The Little Red Blog

Count Me Out

{This is not a review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book, ‘Stolen Honor’; I have not read the book, nor do I intend to do so. Ms. Hochschild means well, bless her heart, but until she writes about the toxicity of the American Right without blaming it on the American Left, I’m just not interested.}

"Can't we all just get along?" (Rodney King)

Thirty days before an already contentious national election, we’re in luck: the esteemed sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has released a new book (Stolen Pride) to help us better understand the misunderstood and much maligned MAGA voters!

Ms. Hochschild knows her subject; in her previous book, Strangers in Their Own Land, she expressed sympathy for the beleaguered Trump supporters who were constantly accused by liberals of being racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic simply because they enthusiastically endorsed a candidate who was, well, racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic. The new American Right, Hochschild found, felt excluded, stereotyped, insulted, abandoned, and under psychological and economic assault from the elite establishment, the D.C. swamp, and the fake news media—in short, all of them, Katie.  

According to Michael Sandel, Hochschild’s Stolen Pride is “the best book yet on the moral and political psychology of the new right, a masterclass in the art of listening across our cultural and political divides.” By her willingness to listen without judgement, “Arlie Hochschild reveals what liberals miss—that the moral emotions of pride and shame animate the resentment that roils our politics.” Stupid liberals, labeling all the MAGA people as a basket of deplorables rather than seeing them as motivated by such “moral emotions” as hate, fear, and self-pity.

Left-wing commentator Robert Kuttner chimes in: “If progressives are ever to regain the trust of downwardly mobile white voters powerfully drawn to Trump and the far right, we need to listen deeply to Arlie Hochschild.” And Robert Reich, a communist by MAGA standards, can barely contain his admiration for Hochschild’s “cutting-edge research into forgotten Americans, people who desperately need help but cling to the myth that anyone can make it in America through hard work. Hochschild’s insights are compassionate, illuminating, and deeply moving.”

It's enough to make a person say WTF? Are we to accept that right-wing anger is caused by the failure of left-wing empathy? What, then, causes left-wing anger, or doesn’t that matter?

I have no doubt that Arlie Russell Hochschild’s subjects are, like the vast majority of people everywhere, decent human beings leading difficult lives (can you say “hardscrabble”?). Apparently, they also feel misunderstood, misunderestimated, and discriminated against; in the MAGA narrative, white men can’t even get hired anymore, and “Help Wanted” signs today come with “No whites need apply” caveats. Unless you get the stamp of approval from your local DEI commissar, you can forget about applying for a mortgage, a small business loan, or a line of credit, and don’t even think about getting a cab on a rainy night! “Why Jared Kushner Can’t Get a Cab” should be Ms. Hochschild’s next project. Not to mention the War on Christianity being waged by atheists, Satanists, secular humanists, and liberals.

I have yet to hear MAGA enthusiasts express empathy or support for anyone who doesn’t look like them, live like them, or think like them. Conservatives don’t believe in “empathy” anyway, because facts don’t care about anyone’s feelings, amirite? Is Appalachia suddenly populated by snowflakes? Does MAGA need a safe space or a timeout? Maybe a grownup to talk to?

Ms. Hochschild is a sociologist; does she not realize that empathy is a two-way street? I can understand resentment and anger—lord knows, I own my share of both—but I can’t and won’t accept gullibility. If I haven’t shown sufficient respect for the MAGA crowd, it’s not because I lack empathy, but because that crowd has supported, and continues to support, the single most vile demagogue in the history of American politics, a man who, for all his populist bluster, has done and will do nothing to improve the lives of his followers (much less the rest of us). Liberals come to MAGA country and propose solutions, or at least possible solutions—job training, subsidies for new industries, extended child tax credits, affordable healthcare—for which they are denounced as “elite” and “heartless”; meanwhile, the once and future MAGA King tilts at windmills and sharks, hollers about toilets, steals government documents, attempts to overturn an election, and generally conducts himself the way he has always done, i.e., as a rich entitled narcissist, a pathological liar and megalomaniac who doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself.

But the MAGA folks love him, so liberals must be to blame. Thank goodness Arlie Russell Hochschild is here to explain that to us and to once again “shed light on an often-overlooked segment of Americans, providing a deeply human exploration of the rituals and emotions that sustain a proud region in precarious times.” Count me out when the rituals include storming the U.S. capitol hoping to overturn the results of an election, or voting for a multiply convicted felon who has never expressed one iota of regret or even taken responsibility for anything he has ever done.

It has been said that a liberal is someone who is too open-minded to take his or her own side in a quarrel. Arlie Russell Hochschild and her admirers seem bent on demonstrating the truth of that axiom.  

MAGA slogan

Today's Musings

I rarely venture into the ideological cesspool that is Christopher Rufo's City Journal, but I do occasionally put on my hip boots, hold my nose, and try to see if I can find anything salvageable in the muck. Today I am pleased to say that Stephen Harrop at City Journal has produced a perfectly reasonable and fair-minded review of Oliver Traldi’s recent book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. Harrop informs his readers that Traldi has articulated at least three essential points about political beliefs:

Traldi, a research fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, enjoins the reader to take a few lessons. The first is that “people’s motivations for developing their political beliefs are often rather obscure.” What someone believes often tells us little about why he believes it. Questioning those beliefs can be little more than self-gratification. Another lesson: exposure to political information is not necessarily a royal road to political knowledge, to knowing what justice is or what the best means to achieve it are. Most important is the “value of independent thought.” Traldi might agree with my summary of this lesson in two Enlightenment slogans, ‘nullius in verba’ (“take no one’s word for it”) and ‘sapere aude’ (“dare to know”).

