The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: Stop Complaining

{The following is the best advice I have ever encountered.}

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

In the workaday world, complainers will not go far. When someone asks how you are doing, you had better be wise enough to reply, “I can’t complain.” If you do complain, even justifiably, people will stop asking how you are doing. Complaining will not help you succeed and influence people. You can complain to your physician or psychiatrist because they are paid to hear you complain. But you cannot complain to your boss or your friends, if you have any. You will soon be dismissed from your job and dropped from the social register. Then you will be left alone with your complaints and no one to listen to them. Perhaps then the message will sink into your head: If you do not feel good enough for long enough, you should act as if you do and even think as if you do. That is the way to get yourself to feel good enough for long enough and stop you from complaining for good, as any self-improvement book can affirm.

But should you not improve, someone must assume the blame. And that someone will be you. This is monumentally so if you are a pessimist or a depressive. Should you conclude that life is objectionable or that nothing matters—do not waste our time with your nonsense. We are on our way to the future, and the philosophically disheartening or the emotionally impaired are not going to hinder our progress. If you cannot say something positive, or at least equivocal, keep it to yourself. Pessimists and depressives need not apply for a position in the enterprise of life.

You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all. The decision is yours, since you are a free agent who can choose to rejoin our fabricated world or stubbornly insist on … what? That we should mollycoddle non-positive thinkers like you or rethink how the whole world transacts its business? That we should start over from scratch? Or that we should go extinct? Try to be realistic. We did the best we could with the tools we had. After all, we are only human, as we like to say. Our world may not be in accord with nature’s way, but it did develop organically according to our consciousness, which delivered us to a lofty prominence over the Creation. The whole thing just took on a life of its own, and nothing is going to stop it anytime soon. There can be no starting over and no going back. No major readjustments are up for a vote. And no melancholic head-case is going to bad-mouth our catastrophe.

The universe was created by the Creator, damn it. We live in a country we love and that loves us back. We have families and friends and jobs that make it all worthwhile. We are somebodies, not a bunch of nobodies without names or numbers or retirement plans. None of this is going to be overhauled by a thought criminal who contends that the world is not doubleplusgood and never will be. Our lives may not be unflawed—that would deny us a better future to work toward—but if this charade is good enough for us, then it should be good enough for you. So if you cannot get your mind right, try walking away. You will find no place to go and no one who will have you. You will find only the same old trap the world over. Lighten up or leave us alone. You will never get us to give up our hopes. You will never get us to wake up from our dreams. We are not contradictory beings whose continuance only worsens our plight as mutants who embody the contorted logic of a paradox. Such opinions will not be accredited by institutions of authority or by the middling run of humanity.

To lay it on the line, whatever thoughts may enter your chemically imbalanced brain are invalid, inauthentic, or whatever dismissive term we care to hang on you, who are only “one of those people.” So start pretending that you feel good enough for long enough, stop your complaining, and get back in line. If you are not as strong as Samson—that no-good suicide and slaughterer of Philistines—then get loaded to the gills and return to the trap. Keep your medicine cabinet and your liquor cabinet well stocked, just like the rest of us. Come on and join the party. No pessimists or depressives invited.

Do you think we are morons? We know all about those complaints of yours. The only difference is that we have sense enough and feel good enough for long enough not to speak of them. Keep your powder dry and your brains blocked. Our shibboleth: “Up the Conspiracy and down with Consciousness.”

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Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror    (Hippocampus Press)

Thomas Ligotti - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: Too Much of Nothing?

{As he was pawing through my bookshelves the other day, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat managed, intentionally or not, to knock one book to the floor. The book was Thomas Ligotti’s ‘The Conspiracy against the Human Race,’ which I had purchased on a whim a year or so ago (for $.99, as I recall), skimmed briefly, and then dismissed as too bleak for my taste. It had been sitting unread on the shelf ever since, until Pascal got his paws on it. As it turns out, the book aligns perfectly with Pascal’s pessimistic view of existence, so much so that he is now encouraging all the other cool existential cats to read it, too.}

Consciousness is an existential liability. Existence is a condition with no redeeming qualities. (Thomas Ligotti)

Life presents itself as a task, a drudgery to be performed. Everything living works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that is of no value. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

When there's too much of nothing, no one has control. (Bob Dylan)

Back in 1912, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in his The Tragic Sense of Life, wrote that “Consciousness is a disease.” I mention this only to demonstrate that Thomas Ligotti was not breaking new ground with his relentlessly grim 2010 book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He was, however, digging the hole of nihilism deeper than had most of his predecessors (e.g., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Unamuno) or his contemporaries (e.g., Emil Cioran). ¹

Like the ancient Gnostics, but without their metaphysical flourishes, Ligotti makes the case that, when it comes to existence, a mistake has been made; we ought not to be here, he insists, and certainly not saddled as we are with consciousness. What, precisely, does Ligotti object to about consciousness or about existence itself? Let him explain:

