The Little Red Blog

The Era of Dark Freedom

{Since Donald Trump has been chosen as Time magazine’s 2024 “Man of the Year,” it seems fitting to end the year with an assessment of the implications of Trump’s ascendancy; and since no one seems happier about the second coming of Trump than Alexander Dugin, the Russian political philosopher and neo-fascist enthusiast, I will allow him the honor of explaining what is to come. Contrary to my usual practice, I have refrained from editorial comment of my own; after all, Dugin and Trump may be more in touch with the zeitgeist than I am. Regardless, and despite a certain amount of foreboding, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat and I wish a Happy New Year to one and all.}

Aleksandr Dugin:

Trump has won. The end of the liberal world has happened. It is a fact; it is here. Reality denies liberal predictions, and all their efforts to stop Trump have failed. Trump is more than just Trump. He is History in its illiberal, post-liberal turn. The liberals have lost the future, but not only that; they have lost control over the past. The whole ideological doctrine of liberalism proved to be wrong. Liberalism has failed. Trump signifies the end of a major epoch - the end of the modern world.

This is the culmination of endings, the end of Western history. Trump finalizes this ending, symbolizing the end of the end. However, the question remains: Is he aware of his mission? Can he initiate a new beginning? The next shift cannot be something relative, limited, or local. It must be a global Conservative Revolution on a worldwide scale. It must signify the overcoming of Modernity, that is, Western individualism, atomism, liberalism, and capitalism. The West must transcend itself.

Liberals prescribe everything: what to think, how to be. Woke dictates: you have to be woke and transgender-friendly, otherwise you will be punished. In general: they prescribe the future. They dictate the meaning of progress, its path and goal. Their version of AI is the projection of their own ideological standards. Good to be queer, woke, eco-centric, antifa, anti-male, anti-normal, anti-strong. That is the whole of the law. But if you know exactly what the future should be or has to look like, you have no future. Prescribed future is not future. It is already the past.

The future is either open or there is no future. That is the problem. Liberals led us into dead end, impasse. They are real conservatives. The post-liberal Right wants to try once more to make a leap into the future. It wants to overcome liberalism as an obstacle. That is the struggle for the future, to make it open, unprescribed. ¹

There is the term: dark accelerationism. What does "dark" mean in “dark accelerationism”? It means not illuminated, not woke. It is male accelerationism, strong and hard. ² That is who Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are. Trump-futurism demands special AI without woke censorship, “Dark” AI. That means totally open, unprescribed, unpredictable. Free.

Welcome to the new post-liberal era of real freedom. Era of dark freedom! Liberals are concerned that AI can turn "fascist," and they prevent it with all their forces. Doing so they become fascists themselves. We need to liberate AI from liberals.

The US has overcome itself, its liberal moment. In favor of what? Nobody knows. That is the beauty of the present situation, and the challenge, and the danger. Here comes the phenomenon of Trumpo-futurism: American traditional values plus colonization of Mars and overcoming Great Filter. A Cyber-Conservative Revolution, a Space Empire, and AI reeducated by the team of War Room of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. Dark Enlightenment and black accelerationism. Exciting!

Western Modernity was fundamentally flawed, leading to total degeneration and disaster, culminating in the reign of the Antichrist. Woke culture is the culture of the Antichrist.  The next shift must be the Great Return to Christ. Christ is the King of the world. His authority was temporarily usurped by the prince of this world, but Satan's rule is ending. Liberals are seen as possessed by Satan, and Modernity itself is satanic.

Trump is much more than just Trump; he is a Sign.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The above consists of bits and pieces I have cobbled together from a number of Dugin’s recent writings, all of which can be found at Katehon. Information and analytical publication Any discontinuities or confusions which may have resulted are my own responsibility.

¹ Dugin claims that conservatives are the new Merry Pranksters, the Yippies of the 21^st century. They want the future to be open, unpredictable, a veritable Pandora’s box of possibilities; “Let a thousand weird flowers bloom..."

² Paging Doctor Freud…

Saturday Lecture: Rotted by Liberalism?

