The Little Red Blog

Waking from Wokeness?

Is our long national nightmare finally coming to an end?

I don’t know which I find more annoying: the Right’s constant cultural catastrophizing, its incessant claims of being victimized, or its occasional moments of smug triumphalism in which it boasts that the Children of Light have overcome, or are in the process of overcoming, the Children of Darkness.

Roger Kimball (The New Criterion) is as fond as anyone of complaining about our neo-Marxist Overlords and their nefarious tyrannical schemes, but in “Signs and Portents,” a brief essay about “Elon Musk’s Growing Political Maturity,” Kimball is in a celebratory mood. Good things are happening in America! “A few weeks ago,” Kimball begins, “Exxon announced that it was banning the display of Pride and BLM flags at its headquarters in Houston. There was a ripple of unhappiness, but nothing was burned down, the media attention was muted, and the world went about its business as before.”

“Nothing was burned down”? Is there a shortage of matches as well as baby formula? How did Antifa miss this opportunity?

Kimball offers further evidence that the tide of cultural decay is being rolled back: 

Across the country, school board elections are tossing out woke ideologues and partisans of critical race theory and replacing what amounts to gay pornography in the curriculum with more wholesome fare. The Biden Administration keeps running into roadblocks, most recently a judicial order halting its efforts to rescind Title 42, a Trump-era emergency order that turned away would-be immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. A few days ago, Biden’s absurd Disinformation Governance Board was shuttered and its pathetic director, Nina Jankowicz, sucked back into the memory hole whence she came. 

The icing on this cake—a cake of which Masterpiece Cakeshop would be proud—is the conversion of Mr. Elon Musk to the side of the angels. As tech billionaires go, so goes the country, or so Kimball seems to think:

Musk has just announced that he had moved from being a moderate Democrat to being a moderate Republican. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God: did you hear that, Mabel?” ¹

“I’ve just switched from moderate D to moderate R,” Musk tweeted, “as I think many independent voters have done.” Salt-in-the-wound time: “We will know the magnitude of this trend in November. I think it’s big.” Me too. 

Or perhaps I should say #MeToo. Musk predicted that attacks against him would escalate once his changed political feelings were made public. “In the past I voted Democrat,” he wrote on May 18, “because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.” I liked that this was followed by a popcorn emoji. And indeed the dirty tricks are flowing in from all sides, the latest being an allegation by a flight attendant that Musk acted inappropriately back in 2016. The charge will not go anywhere—Musk is robust in fighting false charges—but perhaps it will fulfill one longstanding wish. “If there’s ever a scandal about me,” he tweeted in March 2021, “*please* call it Elongate.” Let’s do it!

Whatever your opinion of Elon Musk, Roger Kimball knows a trend when he sees it:

The story of Elon Musk’s growing political maturity is not a one-off or an individual data point. It is part of a process, a gathering sea change. What we are seeing is not so much a pendulum swinging back from the extremism of identity politics as the eruption throughout society of contrary fires. Elon Musk’s coming of age is a sign or portent of a larger shift in the sensibility of our time. The shift won’t happen all at once, and there will be hold-outs and reversals, but what we are witnessing is a sort of spiritual reveille, an awakening from wokeness. The extent of that awakening will not, as Musk said, be evident until the November election. Indeed, I predict that it won’t be fully evident until the 2024 election when (further prediction) Donald Trump wins yet again, this time beyond the margin of fraud and dissimulation. Let’s see if I am right.

Time will tell. While we wait for events to unfold, we can ponder the irony of the Great Populist Revolt being led by two billionaires, one of whom is known for his eccentricity and the other of whom is a narcissistic buffoon of world-historic proportions who has already attempted to undermine and overthrow America’s democratic process, and who will certainly do so again if given a chance.

Signs and Portents: Elon Musk’s Growing Political Maturity › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

¹ Credit where credit is due: Kimball has offered us a pitch-perfect imitation of the Left's typical response to anything that deviates from their agenda. Mabel's reply would be something along the lines of "Fetch me my smelling salts, Wilfred, and prepare the fainting couch!"