When a commentator at City Journal approvingly cites two Enlightenment mottoes, we are in uncharted territory.

Harrop has his quarrels with Traldi’s book; he finds it “short on a precise definition” of what ‘political’ means, or of what qualifies a belief as being political. That aside, Harrop concludes that “Our differing beliefs tend to be defined by the insides and outsides of our little bubbles. That might explain which of our debates are political, but on its own it does little to tell us how reliable those beliefs are. To determine that requires plodding, patient hard work. It requires a “daring to know.” As a call to do that, Traldi’s book excels.”

Thank you, Stephen Harrop, for making my excursion into the muck of City Journal worthwhile.

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Review of Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction by Oliver Traldi | City Journal (city-journal.org)

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Amelia Soth’s article “Wild Saints and Holy Fools” is right up my alley, focusing as it does on the eccentric hermits and monks of the early Christian centuries. As she notes, “Early Christian lore is full of accounts of ascetics who sought salvation through a return to wildness. These bestial saints wandered through the desert, eating only raw food and clothed only in their long, unruly hair; their nails grown into claws, and they shied away from people like wild deer.” I said “eccentric,” but I am fairly certain that a non-zero percentage of these saints were deranged.

Soth continues, in an entirely nonjudgmental tone: “The ascetics reportedly lived alongside lions and gazelles, sharing their food and water, forgetting human civilization and all its evils.” The desert was their preferred habitat; after all, as Bruce Springsteen said, “It’s hard to be a saint in the city.” Soth quotes Judith Adler:

“Desert—in the sense of wild and uncultivated rather than specifically sandy or rocky space—became newly valorized as the spiritual/intellectual center of a cosmopolitan monastic movement. Christian ascetic writers cast wasteland, where there is ‘neither perpetrator nor victim of injustice, nor complaint of a tax collector as an earthly ‘paradise of the fathers,’ while market towns and cities that saints were said to ‘flee’ were depicted as a dark, uninhabitable ‘wilderness of this world’.”

But the wild saints did not have a monopoly on unconventional behavior. There were holy fools as well, some of whom chose to terrorize, or at least scandalize, the towns and cities:

According to legend, after thirty years grazing in the wild, St. Simeon felt a divine call to go to the city. He arrived at its gates with a dead dog strapped to his belt, and, oddly enough for a saint, he quickly established himself as a public menace, writes religious studies scholar Jesse Perillo, by blowing out the candles right before Mass, pelting locals with walnuts, overturning market stalls, flagrantly violating rules of fasting, walking around naked, relieving himself in public, and (perhaps worst of all) openly associating with actors. It was a sixth-century version of freaking out the normies.

At the same time, he performed miracles—curing diseases, driving out demons, saving a building from an earthquake—all the while using his constant mischief to distract the public from his holiness. In doing so, he established a lineage of “holy fools.” In his footsteps followed figures such as St. Andreas, who staggered about pretending to be drunk, curled up with the stray dogs to sleep at night, and quenched his thirst from puddles in the road.

You really cannot make this stuff up.

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Wild Saints and Holy Fools - JSTOR Daily

St. Simeon, patron saint of dog catchers...

Pastry, Champagne, and Unshared Happiness

{The Little Red Blog has been invited to Buffalo this week to help assess the recent draft picks made by the Buffalo Bills, and (maybe) to appear as a guest on the Buffalo Plus podcast! Oh, and there's also a granddaughter's wedding to attend, and a great grandson to chat with about current events; and don't even get me started on the fact that I will just miss (by three days!) a live show by Alison Pipitone, whose sister Natalie still owes me a date night because I have the same birthday (but not birth year) as her husband.}  

What does it say about me that the book I have chosen to bring along when I travel this week from Montana to Buffalo (with lengthy airport layovers in both directions) is Arthur Mendel’s “Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia”? Couldn’t I have found something by Stephen King? Is Russian history normally considered good cross-country travel reading?

Whatever, as they say. I have made my choice and I look forward to reading about “Legal Marxism and Legal Populism” in 19^th-century Russia. The Little Red Blog will be closed, of course, while I am away; Pascal the existential Russian blue cat refuses to take responsibility for maintaining it in my absence. Expect no further activity from us for the next two weeks.

As a parting gift before I go, I offer the following quotes, all from Russian authors, which Arthur Mendel used as epigraphs for his book:

What is it to me that there is a world opened to me of ideas in art, in religion, in history, when I cannot share this with all who should be my brothers? A man’s inner life is incomplete if it does not take upon itself the interests of society and humanity. A living person bears in his spirit, in his heart, in his blood, the life of society. He is hurt by its misfortune, tormented by its suffering, flourishes in its health. (Vissarion Belinsky, 1811-1848)

Remember how things were: the educated minority, having long enjoyed its privileged position, its aristocratic, literary, artistic, governmental ambience, at last felt a pang of conscience and remembered its forgotten brothers—for it is they, none other, who are dying of hunger, of cold, it is their muttering we hear above us and below us, in garrets and in the cellars, while we sit on the ‘piano nobile,’ over pastry and champagne, talking of socialism. (Alexander Herzen, 1812-1870)

