Conservatism

indiana

Indiana’s religion law and liberal left’s intolerance

Reprinted from the Press and Journal:

Not long ago, I noted in the Press and Journal that the cultural clash over same-sex marriage was won. The side in favor gay nuptials was victorious. Cultural conservatives, for all the ire and fist-shaking, lost the fight for traditional marriage in America.

The best we could hope for was, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, the “terms of our surrender” would be respected.

Well, we can now officially say that battle is lost. The recent hullabaloo over Indiana’s passing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is symbolic of liberal triumphalism taken to an extreme degree. The left isn’t just taking a victory lap; they are pounding their ideology into all nonbelievers. The outrage is borderline epileptic.

Here’s what I mean. Time columnist and former professional basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar described the Indiana law as ushering in an “American version of Sharia law.” Forbes writer Ben Kepes likened the law to Kristallnacht. Various big-name businesses are threatening to boycott the state over the measure. Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy went as far as to sign an executive order barring state-funded travel to Indiana, stating that the law “turn[ed] back the clock on progress.”

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Noninterventionist Super Friends, assemble!

Is there anything Hillary Clinton doesn’t have?

Millions of dollars from speaking fees, a private email server, a beloved husband, undying respect from empty-headed women, and infinite political connections. Oh, and all that foreign money, of course.

For someone as popular and well-connected as Clinton, you’d think the only thing she’s missing is a diamond as big as the Ritz. But now, the former First Lady has been gifted with something new: her own Thought Police squadron. A group calling itself “HRC Super Volunteers” has pledged to uncover “coded sexism” as the 2016 race heats up. And here I thought that was Salon.com’s job.

The group is wasting being the Praetorian guard against misogyny. Here are the words, according to these high-strung ladies and beta men, that reveal inner sexism when used to describe Hillary: polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, overconfident, secretive, out of touch, will do anything to win, and represents the past.

How cute. HRC Super Volunteers think they’ll sway the debate in Hillary’s favor by harping about latent sexism. Good thing few people care about such nonsense. The only folks who will be persuaded are Hillary-loving progressives. Their minds won’t be changed, but their convictions will be further confirmed.

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There is no freedom in being uncomfortable within your skin

It was only a matter of time before libertarianism jumped the shark.

The childishly optimistic sect of the liberty movement is moving past pot legalization and gay marriage. Their detente with liberals resulted in a massive culture victory. Pot and sodomy are de rigueur in mainstream American culture, whether you agree with them or not. Those troglodyte conservatives can wipe their tears with white flags!

The next fight for libertarians lies in the traditional gender spectrum. Not content to keep politics within politics, the loud-mouthed revolutionaries are moving into the messy world of transgenderism. This is a huge jump from the philosophy associated with Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. Ayn Rand would be frowning in heaven if she didn’t think God put a damper on her ego trip.

In a recent Daily Beast column, Reason Magazine’s Nick Gillespie praises the latest American hero: Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner. Wait a second, you may say. Didn’t Jenner trounce the Soviets in the decathlon almost three decades ago?  Why is he now the latest emblem of liberation?

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Overwhelmed and overwhelming

Striving to cease being “Addicted to Distraction”

0600 – Wake up, start coffee maker.

0605 – Check Twitter for new “notifications.” Check email for new posts from Dampier, Land, Social Matter, The Mitrailleuse. Etc. Check Drudge to see if the world ended overnight.

0620 – Begin reading local newspaper. Front section is a mish mash of local crime, state legislature blather, Christians beheaded by ISIS, chickens loose on a California freeway after falling off a truck, train crashes in West Virginia, snow storms Back East. Etc.

0645 – Begin making breakfast and lunch for me and my son. For the first time so far today, deal with something real.

Periodically throughout day – repeat check-check-check. Get angry at Mitch McConnell for giving in on “clean DHS funding bill.” Obama wins again. The country is going to shit. The goddam Democrats are blocking everything good and holy, except for bringing millions more illegal aliens who will eventually vote for them and for more welfare. Pope Francis is quoted as saying he’s just skippy with homos having anal sex…or at least that’s what the Lamestream Media want you to believe about him. Greece elects hard-lefties who promise to screw the EU, and it’s hard not to get excited/concerned about that, either because they’re hard-left a-holes or because it would be so delicious to see the EU collapse like the craptacular, multiculti house of cards it truly is. Tweet the blog posts from the people you like that were posted in the last six hours. Throw in a couple of original tweets about how the Oscars are a disgusting sewer hole of Political Correctness. Check Drudge again to see if the world ended while you weren’t noticing. Don’t resist clicking on the story about a man having a freaking baby. Don’t resist clicking on the link at the bottom to “8 Hottest Hotties in their Hottest bikinis.”