Mabel the woke cat upon learning that Elon Musk will now vote "moderate Republican"            

 

Sunday Sermon: "It's What You Value"

George Harrison, “It’s What You Value”

Someone's driving a 450
And his friends are so wild
They're still in their stick shifties
But they feel they have much more style

But I've found it's all up to what you value
Down to where you are
It all swings on the pain you've gone through
Getting where you are

It's all up to what you value
In your motor car
It all rests on what it's cost you
Getting where you are
It's what you value

Someone's driving a six wheeler
Seems the world is all blurred
Knows he's in a show stealer
With a sound that's uncompared

And I've found, it's all up to what you value
Down to where you are
It all swings on the pain you're gone through
Getting where you are

It's all up to what you value
In your motor car
It all rests on what it cost you
Getting where you are
It's what you value

And I've found, it's all up to what you value
Down to where you are
It all swings on the pain you're gone through
Getting where you are

It's all up to what you value
In your motor car
It all rests on what it cost you
Getting where you are
It's what you value

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: George Harrison

It's What You Value lyrics © Umlaut Corporation (ascap)

Album version: (4) It's What You Value (Remastered 2004) - YouTube

Live cover version: (4) Apple Scruffs - It's What You Value - YouTube

 

 

 

 

Saturday Lecture: "A Riot of Incapacity"

{Note: I could not find the publication date for this essay. From contextual clues, it seems to have been written in the early 1920s.}

Ralph Adams Cram (from “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings”):

The doctrine of progressive evolution which became dominant during the last half of the nineteenth century was one of the most calamitous happenings of the last millennium. In union with Protestantism and democracy, and apparently justified in its works by the amazing technological civilization fostered by coal, iron, steam, and electricity, it is responsible for the present state of society, from which there is no escape, it would seem, except through comprehensive calamity.

The entire scheme of progressive evolution was based on a very partial and limited knowledge of geological, biological, and anthropological facts, and on a particularly faulty deductive process, whereby the nature of man, the period of his existence in time and space, his relationship to other forms of life, his inherent potency and his ultimate destiny were gravely misinterpreted, with the result that he has been possessed by delusions of grandeur that have made it impossible for him justly to estimate his own acts, to acquire a right standard of values, or consciously to provide against the issue of his own follies and parlous courses.

According to this doctrine, man was the crown of an immemorial sequence of inevitable development from lower to higher, engineered by myriads of small, upward steps: from primeval slime in an ever ascending line to the glorious product of the Victorian era. Logically, or so it was thought, this would continue indefinitely, with an ever extending horizon of ever increasing glory and honor. The prospect was alluring; it was no wonder that it was accepted with avidity. What glory awaited in the proximate future if only the new things were pushed to the limit and the old and outworn things relentlessly cast aside.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, these ideas were in the ascendant. Since the Great War, however, there has been a very striking transformation in the attitude of thinking men towards their own time. Where once as an irrational overriding confidence in the destiny of man and in the methods and devices by which it was ultimately to be achieved, there is now a growing doubt as to the validity of pretty much anything. The Industrial Age has fallen into chaos. The machine has become a Frankenstein monster, nationalism a menace of further and final war. Both domestic and foreign politics come close to being a riot of incapacity, while crime increases and becomes more widespread and intimate, the domestic and social organisms more perilously poised on the rim of dissolution. The intellectual life, compared even to the last half of the nineteenth century, is arid and sterile, while art has achieved its nemesis in the movies, jazz, modernist architecture, the ‘comic strip,’ and the subway magazines.

One good sign is that physical science has lost its cocksureness of fifty years ago and no longer thinks it knows all about everything or even very much about anything except the most obvious phenomena. Most encouraging of all, however, is the fact that at last we are beginning to reconsider our standard of values, analyze institutions and achievements, and above all to draw comparisons between men, rediscovering the great figures of our historic past, evaluating them anew, rating their times in terms of their own qualities, and placing against them for contrast what we today have to offer. It is a salutary proceeding that has issued in manifold revelations, while its implications are singularly valuable in the light they throw on the dissolving dream of progressive evolution.

We have but to consider our present estate, when, at the summit of our Darwinian advance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest and the development of species have resulted in a condition where, with all the resources of a century and a half of unparalleled scientific and mechanical development, we confront a situation so irrational and apparently hopeless of solution that there is not a scientist, a politician, an industrialist, a financier, a philosopher, or a parson who has the faintest idea how we got that way or how we are to get out of it.

Free and compulsory education, democratic government and universal suffrage, and the unlimited opportunities of industrial civilization: these have clothed men with the deceptive garments of progressive evolution, but underneath he is forever the same. It is not until we are confronted with a thing like the Bolshevik reign of terror; or the futility of popular government as we see it in the sort of men that we choose to govern us in our cities, our state legislatures, and our national Congress; or the bluntness of intellect and lack of vision in big business and finance; or consider the monkeyshines of popular culture; only then are we awakened to a realization of the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong.