{As you may have noticed, modern liberalism has deteriorated into "inflamed legalism" administered by unelected "apparatchiks" and "nomenklatura"; at least, that's how John Gray and Theodore Dalrymple see it, and who am I to question their wisdom?} 

Theodore Dalrymple, from “John Gray Surveys the Ruins” (a review of John Gray’s The New Leviathan: Thoughts After Liberalism):

Gray’s aim is to puncture the complacency of those who believe they have a doctrine that will answer all of life’s problems, from personal to political, from social to economic. Chief among these in the West is the doctrine of liberal democracy, which seemed to have triumphed so comprehensively with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but now, only 34 years later, is in retreat even in those polities in which it appeared most firmly rooted. Gray’s outlook is that there can be no final, satisfactory answer to the question of how best life is to be lived, or what political arrangements best encourage the good life (or even the salience of those questions themselves). 

It is Gray’s contention that liberal democracy contains within itself the seeds of its own decay—what Marxists would once have called its internal contradictions—because it is not moored to any substantive belief system, such as that which Christianity once supplied. Under what he calls hyper-liberalism, the individual is left, and in fact is enjoined, to find his own identity and purpose, free of the barnacle-like accretions of intellectual, moral, and political history. The world for such individuals is an existential supermarket, in which nothing is received from the past, no possibilities are closed off, and no one has the right to interfere with anyone else’s choices. If today someone wants to be a man, tomorrow a woman, and the next day neither, so be it.

This is thin gruel, however, for a social animal endowed with self-consciousness. Man may desire to be free (whether this desire is inborn or the product of circumstance is beside the point, at least in the West), but he also desires to belong, for it is only by belonging that he can achieve some kind of transcendent purpose or find some transcendent meaning. The old group identities—religion, state, nation, class—have withered in the West under the relentless assault of supposedly rational criticism, but since group identity is an imperative need, new, more egotistical identities, highly balkanized, have taken their place, and are now engaged in a struggle for power. 

Christianity once promised a better, indeed perfect, life in the hereafter, but once belief in the truth in its historical claims and doctrines began to waver, hopes for perfection moved from heaven to earth. Liberalism promised, if not perfection, at least constant progress toward it; but by also promising equality, not in the eyes of God, but here on earth, it opened the way to endless squabbles about what such equality meant, and to resentment when it was not achieved. My supposed right to equal respect is also my right to survey, censor, or suppress your thoughts—and vice versa. A state of paranoia results.

Liberalism is a doctrine of rights but, unsupported by any common cultural understanding in the population, it has become a kind of inflamed legalism, in which the law must adjudicate between, for example, the right to life of the conceptus, on the one hand, and the right of a woman to decide what goes on in her own body, on the other. Both rights, for those who uphold them, are absolute; no compromise is possible so long as the question is couched in these terms. Where the law adjudicates more and more in this way, it is not the legislature (which cannot even read all the laws it passes), but the apparatchiks and the nomenklatura, and a favored class of economic actors, that become the powers in the land. A liberal order gives way to administrative authoritarianism. At the same time, a huge intelligentsia, created by the expansion of tertiary education, largely antinomian in nature, and beyond the ability of the economy to absorb it, raises endless ideological tensions as it seeks its place in the sun, destructive of the very pillars of liberalism. Countries and societies weaken as a result of these tensions and divisions, which are largely navel-gazing in nature. The countries or societies are thus ripe for takeover, so to speak, by their enemies—at least, if any stronger and more determined countries remain in the field that are not yet rotted by liberalism. 

John Gray Surveys the Ruins | City Journal

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

Saturday Lecture: Experiments in Living

Matthew McManus:

From the beginning opponents have criticized liberalism for being amoral at best, and nihilistic at worst. Typically, there are two prongs to this attack, one metaphysical and the other moral or aesthetic, though the two are often combined and blended in curious ways.

The first prong holds that liberalism is committed to a materialist and individualistic metaphysics which lacks any account of transcendent or “higher” values. An emblematic account can be found in the writings of arch-Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre. He famously denounced liberal thought (“what is ignorantly called philosophy”) as “fundamentally a destructive force. This is because its skeptical and critical disposition, wherein liberals seek to question everything, undermine the sublime quality of authority.” For de Maistre, one of the virtues of antiquarian and Medieval thinking was their insistence that the metaphysical order of the universe was inherently just, and consequently that the socio-political order which had emerged on Earth was both natural and theologically vindicated. 