Human life is characterized by two movements: ascent and descent. Man dares to climb upwards, to transcend himself and his environment; on this path he gains spiritual strength and creates new life and new values. Yet he cannot forget those left below, those incapable of reaching the summits of creative knowledge and vision; he must descend so that he may attend to the needs of his brothers, who are all destined for a high calling. Even as he soars upward, man does not, or ought not, disregard the world and humanity outside and excuse himself from responsibility for others. (Nikolai Berdyaev, 1874-1948)

How can one reconcile the striving for absolute truth and beauty with the absolute postulate of equality, of the equal value of all people? (Peter Struve, 1870-1944)

I have an incredible, passionate desire to live, and to live always means to strive to move higher, toward perfection, and to achieve it. Yet only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life. An unshared happiness is not happiness. The two basic ideals of modern man, without which he is unthinkable, are the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. (Boris Pasternak, 1890-1960)

I cannot explain why the pathos and tragedy of Russian history affects me as it does. The quotes above illustrate how the best and most sensitive Russian minds of the 19^th (and the early 20^th) century wanted so much more and so much better for their countrymen than what was ultimately delivered: in Alexander Pushkin’s words, “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel.” But maybe it’s not just Russia; maybe it’s the crooked timber of humanity. 

I will be reflecting on such things as I travel and as I read Mendel’s Dilemmas of Progress.

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What can a poor boy do?

Eric Voegelin Explains It All

{Both Pascal the existential Russian blue cat and I have been attempting for some time to grasp the complex ideas of the late Eric Voegelin. As we are both now exhausted by the effort, we have called in Professor Arguendo to see what he can make of ‘Anamnesis,’ a book in which Voegelin explored the nature of consciousness in somewhat the same manner as Augustine explored the nature of time.}

“The analysis of consciousness is a dead end.” (Eric Voegelin)

“Man’s conscious existence is an event within reality.” (Eric Voegelin)

Arguendo, it appears, from my cursory examination of 'Anamnesis,' that Eric Voegelin came to believe—after years of attempting to understand human existence through the study of history, politics, and philosophy—that he needed to focus instead on a basic theory of consciousness: what is “consciousness,” what does it mean to be “conscious,” how and why are we “conscious”?

And so Voegelin waded into the treacherous and largely unmapped terrain of human consciousness. Not unlike scholars who are said to gaze into the well of history and see their own reflection, Voegelin may have identified his consciousness, but not necessarily mine, or, for that matter, yours:

By virtue of their consciousness, human beings are aware of being parts of a comprehensive reality, of which they express their awareness by the symbols of birth and death, of a cosmic whole structured by realms of being, of a world of external objects and of the presence of divine reality in the cosmos, of mortality and immortality, of creation into the cosmic order and of salvation from its disorder, of descent into the depth of the psyche and meditative ascent toward its beyond. Within this rich field of reality-consciousness, there occur the processes of wondering, questing, and seeking, of being moved and drawn into the search by a consciousness of ignorance, which, in order to be sensed as ignorance, requires an apprehension of something worthy of being known; of an appeal to which man can lovingly respond or not so lovingly deny himself; of the joy of finding and the despair of having lost the direction; of the advance of truth from the compact to the differentiated experiences and symbols; and of the great breakthroughs of insight through visions of the prophetic, the philosophic, and the Christian-apostolic type. In brief, Man’s conscious existence is an event within reality, and Man’s consciousness is quite conscious of being constituted by the reality of which it is conscious. Intentionality is a substructure within the comprehensive consciousness of a reality that becomes luminous for its truth in the consciousness of Man.

With all due respect, count me among those who have never been aware of "divine reality in the cosmos" or of any "salvation" from the disorder of existence.

Arguendo, the problem with Voegelin’s search for a theory of consciousness is that it was undermined from the outset by his recognition that “Human consciousness is always the concrete consciousness of concrete persons,” a claim which, if true, means that each human consciousness is unique and that there can be, therefore, no such thing as a universal or generalized “human consciousness”. Voegelin certainly knew this, just as he knew (and said) that abstractions like “mankind” do not exist other than as a linguistic shorthand. Like such fanciful notions as “truth,” “justice,” and “the American way,” “human consciousness” is a concept, not an existent entity. Voegelin did what he could to resolve the seeming contradiction:

If abstract statements about the structure of consciousness were to be accepted as true, they had first to be recognized as true in the concrete. Their truth rested on the concrete experiences of reality by concrete human beings who were able to articulate their experience of reality and of their own role as participants in it, and thus engender the language of consciousness.

However, just as one can never step into the same river twice, “concrete experiences of reality” can never be identical for more than one subjective consciousness; in fact, you and I, given our different consciousnesses, cannot step into the same river at all. Moreover, the articulation of experience is not the same as the experience itself, not to mention (though Voegelin does mention it) that language itself is full of pitfalls, not the least of which is reification (mistaking words for things).

Arguendo, Voegelin wanted to have his cake and eat it too:

The truth of consciousness was both abstract and concrete. The process of verification had to penetrate, therefore, through the engendered symbols to the engendering experience; and the truth of the experience had to be ascertained by a responsive experience that could verify or falsify the engendering experience. Even worse, the process was further burdened with the impossibility of separating language and experience as independent entities. The truth of consciousness, its verification and advance, could not be identified with either the truth of statements or the truth of experience; it revealed itself through participation in reality and it was essentially historical.