We are not behaving like the human beings we imagine ourselves to be because we are still creatures of the Neolithic age whom no camouflage of civilization can change. The gulf that separates us from our ideals is too vast to be bridged by any social, political, or biological formula. Political and social democracy, with their plausible devices and panaceas; popular sovereignty, the religion of the masses; the technological triumphs that were to emancipate labor and redeem the world; all the multiple manifestations of a free and democratic society fail of their predicted issue, and we find ourselves lapped in confusion and numb with disappointment and chagrin.

I suggest that the cause of our comprehensive failure and the obstacle to recovery is the persistence in ourselves of the Neolithic man and his assumption of universal control.   

_____________

[I have done some light editing for this post. The stylistic flourishes of Mr. Cram's day are, to put it politely, no longer in vogue.]

“Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings” can be found in the anthology The Superfluous Men, edited by Robert Morse Crunden. 

Biographical information on Ralph Adams Cram: Ralph Adams Cram - Wikipedia  Mr. Cram—who, as an architect, designed more churches than you can shake a bishop’s crozier at—is honored (along with Richard Upjohn and John La Farge) by the Episcopal Church with a feast day on December 16.

A Ralph Adams Cram Joint: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine 

 

 

 

 

 

The Joy of Heresy (Part 3): The Lake of Fire

{Are we done with Marcionism? No, we are not done with Marcionism, nor is Marcionism done with us. I am going to gnaw at this bone until—well, until I stop.}

In a prescient 2019 article at Crisis, Fr. Tim McCauley warned about neo-Marcionites in our midst, heretics who reject the Old Testament God for being judgmental, cruel, arbitrary, irrational, etc. Neo-Marcionites, like their titular predecessor, prefer a kinder, gentler God, a God of unconditional love and infinite forgiveness; Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion, refers to this conception disparagingly as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a label which has been given the Orthodox Christian seal of approval by serial Christian convert Rod Dreher.

Alas, it is already too late for Fr. McCauley’s alarum, Christian Smith’s analysis, or Rod Dreher’s endorsement to help us. The neo-Marcionite invasion is well underway, as we see from the following publisher’s blurb for Doug Frank’s book A Gentler God:

What is God like? Is he the lofty Almighty of conservative religion, with power to stop heartbreaking human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, but who inexplicably declines to do so? Is he the callous Judge, offering the faithful a place in his heaven while summarily casting the faithless into everlasting hell? Is he the vain King on his throne, requiring us to stroke his ego by praising him--unceasingly--for his "awesome power"? If this is the God we have been taught, it is no wonder that many people have come to realize that they do not like, let alone trust him. The simple certainties of their childhood no longer make sense. But the equally assured assertions of today's atheists also leave them cold. They want a personal connection with God --an honest faith that grows out of their own felt truth and touches them at the deepest levels of their being. This book points the way. It dismantles the "angry, punitive God" of traditional Protestantism and beckons us toward a kinder, more welcoming God. This God does not ask us to grit our teeth and try our best to believe. Instead, this God meets us in our humanity, inviting our hearts to respond in genuine trust and love.

Get thee behind us, Satan disguised as Doug Frank! What Frank's book dismisses as “the simple certainties of childhood” is the very Word of God, preserved in the inspired pages of an infallible Bible. Do today’s pseudo-Christians “want a personal connection with God”? They should be careful what they wish for; as the author of Hebrews proclaimed, and as the pages of scripture abundantly show, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Thankfully, not all Christians are sheep easily led astray. Contra the neo-Marcionites, the folks at “Answers in Genesis” (AiG) proudly subscribe to good old-fashioned Old Testament monotheism. AiG owns (among other things) a popular tourist attraction in Kentucky called “The Ark Encounter,” which, according to one observer, is “devoted to emphasizing – with great specificity – the wrathful nature of God and the eternal damnation that awaits unrepentant sinners.” The Biblical tale of Noah’s ark is a perfect object lesson in YHWH’s severe justice, illustrating as it does that “all humans are sinners and are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.”

The Ark Encounter exhibits are labeled to help visitors draw the correct theological conclusions: 

Genesis 7:16 states that, as the flood waters rose, God slammed shut the door into the Ark. Once shut, all the humans and animals on the other side of the door were doomed to drown. According to a placard displayed at Ark Encounter, there may have been upwards of 20 billion people on Earth at the time of the Genesis flood, a number that would have included children and infants, not to mention the unborn.

Another placard asks, “Was it just for God to judge the whole world?” The answer: “Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Secondly, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment.”

