The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: The Katechon (Part Three)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat here continues, and possibly concludes, his excursus on the modern political expropriation of the Pauline ‘Katechon,’ an expropriation associated primarily with the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.}   

“The task of understanding history is knowing what the Katechon is and what it isn’t.” (Paul Krause)

As Wikipedia forthrightly states, “Carl Schmitt (11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, geopolitician, and prominent member of the Nazi Party.” We will not belabor Carl Schmitt’s association with the Nazi regime, an association he never renounced and for which he never apologized; instead, we will consider his ideas on their own merit, the idea under consideration at the moment being that of the Katechon, a mysterious (if not mythical) beast referred to in Paul’s second letter to his congregation in Thessalonica. ¹

It would be difficult to find a stronger advocate for the Katechon than Carl Schmitt, who wrote (in his postwar book, The Nomos of the Earth), "I believe in the Katechon: it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful." Schmitt claimed that post-Constantinian Christianity, at least until the Reformation, assumed the Katechonic role previously assigned to imperial Rome, that of keeping chaos at bay and allowing history to continue. “Empire,” said Schmitt, “meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon,” and what was Christendom but empire by another name? Schmitt explained:

The unity of [Christendom] was its adequate succession of order in empire and priesthood; it had its visible agents in emperor and pope. The attachment to Rome signified a continuation of ancient orientations adopted by the Christian faith. The history of the Middle Ages is thus the history of a struggle for, and not against, Rome. The continuity that bound medieval international law to the Roman Empire was found not in norms and general ideas, but in the concrete orientation to Rome. This Christian empire was not eternal. It always had its own end and that of the present eon in view. Nevertheless, it was capable of being a historical power. The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the restrainer: katechon.

Following Germany’s humiliating surrender in 1919, with harsh, punitive terms imposed by the Allies, Schmitt, then in his early thirties, observed the resultant breakdown of order—political, economic, social, and cultural. In the ensuing years, the decadence of the Weimar Republic shocked him; worse, the political impotence of the postwar German state presented, to Schmitt, the very real possibility of complete national disintegration. Such a fate was intolerable, and, when Hitler’s National Socialist Party maneuvered its way into power, Schmitt believed that Nazism, whatever its shortcomings, restored order and prosperity, bringing Germany not just respect but prestige. 

But if, in Schmitt’s view, Adolf Hitler served as a Katechon for Germany, he and his regime quickly became a force for global chaos; at which point, Schmitt, seeing his country and the world embroiled in what seemed to be an apocalyptic conflict, began to view the forces allied against Germany as katechonic themselves. After World War II, with the militant, atheist Soviet Union looming on the horizon (and controlling half of German territory), the anti-communist Schmitt, having spent a year in an Allied internment camp, publicly embraced both American military power and America’s policy of nuclear deterrence; to save the world from godlessness and chaos, it seemed the Katechon might have to destroy it.

From the beginning, Schmitt’s political theories were rooted in fear of disorder. Ironically, his conception of politics as a way of playing out enmity between social groups (as opposed to reconciling such groups) leads inevitably to disorder. Carl Raschke called Schmitt’s theories “a kind of friend-enemy hyperbolicism” in which politics is simply war by other means. Since all is fair in love and war, the political enemy can be (must be) vilified and demonized; politics thus becomes a realm of lawlessness, the very thing Schmitt wanted the State to protect against. Schmitt did not shy away from the logical conclusion; such political failure required the ascension to power of a dictator, someone who would suspend the normal rules of politics (and of representative government) to set things right and to restore order.

To be sure, Schmitt accepted the need for authoritarian rule only under (undefined) exigent circumstances.  “Schmitt argued,” says M. Blake Wilson, that, since “no collection of posited laws can foreshadow the vicissitudes of political engagement, liberals must reconcile themselves with the necessity of dictatorship intended to save the constitution from its enemies. Accordingly, Schmitt claimed, a liberal political theory which fails to acknowledge the possibility of dictatorship fatally ignores political reality, which demands that liberal values must be set aside [at times] to preserve the constitution.”