For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And as such, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.²

Ligotti’s train of thought, explicitly building on the radical pessimism of the mid-20th century Norwegian writer Peter Zapffe, in some ways tracks that of Ernest Becker. Becker's thesis (in Denial of Death) was that our awareness of death would have been psychologically crippling if we had not developed ways to distract and to distance ourselves from that awareness. All human activities—the building of civilizations, the construction of cities, the creative arts, religion, etc.—are nothing but frantic efforts to avoid facing our mortality; or, as Ligotti puts it, “Every human activity is a tack for killing time.” ³

All human activities are not created equal, of course; some serve our death-denying purposes better than others. Ligotti notes that deep existential contemplation—or, better, deep ontological contemplation—tends to be a minority preference at best:

That being human might mean something very strange and awful, something quite uncanny, is not given a passing thought. If it were, who knows what would happen to us? We could disappear in a puff of smoke or fall through a mirror that has nothing on the other side. The single most startling and dreadful revelation for human beings is that we are not what we think we are.

In the twentieth century, German philosopher (and sometime Nazi) Martin Heidegger drilled down to the philosophical bedrock by asking, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The radical nihilist responds by saying, “Maybe there isn’t.”

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¹ Spoiler alert: the “conspiracy against the human race” turns out to be life and life only.

² “The silent staring void” evokes none other than Blaise Pascal himself! Pascal was not a nihilist, of course; he was a Jansenist, which Catholic authorities considered even worse.

³ To be clear, Ernest Becker, while probing human motives, generally approved of the ways in which humans kept mortality's skeleton in the closet; Ligotti, on the other hand, was pretty sure there's no point.

I fought the Abyss and the Abyss won.

Friday Fragments

You would have to be entirely ignorant of postwar American politics not to find the following almost hysterically funny. Media Matters has helpfully compiled several of the latest right-wing complaints that Democrats are trying to—wait for it—“delegitimize the Supreme Court.” From Fox News to the Washington Examiner, from the Federalist to Steve Bannon’s War Room, it’s all the rage to be outraged at the idea of casting aspersions at one of the pillars of American government or at the corrupt hacks distinguished jurists who sit on the bench of the highest court in the land. ¹

I have neither the time nor the inclination to refresh anyone’s memory about how enthusiastic conservative Republicans were about impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren back in the 1960s, or about how they spent decades loudly decrying “activist judges” and seeking to curtail the judiciary’s power. To say that conservatives did their best to "delegitimize" the courts, and SCOTUS in particular, is to put it mildly, and their attack on American institutions was just beginning. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became the first man to be elected President by campaigning on the novel idea that the government he wanted to lead was the enemy of freedom. Then, starting in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich, the GOP decided to go all in on delegitimizing institutions: public schools, higher education, the federal government, the courts, the media, liberal Christianity, etc. Patrick Buchanan stood up at the Republican national convention in 1992 and declared that the nation was engaged in a culture war and that liberals were out to destroy the American way of life.

We have now witnessed conservatives extend their cynicism to the nation’s electoral system and to the military, with the predictable result that a not insubstantial number of Americans now believe that elections are rigged, that the news is fake, that the Deep State subverts the will of the people, that “false flag” operations abound, and that the FBI and the Justice Department are given to launching, for political purposes, fraudulent and unfounded investigations. The American Right, taking its cue from the MAGA Man himself, is more inclined to believe Russia's Vladimir Putin than U.S. intelligence agencies.

So, yes, it’s funny to hear conservatives now defend the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, an institution for which they showed not the least respect in the recent past. I’m willing to concede that SCOTUS-punching is a partisan tactic both sides engage in for mostly disingenuous reasons. That, however, does not make Republicans’ high dudgeon in the face of demonstrated ethical lapses by the likes of Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas any less amusing.

¹ Right-wing media accuse the left of trying to “delegitimize the Supreme Court” after reporting shows conservative justices concealed conflicts of interest | Media Matters for America

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Amongst the many voices expressing discontent with the modern world, Paul Kingsnorth’s is among the more unfailingly interesting. In his latest sally against Modernity, he offers a modest proposal: “The West,” he says, “must die.”

That may sound radical, but Kingsnorth has his reasons:

Our whole world now, it seems to me, has been built to prevent any stumbling or wandering from ever happening. Nobody wants to get lost. Preventing us from ever getting lost is what the Machine is for. It is why we like it. It is why, piece by piece, day by day, word by word, it is killing us slowly.

Exchange meaning for control: that was the deal. Exchange beauty for utility, roots for wings, the whole for the parts, lostness and wandering and stumbling for the straight march towards the goal. That was the deal. Turns out it was a trap, and now look at us. Look at everything we know, and how little we can see. Look at us here, flailing, drowning, gasping as we sink into the numbers and words.