Generations after the deluge, a supposedly righteous man named Job learned the folly of questioning God. What part of “I am God, and you are not” do modern Christians not understand?  From Eden onward, testing the LORD’s patience has been a losing strategy; “FAFO" ("Fool Around and Find Out”) is spelled out in fiery letters throughout the Bible. “Answers in Genesis” does not blink at the dire message found in the scriptural text:

According to AiG, this ancient divine slaughter prefigures a future divine slaughter. As the Ark Encounter website puts it, “God will judge this wicked world once again, but this time it will be by fire.  God always keeps His promises – judgment will come.” According to AiG, we can escape this fate by believing in Christ, but for the billions (past and present) who have not or do not, the result is “everlasting, conscious punishment in the lake of fire.” ¹

Doug Frank, neo-Marcionites and Moralistic Therapeutic Deists would be well advised to purchase their asbestos diving suits while they can. They may not have started the fire, but they are destined to spend eternity in its flames. 

______________________

At a popular evangelical tourist site, the Ark Encounter, the image of a 'wrathful God' appeals to millions (theconversation.com)

¹ The “lake of fire” should not be confused with Johnny Cash’s “ring of fire,” although both are known to “burn, burn, burn”.

Wednesday with Pascal: At the End of Our Tether

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with Ukrainian sympathies recently began reading Colin Wilson’s classic The Outsider. Early in the book, Wilson quotes extensively H.G. Wells’ “Mind at the End of Its Tether”; those quotes sent Pascal scurrying to that text to examine it for himself.}

“What I mean is that the time is short. This world in its present form is passing away.” (Paul, 1 Corinthians)

A utopian socialist and a technological optimist for most of his life, H.G. Wells, by 1945, was at the end of his tether, exhausted by a half-century of wars, revolutions, genocides, holocausts, and nuclear destruction. “Mind at the End of Its Tether” made clear that Wells no longer possessed either the strength or the inclination to keep a stiff upper lip. He had given up on everything; “There has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not only human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning,” he pronounced. “This world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything that we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.”

In a passage that Colin Wilson would cite in The Outsider, Wells claimed that “A frightful queerness has come into life. Even quite unobservant people now are betraying, by fits and starts, a certain wonder, a shrinking and fugitive sense that something is happening so that life will never be quite the same again.” Concealed beneath the smoke from Nazi death camps and the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Age of Alienation had arrived.

Wells viewed life as a Darwinian biological process that, once begun, inexorably persisted, leading to the struggle for scarce resources that marked not just human history but the history of every living organism:

“Life begins as an urge to exist so powerful that every form it takes tends to increase in size and numbers and outgrow its supply of food energy. Groups or aggregates or individuals increase not only in numbers but in size. There is an internecine struggle for existence. The bigger aggregations or individuals eliminate the smaller and consume more and more. Resources run short, and new forms, capable of utilizing material which the more primitive were not equipped to assimilate, arise.”

In Wells’ modified Malthusian worldview, life was competitive, precarious, and unforgiving, with even the most endangered species clinging stubbornly to life:

“For the whole three thousand million years of organic evolution, we have the same spectacle of beings overrunning their means of subsistence and thrusting their fellows out of the normal way of life into strange habitats they would never have tolerated but for that urge to live, anyhow and at any price, rather than die. For long periods, a sort of balance of life between various species has existed, and their needless mutations have been eliminated. Hypertrophy, however, has led not only to an excess of growth over nutriment but also to a loss of adaptability through the relative importance of bigness over variation. The more they dominated, the more they kept on being the same thing.”

Once organisms become too big to fail in their given evolutionary niche, they cease to evolve. Stagnation is vulnerability; eventually, some novelty of nature comes along to replace those once dominant organisms. Alternatively, nature alters the environment, creating conditions in which the former lords of the habitats can no longer survive. Nothing lasts forever except the endless, repetitious cycles of living and dying, breeding and fighting. The more the world changed, the more it remained the same.

In the 20^th century, according to Wells, the Cosmic Order had finally grown tired of the whole pointless process. Having somehow arranged for the existence of life on this planet, the Order was beginning to “turn against us, to set its face against us.” Wells was uncertain how to address the Cosmic Order or to explain its volte face: “Power, the ‘Cosmic Process,’ the ‘Beyond,’ the ‘Unknown,’ the ‘Unknowable,’ all carry unsound implications. The ‘Antagonism’ by itself overstresses the idea of positive enmity. But if we fall back on the structure of Greek tragic drama and think of life as the ‘Protagonist’ (trailing with it the presence of an indifferent chorus), we get something to meet our need: ‘the Antagonist’ expresses the unknown implacable which has endured life for so long and has now turned against it to wipe it out.”