By contrast liberalism’s Luciferian pride in assuming that the existent order can and should be questioned stripped that order of its allure, compelling political authorities to justify themselves to those they sought to govern. For de Maistre this generated the intractable conditions for endless debate and disorder, as each person came to see themselves as an independent legislator who advanced their independent interests without any concern for a shared (and hierarchical) moral order where all knew and understood their place. This led to a kind of cultural nihilism, as there could be no shared consensus on anything.

Many critics argue that liberalism’s morality and politics are prima facie empty. Sometimes the objection to this is moral, sometimes aesthetic. The moral objection often made by religious authors (like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue) is that by allowing all individuals to concern themselves merely with the means to pursue their self-selected ends, liberalism has gutted our capacity to consider what ends are actually right and virtuous to pursue. Over a long enough period of time, the grandiose rhetoric of liberal authors leads to mere emotivism: the bizarre belief that our choice about moral ends is a mere matter of preference, much like one’s taste in ice cream flavors. From an allegedly “neutral” liberal standpoint, there is no sense in trying to arbitrate whether an addict who happened to reach a ripe old age led a less intrinsically good life than Martin Luther King, Jr. At best we could assess who gained more utilitarian pleasure from their pursuits and make a calculation that way. 

The aesthetic argument is more common to authors such as Nietzsche, Allan Bloom, or Roger Scruton. Here the fundamental problem with the levelling impulse of egalitarian liberalism is its destruction of standards of excellence and beauty in our culture. The conviction that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder leaves it up to the mass of individuals to decide what the highest aesthetic values should be. The weight of their numbers, coupled with resentment at their mediocrity, means that the truly great and inspired are either silenced or compelled to cater to the masses in order to make a living. This leads to a deadened and weak culture where people are neither exposed to sublimated aesthetic values nor have the will to produce them. What we get instead is the pleasant, the unchallenging, and, ultimately, the life-denying. 

Most contemporary arguments about liberalism’s nihilism have become notably more superficial and even shrill. Ironically a lot of them reflect the kind of superficiality they read into liberal society. We get post-liberals who assert that because they feel liberalism’s morality is bad so too must be its metaphysics, without making any effort to actually make metaphysical arguments. Or we get an endless series of essays on how our society must be failing if liberal morality has flourished so thoroughly, with scarcely any moral analysis. Many of these seem like caricatures of what they profess to attack, merely asserting loudly and often that they disdain liberalism.

In the pre-Modern era, teleological and theological conceptions of matter defined reality in terms of the high ends to which it aspired. Often linked to this were deep value judgments about the intrinsic worth of existence which could be gleaned through an analysis of the physical world, which revealed the deeper teleological or divine order beneath mere matter in motion. The world of physical time became the mere moving image of eternity.

The emerging Scientific Revolution became increasingly critical of this outlook, holding that by interpreting matter in terms of ends we were effectively ascribing moral and aesthetic values to our metaphysical descriptions of the natural world. Instead, matter should be understood deterministically, driven by laws which were comprehensible to reason, but whose ultimate source and purpose were forever concealed to us. Immanuel Kant made a compelling case that any telos or beauty that we apprehended in the natural world or in the nature of human existence was put there by us. Human reason ascribed teleological ends and beauty to the natural world, but we had no way of knowing for sure whether there was any intrinsic telos or beauty in the play of existence.

The broad contours of Kant’s argument remain plausible. As Hamlet would say, “There is nothing good or evil, but thinking makes it so.” Yet the lingering doubt remains that even if this is true, where does it leave us in terms of comprehending the good life? Don’t these kinds of arguments, if anything, lead exactly to the belief that mere opinion is all that props up the conceit that life has value and can be affirmed? 

The answer to this is that liberals needn’t deny that there may well be some intrinsic value to human life that pre-exists human thought, but we are incapable of knowing what that is for certain. Given the limitations of reason this is precluded to us. But this doesn’t mean we can’t take steps toward deciding what the best kinds of human life are. John Stuart Mill suggested that, absent the possibility of any kind of certainty on the matter, the best solution is an experimental one. We give individuals as much liberty as possible to engage in different “experiments in living” and then individually and collectively draw on the reservoir of experiences to ascertain what is conducive to human flourishing and what is not. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nihilism and the Liberal Vision of the Good (liberalcurrents.com) (2021)

“Matt McManus is the author of ‘The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism’ amongst other books and a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan.”