How are we going to get out of this one?

One answer, of course, is that we can turn on each other in an effort, if not to fix anything, to place the blame: “The culture wars,” writes Kingsnorth, “are a surface manifestation of a much deeper rift in the psyche of modern Western people. You only get a culture war when you no longer have a culture.” That last sentence sounds profound; I’m just not sure it makes sense.

Regardless, Kingsnorth struggles against the impulse to take a side:

The culture wars continue, and the camps are well defined. On one side, the ‘woke’ tribe - that curious agglomeration of international capital and elite progressive opinion posing as an uprising from below - works to invert the culture as it crusades against everything that the place has ever been or stood for. In response, the ‘based’ tribe rises up to ‘defend the West,’ but it can never seem to agree on what it is defending. What is this ‘West,’ after all? Is it an ethnic homeland, a religion, a set of principles, a particular economic or social model, or some other way of seeing or being? Nobody seems to agree.

Surveying the ongoing demolition of the pillars of my culture, I am sometimes, in my worst moods, tempted to join the defenders of the West in their work. But when I have calmed down, I remember that those pillars are mostly rotten anyway, and that those attacking them, repulsive as they can sometimes be, are not entirely wrong either. Something has gone wrong with this ‘West’, and those who highlight its past crimes are getting at something that maybe even they can’t quite put their finger on.

The West Must Die - by Paul Kingsnorth (substack.com)

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Lastly, let us hear from the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, from his essay “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture”:

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. One can accept life and, at the same time, accept it as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history—if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred. A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave us only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings, and are therefore contemptible. 

Without the sacred, Kolakowski concludes, “Everything is then contemptible, and there is no more to be said.”

And yet people keep saying things, without regard for the sacred or, for that matter, for Leszek Kolakowski’s opinion. Critics of Modernity continue to insist that we can’t keep living this way, and yet here we are, doing exactly that.

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Kolakowski's "The Revenge of the Sacred" is found in his collection, Modernity on Endless Trial.

Our Museum of Historical Survivals

{In which Pascal the existential Russian blue cat returns to his habit of writing about whatever strikes his fancy at any given moment: Pitirim Sorokin, anyone?}

“Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial / Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while” (Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”)

News flash: the “culture wars” did not begin in 1992 with Patrick Buchanan’s declaration at the Republican Party’s national convention. According to Pitirim Sorokin, the Russian-born sociologist who managed to escape Bolshevik captivity and make his way to America, Western culture had been collapsing since at least the turn of the twentieth century; the war, such as it was, was mostly about division of the spoils and/or possession of the ruins.

On the one hand, Sorokin ridiculed the catastrophists and Cassandras of his era. In his 1941 book, The Crisis of Our Age, he heaped scorn on them: 

How ridiculous are the daily cries of politicians, journalists, and the press about the end of civilization and progress if they are defeated and if their opponents are victorious. During every political campaign we hear a petty politician threatening his listeners with “the end of civilization” if he is not elected. Who is not familiar with “the fight for progress and culture” of the leaders of warring cliques? Who does not know the slogan, “The world is coming to an end,” uttered by an ambitious person unable to attain his Lilliputian objective? Almost daily we hear a familiar variation on this theme from a crowd of high-brow and low-brow seekers after certain objectives, often utterly insignificant and egotistic. If we are to believe these pseudo-prophets, then civilization and culture must have died long ago or must be about to perish any minute! Fortunately, culture and civilization are infinitely tougher than these clowns of the historical circus assure us.

Nonetheless, Sorokin insisted that Western culture was at a critical juncture, with what he called the post-medieval “sensate culture” (scientific, empirical, materialist) having exhausted itself after flourishing for four hundred years. The West was going through a final, decadent phase, claimed Sorokin; and while we would survive it, we would necessarily be changed in unpredictable ways. Sorokin was no Cassandra, but he understood that the birth of the New would be a painful, bloody process.  

In the meantime, he saw nothing but chaos and confusion:

Our intellectual life is but an incessant dance of jitterbugs. Its spineless and disjointed syncretism pervades all our social and mental life. Our education consists mainly in pumping into the mind-area of students the most heterogeneous bits of information about everything. Our newspapers and magazines reflect the same syncretism elevated into a dogma of “all the news” sprinkled by the sensationalism of the yellow press. Our science changes its hypotheses every decade or year. Our ethics is a jungle of discordant norms and opposite values. Our religious belief is a wild concoction of a dozen various “Social Gospels,” diversified by several beliefs of Christianity diluted by those of Marxism, Democracy, and Theosophy, enriched by a dozen vulgarized philosophical ideas, corrected by several scientific theories, peacefully squatting side by side with the most atrocious magical superstitions. So also are our philosophies and Weltanschauung, our fine arts and tastes. With an equal enthusiasm we accept the Gregorian Chants and “The St. Louis Blues”; the Bible and the erotic novel; behaviorism and the Neo-Thomism; the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, Esquire and The Grapes of Wrath; psychoanalysis and the Confessions of St. Augustine; jitterbugs and classical dance. And so on. All this lies side by side, undigested and unintegrated into any unity.