Arguendo, and I may well be mistaken, Voegelin here seems to have been saying that the proof is in the pudding; experiences—let us say, theophanies, which Voegelin took very seriously—can only be verified/validated by incorporating them into the life of the recipient (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, etc.) and the life of anyone else who wishes in turn to verify for themselves their truth value. This leads Voegelin to admit that “Truth must be sought not in a theory of consciousness, but concretely in the constitution of the responding and verifying consciousness; and that concrete consciousness is always one’s own. A philosopher, then, must engage in an anamnetic exploration of his own consciousness to discover its constitution by his own experiences of reality.”

By “anamnetic exploration of consciousness,” Voegelin meant tracing one’s consciousness as far back as one could toward its origins, because each individual consciousness is shaped from birth by its experiences. Anamnetic exploration would require serious introspection:

This exploration could not stop short at more recent enrichments of one’s consciousness by learning or by the observation of events, because one’s manner of response to learning and events was precisely what needed to be clarified. The exploration had to go as far back as memory would allow, to reach the strata of reality-consciousness that had been the least overlaid by later accretions. Anamnesis had to capture the childhood experiences that let themselves be captured because they remained living forces in the present constitution of his consciousness.  

Arguendo, the child is father to the man; also, “Rosebud”. Having figured that much out, Voegelin then conducted his own “anamnetic experiments,” aka trips down memory lane:

My earliest recollection takes me back to Cologne. My mother took me along on her shopping trips. In a bakery, the saleslady expressed proper admiration for the little creature (me) who could hardly walk, and she asked about my age. My mother informed her: fourteen months. I recall a general feeling of pride about the attention paid to me and a feeling of special significance. This recollection is neither supported nor influenced by information on the part of my family. As far as I know, I first told it when I was more than twenty years old, evoking only the incredulity of my parents.

The memory, and the feelings Voegelin attached to them, is touching; but it does not seem to provide much basis for scientific investigation. Arguendo, it likely did not occur to Eric Voegelin that consciousness is the thing with feathers, or that developing a “theory of consciousness” is akin to trying to catch the wind.  

 

A Plan that Failed

“Jesus lay in the tomb over the Sabbath. He would not regain consciousness for many hours, and in the meantime the spices and linen bandages provided the best dressing for his injuries.” (Hugh Schonfield, The Passover Plot)

Hugh Schonfield’s ‘The Passover Plot’ made a splash when it was published in 1965; its reputation has not fared well over the ensuing decades. Schonfield speculated that Jesus, convinced of his messianic destiny, cleverly manipulated his enemies and the authorities and somehow masterminded his own crucifixion and apparent death. The “plot” twist was that Jesus arranged in advance to be given a powerful sedating potion while on the cross ("I thirst"), the effect of which would simulate death; when it wore off (so the scheme went), the revived Jesus would declare that he had risen from the dead. In Schonfield’s narrative, all went according to plan until a Roman centurion, wanting to be sure Jesus was dead, thrust a sword into Jesus’ side—the fatal blow, unexpected, from which the resuscitated Jesus would not recover. Joseph of Arimathea played his part faithfully, but, alas, all the messiah's angels and all the messiah's men could not put the messiah together again. 

Needless to say, scholars everywhere lambasted Schonfield’s far-fetched theory, preferring instead the sober, much more plausible claim that the dead Jesus, after spending some time harrowing Hell, was spirited back to life in new and improved form—and just in time for Easter! Plausibility, like just about everything else, is in the eye of the beholder, which is not to say that I agree with Schonfield's theory, only that I have yet to figure out how "Jesus rose from the dead" can possibly be considered the most likely explanation of the gospel stories.  

That said, here is Schonfield's assessment: 

Of set purpose, Jesus embarked on a program calculated to what he believed the Scriptural prophecies demanded of the Messiah. He was obsessed with this necessity. Its requirements shaped his every move and engaged his constant vigilance. As he understood it, the greatest issues for humanity depended on his success. It was a singular, fantastic, and heroic enterprise, though in the strange apocalyptic milieu of the time perfectly comprehensible. It called for intense messianic faith, acute perceptiveness, an iron will, and a very high order of intelligence. ¹

Jerusalem waited breathlessly on the eve of this portentous Passover, in hope, in doubt, and in fear.

The destined road for Jesus led to torture at Jerusalem on a Roman cross, to be followed by resurrection. But these things had to come about in the manner predicted by the Scriptures, and after preliminaries entailing the most careful scheming and plotting to produce them. Moves and situations had to be anticipated, rulers and associates had to perform their functions without realizing that they were being used. A conspiracy had to be organized of which the victim himself was the deliberate chief instigator. It was a nightmarish conception and undertaking, the outcome of the frightening logic of a sick mind, or of a genius.

And it worked out. ² The Messianic hope which Jesus espoused and in a unique manner personified has not yet exhibited its full potentialities; he is still the leader, worthy to be followed, not of a lost cause but of one ever demanding fuller realization. He has not been forgotten; he is continually with us, pestering us and challenging us.

Despite viewing Jesus as a master manipulator (and a dissimulator, and a charlatan) Schonfield nonetheless declared the man from Nazareth to be the model for us all:

The Mind that was in the Messiah can also be in us, stimulating us to accomplish what others declare impossible. The victory for which Jesus relentlessly schemed and strove will be won at last. There will be peace throughout the earth. ³

I can hardly wait.

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The Passover Plot - Wikipedia

¹ Forgive me, but I can’t help noticing that the qualities Schonfield attributes to Jesus could apply just as easily to, well, Lenin, among others.

² Sort of. Let us not lose sight of Alfred Loisy's famous remark, “Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came." 