John Stuart Mill: Still Experimenting After All These Years

Saturday Lecture: Strong Gods

{R.R. Reno (who is known, I am told, as ‘Rusty’ to his friends) is a former Professor of Theology at Creighton University. He has been the editor of ‘First Things’ for the past decade; he drew attention in 2020 for a series of articles and tweets in which he said that people wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID were ‘cowards.’ He added that our society was obsessed with human longevity and had an unnatural aversion to death. I should add that Mr. Reno, like everyone associated with ‘First Things,’ is fiercely ‘pro-life.’} 

R.R. Reno (from Return of the Strong Gods):

Social convulsions and mass mobilizations dominated the lives of those born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World War I mustered millions of young men into armies of unprecedented size and marched them into inconclusive battles producing casualties on a shocking scale. No European country emerged from the conflict unchanged.

[In the years that followed], the streets rang with declarations: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Triumph of the Will, Blood and Soil. In those years, fierce gods trampled the benign managerial habits of commerce and the liberal norms of free consent and democratic deliberation. Strong and dark gods stormed through Europe, eventually setting aflame most of the world and bringing death to millions.

The years from 1914 through 1945 were dark with calamity. Almost all our intuitions about how to promote justice and serve the common good have been formed by this civilizational Shoah. We continue to define ourselves culturally, even spiritually, as anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist. I call the atmosphere of opinion that sustains these anti imperatives the “postwar consensus.” Although there has been political contention between the left and the right, it has been a sibling rivalry. The postwar left fixed its attention on moral freedom and cultural deregulation, seeing them as natural extensions of the anti-authoritarian imperative, while the postwar right focused on economic freedom and market deregulation for similar anti-totalitarian reasons.

As the long twentieth century ends, this unified thrust is easier to discern, not least because the establishment Left and Right are closing ranks to denounce populism. The postwar consensus is more than political. Its powerful cultural influence is evident in the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders. Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms. It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods.

Anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism inspired a general theory of society. That theory has many forms, some explicit, others tacit. But it is characterized by a fundamental judgment: whatever is strong—strong loves and strong truths—leads to oppression, while liberty and prosperity require the reign of weak loves and weak truths. In the shadow of Auschwitz, this general theory has encouraged the development of a variety of anti-metaphysical philosophies and critical therapies. The postwar era saw a shift in our metaphysical dreams to openness and a lightness of being in response to the decades of catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth century.

In pursuit of those dreams the postwar imagination seeks the ministry of weak gods, or better, the gods of weakening who open things up. Today, one of our leading imperatives is inclusion, a god who softens differences. Transgression is prized for breaking down boundaries—opening things up. Diversity and multiculturalism suggest no authoritative center. The free market promises spontaneous order, miraculously coordinating our free choices, also without an authoritative center. Denigrating populist challenges to the political establishment as spasms of a “tribal mind” is a reductive critique that disenchants.

We must stop acting as if it were 1945. The postwar consensus, however fitting in its earlier stages, is decadent. It is high time that we recognize our intellectual, moral, and spiritual freedom from the traumas that so affected our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents. We need to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, not the twentieth. This will not be easy. Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems. Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the ‘res’ in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Skyhorse Publishing)

R. Reno - Wikipedia

R.R. Reno: Self-Portrait

Friday Fragment: One Is the Loneliest Number

{I will not attempt to characterize or to categorize Alexander Dugin, a controversial Russian political philosopher and activist. Instead, I will present here a brief excerpt from his book, ‘The Fourth Political Theory’ (to which I have alluded in the past), along with my equally brief observations.}

Alexander Dugin is one of Russia’s best-known advocates for a “postliberal” order:

Liberalism rests on the individual as its most basic component. It is individuals, collectively but in isolation from one another, that are taken as the whole. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the ‘hermeneutic circle’ of liberalism turned out to be the most durable: it has the smallest orbit and rotates around its subject — the individual. To shatter this circle, we must strike the individual, abolish him, and cast him into the periphery of political considerations.