The eclectic nature of the modern West, celebrating diversity and multiple perspectives, admiring its own nonjudgmental openness, was, for Sorokin, a sign of the end times:  

This jumble of diverse elements means that the soul of our sensate culture is broken down. It appears to have lost its self-confidence. It begins to doubt its own superiority and primogeniture. It ceases to be loyal to itself. It progressively fails to continue to be its own sculptor, to keep unimpaired the integrity and sameness of its style, that takes in only what agrees with it and rejects all that impairs it. Such a culture loses its individuality. It becomes formless, shapeless, style-less. As such, it becomes less and less distinguishable in the ocean of cultural phenomena as a striking and magnificent individuality. When it reaches this stage, its creative career is finished. From being the creative actor of history, it becomes merely a museum of historical survivals.

Museums, of course, are nice places to visit, and instructive in their own ways; but they are not intended to be places in which people live. Writing eighty years ago, Pitirim Sorokin observed that the museum of the West was beginning to crumble, and that its inhabitants were frantically fighting each other to get to the exits.

Here we are, eighty years later, still battling amidst the ruins and still trying to get out, although none of us has any idea what might be lying in wait for us outside the museum.

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Saturday Lecture: "Sacrosanct Shibboleths"

{The following reflections are from Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion and, from the evidence, a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile. The first selection was written in 2012, as Preface to a collection of essays titled Future Tense: The Future of Culture in an Age of Upheaval; the second is excerpted from Kimball’s “The Right Targets,” which appeared in January 2022. It may be instructive to note the shift in tone (from thoughtful to hysterical) which took place over the course of a decade, and which may reflect changes in the conservative movement (or at least its rhetoric); or it may simply reflect the fact that Kimball, like many on the Right, appears to have lost his mind.¹}  

Roger Kimball, from Future Tense (2012):

Writing in the early 1960s, towards the end of his life, Evelyn Waugh had this to say about Rudyard Kipling’s reputation as a ‘conservative’:

“He believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned, and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” ¹

That appreciation of the fragility of civilization—the insight that our enabling cultural habits and institutions must constantly be renewed or fail—is at the heart of contemporary conservatism’s critical mission. Civilization, we conservatives know, is not a gift but an achievement, difficult of attainment but all too easy to forfeit. The barbarians who would tear it down are not only at the gates but deep within us. As Waugh, writing at the end of the 1930s, put it: “We are all potential recruits for anarchy.”

The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present, it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not only the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

Every age thinks itself uniquely privileged and uniquely problematic. But as we look back across history, we recognize certain periods in which inherited habits and institutions are suddenly unsettled in a fundamental way—those ‘plastic moments’ that Karl Marx talked about, when many taken-for-granted assumptions about the configuration of society and the shared values that order our lives together seem curiously up for grabs.

We in America, in the West generally, are in the midst of such a revolution in sentiment. There is a growing sense of uneasiness, of anxiety. The law; the economy; the political prospects; changes in our intellectual habits wrought by changes in our technology; the destiny that is demography: America, the West, indeed the entire world in the early years of the twenty-first century, seems unsettled. Things we have taken for granted seem suddenly up for grabs in some fundamental if still difficult-to-grasp way. Fissures have opened among the confidences we had always assumed—in the market, in national identity, in the basics of social order and cultural value. Future tense: the always hazardous art of cultural prognostication seems more brittle now, more uneasy, more tentative.

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Roger Kimball, from “The Right Targets” (2022):

The woke culture of the Left seeks to destroy not only America as we know it but also the political, moral, and economic foundations upon which it rests. The conflagration is partly physical, as we saw and see on city streets throughout the country. It is also partly spiritual, as the most basic human realities and aspirations are deconstructed and politicized. When the criterion of merit and the ideal of disinterested judgment are rejected as white, patriarchal tools of oppression, or racial and sexual identity are elevated into sacrosanct shibboleths of election, we are cast into a vertiginous, all-consuming whirlpool of nihilistic self-engorgement.