³ Eventually. For now, violent conflict continues to have the upper hand. See this helpful list of current wars, uprisings, and protracted unpleasantness:

List of ongoing armed conflicts - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Thirsting for Ignorance

{Writing over a century ago, Gerald Stanley Lee, a self-proclaimed ‘disagreeable character,’ denounced modern education for forcing books upon children who didn’t want them, for turning reading into drudgery rather than pleasure, and for using the printed word to intimidate rather than to inspire the imagination. Shades of 11^th-grade English class, circa 1965!}

“I never read if I can help it.” (Gerald Stanley Lee)

Gerald Stanley Lee, from The Lost Art of Reading (1907):

Do you not know what it means when you, a civilized, cultivated human being, can stand face to face with a list headed  “books of the week,” and when, unblinking and shameless, and without a cry of protest, you actually read it through, without seeing, or seeming to see, for a single moment that right there in that list, in the fact that there is such a list, your civilization is on trial for its life? That any society or nation or century that is shallow enough to publish as many books as that has yet to face the most awful, the most unprecedented, the most headlong-coming crisis in the history of the human race?

I was born to read. I spent all my early years, as I remember them, with books, peering softly about in them. My whole being was hushed and trustful and expectant at the sight of a printed page. I lived in the presence of books, with all my thoughts lying open about me; a kind of still, radiant mood of welcome seemed to lie upon them. When I looked at a shelf of books, I felt the whole world flocking to me.

I have been civilized now, I should say, twenty, or possibly twenty-five, years, and my whole being has changed. I cannot so much as look upon a great many books in a library or any other heaped-up place, without feeling bleak and heartless. I never read if I can help it. My whole attitude toward current literature is grouchy and snappish, a kind of perpetual interrupted “What are you ringing my doorbell now for?" attitude. I am a disagreeable character.

It is a serious question whether the average American youth is ever given a chance to thirst for knowledge. He thirsts for ignorance instead. From the very first he is hemmed in by knowledge. The kindergarten with its suave relentlessness, its perfunctory cheerfulness, closes in upon the life of every child with himself. The dear old-fashioned breathing spell he used to have after getting here — whither has it gone? The rough, strong, ruthless, unseemly, grown-up world crowds to the very edge of every beginning life. It has no patience with trailing clouds of glory. Flocks of infants every year — newcomers to this planet — who can but watch them sadly, huddled closer and closer to the little strip of wonder that is left near the land from which they came? No lingering away from us. No infinite holiday. Childhood walks a precipice crowded to the brink of birth. We tabulate its moods. We register its learning inch by inch. We draw its poor little premature soul out of its body breath by breath. Infants are well informed now. The suckling has nerves. A few days more he will be like all the rest of us.

There was a time when, if a man revealed in conversation that he was familiar with poetic structure in John Keats, it meant something about the man — his temperament, his imaginative or delighting power. Now, it means that he has taken a course in poetics in college, or teaches English in a high school, and is carrying deadly information about with him wherever he goes. It does not mean that he has a spark of the Keats spirit in him, or that he could have endured being in the same room with Keats, or Keats could have endured being in the same room with him, for fifteen minutes.

The greatest inconvenience of being born in the latter half of the nineteenth century is the almost constant compulsion one is under of finding people out, of making a distinction between the worthwhile people who know a beautiful thing and the boors of culture who know all about it. One sees on every hand today persons occupying positions of importance who have been taken through all the motions of education, from the bottom to the top, but who, whatever their positions might be, are clumsy and futile with knowledge. Their culture has not been made over into themselves. They have acquired it largely under mob-influence (the Dead Level of intelligence), and all that they can do with it, not wanting it, is to be teachery with it — to force it on other people who do not want it.

Whether in the origin, processes, or results of their learning, these people have all the attributes of a mob. Their influence and force in civilization is a mob influence, and it operates in the old and classic fashion of mobs upon all who oppose it. It constitutes at present the most important and securely intrenched intimidating force that modem society presents against the actual culture of the world, whether in the schools or out of them. Its voice is in every street, and its shout of derision may be heard in almost every walk of life against all who refuse to conform to it. There are but very few who refuse. Millions of human beings, young and old, in meek and willing rows are seen on every side, standing before It, the Dead Level, anxious to do anything to be graded up to It, or to be graded down to It, offering their heads to be taken off, their necks to be stretched, or their waists, willing to live footless all their days, anything, anything  whatever, bless their hearts! to know that they are on the Level, the Dead Level, the precise and exact Dead Level of Intelligence. The fact that this mob-power keeps its hold by using books instead of bricks is merely a matter of form.

If John Milton had had any idea when he wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ that it was going to be used mostly to batter children's minds with, it is doubtful if he would ever have had the heart to write it. It does not damage a book very much to let it lie on a wooden shelf little longer than it ought to. But to come crashing down into the exquisite filaments of a human brain with it, to use it to keep a brain from continuing to be a brain — that is, an organ with all its reading senses acting and reacting warm and living in it—is a very serious matter. It always ends in the same way, this modem brutality with books. Even Bibles cannot stand it. Human nature stands it least of all. That books of all things in this world, made to open men's instincts with, should be so generally used to shut them up with, is one of the saddest signs we have of the caricature of culture that is having its way in our modem world. It is getting so that the only way the average dinned-at, educated modem boy, shut in with masterpieces, can really get to read is in some still overlooked moment when people are too tired of him to do him good. Then softly, perhaps guiltily, left all by himself with a book he stumbles upon, his soul suddenly steals out and loves something.