In groping for the right word, Wells could have saved himself a good bit of trouble by simply borrowing the Biblical term ‘the Adversary,’ but he likely did not want to drag either Satan or YHWH into his scenario. Still, Wells’ thinking was suggestive of a metaphysical drama. In some interpretations of scripture, Satan had been allowed (by God) to rule over the earth until the eschaton; perhaps, in the light of the first half of the twentieth century, Satan felt his work here was effectively done and that it was time to draw the curtain on the whole terrestrial tragedy. If Satan’s role was to be both “tempter” and “accuser” of mankind, what more proof of human culpability could he submit to YHWH’s divine court?

Absent such a dramatic, albeit fanciful, explanation of our plight, Wells had nothing better to offer than a tired, indifferent cosmic dualism. The Antagonist wasn’t angry with us, or even displeased; it was just, well, bored. Wells did not imagine a war between Good and Evil; rather, he sensed a kind of cosmic ennui, as if the life force simply had lost interest and had given the universe over to entropy. The batteries of the cosmos had run out; like T.S. Eliot, Wells foresaw things ending not with a bang but with a whimper.  

Having declared the end to be at hand, Wells then posed the obvious question: what had been the point in the first place? Had life, human and otherwise, meant anything or accomplished anything? “From time immemorial,” Wells reflected, “introspective minds have conceived a disgust for the stresses, vexations, and petty indignities of life, from which they have taken refuge in mystical withdrawal. It is a peculiar human element: the recurrent refusal to be satisfied with the real world. The question “Is this all there is?” has troubled countless unsatisfied minds throughout the ages; and now, at the end of our tether, here it is, still baffling but persistent.”

As of 1945, H.G. Wells had apparently arrived at his answer:

“The world of our everyday reality is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressing story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves us greatly; yet some of us feel it is faked. The vast majority of the viewers accept all the conventions of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in it and with it. But the skeptical watcher says, ‘This is delusion. There must be something beyond this.’ But is there? Events vanish into an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but only until the struggle is finally overcome. Our world of self-delusion will perish along with its evasions and fatuities. Mind near exhaustion will make its final futile movements towards some way out or round or through the impasse.”

And a closing couplet: “This is the utmost now that mind can do. There is no way out or round or through.”

H.G. Wells died in 1946. It is almost eighty years now since he declared the imminent end of all our hopes and even of life itself. One could say that the passage of time makes Wells a failed prophet, or even a false prophet; to be fair, though, it has been two thousand years since Jesus and Paul made their equally apocalyptic and equally erroneous predictions. Perhaps we should cut Wells a bit of slack; perhaps we should even consider—as the Anthropocene and the Sixth Great Extinction continue apace, the ice sheets melt, the forests burn, and the ocean levels rise—his gloomy intuitions were not entirely unfounded.     

____________________

H. G. Wells - Wikipedia

(3) Tackhead - Mind At The End Of The Tether - YouTube

Stuff, and Nonsense

At First Things, Mark Bauerlein writes about the current “sorry situation of Catholic schools” (spoiler: they aren’t Catholic enough). Bauerlein offers some tips for reform that could be applied even to non-papist Catholic educational institutions.

For instance, he advocates that “educators maintain a clear distinction between high culture and everything else. In arts and humanities classes, the masterpieces must dominate.” It would be fruitful, indeed, for educators to lead classroom discussions on such issues as the “distinction” between “high culture” and “low culture” (or “middlebrow culture”); who assigns these labels in the first place, and who decides what fits into which category? Similarly, “What makes a ‘masterpiece’?” is an excellent question to pose, as would be “What is a ‘masterpiece’?” Those are probably not questions Bauerlein wants to encourage, but I think students would find them of interest.

Another Bauerlein suggestion is: “In history classes, let no Whiggish or progressivist notions of time and change enter. They frame the past as inferior; [students should] rightly understand history as ever a mix of gains and losses.” Fair enough, and food for thought: does history ‘progress’? What does ‘progress’ even mean? What are the downsides to ‘progress,’ and what is lost as history moves on? Readings could include such authors as Robert Nisbet, Saint Augustine, Karl Marx, Lewis Mumford, et al. 

Bauerlein then offers this nonsensical caution: “Diversity” and “inclusion” are but soft names for identity politics, and sow resentment, not fellowship, poisoning children’s minds with tribal suspicions. Never use those terms.” Why not discuss “diversity” and “inclusion”? Why not talk about their conceptual utility or disutility, their practical applications, and put their use and misuse into historical context? 