Moreover, Wilson continues, “Schmitt argued that liberalism fails as a political doctrine because of its inability to countenance a leader who faces the possibility of having to make necessary yet anti-liberal decisions when the very existence of the nation requires it to act decisively.” It is never clear who decides that the nation’s existence is threatened, or how the polis can distinguish between a genuine national existential crisis and a manufactured one.  

Perhaps Schmitt would have said that such concerns were secondary; the important thing was that the State—or someone wielding its power—had to be strong enough, and resolute enough, to do what needed to be done. In the words of Paul Krause, “The State as Katechon was Schmitt’s secular god; the State embodies all the characteristics and attributes of God. It is the State that literally saves us from killing one another and living miserable lives in the state of nature.” Schmitt believed that the modern liberal State lacked the determination to preserve itself at all costs from enemies both foreign and domestic; he worried that the modern West would not rise to the occasion when a Katechon was required to prevent the triumph of evil.

Were Schmitt’s forebodings correct, and was his willingness to abandon the liberal constitutional order justified? Is the Katechon, whoever or whatever it is, our only hope?  Paul, who invented the Katechon, presumably saw it as providing merely a temporary reprieve before (a) all Hell would break loose and (b) Jesus would return to take out the trash, as it were. What part of the Parousia did Carl Schmitt not welcome? In any case, his service to Nazi Germany helped bring humanity to the brink of Armageddon, the very thing he claimed to dread, which is to say, I would not put a lot of stock in his theories.    

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¹ Carl Schmitt - Wikipedia As usual, the Wikipedia entry has its critics. For those interested in Schmitt’s thought, Gopal Balakrishnan’s The Enemy (published in 2000) testifies to the resurgence of interest in the topic.  

The Imaginary America of Patrick Deneen

Out with the old order and in with the new: that is the essential thrust of Patrick Deneen’s 2023 Regime Change. Deneen, a leading advocate of something called “post-liberalism,” announces liberalism’s demise without a hint of regret:

With the dimming of the bright light of liberalism, and with its seeming historical inevitability now relegated to the dustbin of bad theories of history, both the need and the prospect for liberalism’s true and natural opponent arises: a movement that begins with, and is defined by, a rejection of the ideological pursuit of progress along with the baleful political, economic, social, and psychological costs of that pursuit.

Liberalism having been unceremoniously laid to rest, what does Patrick Deneen intend to put in its place? This:

What is needed—and what most ordinary people instinctively seek—is stability, order, continuity, and a sense of gratitude for the past and obligation toward the future. What they want, without knowing the right word for it, is a conservatism that conserves: a form of liberty no longer abstracted from our places and people, but embedded within duties and mutual obligations; formative institutions in which all can and are expected to participate as shared “social utilities”; an elite that respects and supports the basic commitments and condition of the populace; and a populace that in turn renders its ruling class responsive and responsible to protection of the common good.

It is not difficult in theory to make the case for a society that values “stability, order, [and] continuity”; such a society might well be more sustainable, and less stressful, than a society that values “progress” and the “pursuit of happiness” (to coin a phrase). Mr. Deneen’s problem, however, is that he is either ignorant of, or deliberately oblivious to, the realities of the country in which he lives and for which he prescribes a new socio-political paradigm, which is to say, he ought to read some American history and familiarize himself with the landscape he wants to transform.

Pace Deneen, Americans have never embraced stability, order, and continuity; instead, we have always been rowdy, disorderly, restless, disdainful of the past, and heedless of the future. Having left behind the Old World and its Old ways, we undertook an errand into the wilderness, clearing land, blazing trails, and disposing of inconvenient native inhabitants. We began our official national existence with a revolution; spent decades subduing (exterminating) various stable and traditional indigenous tribes; conducted a bloody civil war; experienced local rebellions and labor unrest of all kinds; and lit out for the territories at the very thought of getting ourselves “sivilized”. We absorbed immigrants from around the world, all of whom wanted to get in on the action. We looked for wars to fight, frontiers to tame, fortunes to find, and something or someone to conquer. We learned never to look back (Satchel Paige, Bob Dylan), in case someone or something might have been gaining on us.