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Gerald Stanley Lee - Wikipedia

Wednesday without Pascal

Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has asked to be excused from today’s posting. Given that he skipped last Wednesday as well, an explanation would seem to be in order.

In his ongoing quest to understand Modernity, Postmodernity, and Anti-modernity, Pascal found himself reading up on Traditionalism, an antimodern movement which began with Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon in the early twentieth century. While originally conceived and presented as a neo-Gnostic esoteric spirituality (linked to what has been called the “Perennial Philosophy”), Traditionalism soon morphed into a political ideology with strong links to fascism (because of its emphasis on order, stability, and hierarchy) via the likes of Julius Evola and, more recently, Russia’s Alexander Dugin. Closer to home, and perhaps not quite so fascistic, Steve Bannon, who served as campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016, is an avowed Traditionalist, although he puts his own spin on it and disavows the blatantly racist elements which other Traditionalists embrace.

As Pascal learned more about Traditionalism, he discovered that many Traditionalists in Russia invoke the long-held belief that Russia has a messianic destiny to serve as a bulwark against Western decadence. This aligns with an existing “Eurasian” view in which Russia and Germany should be allied in the defense of the European heartland against “Atlanticist” nations, primarily Great Britain and the United States.

On top of which, Russian Orthodox Christians earlier appropriated an obscure Greek word found in St. Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians; the word was ‘katechon,’ and it means either “that which restrains” or “he who restrains”. Paul was explaining why the eschaton, the end times, had not yet arrived and why Jesus had not yet returned. Paul claimed that some mysterious (to outsiders, not to Paul) force and/or person was delaying the “man of lawlessness’ (read, the Antichrist). Paul’s language was cryptic in the extreme, but he did indicate that he had spoken of these matters in person when he was in Thessalonica, and that the Thessalonians should therefore understand his meaning. We have no way of knowing whether they did or, if they did, what they thought about it. Two thousand years later, we have no idea who or what Paul identified as ‘the katechon’; we do not know if Paul thought it was a servant of God or a tool of Satan; and we have no clue as to the basis of Paul’s claimed knowledge of eschatological events.

In any case, the point here is that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat added a study of the katechon to his ongoing study of Traditionalism. One of the first things he learned about modern references to a katechon was that the German legal and political theorist (and Nazi) Carl Schmitt had made the concept an integral part of his political vision. In every era, Schmitt asserted, a katechon was necessary to hold back the forces of chaos and to protect the social, cultural, spiritual, and national orders. That katechon, though it might be someone as repugnant as Adolf Hitler, served an invaluable purpose; without it, Schmitt thought, Yeats’ eschatological nightmare—Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed—would be realized.

To sum up: Pascal is busy now pursuing threads of Traditionalism entangled and entwined with Russian messianic visions, Carl Schmitt’s politics, and the mystery of the katechon. When you consider that prominent political figures like Viktor Orban (currently President of Turkey Hungary) and, as previously mentioned, Steve Bannon, adhere (or claim to adhere) to at least parts of the Traditionalist worldview, you can understand why Pascal has become—well, let us just say preoccupied with those subjects. 

And that is why he has taken today off. Should you have the least interest in following Pascal down these various rabbit holes: Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, Rene Guenon's The Reign of Quantity and his The Crisis of the Modern World, Alexander Dugin's The Fourth Political Theory, St. Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Benjamin Teitelbaum's War for Eternity, Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World, and Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World are good places to start.   

Eschewing fame and fortune as a matinee idol, Rene Guenon turned to metaphysics instead...

Books Report

{I recently had considerable time to read on airplanes and in airport lounges.} 

Jonas Ceika is a Norwegian philosopher and YouTube entrepreneur. He is also, it seems, a Marxist, and he has written a book titled How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century. Among other things, Ceika sets out to debunk common misreadings of the two nineteenth-century giants; he also attempts to show that they were, if not exactly philosophical bedfellows, at least more similar in their views than has been thought. Ceika suggests that we read Marx through the lens of Nietzsche’s nihilism, and that we read Nietzsche through the lens of Marxist social radicalism: “If we use Nietzsche to excavate Marxism, we can uncover all the Nietzschean aspects of Marx that have been purposefully denounced, overlooked, or ignored throughout the failures and deformations of Marxism in the twentieth century.”

Those “Nietzschean aspects” to which Ceika refers compose “the human element—active human beings, their lived experience and their most personal concerns—and there is no modern philosopher who provides this element more fiercely than Nietzsche.” In view of that, writes Ceika, “I propose a Nietzschean Marxism, which, paradoxically, comes to be more Marxist than forms of Marxism claiming to be Marx’s direct heirs.

As Ceika says, “Marx has been made to suffer through many horrific surgeries and mutations. He has been transformed from a thinker who wants to transcend modernity’s categories altogether, into a thinker who merely wants to reform some given sphere of modernity: a social democrat, a moralist, a historical determinist.” When Marxism was made into an ideology focused solely on power—that is, when Lenin appropriated Marx for his own purposes—the human element, the humanism of Marx’s thought, was lost. Ceika’s attempt to rescue it is welcome, though likely wasted on Americans who, by and large, have preferred to caricature Marx rather than grapple with his actual ideas.