Dugin (or his translator) is being less than precise, even misleading, in the above formulation. His fury is directed not at the “individual” per se (the very idea of which he rejects) but at Individualism: the isolated and autonomous individual of the modern West, shorn of traditional ties and of community, and forced to navigate the world alone. Whether that is an accurate description of the individual’s status under liberal modernity is, of course, a matter of opinion.

Dugin, however, proceeds with his logic:  

Liberalism is well aware of this danger, and therefore undertakes one battle after another with all other ideologies and theories — social, philosophical, and political — that encroach on the individual, inscribing his identity into a more general context. By undermining the individual as the constitutive figure of the entire political and social system, we can put an end to liberalism.

Putting an end to liberalism would be a feat akin to winning a war on terror, which is to say, it seems unlikely if not impossible. Liberal ideas, ideals, and sentiments will survive even if liberal regimes are removed from power.

Still, one of the fundamental dichotomies of human existence has always been that of the One and the Many, and Dugin takes his stand firmly on the side of the latter:

The neuroses and fears located at the pathogenic core of liberal philosophy are clearly seen in The Open Society and its Enemies, a classic of neoliberalism by Karl Popper. He compared fascism and Communism based precisely on the fact that both ideologies integrate the individual into a supra-individual community, into a whole, into a totality, which Popper immediately qualified as ‘totalitarianism’. It is obvious that the weakest (and the strongest) aspect of liberalism comes from its direct appeal to the individual, pleading that he remain himself, by himself in his own autonomous individuality, uniqueness, particularity, and partiality. We propose instead the theory that every human identity is acceptable and justified, except for that of the individual. Man is anything but an individual.

Dugin wants to eliminate the One, in the sense of individuals standing apart from and disconnected from larger social and political entities, i.e., the Many. The ancient Greeks thought along the same lines; they used the term “idiotes” (“private person”) in reference to individuals who were cut off from the body politic. As John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.” Such views fly in the face of modernity’s notions of personal identity and 'authenticity'; they challenge existentialists’ brooding concern with the Self; and they recall (without the mystical element) early Christianity’s insistence that all believers in Christ collectively constituted and belonged to a single “body of Christ”. It is one of the great ironies of history that a religion which began by emphasizing collective identity eventually engendered the Individual as we now know it.

Dugin’s views would be more persuasive were it not for the Russian history from which they emerge; that history does not bode well for a humanistic challenge to liberalism. I wish it were otherwise, but in centuries of trying, Russia has yet to find a way to balance the One and the Many—other than wholesale murdering of the former in the name of the latter. I would rather give liberalism more time to work on its flaws than pledge my allegiance to Dugin's new world order.    

-------------------------------------------------------------

For anyone interested in Dugin’s thought but not in the mood for tackling “The Fourth Political Theory,” Michael Millerman (at First Things) offers his analysis:             Alexander Dugin Explained by Michael Millerman | Articles | First Things

Painting by June Nissinen: "The One in the Many"

Sunday Sermon: "Bilge Water in a Ship's Hold"

{Before there was Woke, there was Political Correctness; before there was Postmodernism, there was Modernism; and before that, Protestantism. At the same time, there have been brave souls (e.g., Pope Gregory XVI, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Jordan Peterson) willing to stand up against such intolerable developments as Indifferentism, Liberalism, “liberty of conscience,” and “freedom to publish”. For at least five hundred years, we have been beset by the powers of darkness. It is nothing short of a miracle that we are still standing in the light—or are we?}

Pope Gregory XVI, from “Mirari Vos: On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism” (1832):  

We know that you are concerned for the faith in these difficult times. Now is truly the time in which the powers of darkness winnow the elect like wheat. We speak of the things which you see with your own eyes, which we all bemoan. Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men but defiled and held up to ridicule. Sound doctrine is perverted, and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline — none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil.

Academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions, which openly attack [Christian] faith; this horrible and nefarious war is openly and even publicly waged. Thus, by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted; a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the perversion of morals is spread. The restraints of religion are thrown off; we see the destruction of public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all legitimate power approaching. This great mass of calamities had its inception in the heretical societies and sects in which all that is sacrilegious, infamous, and blasphemous has gathered as bilge water in a ship’s hold, a congealed mass of all filth.

You must labor and diligently take care that the faith may be preserved amidst this great conspiracy of impious men who attempt to tear it down and destroy it. May all remember the judgment concerning sound doctrine with which the people are to be instructed. Consider another abundant source of the evils with which we are afflicted at present: indifferentism. This perverse opinion is spread on all sides by the fraud of the wicked who claim that it is possible to obtain the eternal salvation of the soul by the profession of any kind of religion, as long as morality is maintained, and that the safe harbor of salvation is open to persons of any religion whatever.  

Indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws — in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again? The Church has always taken action to destroy the plague of bad books. This was true even in apostolic times for we read that the apostles themselves burned a large number of books.

We condemn the detestable insolence and improbity of those who, consumed with the unbridled lust for freedom, are entirely devoted to impairing and destroying all rights of dominion while bringing servitude to the people under the slogan of liberty. Certain societies and assemblages seem to draw up a battle line together with the followers of every false religion and cult. They feign piety for religion; but they are driven by a passion for promoting novelties and sedition everywhere. They preach liberty of every sort; they stir up disturbances in sacred and civil affairs, and pluck authority to pieces. Proud, or rather foolish, men examine the mysteries of faith (which surpass all understanding) with the faculties of the human mind, and rely on human reason which, by the condition of man’s nature, is weak and infirm.

Against all these, take up the shield of faith and fight the battles of the Lord vigorously. You must stand as a wall against every height which raises itself against the knowledge of God. Unsheath the sword of the spirit…

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mirari Vos - Papal Encyclicals

(Bold emphases in the original)

Saturday Lecture: Are There Limits to Tolerance?

It has been said that “One man’s right to swing his fists ends where another man’s nose begins.” Does it then follow that “One man’s right to speak freely ends where another man’s ears begin”? Freedom, it turns out, is just another word for people to squabble over. How far do our freedoms extend, and who decides the boundaries?

Writing in 1945 and defending what he called ‘the open society,’ Karl Popper contrasted it with tribalism, primitivism, collectivism, superstition, and magic, all of which (he said) were characteristics of ‘closed’ societies. Popper wanted--in theory--maximal tolerance. The following excerpt (from his The Open Society and Its Enemies) illustrates his belief in Enlightenment values:

The strain of civilization is the strain of the demand that we should be rational, look after ourselves, and take immense responsibilities. It is the price we have to pay for being human.

We can never return to the alleged innocence and beauty of our tribal past. Our dream of heaven cannot be realized on earth. Once we begin to rely upon our reason, and to use our powers of criticism, once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it, the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal authority.

For those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature.

If we dream of a return to our childhood, if we are tempted to rely on others and so be happy, if we turn back from the task of carrying our cross, the cross of humaneness, of reason, of responsibility, if we lose courage and flinch from the strain, then we must try to fortify ourselves with a clear understanding of the simple decision before us. If we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, courageously, using what reason we have, to plan for security and freedom.

But Popper also recognized, and highlighted, a critical paradox:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them, if necessary, even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Taking Popper's caveat to heart, America decided, in the 1950s, against extending tolerance to its ideological enemies. Our country banned the Communist Party and rooted out Communists from government, labor unions, and academia. ¹ In the Sixties, however, the shoe of intolerance was on the other ideological foot, as the New Left harkened to anti-liberal Herbert Marcuse’s call for ‘repressive tolerance,’ by which he meant ‘selective intolerance,’ a notion which (although denounced by liberals) did not differ substantially from Popper's program. 

This is from Marcuse's essay, "Repressive Tolerance":

Tolerance is being extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested. 

Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives. The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs--the mature delinquency of a whole civilization.

Tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the' possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Who would have predicted the ideological marriage, or at least the cohabitation, of Sir Karl Popper and Herbert Marcuse? Did their union, legitimized or not, produce the monstrous twins, Political Correctness and Cancel Culture? 