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¹ Dan Quayle, circa 1992: “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.” A 2018 article by John Ganz (at The Baffler) examines “The Decline of The New Criterion” and the pretensions of Roger Kimball: The Decline of The New Criterion | John Ganz (thebaffler.com)

The right targets | The New Criterion

Roger Kimball - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Empire of the Masses

{Jose Ortega y Gasset was one of the great Spanish philosophers of the twentieth century. Ortega's best-known work was “The Revolt of the Masses,” in which he defended the values of meritocratic liberalism while simultaneously criticizing the trend toward democracy. Ortega shared John Stuart Mill's (and Tocqueville’s, and the American founders’) fear of the "tyranny of the majority" and the "collective mediocrity" of the masses, which threatened (according to democracy’s critics) individuality, free thought, and protections for minorities. Ortega also found the unwashed masses unpleasant to be around, what with their ever increasing 'appetites and needs.'}

“Today, the masses enjoy the pleasures and use the instruments invented by the select groups, and hitherto exclusively at the service of the latter. The masses feel appetites and needs which were previously looked upon as refinements, inasmuch as they were the patrimony of the few. Take a trivial example: in 1820 there cannot have been ten bathrooms in private houses in Paris…” (Jose Ortega y Gasset)

Jose Ortega y Gasset, from The Revolt of the Masses (1932):

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe today: that is, the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilization.

Consider what I call the fact of agglomeration, of “plenitude.” Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafes full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

Approximately the same number of people existed fifteen years ago. The individuals who made up these multitudes existed, but not, however, qua multitude. Scattered about the world in small groups, or solitary, they lived a life, to all appearances, divergent, dissociate, apart. Each individual or small group occupied a place, its own, in country, village, town, or quarter of the great city. Now, suddenly, they appear as an agglomeration, and looking in any direction our eyes meet with the multitudes. Not only in any direction, but precisely in the best places, the relatively refined creation of human culture, previously reserved to lesser groups, in a word, to the elite. ¹

Everywhere we encounter the predominance of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified.

Today, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this “everybody” is not “everybody.” “Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elites. Nowadays, “everybody” is the mass alone.

Such, then, is the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features. The phenomenon is, furthermore, entirely new in the history of our modem civilization; never in the course of its development has anything similar happened. If we wish to find its like we shall have to take a leap outside our modern history and immerse ourselves in a world, a vital element, entirely different from our own; we shall have to penetrate the ancient world till we reach the hour of its decline. The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of “the full.” For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.

I reject any interpretation of our times which does not lay clear the meaning hidden under the actual rule of the masses and which accepts it blissfully, without a shudder of horror. Every destiny is dramatic, tragic in its deepest meaning. The element of terror in the destiny of our time is furnished by the over whelming and violent moral upheaval of the masses; imposing, invincible, and treacherous, as is destiny in every case. Whither is it leading us? Is it an absolute evil or a possible good? There it is, colossal, astride our times like a giant, a cosmic note of interrogation, always of uncertain shape, with something in it of the guillotine or the gallows, but also with something that strives to round itself into a triumphal arch.

In the XVIIIth Century, certain elite thinkers discovered that every human being, by the mere fact of birth, and without requiring any special qualification whatsoever, possessed certain fundamental political rights, the so-called rights of the man and the citizen; and further that, strictly speaking, these rights, common to all, are the only ones that exist.

Every other right attached to special gifts was condemned as being a privilege. This was at first a mere theory, the idea of a few men; then those few began to put the idea into practice, to impose it and insist upon it. As a result, the sovereignty of the unqualified individual, of the human being as such, generically, has now passed from being a juridical idea or ideal to be a psychological state inherent in the average man. When what was before an ideal becomes a component part of reality, it inevitably ceases to be an ideal; the prestige and the magic that are attributes of the ideal are volatilized. The levelling demands of a generous democratic inspiration have been changed from aspirations and ideals into appetites and unconscious assumptions.

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José Ortega y Gasset - Wikipedia

¹ Gasset (or his translator) uses the word “minorities” rather than “elites”. I have substituted the latter term because “minorities” today calls to mind individuals and social groups marginalized by dint of race, color, ethnicity, gender, etc. Gasset, however, was referring to individuals who stood out from the mass by dint of ability, training, experience, inborn privilege, etc.

Wednesday with Pascal: "What Ought I To Do?"

{It is possible that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is showing the effects of being stuck inside of Pony with the Three Forks blues again. I know of no other way to explain his latest missive, which I reproduce here without further comment.}

Dear The Little Red Blog,

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? 

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

What ought I to do? I see only darkness everywhere. Shall I believe I am nothing? Shall I believe I am God?

It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created, etc.; that original sin should be, and that it should not be.

This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred times wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be so dear to me for eternity.

Yours most sincerely,

Pascal the existential Russian blue cat

P.S. The esteemed poet and critic T.S. Eliot displayed his usual perspicacity when he wrote about me:

"Pascal is a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world; he had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole. The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion. Pascal's disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic."