Americans have eagerly embraced change of all kinds, from political to sociological to technological. Given a choice between old-fashioned and newfangled, we rarely hesitated to choose the latter; though, inevitably, some curmudgeons would complain about it. We are tinkerers, improvisers, gadget-makers, and DIY autodidacts. We invented the telephone, the telegraph, the lightbulb, manned flight, the assembly line, and motion pictures; we took the lead in developing machinery for war as well as for peace. We all but patented automotive culture, suburbia, film noir, pulp fiction, television sitcoms, jazz, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll, among much else. For that matter, the sainted right-wing icon Ronald Reagan spent years shilling for a company whose motto was “Progress is our most important product,” and yet he still called himself a “conservative”.     

“History is bunk,” according to Henry Ford, arguably the single most influential American of the 20^th century. “We don't want tradition,” he added, speaking for an entire nation. “We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.” There is no America that fits Patrick Deneen’s genteel vision, a vision aligned with the English conservatism of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott (and perhaps with the aristocratic Anglophile Russell Kirk), but a vision with no roots at all in this country. Long before Jack Kerouac wrote his hipster saga, Americans have always been on the road, heading down Route 66 and looking for kicks. We are known for, above all else, what Jimmie Rodgers called our "rough and rowdy ways."

Does Patrick Deneen really believe he can get us to settle down?  

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Patrick J. Deneen, Regime Change (Penguin Publishing Group)

19th-century Americans in search of stability, order, and continuity

Saturday Lecture: A Kinder, Gentler Ethnocentrism

{Alexander Dugin constructs his Fourth Political Theory from what he considers the salvageable parts of Fascism and Communism, while avoiding the pitfalls of Liberalism, which he sees as the real ideological enemy, perhaps because it’s the only one still standing.}

Alexander Dugin:

We note a positive attitude toward the ethnos, an ethnocentrism directed toward that type of existence which is formed within the structure of the ethnos itself, and which remains intact throughout a variety of stages, including the highly differentiated types of societies which a people may develop in the course of their history. This topic has found deep resonance in certain philosophical directions of the Conservative Revolution. Ethnos is the greatest value of the Fourth Political Theory as a cultural phenomenon; as a community of language, religious belief, daily life, and the sharing of resources and goals; as an organic entity written into an accommodating landscape; as a refined system for constructing models for married life; as an always-unique means of establishing a relationship with the outside world; as the matrix of the ‘lifeworld’; and as the source of all ‘language-games’.

Liberalism as an ideology, calling for liberation from all forms of collective identity in general, is entirely incompatible with ethnos and ethnocentrism, and is an expression of a systemic theoretical and technological ethnocide. ¹

Ethnos and ethnocentrism have every reason to be considered as candidates for becoming the subject of the Fourth Political Theory. ² At the same time, we must again and again pay attention to the fact that we view ethnos in the plural, without trying to establish any kind of a hierarchical system: ethnicities are different, but each of them is, in itself, universal; ethnicities live and develop, but this life and this development do not fit into one specific paradigm; they are open and always distinct; ethnicities mix and separate, but neither one nor the other is good or evil per se — ethnicities themselves generate the criteria by which others are judged, each time in a different way. We can draw many conclusions based on this point. In particular, we can relativize the very notion of ‘politics’, which comes from the normative values of the city, the polis, and, consequently, of the urban model of self-organization within the community (or the society).

Marxism is relevant in terms of its description of liberalism, in identifying the contradictions of capitalism, in its criticism of the bourgeois system, and in revealing the truth behind the bourgeois-democratic policies of exploitation and enslavement which are presented as ‘development’ and ‘liberation’. Marxism’s critical potential is highly useful and applicable. It may well be included in the arsenal of the Fourth Political Theory. But, if so, Marxism will not appear as an ideology that provides answers to a full range of emerging issues — answers that are rational and axiomatic in their foundation — but as an expressive myth or a witty sociological method. The Marxism which we can accept is mythic, sociological Marxism.

As a myth, Marxism tells us the story of the original state of paradise (‘primitive Communism’), which was gradually lost (‘the initial division of labor and the stratification of the primitive society’). Then the contradictions grew, moving toward the point when, at the end of this world, they were reincarnated, in their most paradigmatically pure form, as the confrontation between Labor and Capital. Capital — the bourgeoisie and liberal democracy — personified global evil, exploitation, alienation, lies, and violence. Labor embodied a great dream and an ancient memory of the ‘common good’, and its acquisition (the ‘surplus value’) by an evil minority gave birth to all the problems of modern life.