Finally, Bauerlein believes educators should privilege the past; “The call of “relevance” should be resisted, as should the drift toward contemporary readings. It’s a presentist impulse that matches too closely the world’s norms. As a rule, the old is better than the new.” As a rule, that rule is wrong. An educator's job is not to prepare students to live in the past—which is, after all, a foreign country; they do things differently there--but to know enough about it to help understand the present and shape the future. 

On the other hand, if students are steered towards ancient wisdom rather than towards contemporary pabulum, at least they won’t have to read Mark Bauerlein.

 The Sorry Situation of Catholic Schools | Mark Bauerlein | First Things

Have some sympathy for Victor Davis Hanson, who, with his recurring "woke" nightmares, must have a hard time sleeping at night. In a primal screed at American Greatness (a publication devoted mainly to belittling America), Hanson can’t stop gnawing at the bone of “wokeness”; he wonders, for instance, “whether the woke progressives now in power in Washington dislike the habits and traditions of the United States even more than [our enemies] do.” He claims that “the new woke United States exudes both arrogance and weakness, a fatal combination for a major power.” He warns that “In the West in general, and in the United States in particular, we are seeing a final fruition of decades of woke self-loathing.”

Obviously obsessed and wide-awoke, Hanson just cannot stop. He is utterly relentless, a latter-day Ahab repeatedly harpooning the great white woke whale: “The sight of a pride flag flying on the Kabul embassy as the most lavishly supplied and funded military force in history scrambled to fly home, abandoning allies and employees, was a bitter metaphor of the arrogance, ignorance, and impotence of woke ideology.” And again: “The idea of meritocracy is disappearing, replaced by woke reparatory fixations on race, in the manner the ideologically correct Soviet commissariat destroyed Russian institutions or Mao’s cultural revolutionary insanity destroyed millions of Chinese.”

What phantoms haunt the dreams of Victor Davis Hanson? “The millions of opportunistic mediocrities emerging from the shadows to mouth wokester shibboleths about climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion, identity politics, and transgenderism, while damning the customs, traditions, history, and values of a prior society that alone is responsible for their very affluence and leisure.” As I said, it must be hard for Hanson to get a good night’s sleep; perhaps he should try counting wokester shibboleths?

Losing what grip he ever had, Hanson reminds us that this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around: “This cannibalistic woke revolution is no Wobbly mine takeover, no 1960s Woodstock, not even a Black Panther, Weatherman, or Symbionese Liberation Army violent spasm. Instead, wokeism is so institutionalized that, like the Soviet Party or the adherents of Mao’s little red book, joining the virtue-signaling wokesters is seen as a smart career move. Going woke is a bully’s paradise, an indemnity against a past ill-considered tweet or a future peccadillo. Indeed, it is quasi-religious groupthink proselytizing.” 

Caveat lector: this is what sleep deprivation can do. Plagued by self-conjured demons of "wokeness," Victor Davis Hanson--a man intelligent enough to have written numerous books, to have taught at accredited universities (and at Hillsdale College), to have been named a Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and to have been awarded the National Humanities Medal--has become just another vitriolic voice in the increasingly unhinged right-wing chorus.  

When it comes to sleep, a good pillow can make a world of difference. If only there was a trustworthy pillow salesman to whom Victor Davis Hanson could turn... 

The Cycles of Revolutions in Our Midst › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

Victor Davis Hanson - Wikipedia

Wide awake and worried about Wokesters under the bed

 

Sunday Sermon: What Kind of a Nation?

{Before moving to Montana, I lived in Buffalo NY for over thirty years. My children and grandchildren live there. I have close friends who live there. I make the trip from Montana to Buffalo once a year to visit the people I love and care about the most in all the world. I want to tell them all, "Stay safe," but what is the point of saying that in a world where a trip to the local grocery store on an ordinary Saturday puts you at risk?}  

Robert F. Kennedy (speaking to a crowd in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, the night of Martin Luther King’s murder):

On this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these difficult times.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

So I shall ask you to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and for compassion.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

 

{Photo from WGRZ, Buffalo NY}

Saturday Lecture: Grim and Bear It

{This is admittedly grim, but so is life; not for nothing was the Stoics’ motto “Grim and bear it.”}

“We humans have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirch-less innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development, nameable as the Human Being. Below us, nothing.” (Mark Twain, from “The Damned Human Race”)

Thomas Ligotti (from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race):

What is man? “A diseased and suffering thing / With a head full of false imaginings.” (The Dhammapada)

As humans, we are preoccupied with the good life, always working step by step towards a better life. We set marker for ourselves; once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. If you are too conscious of not liking it, you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live it without it. In so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.