What more could one ask, than to have one's despair and disillusion affirmed as "perfectly objective"? In any case, I have resolved my perplexity by means of a simple, straightforward wager; for while we cannot estimate the likelihood of God's existence, we can definitively assess the potential consequences of nonbelief.  The matter is illustrated here:

 

 

Illiberalism, Pessimism, and Hope

Illiberalism is in the air, as is post-Liberalism, and Rachel Lu, for one, is all for it.  Writing at Law & Liberty, Lu reviews a book about the late Alasdair MacIntyre, a favorite on the academic Right (as well as Ms. Lu’s one-time teacher). Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography was first published in France in 2005 but has only now been issued in an English translation; its author, Emile Perreau-Saussine, died in 2010 at the age of thirty-seven.

Ms. Lu’s review is in essence a tribute to MacIntyre, whom she calls “a great illiberal American.” In the circles in which Lu travels, that is a compliment; MacIntyre, she insists, was “a very significant thinker.” At the same time, she admits to wondering “whether his deep hostility to modernity may, for some, have proven to be a significant stumbling block, not only in the effort to protect the great traditions, but even possibly in their efforts to live rich and fulfilling lives.”

Indeed, taking a stand against the modern world and the liberal project—however those things are defined—might be off-putting to some. Temperamentally as well as ideologically, it seems that Ms. Lu’s “great illiberal American” was something of a curmudgeon; “MacIntyre stands in the modern intellectual landscape as one of tradition’s great champions,” Lu tells us, “but he was never a particularly happy warrior, even though he had a great deal to say about what makes men happy.”

That paradox aside, contemporary conservative intellectuals adore MacIntyre. His seminal book After Virtue is cited reverently by everyone from Rod Dreher to Ross Douthat to Patrick Deneen. Others who cite him, though, may be unaware of MacIntyre’s youthful embrace of Trotskyist communism; his first book, published in 1953, was Marxism: An Interpretation. Admirers may also be unaware that MacIntyre emigrated from Scotland to America at the age of 40; it seems ironic that the man best known for advocating the virtues of tradition and community chose to leave behind his native country along with his ideological baggage. Not unlike Huck Finn, the quintessential American, the dour Scotsman MacIntyre lit out for the territory; having arrived in America, he made a career of being “an intellectual nomad,” teaching, variously, at Yale, Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Brandeis, and other prestigious universities.

In her review, Lu grapples both with MacIntyre’s thought and with Perreau-Saussine’s interpretations of it (and quarrels with it). She concludes on a note of admiration for her former mentor:

Alasdair MacIntyre faced down modern rationalists and vanquished post-modern irrationalists. He offered a ringing defense of tradition in the virulently anti-traditional world of the modern academy. He had a keen sense of the brokenness and fragmentation of modern life, which led him first to communism, and later to Wittgenstein, virtue, and the Catholic faith. Is it wrong to be dazzled by such a prestigious figure? I suspect most young scholars could do worse.

Though I confess to having foundered in my attempts to get through After Virtue, I see no reason to disagree with Rachel Lu’s assessment. In an era of superficial polemicists trafficking in talking points rather than ideas, Alasdair MacIntyre has the distinction of being a serious thinker; if only for that, his reputation is well deserved.   

A Great Illiberal American – (lawliberty.org)

On the other hand, Tara Isabella Burton is not ready to dismiss, much less to give up on, modernity. Writing at The Hedgehog Review, she begins her essay “On Hope and Holy Fools” by invoking Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov, a book (or, more accurately, the book’s “Grand Inquisitor” section) she credits with having been “formative” in her conversion to Christianity. From there, she moves on to a discussion of her declared topic, hope: “There is nothing very sexy about hope,” she admits. “Certainly, there is nothing sexy about grace.” She elaborates, bringing the Karamazovs back into the conversation:

The idea that we might be redeemed by an act of love—a wordless affirmation of something beyond the paradigms through which we are capable of understanding ourselves—is, well, a little mawkish, a bit cringe. Hope has little aesthetic appeal…Better, at least according to Ivan Karamazov, to look at the horrors of the world straight on, to stare the absent and unloving God in the face, to take stock of the rapes and murders and terrors and quotidian derelictions that make up the whole of human existence, and to live—whatever that kind of living looks like—accordingly. Better to know that our life is inherently a tragic one.  

Burton then turns to an analysis of the contemporary Right and of “a certain kind of reactionary online troll”:

They differ in their precise politics, their theological maxims, and their memes. But what they have in common is a fundamentally tragic vision of the world and of human beings. The world is bleak and meaningless; the social hierarchy is encoded into the very building blocks of nature; there is no way of understanding ourselves or one another outside the erotically violent patterns of dominance and submission. Facts, as one common saying among these groups goes, don’t care about your feelings.

Among today’s most prominent illiberal voices, Jordan Peterson’s is prominent, which no doubt is why Ms. Burton calls attention to it:

As Jordan Peterson puts it in his self-help book 12 Rules for Life, “The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism.… It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy.… It’s not even a human creation.… It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment.” The world is the way it is, the story goes; those soft-hearted sheep who wish to pretend that it’s otherwise—the social-justice activists who deny differences among persons, the utopian progressives who wish to explain away crime as a product of circumstance, the idealists who think two people can fall in love without implicitly comparing and maximizing their social capital—are simply too cowardly to recognize it. Optimism is simply clichés believed (and posted) by people who need illusions to cling to.

Burton points out that the new illiberal attitude resembles that of 19^th-century philosophers of pessimism like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche:

It is a vision of life that contrasts the mediocre illusions of ordinary people— characterized complacent sheep, slaves to outmoded idols of love, marriage, and family—with the highly individualistic moral and intellectual strength it takes to face life’s harsh truths alone. Life is about power. It is a zero-sum game. Its winners are either those who are already lucky enough have power or those who are brave and ruthless enough to seek it. The losers are the resentful bourgeoisie with their feigned Christian morality, which is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover up their own weakness by condemning strength in others. ¹

As should be obvious, Burton is having none of this. According to her, “The appeal of this pessimism is less about logic or metaphysics than the alluring narrative it presents. This kind of pessimism is a fantasy of aloneness, of uniqueness, of being the only person (or, at least, one of a very few elect people) brave or intellectually honest enough to see the inherent tragedy of the world.” And, she adds, “There is something sexy about the tragic hero: alone among the rabble, speaking in high poetry instead of dull prose, realizing truths that the rest of us are too bovine to understand. It is Ivan Karamazov, standing alone against God, taking a brave and solitary stand against eternity itself.”

Read the entire essay; it is superb, and it is hopeful.

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On Hope and Holy Fools | Hope Itself | Issues | The Hedgehog Review

¹ Ms. Burton does not entirely spare the contemporary Left. “It is a mood, too,” she acknowledges, “that we find—albeit with somewhat less frequency—in certain apocalyptic memes on the online left: the idea that “all this” is little more than a “trash fire,” that “because capitalism,” our lives and our obligations do not matter. It is the end of history, after all (or so this story goes), and so hedonism can double as self-care."

Saturday Lecture: Contempt of the World

{The following is from Jean Delumeau’s “Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13^th through 18^th Centuries.” The fact that I am reading, much less referencing, such a book should tell you more about me than you wanted to know. In any case, Delumeau also authored the exemplary “History of Paradise,” which I highly recommend.}

Jean Delumeau, from Sin and Fear:

By the fourth century, the Christian theory of contempt for the world was already fully developed. St. Augustine’s prolific writings sometimes painted a slightly less pessimistic picture; nonetheless, St. Augustine himself was convinced of “the decrepitude of the world.” What was the use, therefore, of becoming attached to “vain and harmful things” that could only give rise to:

“bitter worries, disorders, afflictions, fears, mad joys, dissensions, trials, wars, ambushes, rages, enmities, duplicities, flatteries, frauds, theft, pillage, treachery, pride, ambition, envy, homicides, parricides, cruelty, savagery, perversity, lust, rudeness, impudence, lewdness, debaucheries, adulteries, incest, and so many violations and effronteries against the nature of both sexes that one blushes to name them; sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, perjuries, oppressions of the innocent, calumnies, deceptions, prevarications, robberies, and many other crimes which do not come to mind but which are nevertheless ever present in this sad human life.”

The Christian doctrine of detachment from the world most often ended up as an accusation of the world, insofar as the earth men lived on was also the earth men sinned on.

Certain oppositions help to define the doctrine of ‘contemptus mundi,’ since this doctrine was dominated by conflicts—between time and eternity, multiplicity and unity, exterior and interior, vanity and truth, earth and heaven, body and soul, pleasure and virtue, flesh and spirit. First and foremost, the world is vain because it is ephemeral. The monk Jean de Fecamp (1078) confessed: “All that I see saddens me. Everything I hear about transitory things weighs upon me.” In one of his laments, he elaborates upon Ecclesiastes in terms that will remain virtually unchanged right up to the fifteenth century:

“Alas man, alas woman, alas unhappy man. Why do you love the goods and chattels of this earth, which will perish? Vanity of vanities, all that exists under the sun is vanity. Like the flower and the grass is the glory of this world. The world will pass, and so will desire.”

The saintly monk Anselm of Canterbury (died 1109) drew the same conclusion, a conclusion imposed by the fear of passing time: “No one can love both earthly and eternal things at the same time. Say with the blessed apostle Paul, ‘The world is crucified for me and I am crucified for the world,’ and like this same apostle look at all transitory things as if they were dung.” In the same spirit, the hermit Peter Damian (died 1072) concluded a sermon with an exhortation to “scorn all this is visible.”

The transitory nature of life was thus linked to its sadness. This connection was a constant of the ‘contemptus mundi’ and it ran counter to Horace’s ‘carpe diem’. Peter Damian incessantly decried “the miserable condition of man.” Jean de Fecamp affirmed that life is “very evil and unhappy” and that man is “full of misery [and] lives in sorrow.” Around 1045, another monk, Hermann Contract, wrote “An Exhortatory Poem on the Contempt for the World” where he enumerated the worries, sadness, problems, sicknesses, fears, ills, and sufferings that fill existence. He also cited pell-mell the dangers and aggressions that persecute man: worms, serpents, beasts of all kinds, birds, cold, heat, hunger, thirst, water, fire, wind, earth, violence, thunder, lightning, accidents, poisons, deceit, discord, amputations, war, captivity, slavery, and countless diseases. ¹

In this view, Earth is ‘a vale of tears,’ a ‘desert,’ an ‘exile’ which cannot be over-depreciated in comparison with the blessed life, the ‘sure life, tranquil life, beautiful life, pure life.’ ² An anonymous poet of the twelfth century wrote:

“Life, stupid thing / Accepted only by fools, / I reject you with all my heart. / You are full of filth. / With all my heart I reject you. / I prefer to undergo death, / O life, rather than serve you.”

In short, the secular world has no meaning. The activities inherent to man’s earthly condition belong to a vacuum of anti-values, just as nature is emptied of its worth and all worldly pleasures are repudiated as being unhealthy.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Delumeau I note with admiration that M. Delumeau once held the Chair of the History of Religious Mentalities.

¹ Herr Contract may have cribbed his list from Augustine, though he omitted the latter’s multiple references to erectile dysfunction. One can summarize Christian pessimism as “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”; it’s also kind of like “The food here is awful, and the portions are so small.”    

² The gnostic temperament, if not the gnostic cosmology, was never lacking in Christianity.

 

Wednesday without Pascal: Disguise, Falsehood, and Hypocrisy

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has not returned, nor has he been located. However, I found the following letter in an envelope slipped under my front door. I assume it was delivered either by Pascal himself or by some trusted messenger. Reading the letter, I cannot but wonder, is this how Pascal the existential Russian blue cat sees humanity (including, of course, me)? And was this letter intended to make me aware of my faults and of the flawed nature of all humans?} 

Dear The Little Red Blog,

The nature of self-love and of this human Ego is to love self only and consider self only. But what will man do? He cannot prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and wants. He wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, and he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. This embarrassment in which he finds himself produces in him the most unrighteous and criminal passion that can be imagined; for he conceives a mortal enmity against that truth which reproves him, and which convinces him of his faults. He would annihilate it, but, unable to destroy it in its essence, he destroys it as far as possible in his own knowledge and in that of others; that is to say, he devotes all his attention to hiding his faults both from others and from himself, and he cannot endure either that others should point them out to him, or that they should see them.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion. We do not like others to deceive us; we do not think it fair that they should be held in higher esteem by us than they deserve; it is not then fair that we should deceive them and should wish them to esteem us more highly than we deserve.

Thus, when they discover the imperfections and vices which we really have, it is plain they do us no wrong, since it is not they who cause them; they rather do us good, since they help us to free ourselves from an evil, namely, the ignorance of these imperfections. We ought not to be angry at their knowing our faults and despising us; it is but right that they should know us for what we are, and should despise us, if we are contemptible.

Such are the feelings that would arise in a heart full of equity and justice. What must we say then of our own heart, when we see in it a wholly different disposition? For is it not true that we hate truth and those who tell it us, and that we like them to be deceived in our favor, and prefer to be esteemed by them as being other than what we are in fact?  Is it right that we should deceive men?

There are different degrees in this aversion to truth; but all may perhaps be said to have it in some degree, because it is inseparable from self-love. It is this false delicacy which makes those who are under the necessity of reproving others choose so many windings and middle courses to avoid offence. They must lessen our faults, appear to excuse them, intersperse praises and evidence of love and esteem. Despite all this, the medicine does not cease to be bitter to self-love. It takes as little as it can, always with disgust, and often with a secret spite against those who administer it.

Hence it happens that if any have some interest in being loved by us, they are averse to render us a service which they know to be disagreeable. They treat us as we wish to be treated. We hate the truth, and they hide it from us. We desire flattery, and they flatter us. We like to be deceived, and they deceive us.

Thus, each degree of good fortune which raises us in the world removes us farther from truth, because we are most afraid of wounding those whose affection is most useful and whose dislike is most dangerous. A prince may be the byword of all Europe, and he alone will know nothing of it. I am not astonished. To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them disliked. Now those who live with princes love their own interests more than that of the prince whom they serve; therefore, they take care not to confer on him a benefit that would injure themselves.

This evil is no doubt greater and more common among the higher classes; but the lower are not exempt from it, since there is always some advantage in making men love us. Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.

Yours,

Pascal

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Excerpted from Section 100 of Blaise Pascal’s Pensees