This myth fits neatly into the structure of eschatological consciousness, which occupies a significant place in mythologies of all tribes and peoples, not to mention the highly differentiated religions. That alone speaks in its favor for us to treat it with the utmost consideration.

On the other hand, as sociology, Marxism is tremendously useful in revealing those mechanisms of alienation and mystification that liberalism uses to justify its dominion and as proof of its ‘correctness’. Being a myth itself, in its polemical, activist form, Marxism serves as an excellent tool to expose the bourgeois ‘great stories’ and to overthrow the credibility of liberal pathos. And in this capacity — ‘against liberalism’ — it can be used effectively under the new conditions: after all, we continue to exist under capitalism, and hence, Marxist criticism of it, and the struggle against it, remain on the agenda, even if the old forms of this struggle have become irrelevant.

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¹ It is interesting that Dugin accuses Liberalism of attempting to dissolve group identities in favor of a bland universal individualism, whereas the common charge against Liberalism today is that it promotes “identity politics” in which group identity outweighs the merits of the individual.

² Dugin establishes a dualism of good ethnocentrism versus bad ethnocentrism. Good ethnocentrism, the kind Dugin applauds, is pluralistic and tolerant; it values its own ethnos, but it does not thereby devalue or condemn other people’s ethnos. On the other hand, when Dugin writes, “Ethnocentrism is the purest manifestation of racist ideology,” he is referring to an ethnocentrism based on hatred and fear of the Other, rather than on pride in one’s own roots and culture. I suspect that, in practice, it may not be so easy to distinguish between the two.

 

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.    

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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"

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? 

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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

Friday Thought: "Error Has No Rights"

{The following is taken from a September 2021 blog post by Mark Shea. It reflects Mr. Shea’s opinions and not my own; but it is, I think, a helpful introduction to the controversial claim that “Error has no rights”. Whatever the epistemological validity of that assertion, in practice error is often in the eye of the beholder; truth and error are frequently found mixed in uncertain proportions; and a quick look back at either the Inquisition or Bolshevik-Soviet history shows what can happen when “Error has no rights” becomes state policy. In short, while I sympathize with Mr. Shea's outrage over the prevarications of the MAGA universe, I am not sure he has given this topic sufficient thought.}

Mark Shea:

“Error has no rights”: Medieval Christians deeply believed this formula. It fired any number of bonfires that consumed the bodies of heretics. It gave strength to the arms of men who racked people for teachings contrary to the Faith or dangerous to civil peace.

Because of this, postmodern minds tend to look back on the notion that Error Has No Rights with the serene assumption that arrogance and nothing but arrogance fueled it. They pride themselves today on their tolerance.

Or they have until recently. Now, postmodern minds have discovered that the medieval Christians were perfectly right: Error has no rights. Morons and liars who prattle, “I’m entitled to my opinion” as their all-excusing way of asserting the validity of their stupid claims, ignorant views, ill-informed blather, and murderous lies are, very simply, wrong. They may feel entitled. Indeed, fools feel nothing but entitled. But we are, in fact, not entitled to a counter-factual opinion–particularly when such opinions are deadly and dangerous. In such cases, fools are simply wrong. They may be ignorant, stupid, liars, barking nuts, or a mixture of the four. But the one thing they are not is entitled to their opinion if their opinion is contradicted by reality and fact.

As the incredible folly of postmodern MAGA commitment to lies, deceit, ignorance, stupidity, and folly is now making clear, we cannot repudiate without catastrophe the ancient truth that error has no rights. Precisely what the imbeciles braying, “I am entitled to my truth about vaccines being part of the Great Microchip Conspiracy” are demonstrating is that such lies have no right to equal standing with truth. Nobody has an obligation to platform them. Nobody has an obligation to listen to them. Everybody has an obligation to denounce, refute, ignore, and scotch the spread of them. And the state, depending on the gravity of the lie in question, has an obligation to penalize and punish those responsible for creating and spreading them.