For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, and death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with that: surviving, reproducing, and dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive, and we know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives, including suffering, slowly or quickly, as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we enjoy as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature; and being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us but to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or, at least, we want to think there is. This is the tragedy: consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death; but we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.

In short, consciousness has overreached the point of being a sufferable property of our species; to minimize this problem we must minimize our consciousness. We must keep ourselves from scrutinizing too assiduously the startling and dreadful mishaps that may befall us. Best to immunize your consciousness from any startling and dreadful thoughts; at worst, keep such thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: None of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother the urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town. Bury your dead but don’t leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things, or we will get on without you.   

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The Joy of Heresy (Part 2)

{It has been suggested to me that very few people share my interest in early Christian heresies or in the ditheistic system of Marcion of Sinope. I find this difficult to believe. Is this not still a Christian nation? And ought Christians not to be on guard against the revival of ancient heresies such as Gnosticism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism? The roads to Hell are many and varied, filled with seductive roadside attractions and a plethora of unknown unknowns; the more we learn about the landscape of heresy, the better we can avoid it.} ¹

“In holding the idea that the revelation of God in Christ was transitory rather than intrinsic to the godhead itself, Marcion anticipated the modalist-Monarchians such as Praxeas and Sibellius. His Christology inevitably led him in the direction of patripassianism.” (R. Joseph Hoffmann, from Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity)

Whatever happened to the Modalist Monarchians? They were one of the best of the New Wave/punk pseudo-apostolic bands; Praxeas and Sibellius were the Lennon and McCartney of their era. Perhaps they got lost on their way to Patripassianism; it is, I have heard, a long and winding road, and the signage, in koine Greek and Aramaic, is confusing.  

As we were saying, heresies—by which we mean, divergent views about Jesus and about the implications of his life, death, and resurrection—abounded in the early centuries of Christianity. It was only a matter of time before authorities stepped in to quell the riot of religious and metaphysical speculation. Unfortunately, by the time order was restored, an entire clowder of Gnostic cats had been let out of the bag. We turn again to Rufus Jones (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) for explanation:

It is no exaggeration to say that by the middle of the second century the Church found itself engaged in a life and death struggle with the multitudinous forms of Gnostic religion. With all their variations, they can quite well be grouped under the label, 'the Gnostic complex.'  ‘Complex’ seems a very appropriate word for these movements. The word properly means organized tendencies or sentiments which are in some degree confused, morbid and abnormal. They are usually found in individuals, but here in these movements we are confronted with social waves, or tides, or drifts, of morbid and unbalanced sentiments which were more or less 'contagious.' We have revealed to us in these movements a society which seems neurasthenic and psychopathic—suffering from nervous prostration— in which almost any ‘suggestion’ may powerfully operate and effectively work.

A great many of the Gnostic societies are, of course, not rightly called heretical. They were often wholly outside the sphere and area of the Church. Some of them plainly antedate the birth of the Church, but they tended all the time to influence and color its life and thought, and the movement was the fertile mother of heresies. Christianity has throughout all its history borne the marks of its conflict with this mélange of rival faiths, for while it was ostensibly victorious over them, it was at the same time in some degree 'led captive' by those whom it conquered.

Gnostic writings were given to speculation about the origin of the world and the source of evil, but they were much more akin to magic than to philosophy, and they drew upon mythology and imagination for their constructive material rather than upon rational and verifiable grounds of truth. They are decadent forms of religion, full of confusion, superstition, gullibility, credulity and wild imagination. ²

With all due respect to Rufus Jones: just hold your horses there a minute, buddy. “Mainstream” Christianity was chock-full of so-called "divine revelations," miraculous events, and what might plausibly be called wild imaginings. Paul deliberately eschewed and explicitly denigrated “rational and verifiable grounds of truth” in favor of mystical visions he modestly claimed to have been granted (“whether in the body or out of the body,” he did not know); those visions revealed to him, in his words, "things hidden since the foundation of the world."

As for Gnostics’ belief in magic: I am at a loss as to how anyone can view the transformative effects of pneuma, as described by Paul, as anything other than magic; pneuma was said eventually to transform believers into quasi-divine creatures with authority to judge angels. ³ The Church’s official doctrine of eucharistic “transubstantiation”—bread and wine transmuted into “the body and blood of Christ”—is as magical as the day is long, especially as it is facilitated, according to the Church, by formulaic words being spoken as part of a structured ritual by an authorized priest. You simply cannot get more magical than that.  