Etc.

Read Dr. Bruce Charlton’s new book Addicted to Distraction. It’s free, and it’ll take you an hour. May you never look at Mass Media the same. We are indeed addicted to distraction, you and I and most of the people who immerse themselves in the Mass Media. Which is just plain most people in the West, and soon the world.

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Dr. Charlton makes the point often missed: the media aren’t “biased” to the Left, the Medium is the Message, and the message is that everything is someone’s opinion, everything is “relative.” Even when media presents something good, heroic, charitable, it’s immediately subject to analysis and criticism, to dissection of motive, to questioning on whether the White Cismale who saved a kid from drowning was just another Macho stereotype.

We thought we would use the Web for our purposes, us conservatives, men of the Right, Traditionalists, Neoreactionaries. The Left controlled the Old Mass Media, the NYTWAPO and NBABCBS, but we would seize our chance for every man and woman jack to blog and comment and share our perspective, to go around the Gatekeepers, to form our own networks and “get our message out.”

We were wrong. We were assimilated. We continued to click on the Mass Media, to respond, respond, respond to all of the relativism and the bullshit, to “strike back” at Obama and Reid and Pelosi and Jezebel and Buzzfeed,  Slate and Salon, to the married fags and the trannies and the Slut Walkers, the beheaders and terrorists, the escaped tigers and maniacs, the Kardashians and Housewives; to the Daily Spew.

Dr. Charlton is a blogger himself, of course, and he’s quite frank in his assessment that not only is he mired in the Mass Media, too, but his efforts to escape the addiction are subject to constant temptation and periodic backsliding. But it’s a fight well worth making, not in an effort to save the society, but to save your soul. You might with profit read his piece The Psychological Basis of Self-Remembering as an aid.

It is possible, if barely, to continue to use the web and to post articles on real things without remaining in the Mass Media matrix. I’m going to try.  My strength is the examination of Old Stuff, anyway. Like Dr. Charlton, I know I’ll backslide, just like with the Commandments I’m taught in the Church. These human frailties are the base upon which the Mass Media was built.

The Church, at least, has the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Hopefully, as the media continue to lead society toward the drain we can, like AA members, help each other retain a measure of sanity.

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Will Herberg and the agony of liberal religion

The collapse of the Christian right, and the delayed backlash that has aroused the classic paranoid style of American politics in contemporary liberalism, has barely even begun to suggest the full ramifications of the United States catching up to the rest of the developed world in the steep decline of religion. It would seem a good time to reconsider the self-understanding of religion in American life that emerged in the 1950s, that to one degree or another would be definitive for the postwar era. And as it happens, the leading academic chronicler and interpreter of that moment (in however problematically dated terms) also offered the most compelling philosophical understanding of the promise, pitfalls, and paradox of liberal religion that defined his moment and remains no less relevant today.

Will Herberg, a Jewish-socialist-atheist who in middle age embraced and championed an interpretation of Judaism arguably owing more to Christian existentialism than rabbinic tradition, was the most celebrated philosopher of Judaism in America in the 1950s, yet is profoundly unfashionable to the extent he is even remembered at all by American Jews today. Born in 1901 to avowedly socialist and atheist Jewish immigrant parents, Herberg joined the newly formed Communist Party as a teenager but was one of many premature anti-Communists to leave the party with Bukharin follower Jay Lovestone; a connection that led to years of gainful employment with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, led by the irrepressible anti-Communist David Dubinsky.

Ever the garrulous intellectual, the madness of a world rushing toward war and totalitarianism thoroughly dissembled Herberg’s frankly religious faith in Marxism and led him on a search for the genuine article. He befriended Reinhold Niebuhr, who urged him to first consider returning to Judaism before he could in good conscience bless a conversion to Christianity, pointing him directly across the street, literally, from Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary to the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In 1947 Herberg published in the young, relatively ecumenical Commentary his personal confession, “From Marxism to Judaism,” lacking noticeable anti-communist fervor and describing the journey in a curiously value-neutral tone from one faith to another. He declared in what was essentially his mission statement that “The worship of a holy and transcendent God who yet manifests himself in history saves us alike from the shallow positivism that leaves nature and history and life all without ultimate meaning, from a pantheism that in the end amounts to an idolatrous worship of the world, and from a sterile other-worldliness that breaks all connection between religion and life.” He went on to warn that “we are witnessing the gradual corrosion of faith by the naturalistic and secularist temper of the time. It is a corrosion that can and must be arrested and undone by a vital theology, cast in contemporary terms.”