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Speaking of Marx: Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism is a three-volume doorstop of Marxist theory, beginning not with Marx himself but with a whirlwind tour of the elements of Western philosophy that served as background to Marx’s thinking. Kolakowski was born, raised, and educated under a Communist regime, from which he eventually deviated and which he ultimately rejected. His magnum opus was originally published in 1976, translated into English in 1978, and reissued as a single volume in 2005.

The striking thing about Kolakowski’s work, aside from the obvious erudition it displays, is its lack of vitriol or invective rhetoric. Main Currents of Marxism is not a polemic; it is a thoughtful, measured analysis of Marxist thought in historical context, including the myriad “Marxisms” that competed for the mantle of the great man’s rightful heirs. Nor was Kolakowski an apologist for Marx; he believed that the brutalities and tyrannies of Leninism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism were logical outgrowths of Marx’s thought, which is not to say that Marx would have endorsed them.

Jonas Ceika (above) would almost certainly have nothing but disdain for Leszek Kolakowski, an ex-Marxist and a lifelong atheist who converted late in life to Christianity. Kolakowski, though, remains one of my intellectual heroes, someone with whom I do not always agree but cannot help but respect. As I slowly work my way through Volume One (“The Founders”) of Main Currents of Marxism, I believe I am in good hands.

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We Shall Be Masters, by Chris Miller, is not about Marx; the subject of the book is Russia’s “pivot to East Asia, from Peter the Great to Putin.” The Russian psyche, as well as Russian foreign policy, has long been torn between its historic ties to the West and its heritage from the East—Russia was under the rule of Tatars (Mongols) for some two hundred and fifty years, and it borders China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Japan. Even as Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great sought to Westernize Russian ways, and while Slavophiles and “Old Believers” sought to preserve Russian traditions against Western influence, the Far East always beckoned, if only because it seemed less intimidating than the West. It is hard to overstate the humiliation Russians felt when they were defeated by Japan in 1905, or the loss of confidence in Tsar Nicholas II that resulted.

Miller’s book, then, is about “the promise of the East” and the repeated disappointments Russia has suffered over its expansionist dreams. Miller claims that Putin, in pursuing a strategic alliance with Xi Jinping’s China, is following in his predecessors’ footsteps; but he suggests that any such alliance will be limited and short-term, and that, in the long run, Russia’s ambitions in East Asia “are likely to be unattainable”.

You can read We Shall Be Masters to help understand current events and Russia’s foreign policy, or you can read it simply as a foray into Russian history; it is informative in either case. 

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Aristopopulism and Its Discontents

Patrick Deneen, Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and noted author of Why Liberalism Failed, has published a new book, Regime Change, which purports to explain how to put Western culture back on its feet and redirect it toward its proper destination—anywhere but liberalism. Deneen, you see, is a charter member of the “postliberalism” movement, about which you can discover more at the Substack site, The Postliberal Order.

For Deneen, moving on from liberalism entails “the strategic formation of a new elite devoted to a “pre-postmodern conservatism” and aligned with the interest of the “many.” Their top-down efforts to form a new governing philosophy, ethos, and class could transform our broken regime from one that serves only the so-called meritocrats.” Deneen himself has accepted the term “aristo-populism” for his project, as if that makes it either more understandable or more palatable.

Deneen’s book has been highly anticipated, to say the least. At least two websites—Law & Liberty and Real Clear Books—have featured symposia on Regime Change. Surprisingly, the reviews have been mixed. Oliver Bateman, for one, in “Yearning for Collapse,” says that “Deneen is forced to employ a host of sophisticated circumlocutions to get around the fact that he is arguing for something akin to the 1932 Italian essay “The Doctrine of Fascism”.”

Bateman, mind you, does not call Deneen a Fascist; he merely notes that “Deneen's proposed solution to liberalism’s seemingly self-evident failures is an "aristopopulism" led by the newly-minted "self-conscious aristoi who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, and an equitable social safety net supportive of these goods, constraints upon corporate power, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.” In the end, Bateman suggests, how one assesses Deneen’s proposals depends on whether one agrees with his premise—that liberalism has failed, that America’s socio-cultural sky is falling, and that regime change is our only hope. ¹

Jarod Facundo is more accepting of Deneen’s premise but concludes that “Regime Change is frustrating because we do have what feels like a pathetic ruling class doing everything possible to preserve its status from critique, in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But I’m not convinced that sexuality or gender fluidity are why we cannot have nice things. And my inner-Marxist tendencies tell me that even as Deneen cites various decreasing quality of life indicators, the only way out of this is through mass politics, which requires raising class consciousness—not a restrained, passive working class whose noble vibes rub onto the elites ruling over them.” ²

You would expect reviewers at Law & Liberty to be more sympathetic to Deneen’s opus, but Timothy Fuller is having none of it: 

Deneen’s “conservatism” is a revolutionary movement promoting a new elite to transform our lives. In rejecting existing American conservatism as a constrained form of liberalism, Deneen is appropriating the word in support of a revolution: “To constitute a political and social order worth conserving, something revolutionary must first take place: the priority of the liberal progressive agenda must be displaced for one that seeks stability, order, and continuity.” Revolution first, then preservation. How is this to occur? How is the spirit of his revolution to create a coherent, stable, non-revolutionary culture? Initiating radical change cannot ensure control of the consequences.” ³

Lastly, Elizabeth Kaufer Busch is thoroughly skeptical of Deneen’s analysis, his premise, and his proposals:

Deneen’s postliberal order embraces the need to moderate, train, and uplift the many, but who will moderate, uplift, and train the aristoi when they fall into error, as they inevitably will? Deneen’s regime change fails to provide adequate guardrails for them. Moreover, to what extent will the superficial maintenance of our liberal institutions dismantle the guardrails that do exist? While his common-good conservatism does not advocate physical rebellion, it explicitly circumvents constitutional and legal norms, and explicitly calls for “Machiavellian means” to produce the ends he seeks. At the very least, ruling out violence while advocating Machiavellianism is a contradiction in terms. But his apparent hope that the elite will arise via covert means may be even more insidious.” ⁴

It must be discouraging for Deneen to find his seeds of regime change falling on such stony ground or choked by weeds of skepticism; his ideas for hijacking the American experiment have even been referred to as “right-wing Marxism”! Still, we should give credit where credit is due; Deneen’s book is being read and it is provoking reaction, discussion, and disagreement even among his erstwhile allies. The extremism (or at least the implausibility) of his solutions is giving pause to many who admired Why Liberalism Failed. What author would not want to be at the center of such controversy? I would suspect that, so long as no angry mobs of critics carrying torches and pitchforks show up at his office at Notre Dame, Patrick Deneen will be content to know that his ideas as put forward in Regime Change are having consequences—if not necessarily the consequences he had in mind.

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Patrick Deneen (author) - Wikipedia

¹ Yearning for Collapse | RealClearBooks

² Ending Systemic Liberalism | RealClearBooks

³ Reactionary and Revolutionary – (lawliberty.org)

⁴ Renewal or Regime Change? – (lawliberty.org)

Books Report

Stephen Marche is Canadian, and his The New Civil War (2022) is written in the calm, reasonable tones one would expect from a Canadian. “The United States is coming to an end,” he begins. “The question is how.” Marche’s book is a discouraging read for anyone who believes that the United States is just going through a rough patch, politically speaking; Marche thinks we are kidding ourselves if we think the country can survive its current enmities and divisions. He insists that the USA can no longer function as a nation; it is a failing state, if not already a failed one, and it will either explode, implode, or, best case scenario, amicably reconfigure itself into four countries (Texas, California, North, and South). I am not usually susceptible to alarmism or to doomsday scenarios, but Marche’s matter-of-fact presentation tends to wear down even the most skeptical reader; “One way or another,” Marche announces authoritatively, “the United States is coming to an end. The divisions have become intractable. The political parties are irreconcilable. The capacity of government to make policy is diminishing. An underlying tribalism is shredding the ability of the political order to respond to threats against its own stability. The Constitution is becoming incoherent…The situation is clear; the system is broken, all along the line.”

It is difficult to dispute any of that; moreover, hope not being a plan, I have no solution to offer.

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Abolish Work is a 2016 anthology edited by Nick Ford, the express purpose of which is “to desecrate the temples of work.” David D’Amato establishes the book’s tone in his Foreword:

For the conniving sycophants of the political sphere, work is not only inevitable but desirable, not only desirable but holy. And among those afflicted with the political delusion, whether purportedly worried about coercion against the individual or social and economic justice, the salutary effects of more work — morally, psychologically, physically, etc. — are much touted. How little awareness they show of their shared religion, buried under the slogans of duty and self-denial, of twenty-first century slavery. Afraid of what they might see should they open their eyes, work’s prey cower and keep up the pretense of choice. Earnest employees itch to broadcast their schedules, each one more brimful than the last, proud, affected signals of just how busy they are.

D'Amato suggests that work serves purposes other than “productivity and efficiency”; it is at heart a “mechanism of control” that reinforces “existing class stratifications and categories…” He continues: "Premised on what David Graeber accurately calls “a hyper-fetishism of paperwork,” the bowels of our hellish corporate economy are simply bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, a moribund world of anxiety and alienation. Quite contrary to the supercilious assurances of capitalist apologetics, work is decidedly not finely tuned for maximum productivity and efficiency; it is a mechanism of control, as concerned with maintaining existing class stratifications and categories as it is with producing iPhones and Nikes. Were efficiency (whatever indeed that is) its goal, work would at least appear very different from the bloated, wasteful monstrosity of the existing corporate economy, so dependent on the very kinds of compulsion that advocates of “free trade” purport to hate."

Thus is work necessarily predicated on a disorienting and Orwellian denial of reality.

Abolish Work is obviously just one more bit of Critical Thought meant to destroy the American Way of Life, a plot conceived by Marxist intellectuals to seduce the proletariat. But if America is on its way out anyway, why worry about its work ethic?

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The French author Emmanuel Carrere has won numerous awards for his work, fiction and non-fiction alike, on subjects ranging from Philip K. Dick to post-Soviet Russia; he was also involved in creating the brilliant French television series, Les Revenants. In The Kingdom, a book that is part historical novel, part memoir, and part theological meditation, Carrere grapples with the genesis of Christianity, with its “charms and foibles,” and with “the ragtag group of early Christians” who followed in the path of a man named Jesus (“an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances”); all in an effort to understand how "normal, intelligent people can believe something as unreasonable as the Christian religion, something exactly like Greek mythology or fairy tales." Preposterously, to Carrere, modern Christians' "pie-in-the-sky ideas coexist alongside perfectly level-headed activities."  Is such belief an instance of "double-mindedness" or does it suggest some profound truth inaccessible to ordinary reason? 

Described as “blending scholarship with speculation [and] memoir with journalistic muckraking,” The Kingdom promises to be, like its author and its subject alike, both idiosyncratic and iconoclastic.

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They're called "books". They contain words printed, in ink, on paper.