That does not mean auto-de-fe’s and the rack. But it does absolutely mean that you don’t get to “Teach the Controversy” about the Flat Earth in science class as though the sphericity of the earth is one valid view among many. It means that if you spread idiocy about windmill cancer, you don’t get to be an oncologist no matter how entitled you feel.

It means that if you spread misinformation about a pandemic, you should be punished and penalized and made to suffer for your crimes against the common good, whether by expulsion from social media, or fines, or jail, or crushing insurance costs, or other penalties–no matter how entitled you feel. It means that if you harass gun massacre victims, you should lose your job and your media platform and be bled white financially to compensate for your crime against them–no matter how entitled you feel.

It means that if you commit a treasonous insurrection or act as accomplice to it, you should go to prison–no matter how entitled you feel. It means that if you lie about Dominion voting systems corrupting the election without a shred of evidence–they can and should sue you for a billion dollars–no matter how entitled you feel. Reality does not care about your sense of entitlement to an opinion. You have no right to a lie. Error has no rights.

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Error Has No Rights - Stumbling Toward Heaven (markpshea.com)

Mark Shea is a Catholic author and blogger whose latest book, The Church’s Best-Kept Secret: A Primer on Catholic Social Teaching, was published in September 2020 by New City Press.

Wednesday with Pascal: "The Metaphysics of Debris"

{Who, you may ask, is Alexander Dugin, and why is Pascal the existential Russian blue cat interested in him? Well, to begin with, Alexander Dugin is Russian; more precisely, he is a Russian polemicist, ideologue, and political schemer. He may or may not be a Fascist, an anti-Semite, an esoteric Traditionalist, or on Putin’s shortlist of influencers, but he is without doubt a figure who should be taken seriously, not least because Russia’s war against Ukraine is consistent with his repeated calls for Russian domination of central Europe. Moreover, notes Pascal, whatever Dugin’s purposes or motives, his critique of liberal modernity (and postmodernity) sounds an awful lot like that of, say, Newt Gingrich and the modern Republican Party, for whom Liberalism is evil incarnate. Like MAGA stalwart Steve Bannon, Dugin eschews traditional ideological labels like “Right” and “Left”; he wants to rally the (marginalized and resentful) “periphery” against the (smug and condescending) “center,” playing both ends against the middle. In this, Dugin and Bannon are lineal descendants of the 19^th-century Russian nihilist Dimitri Pisarev, who wrote: "What can be smashed must be smashed. Whatever withstands the blow is fit to survive; what flies into pieces is rubbish. In any case, strike out right and left, no harm can come of it.”}

“Of all creations, Paradise is the most ancient one. The carriers of the Fourth Political Theory must strive toward rediscovering it in the near future.” ¹ (Alexander Dugin)

Utopia much?

The ideological Left is frequently accused of trying to build the kingdom of heaven right here on earth, but Alexander Dugin, an icon of the “new Right,” seems to have set his sights on nothing less. Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory,” ² while lacking detail, provides the framework for the edifice:

The Fourth Political Theory arises from a common impulse to recover everything that was discarded, toppled, and humiliated during the course of constructing ‘the society of the spectacle’ (modernity/postmodernity). ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’ The philosopher Alexander Sekatsky rightly pointed out the significance of ‘marginalia’ in the formation of a new philosophical age, suggesting the term ‘metaphysics of debris’ as a metaphor.

“Marginalia” and “debris”: this is the language of the apostle Paul, who described the earliest Christians as “refuse” and “the scum of the earth,” and who boasted that God had revealed His truths not to the wise and powerful but to the ignorant and lowly. Like Paul, Dugin is both Manichaean and eschatological, casting Modernity in the role of Babylon and Rome:

Tradition (religion, hierarchy, and family) and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. All [modern] political theories were conceived as artificial ideological constructions by people who comprehended, in various ways, ‘the death of God,’ the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ and the ‘end of the sacred’. This was the core of the New Era of modernity: man came to replace God, philosophy and science replaced religion, and the rational, forceful, and technological constructs took the place of revelation. ³

Dugin is eager to jettison modernity and to re-create the past:

It is now safe to institute a political program that was once outlawed by modernity. It no longer appears as foolish and doomed for failure as before, because everything in postmodernity looks foolish and doomed for failure, including its most ‘glamorous’ aspects. It is not by chance that the heroes of postmodernity are ‘freaks’ and ‘monsters,’ ‘transvestites’ and ‘degenerates’ — this is the law of style. Against the backdrop of the world’s clowns, nothing and no one could look ‘too archaic’, not even the people of Tradition who ignore the imperatives of modern life. If we reject the idea of progress that is inherent in modernity, then all that is ancient gains value and credibility for us simply by virtue of the fact that it is ancient. ‘Ancient’ means good, and the more ancient — the better.