Continuing his polemic, Rufus Jones damned Gnostics with the faintest of praise, suggesting they were, at best, industrious scavengers:

Gnostics were very skillful in their use of “the debris of ancient faiths,” out of which they fashioned new and fantastic structures. They “plundered” the older faiths somewhat as the builders of new temples plundered the ancient shrines for their building material. The religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Old Testament and Greece, especially the imaginary world system set forth in Plato’s Timaeus, furnished suggestions, and sometimes even body and filling, for the weird Gnostic “gospel” during the prolific period of the first and second centuries.

Again, with respect: Gnostics were no more guilty of “plundering” than were orthodox Christians, who expropriated in toto the sacred scriptures of ancient Israel, reinterpreting them at will and using them as a cudgel with which to browbeat the Jewish people. Moreover, while the Gnostic gospels were undeniably “weird,” I would hesitate to make that point if I were, like Rufus Jones, an adherent of a religion which worships an incarnate God who was born of a miraculously impregnated virgin and who, after performing all sorts of miracles, allowed himself to be cruelly murdered before rising from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes and then disappearing from the planet for good.

In other words: let whoever is without weird religious ideas of their own cast the first stone at the glass houses of others.

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¹ See Fr. Tim McCauley’s prescient warning: Beware the Neo-Marcionites (crisismagazine.com)

² Pagans like Celsus and Porphyry described Christianity itself in almost identical terms.

³ Pneuma was also said to help build strong bodies 12 ways--I think. 

 

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Existential Wednesday: The End

{Sadly, “Existential Wednesday” may be on its last legs. Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with Ukrainian sympathies is close to concluding that, so far as Existentialism is concerned, there is no ‘there’ there. I have offered Pascal carte blanche with future Wednesday essays; he is considering his options.}

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas." (T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")

"Wanna be a mole in a hole, digging low and slow, wanna be a fly flying high in the sky." (Richard and Linda Thompson, "Mole in a Hole")

Once you have grasped that “existence precedes essence,” what exactly is there to be learned from Existentialism?

The fact that we are “free but situated” should hardly come as news. A cursory glance around reveals that one’s freedom depends on one’s situation, and some people are better situated and therefore freer than others. For that matter, birds are never free from the chains of the skyway; we are only as free as our chains allow us to be. Acceptance and realism are commendable, but we could learn that from the Serenity Prayer.

Existentialism reminds us, as if we needed reminding, that we are responsible for our choices, for our actions, and for how we react to events—really, for everything except our inherent (essential?) situatedness. As Sartre noted, “Everything that happens to me happens through me.” To whom are we then responsible? To ourselves, one assumes, and to others—others who are as free, as bound, and as uncertain as we are.

To be in good faith means being true to oneself; but the Self is an ongoing project, and what seems to be good faith today may appear bad faith tomorrow. We know neither who we are nor who we wish to become, much less whether “who we become” will prove satisfying. We may prefer simply to let life happen to us, to let events take us where they will, but then we are in bad faith, not that it matters. Bad faith is a refusal to engage in the project of self-invention, whereas engaging in it is no guarantee of good faith either.

To paraphrase: life is absurd and then we die. All philosophy, said Plato, is a preparation for death; does Existentialism help us to comprehend, or at least to accept, our mortality? Or does it simply give us something to think about while waiting for Godot? Our lives are merely busywork, distractions to keep us from hearing the incessant ticking of the clock.  

At its best, Existentialism is a variation on Stoicism, a much older philosophy that makes up with substance for its lack of Left Bank cachet. The Stoics offered more than world-weary wisdom; they offered an entire cosmology, an ontology, and a physics, none of which, of course, make the least bit of sense in the light of modern scientific advances. Stoicism influenced early Christianity; the Stoic understanding of a substance called “pneuma” is at the heart of St. Paul’s gospel, and the Stoic expectation of a world-cleansing spiritual “fire from heaven” tracks closely with Jewish and Christian apocalyptic.

I conclude my excursion into Existentialism with this quote from Colin Wilson: “The existential question of freedom has been vitiated by existentialism’s inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom. Existentialism has created many of its own difficulties. It found itself in a hole of its own digging, and its efforts since then have amounted to walking in circles around that hole.”

I must find a different hole around which to walk.

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The Colin Wilson quote is from his book The Lazy Years. If you are interested in Existentialism, Wilson’s first book, The Outsiders, is as good a place as any to start.

For an overview of Stoicism: Stoicism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

For a discussion of the relationship between Existentialism and Stoicism:

A Puff of Absurdity: On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism