can hardly be defended on the grounds of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"; it's broke, and it has been for a long time. 

Baumann also implies that ordaining women will drive churchgoers away: “More liberal Christian churches began ordaining women and adopting modern attitudes toward sexual morality decades ago,” he writes, before noting “the dramatic decline of mainline Protestantism over these same decades.” In other words, Catholic traditionalists would rather leave their beloved Church than accept women priests. Still, Baumann is no troglodyte, much less a misogynist; “Does the Church need to give women decision-making authority?” he asks. “Yes, it does,” he answers. “Is ordination the only way to achieve that end?” he wonders. “Perhaps not.” Maybe, he says, again following Mary Douglas, “There should be a Women’s Commission on Doctrine, one that would be responsible for certain areas of Church teaching and practice, with veto power over the actions of the traditional male hierarchy. She argued it might be appropriate for the commission to have special authority over questions such as contraception, abortion, and bioethics. It would be made up of both women religious and lay women from all walks of life.”

So: women, who are unfit to stand on the altar and perform the rite of consecrating the Eucharist, will nonetheless be able to veto the Church’s celibate male hierarchy, i.e., bishops, cardinals, and even popes? I will give you better odds that the camel will make it through the eye of the needle.

The Standoff Over Women’s Ordination | Commonweal Magazine

As I have been saying, it all started with the Enlightenment, and Sohrab Ahmari (The Unbroken Thread), agrees with me, writing:

“Our version of freedom sprang from the European Enlightenment, a philosophical movement that “sought to liberate man from the dead hand of tradition,” as one historian of ideas has written. Beginning in the late Eighteenth Century, men and women inspired by Enlightenment ideas swept violently through the West, assailing every source and symbol of authority that stood in the way of the sovereign individual and his autonomous exercise of his reason and his rights.”

Reviewing Ahmari’s book, Robert Tracinski, staunch defender of post-Enlightenment liberalism, suggests that “the rise of this new strain of intellectual opposition reminds us to increase our own engagement with Enlightenment philosophers and ideas—and with the challenges to them—and to rededicate ourselves to strengthen and extend those ideas through vigorous debate and discussion.”

Yes: Come, let us reason together, because that has worked so well in our past.

Sohrab Ahmari's Straw Man Assault on Liberalism - Discourse (discoursemagazine.com)

In “How Important Is White Fear?” Mark Reiff tries to get at the heart of our current darkenss. If it isn’t economic anxiety and if it isn’t demographic changes, what the heck is it that drives the Trump movement? Prepare to be surprised:

The demographic shift explanation is in fact both unconvincing and dangerous. It is unconvincing because it is built on a series of what are in fact highly implausible presumptions. It is dangerous because it disguises the fact that what is really going on is not a battle with what philosophers call akrasia, or weakness of the moral will – the struggle to live up to our moral ideals when doing so seems contrary to our self-interest. Rather, the battle is over what moral values society should embrace. It is a battle over whether society should remain committed to liberalism, even if imperfectly so, or whether it should reject the aspirations of liberalism entirely and embrace illiberalism and all the consequences that flow from this.

“Illiberalism”? What does that even mean? Reiff elaborates:

The fundamental moral commitments of many of those in supposedly liberal societies are now changing. People’s allegiance to liberal values is fading; not because they are trying to protect their self-interest and putting this above satisfying what they continue to recognize as the demands of morality. It is fading because they are becoming convinced that certain types of people are not entitled to be treated with equal concern and respect. They think that society should be as hierarchical in assigning moral value to people as it is hierarchical in assigning income, wealth, power, and everything else. They see ‘others’ as ‘beings of lesser moral worth’. They find authoritarianism, not democracy, as most comforting, even when they have little influence over that authority themselves. And they would feel this way regardless of whether a demographic shift was coming.

In other words, “they” are growing tired of participating in the seemingly endless struggle for justice, equity, dignity, and all the other easily mocked ideals of liberalism. On the other hand, I for one am growing tired of being told I should try to understand the anger of the MAGA crowd, which is why Mark Reiff’s article is so refreshing. “Illiberal arguments,” he says, “are not based on facts, but on self-serving narratives.”  Furthermore, Reiff insists, “Illiberal attitudes are wrong, not just because they hurt the people subject to them, but because they diminish us all – they pollute the world with ugliness, which stains everyone. And our arguments for liberalism must be as passionate and vigorous as the attacks on liberalism now coming out of the illiberal Right.”

Reiff invokes the need for something more that Robert Tracinski’s prescription (above) for “vigorous debate and discussion.” Instead, Reiff unapologetically insists, “The obstacle we really have to overcome is a lack of political will. For there is a strong liberal tendency to avoid being disagreeable; to try to see both sides of every argument, no matter how unreasonable one side might be. But illiberalism is unreasonable. And the sooner we stop pretending otherwise and recognize that an appeal to values, not self-interest, is what is needed to convince those attracted to the unreasonable to reject it, the sooner we will start making progress in halting the decline of liberalism throughout the world."

The demographic shift isn’t driving white people to the Right | Aeon Essays

Sgt. Pepper's Paleolithic Band

"In four centuries of taking wealth and comfort from the body of the Earth, modern science has not troubled to produce a single rite or ritual, not even a minor prayer, that asks pardon or gives thanks." (Theodore Roszak, from The Gendered Atom)

The late Theodore Roszak was an impassioned observer/interpreter of Sixties’ counterculture. In his 1969 classic The Making of a Counter Culture, he urged what we might call a paleo-radicalism, a neo-primitivism that would liberate us from the bourgeois lives of quiet desperation we lead but “inwardly loathe”. “Harking back,” he wrote, “to the shamanistic world view, a cultural stage buried in the primitive past of our society,” Roszak insisted on the necessity of breaking “the spell of the objective consciousness” which gripped the modern West, bringing with it “the regime of experts, the high priests of the citadel who control access to reality”. Going beyond the New Left’s calls for “participatory democracy,” Roszak called for “participatory reality”: “It is participation of this order—experiential and not merely political—that alone can guarantee the dignity and autonomy of the individual citizen.” The Sixties’ youth, guided by instinct and rebelling against their elders, were on the right track:

“The strange youngsters who don cowbells and primitive talismans and who take to the public parks or wilderness to improvise outlandish communal ceremonies are in reality seeking to ground democracy safely beyond the culture of expertise. They give us back the image of the paleolithic band, where the community during its rituals stood in the presence of the sacred in a rude equality that pre-dated class, state, status.”

“It is a strange brand of radicalism,” Roszak acknowledged, “that turns to prehistoric precedent for its inspiration.” What else could we do, though, trapped as we were in a culture that had replaced “the immediacy of the personal vision with the aloofness of objective knowledge”? Alas, “the old magic that could illuminate the sacramental presence in a tree, a pond, a rock, a totem is derided as a form of superstition unworthy of civilized men. Nothing we come upon in the world can any longer speak to us in its own right. Things, events, even the person of our fellow human beings have been deprived of the voice with which they once declared their mystery to men.”

Despite the turmoil of the late Sixties and early Seventies, Roszak doubled down on his anti-modern stance in his 1972 Where the Wasteland Ends, an extended screed against “the mad rationality” of our time in which he invoked “magic and dreams, science and alchemy, idolatry and the sacramental awareness, visionary poetry and the tricks of perception.”  The human species, Roszak claimed, was in desperate, urgent need of spiritual rescue: “It has become too great a strain to continue regarding the sickness of spirit so long festering among anxious artists and philosophers of our society as the private wound of a sensitive few.” The plague of modernity encompassed everyone; we had met the afflicted and they were us. ¹

“The world cries out for revolution,” exhorted Roszak; indeed, it cried out for two, three, many revolutions, “revolutions of bread, of social justice, and of national liberation.” Above and beyond those, however, what was required was a revolution of consciousness, a transformed understanding of reality that would help explain “the terrible paradox of progress which gives us this world where things get worse as they get better.” Roszak barraged his readers with questions which went to the heart of the “Enlightenment versus anti-Enlightenment” debate:

“Why, in our time, have societies well-endowed with industrial plenty and scientific genius turned uglier with totalitarian violence than any barbarous people? Why does the moral blight of nationalist bigotry and the disease of total war continue to haunt the children of the Enlightenment, more oppressively now than in the age of Voltaire? Why do nihilism and neurosis brood over what we please to call the ‘developed’ societies, taking as great a toll of human happiness as gross physical privation in the Third World?”

It was not simply a question of “Why can’t we have nice things?” It was also a question of “Why can’t we enjoy the nice things we have?” “We conquer nature,” Roszak lamented, “we augment our power and wealth, we multiply the means of distracting our attention this way and that, but the despair burrows in deeper and grows fatter; it feeds on our secret sense of having failed the potentialities of human being.” Our despair was born of a “diminished consciousness” enforced by a “corrupt consensus” imposed and monitored by “the rascals and self-serving mandarins who pilot the technocratic of urban-industrial society” who themselves were not immune to the same despair.  

Roszak understood and sympathized with “the healthy human desire for a measure of ease and material security.” The problem was that our ease and material security were based on “a root assumption that has given our machines and desires a demonic animation: that the transcendent aspirations of mankind can be, and must be, translated into purely secular equivalents; that culture—if it is to be cleansed of superstition and reclaimed for humanitarian values—must be wholly entrusted to the mindscape of scientific rationality.”

It may have seemed quixotic at best “to question the sufficiency of science” and the Enlightenment values (critical reason, empiricism, skepticism, distrust of received authority, etc.) associated with it, but Roszak could see no other choice but “to shake the stone on which our orthodox reality stands. That cannot help but be a fearful event,” he conceded, involving as it would “alternative realities [and] summoning up forces of nature and mind which urban-industrialism was designed to exclude, never to contain.”

In a brief but ringing manifesto of sorts, Roszak declared:

“There are dragons buried beneath our cities, primordial energies greater than the power of our bombs. Two thousand years of Judeo-Christian soul-shaping and three centuries of crusading scientific intellect have gone into their interment. We had assumed them dead, forgotten their presence, constructed our social order atop their graves. But now they wake and stir. Something in the mode of the music, of the mind-rhythms of the time disturbs them. I am as aware as any that these dragon forces are nothing to be trifled with, even if one thinks they are no more than subjective passions. Nonetheless, to admit that urban-industrialism is erected upon a culture of alienation is like admitting that an edifice tall as the clouds and centuries in the building has been raised on a rotten foundation. Sooner or later, that foundation must be dug up and rebuilt—though the edifice should be toppled and the dragons below aroused. Let us hope they will wake to be gentle beasts after all.”

Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery (another Sixties countercultural favorite), Theodore Roszak believed that “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The problem, as rationalists are quick to point out, is that what is “invisible to the eye” is often nothing but a figment of the imagination. Moreover, there is nothing in history to suggest that primordial “dragon forces,” once unleashed, will prove to be “gentle beasts”; and now they have modern technology at their disposal. Methinks it is better, as a rule, and pace the ghost of Theodore Roszak, to let sleeping dragons lie.

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¹ Contrast Roszak's stance with that of the 19th-century Russian social philosopher Alexander Herzen, who wrote, "We are not the doctors. We are the disease." 

Do You Believe in Reason? (#2)

“The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.” (Blaise Pascal)

“Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs.” (Joseph de Maistre)

The scriptural injunction “‘Come now and let us reason together,’ saith the Lord,” (from the Book of Isaiah) was a favorite of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who ordered the buildup of US military forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and who authorized, beginning in 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained widespread bombing of North Vietnam. Despite such measures, the war went on and the killing increased, leading LBJ to lament, “I can’t get out, I can’t finish it with what I have got. What the hell do I do?” The believer in reason and patient persuasion (augmented from time to time by bribes and/or by bullying) found himself, and his country, trapped in a situation neither sweet reason nor the limbic unreason of war could satisfactorily resolve. Unnerved and all but unmanned, Johnson chose not to pursue another term as President, a decision which, though inexplicable at the time, many have since considered reasonable.

Irrationalism, according to Raymond Tallis, is characterized by “disbelief in the ability of reason to regulate human behavior and in the possibility of a rational reorganization of society upon the lines laid down by universal moral and intellectual ideals and principles.” This basic skepticism is shared by, among others, social and political conservatives who distrust “theory” and who oppose “social engineering”. Traditionalists of all stripes also emphasize the limits of Reason divorced from experience; they prefer time-tested, if imperfect, ways of life to “rationally” designed experiments. Such thinkers—e.g., Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Karl Popper, et al—are, as Raymond Tallis sees it, either self-contradictory (“They mobilize extremely abstract, universal principles and reasons to underpin their criticism of abstract, universalist, rationalism.”) or unhelpfully vague (“They do not give any indication as to how one should determine the limits of rational intervention or attempts to improve society on rational grounds.”).

It is one thing, of course, to doubt the capacities of Reason, but another thing entirely to exalt the powers of Irrationality; such assertive and cultish Irrationalism has been blamed for the horrors of both Fascism and Communism. ¹ Irrationalism was one form of reaction against the Enlightenment’s enthronement, figurative and literal, of Reason. Isaiah Berlin has written much about Irrationalism (sometimes labeled “Counter-Enlightenment” or “Anti-Enlightenment”) as a modern intellectual phenomenon; he profiled and evaluated the likes of Hamann, Herder, and Maistre, assessing their arguments and their influence on posterity.  

If you set Reason to work explaining the world, one of the first things it will explain is its inadequacy to the task, if only because the world itself is neither rational nor irrational, those being humanly invented categories. The world is “arational”; to use a trendy phrase, it simply is what it is. Furthermore, Reason will cite Rousseau’s assertion that “right action cannot be derived from right reason,” a claim famously made centuries before by St. Paul: For the good that I would do, I do not; but the evil that I would not do, that I do. Reason cannot simply command Desire; there is, wrote Paul, “another law” within us that is “warring against the law” of our minds. As Raymond Tallis writes, “David Hume asserted that happiness and virtue could not be achieved through the exercise of reason alone: ‘Reason is, and ought always to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’.”

And yet, even if enslaved, Reason is by no means helpless. It can restrain, overrule, influence, or moderate the passions, even more if it has been instructed and trained to do so and if it can find supports outside itself (from friends, peers, social institutions, etc.); but a person needs to will it to do so and then will herself to accept its claims against the strong pull of Desire. Reason is not, contrary to Plato’s famous image, the charioteer reigning in the steeds of Passion; the charioteer is the Self, who harnesses Reason alongside Passion, alternating leads and steering them in tandem as the charioteer sees fit. ² The result of such skillful guidance is what we call Wisdom, cultivating which should be the goal of education and of living.

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My musings on this subject have been prompted by my reading of Raymond Tallis (Enemies of Hope), Isaiah Berlin (Two Enemies of the Enlightenment), Justin E.H. Smith (Irrationality), and others. 

¹ Paradoxically, such totalitarian ideologies, particularly Communism, are also held up as examples of “social engineering,” willful attempts to remake the world according to “rational” blueprints divorced from experience. In other words, totalitarian ideologies seem to demonstrate simultaneously the perils of both Reason and Unreason, which makes them convenient points of reference for almost any argument at all.

² This metaphor could be elaborated to include such things as charioteer training and licensing, laws against “charioteering under the influence,” runaway chariot ramps, posted chariot limits, etc. It is misleading to picture the Self as lacking resources to help it to manage (i.e., to hold) its horses.