That Dugin has simply inverted the modern notion of “progress” is obvious; whether he (or anyone) can reverse the currents and tides of history is less so. Still, “Back to the Future” is for some an inspiring slogan:

Thus, the Fourth Political Theory may easily turn for its inspiration toward everything that preceded modernity. The acknowledgement of ‘God’s death’ ceases to be the mandatory imperative for those who want to stay relevant. The people of postmodernity are already so resigned to this event that they can no longer understand it — ‘Who died, exactly?’ But, in the same way, the developers of the Fourth Political Theory can forget about this ‘event’: ‘We believe in God, but ignore those who talk about His death, much like we ignore the words of madmen’.

God’s death is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant; Deus had been absconditus for centuries, if not millennia. For Dugin, though, the deity’s passing offers an opportunity to rid Christianity of its modern, rationalist accretions and to resurrect God in all his ancient, irrational splendor: 

This marks the return of theology and becomes an essential element of the Fourth Political Theory. When it returns, postmodernity (globalization, postliberalism, and the post-industrial society) is easily recognized as ‘the kingdom of the Antichrist’. Eliminating the need to adjust theology to the rationalism of modernity, the adherents of the Fourth Political Theory are free to ignore those theological and dogmatic elements in monotheistic societies which were influenced by rationalism, especially in their later stages. The latter led to the appearance of deism upon the ruins of Christian European culture, followed by atheism and materialism, during the development of the program of the modern age.

Dugin emphasizes that Western rationalism has a long and (to him) regrettable history, stretching back to ancient Greece. He cites Heidegger’s notion that “Western man placed ideas between man and existence and defined truth as that which corresponded to them. This project [culminated] in failure, engendering alienation, eventually leading to ‘calculating thinking’ and then to the development of technology.” Step by step, “man pursued the path of nihilism. Technical development ultimately crowns ‘nothingness’.”

All this, says Dugin, will not stand; if nature abhors a vacuum, then Nothingness cannot endure. Therefore:

Postmodernity’s challenge is tremendously significant: it is rooted in mankind’s departure from its existential (ontological) and spiritual (theological) roots. Responding to it with hat-tossing innovation or public-relations surrogates is impossible. Therefore, we must refer to the philosophical foundations of history and make a metaphysical effort to solve the current problems.

How any of this is “political” remains to be seen, as Dugin himself readily admits. Like many on the Right, Dugin can more readily identify what he hates about liberal, rational, secular modernity than what he plans to put in its place—although he is quick to reassure us that a brave new world of some sort, even a brand-new Paradise, will materialize on the ruins of the old. Just clear away the modern ideological clutter, do some metaphysical housekeeping and some ontological renovation, restore the gods of the hearth, and our house will be, as it was in the beginning, a very, very, very fine house.

I can’t hardly wait. ⁴

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¹ Dugin’s reference to “the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory” makes said theory sound more like a viral disease than a political program.

² In Dugin’s ideological taxonomy, the three political theories of modernity—all of which have failed—have been Liberalism (the primacy of the individual), Communism (the primacy of the collective), and Fascism (the primacy of race, ethnicity, and nationhood). Each of these theories spawned numerous offspring, sects, heresies, and hybrids, the details of which don’t matter because they are all, according to Dugin, defunct.

³ Modern science and technology, it should be noted, have put men into space; by way of contrast, revelation never even got us off the ground, nor did it provide us with much in the way of useful medical knowledge, advice about sanitation, or tips about building better mousetraps. In any kind of life-threatening emergency, I guarantee that you’ll get better results by calling 911 than by praying.

⁴ (131) The Replacements - Can’t Hardly Wait (Official Music Video) - YouTube

What good is a theory without a logo?

Saturday Lecture: A Democratic Minimum

Richard Wolin (from The Seduction of Unreason):

Today the postmodern juggernaut seems to have run aground. Outside of the parochial climate of contemporary academe, its program of a “farewell to reason” failed to take root. Its bold proclamation concerning the end of “metanarratives” of human emancipation also failed to gain widespread acceptance. Moreover, the eastern European dissidents whose words and actions inspired the “revolutions of 1989” successfully relied on the discourse of “human rights” to undermine totalitarianism. In this way, a political orientation predicated on the values of Western humanism that the cultural left had denigrated as a tool of American hegemony made a meaningful comeback.

During the 1980s and 1990s the academic left attempted to replace the discourse of democratic legitimacy with the avowedly anti-universalistic concept of “identity politics.” But this approach was fraught with contradictions and difficulties. Identity politics—the anti-politics of cultural self-affirmation—seemed plausible and attractive among polities where basic constitutional and legal guarantees remained firmly in place. Such provisions secured a political space—a “magic wall” of governmental noninterference, so to speak—in which the parameters of cultural identity could be safely explored in ways that stopped short of riding roughshod over competing identity claims. Yet where such assurances were lacking—the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Algeria immediately leap to mind—identity politics engendered unspeakable tragedy.

These experiences affirm one of the central precepts of political modernity: the formal guarantees of procedural democracy remain an indispensable prerequisite for the values of toleration and mutual recognition to flourish. Or, to express this insight in the idiom of contemporary political theory, such experiences confirm the priority of the “right” over the “good.” In retrospect, postmodernism’s contention, most pointedly expressed in Michel Foucault’s work, that the institutionalization of “reason” and “progress” leads to enhanced domination rather than emancipation seems overtly cynical and empirically untenable. The “Third Wave” of democratization that swept across eastern Europe, South America, and (more tentatively) Asia during the 1980s and 1990s has demonstrated that the legacy of democratic humanism harbors considerable staying power. Conversely, principled enmity toward democratic values can easily lead to disastrous political outcomes.

The current disaffection with postmodernism is in no small measure attributable to recent political circumstances. Humanism’s return spells postmodernism’s demise. Totalitarianism was the twentieth century’s defining political experience. Its aftermath has left us with a new categorical imperative: no more Auschwitzes or Gulags. We now know that an ineffaceable difference separates democratic and totalitarian regimes. Despite their manifest empirical failings, democratic polities possess a capacity for internal political change that totalitarian societies do not. A discourse such as postmodernism that celebrates the virtues of cultural relativism and that remains ambivalent, at best, vis-à-vis democratic norms is inadequate to the moral and political demands of the contemporary hour.

Whereas, historically, fascism flirted with the values of a strong state, postmodernist political thought leans toward a philosophical anarchism. As a rule, it views almost all political institutions—democratic ones included—with endemic suspicion. From a practical standpoint, this attitude has meant an adieu to real-world politics in favor of airy and speculative discussions of “the political.” At a certain point postmodernism’s hostility towards “reason” and “truth” is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating. Often its mistrust of logic and argumentation are so extreme that its practitioners are left dazed and disoriented—morally and politically defenseless.

When, in keeping with the practice of a neo-Nietzschean “hermeneutic of suspicion,” reason and democracy are reduced to objects of mistrust, one invites political impotence: one risks surrendering the capacity for effective action in the world. Esoteric theorizing—theory tailored to an audience of initiates and acolytes—threatens to become an ersatz praxis and an end in itself. As a result, the postmodern left risks depriving democracy of valuable normative resources at an hour of extreme historical need. In times of crisis, that the elements of a “democratic minimum” be preserved is imperative. Postmodern political thought, which devalues coalition building and consensus in favor of identity politics and political agonistics, prematurely discounts this heritage. It thereby inherits one of the most problematic traits of “leftism”: the cynical assumption that democratic norms are little more than a veil for vested interests. Of course, they can and do serve such purposes, but they also offer a crucial element of ethical leverage by means of which dominant interests may be exposed and transformed. The political gains that have been registered during the last three decades by previously marginalized social groups (women, gays, ethnic minorities) testify to a logic of political inclusion. They demonstrate capacities for progressive political change that remain lodged in democratic precepts and institutions. To surrender entirely these potentials means abandoning progressive politics altogether.

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Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton University Press, 2003)

Richard Wolin - Wikipedia

Wednesday without Pascal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Democracy

{In the late 1990s, the left-wing British historian Perry Anderson published an essay, “The Intransigent Right at the End of the Century,” analyzing the ideas of four seminal 20^th-century conservatives: Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Frederick Hayek, and Carl Schmitt. The essay later constituted a chapter in Anderson’s 2005 book, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas. The following are the briefest of excerpts on three of the writers addressed by Anderson’s essay. Of particular interest, to me at least, is the last excerpt, which refers to Carl Schmitt’s politicization of a term (the ‘katechon’) used by St. Paul in explaining why ‘the day of the Lord’ had not yet arrived.}

Perry Anderson:

1. Michael Oakeshott, “The power of the ‘mass man’”

For Oakeshott, inequality was the outcome of a historical differentiation. In the late Middle Ages, a new character emerged on the scene, an autonomous moral individual freed from the shackles of community, capable of choosing his own way of life. The spread of this kind of individuality, the pre-eminent event of European history, gradually gave rise to institutions expressing its freedom. These achieved their climax with the parliamentary government that emerged in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But the salutary dissolution of traditional communities had also released a dangerous multitude of opposite bent, all those left behind in the new conditions because they were unwilling to accept the responsibility of personal independence, a swarm of moral and social failures consumed with ‘envy, jealousy and resentment’. By the late 19th century, this inferior mass had pressed towards a dire change: the gradual transformation of ‘parliamentary’ into ‘popular government’, whose ‘first great enterprise was the establishment of universal adult suffrage’. For ‘the power of the “mass man” lay in his numbers, and this power could be brought to bear upon government by means of the “vote”– that is, a regime based on ‘the authority of mere numbers’. Modern democracy in this sense defied, not the hierarchy of natural gifts, but that of existential choices. For the anti-individual behind universal suffrage ‘is specified by a moral, not an intellectual, inadequacy’.

2. F.A. Hayek, ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Taxis’

‘The predominant model of liberal democratic institutions’ in the Western world ‘necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system’. To avert this fatal propensity, three truths urgently needed to be understood. The first was the fundamental difference between a spontaneous order and a purposive organization, or what Hayek termed a cosmos and a 'taxis' – the one an unintended yet coherent web of relations within which individual agents pursued their different ends, regulated only by common procedural rules; the other a willed enterprise seeking to realize substantive collective goals. The rule of law could be preserved only so long as the structure of government reflected a principled separation of the two, according an absolute priority to the maintenance of the first, as the condition of a market economy in a free society, and confining the second to strictly delimited, subordinate functions in the public interest. All current democracies confused these requirements, permitting the reckless trespass of ‘taxis’ onto the proper ground of cosmos, with the intrusion of macro-economic steering and the erection of a welfare state, in the name of an imaginary ‘social justice’ – a notion without meaning. For the spontaneous order of the market not only precludes equality, it necessarily ignores merit: success within it is undeniably often a mere matter of chance. The social hierarchy it generates is thus not founded on a cultural gradation in nature. Hayek confessed that this was perhaps too uncomfortable a truth to be widely proclaimed; he concluded that religion might be a necessary dummy to assure social cohesion, against dangers from those who were disappointed in the run of chance.

3. Carl Schmitt, ‘The Katechon’

Carl Schmitt’s later work is haunted by a theological image. Again and again, he alluded to one of the most enigmatic of all apocalyptic texts, the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, without ever quoting it. What does Paul say there? ‘The mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way; and then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought with the manifestation of his coming.’ It was the second clause that mattered. Who was the Restrainer – the katechon who holds back the prowl of evil on earth, until the arrival of the Redeemer? Learned speculation has debated the cryptic identity of the katechon (this is its sole Scriptural appearance) since the time of Tertullian. In Schmitt’s own writing, the obscure figure assumes various – typically oblique – historical guises, as political or juridical restrainer in different epochs, constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy – seen and feared through the prisms of the mystery of lawlessness.