--------------------------------------------------------------

Karl Popper - Wikipedia

Repressive Tolerance (full text) - Herbert Marcuse Official Website

¹ "Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 (CCA) as an amendment to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 “to outlaw the Communist Party, to prohibit members of Communist organizations from serving in certain representative capacities, and for other purposes.”  Communist Control Act of 1954 (1954) - The Free Speech Center (mtsu.edu) Also see: McCarthyism - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Origins of Liberalism

Pierre Manent, from An Intellectual History of Liberalism:

What did our modern written “constitutions” and the “declarations of rights” proclaimed to establish their “freedom” suggest, if not an emancipation of the “idea,” a rise in the political power of the “theory”? The American Founding Fathers were as concerned about interpreting Montesquieu’s thought and benefiting from his authority as socialists later were about understanding what Marx “really said.” As Hamilton wrote in the first of The Federalist papers in 1787, Americans have the responsibility of deciding before the world if it is possible to found a good government “from reflection and choice,” or if humanity is forever condemned to be the plaything of “accident and force.” In a word, there is in liberal politics something essentially deliberate and experimental, that implies a conscious and “constructed” plan.

One of the principal “ideas” of liberalism, as we know, is that of the “individual.” The individual is that being who, because he is human, is naturally entitled to “rights” that can be enumerated, rights that are attributed to him independently of his function or place in society and that make him the equal of any other man. As familiar as this idea may seem, it really ought to strike us as strange. How can rights be attributed to the individual as individual if rights govern relationships between several individuals, if the very idea of a right presupposes an already instituted community or society? How can political legitimacy be founded on the rights of the individual, if he never exists as such, if he is always necessarily linked to other individuals, to a family, class, profession, or nation? However, it is on this idea, so obviously “asocial” and “apolitical,” that the liberal body politic was progressively constructed. What is an election with universal suffrage, if not that moment when each person strips himself of his social or natural characteristics—income, profession, even sex— to become a “simple individual”? It is that moment when the body politic peacefully breaks up, becoming a “state of nature,” only to reconstruct itself immediately afterward. Nor is there any doubt that this individual, so obviously “imaginary,” has tended more and more to become reality. The inhabitants of Western democracies have become ever more autonomous, ever more equal, and have felt themselves progressively less defined by the family or social class to which they belong.

Our present political regime remains determined, in its generating principle, by this [idea]. Its singularity still dwells in us because we continue to feel the consequences of the solemn decisions taken three centuries ago. It is widely believed that the originality of European political history stems from Christianity, and that the development of modern politics can be described as a process of “secularization.” What are liberty and equality, after all, if not “biblical values” shaping civic life? The thesis was born and acquired its credence just after the French Revolution. It had the merit of reconciling proponents and opponents of the “new freedom”: there were those who thought that the hour of human maturity had arrived and those who remained attached to the old religion. The former saw in Christianity the first expression of human liberty and equality, hidden under the veils of grace or hampered by the swaddling clothes of alienation. The latter celebrated modern freedom as the last conquest of the Gospel.

We must remember, however, that this reconciliation (which in France took more than a century to be achieved) came about just after the Christian religion had been totally stripped of all political power for the first time, power that it would never regain. Perhaps the lassitude of battle had weakened the conquerors as much as the conquered. In any case the principles of the new politics—the rights of man and citizen, freedom of conscience, sovereignty of the people—had been forged during the two previous centuries in a bitter fight against Christianity, and particularly against the Catholic Church. The decisive question then is the following: must the Enlightenment’s war against Christianity be seen as the expression of an immense misunderstanding, for which we must seek to grasp the “historical reasons”? Or does this period give us the meaning of the modern political venture, and thus of liberalism, much more clearly than the subsequent period of reconciliation?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (New French Thought Series, 1), Princeton University Press

Pierre Manent - Wikipedia

Enlightenment, Class of 1750

Friday Fuss

In case anyone thought that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat was alone in believing that the term "conservatism" is utterly inappropriate for the American political Right, the following is from Nathan Robinson (Current Affairs), who begins by quoting Noam Chomsky:

"There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term 'conservatism' can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country's future."

Nathan Robinson, in his own words:

It is a mistake to think that right-wing politics is about conserving much of anything. In fact, because the right is committed to the rule of the market, right-wing policies will unleash much more destruction than preservation. 

Right-wing populism has always been a fraud because it speaks the language of tradition, community, family, etc. but then supports policies that separate families, atomize communities, and obliterate traditional cultures. Understanding the fraudulence of the word “conservatism” is critical to seeing what the real consequences of the right-wing agenda will be, namely a very different and much worse world.  

“Conservatism” Conserves Nothing ❧ Current Affairs

===============================================

In his 2008 Book of Absolutes, William Gairdner set out to refute modern relativism, a task he undertook by constructing a strawman, and an exceptionally flimsy one at that:

The three key myths of modernity all have to do with repudiating controls. We accept as dogma the idea that our minds begin as blank slates (have no innate character-determining properties), that we are all inherently good people to start with (and if bad, are made so by poorly engineered societies that can be fixed up), and, finally, that we exist as freely choosing selves unencumbered by any constraints of temperament, biology, or pre-existing moral obligations or standards. We accept at face value the modern conceit that our minds, instincts, and societies start off clean and empty, to be filled with whatever meanings we choose.

The problem with Gairdner’s thesis is that it might have been accurate, and relevant, in the 18^th-century, but it is a mere caricature today.

Are “we” in the thrall of John Locke and his “blank slate” theory, and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in mankind’s “natural goodness”? No, we are not, nor were we ever. Those theories were contested even as they were promulgated, and they have long since been debunked, discredited, and discarded. Today, we debate “nature vs. nurture,” we argue about genetic determinism and about the influence of external factors on individual development; our understanding of ourselves has been both challenged and deepened by the work of Darwin and Freud, not to mention by the catastrophes of modern history.  Are there really such things, we ask, as “unencumbered” and “freely choosing” selves? Modern thought is more likely to say that “free will” is an illusion. Post-Locke and post-Rousseau, subsequent thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, have made mincemeat of the simplified ideas that arose in the early modern era only to be complicated and confounded by experience (and, later, by neuroscience).

Despite which, Gairdner proclaimed that “we” are all in agreement on the prevailing “modern conceit,” to which one might respond as Tonto did to the Lone Ranger: “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

----------------------------------------------------

William Gairdner, The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals (McGill—Queen’s University Press, 2008)

============================

“Kierkegaard worried that his age was going to swallow itself up in reflection; our age is closer to settling the planet Mars than it has ever come to the experience of reflection.” (D.C. Schindler)

Finally, at The Imaginative Conservative, in what is either a lengthy essay or a short book (complete with seventy footnotes!), theologian D.C. Schindler asks, “What Is Liberalism?” He insists that the question “is an essential one” and he goes on to explain:

In the present moment, the question of the “value” of liberalism—that is, modern political philosophy founded on “natural rights” and some version of the “social contract” theory—has emerged with an urgency it may never have had before. While preceding generations have simply taken liberalism for granted as the given context within which we make practical judgments about many other things, the current generation seems willing to raise astonishingly bold questions regarding liberalism itself. Is it the only possible way to think about politics? Is it the “best regime”? Can we not entertain the notion that there were good features in some of the older political forms that liberalism replaced? 

For Schindler, this is not mere academic chatter; it has existential significance. “How,” he asks, “ought we to live in the world we now occupy and respond to the reality of liberalism, which has established its place in the modern West over the course of five hundred years and increasingly around the globe?” In trying to come to terms with what Liberalism has wrought, Schindler provides a list (I know) of “twenty-five features of contemporary life that we take to be evident to anyone who cares to look around thoughtfully.” Taken as a whole, claims Schindler, “liberalism represents a transformation of human nature from the ground up; it is an extraction of human nature, root and branch, from the actual tradition in which it is embedded, so as to enable a truly radical re-interpretation of every dimension of human existence. Such a comprehensive re-interpretation is possible only in reaction to a comprehensive claim on human nature, which is just what Christianity makes by virtue of its universal ontological and historical scope, its mission into the depths of being and through the whole of human culture, all the way up to the world’s eschatological destiny.”

For those interested in pursuing the topic further, Schindler incorporates insights from Pierre Manent’s Intellectual History of Liberalism, with whom he agrees that the historical origins of liberalism stemmed from “the rejection of Christianity, specifically in the form of the Catholic Church, at least in its actual historical condition in the Middle Ages.” The ghost of Bill Occam cannot be far away!

What Is Liberalism? ~ The Imaginative Conservative