The definitive statement of Herberg’s philosophy of Judaism was in his widely acclaimed 1951 book Judaism and Modern Man, borrowing heavily from the thought of such Christian friends as Niebuhr and Paul Tillich yet animated by his deep commitment to Judaism. Herberg offered a radical affirmation of Judaism’s first principles for the modern world:

Idolatry, in Jewish thinking, is the root source of all wrongdoing and moral evil. But to grasp the full scope and significance of this principle it is necessary to understand the essential meaning of idolatry. Idolatry is not simply the worship of sticks and stones, or it would obviously have no relevance to our times. Idolatry is the absolutization of the relative, it is absolute devotion paid to anything short of the absolute. What idolatry does is to convert its object into an absolute, thereby destroying the partial good within it and transforming it into a total evil. Contemporary life is idolatry-ridden to an appalling degree. Man, it cannot be too often repeated, must fix his devotion and anchor his being in something ultimate, and if it is not the Living God, it will be some spurious substitute.

This, in short, is the paradox of liberal religion, if not a historic paradox at the heart of Judaism itself, whose profound relevance to modernity Herberg was unique in recognizing. If only the absolute, the Living God, is sacred, how, ultimately, can any institution effectively affirm and uphold the sacred without in one way or another succumbing to idolatry?

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The radicals are the only ones we read

Remember the donkey, Benjamin, from Animal Farm? He is a dissident intellectual who sees how things really are, providing exposition to the reader about how the ridiculous, surreptitious deception defines the post-revolution farm. He’s not a resister, he’s not a rabble-rouser and he’s not counter-revolutionary. He is passive, and he passively speaks the sober truth, with neither a delusion of living under a reasonable system or delusion of being able to change that system. That’s the only reason why he can occupy his strange position — he is an utterly defeated fellow with nothing to lose and no reason to speak anything but the harsh truth. This is the mystique of the neoreactionary.

The neoreactionary is the guy at the end of the movie that tells everyone exactly how he feels about them. He’s already lost his job, or lost the battle, or he’s just had an epiphany about how he’s been full of shit the whole time (does anyone else remember Talk Radio?) That’s why people actually read neoreactionary blogs instead of those of, say, Stormfront.org buffoons, despite the two being about equal in political incorrectness. Where white nationalists might have laughable fantasies about a “white revolution” and coming neo-Nazi order, neoreactionaries are acutely aware of the insurmountable obstacles that face an anti-mass movement. Nick Land writes:

Neoreactionary realism, in contrast, is positively aligned with the recession of demotic sustenance. If this were not the case, it would exhibit its own specific mode of democratic politics — an evident absurdity. Any suggestion of frustrated rage, tilting into terroristic expressions, would immediately reveal profound confusion, or hypocrisy. Lashing the masses into ideological acquiescence, through exemplary violence, cannot imaginably be a neoreactionary objective…

“What is to be done?” is not a neutral question. The agent it invokes already strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist response: Nothing. Do nothing. Your progressive ‘praxis’ will come to nought in any case. Despair. Subside into horror. You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but reality is your true — and fatal — enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently, in your ear: “despair”. (The horror.)

Compare this to the embarrassing pretensions of power that “anti-establishment” types have: libertarians saying “smash the state,” feminists saying, “smash the patriatrchy,” and socialists saying, “smash capitalism.” There is clearly no smashing of any of these types going on and no plausibility of it happening either. It’s a game of make-believe that the neoreactionaries do not play.

Progressive intellectuals, even the Marxist ones, are toiling in the status quo. Apparently fresh academia-intelligentsia-social media trends are just new exegesis of old progressive canon. Criticism of Patricia Arquette’s progressive Oscar acceptance speech is being made from the exact same assumptions about the nature of justice human interaction that Patricia Arquette’s speech itself is built upon. Even conservatives attempting to implement conservative ideas work within the status quo by using proxy arguments: “We should cut welfare because welfare leads to bad results for the poor,” or the ever eye roll inducing, “Liberals are the real racists for supporting affirmative action!” Both of these talking points, regardless of their truth value, are ultimately competing in the rat race of finding creative ways to dignify progressive assumptions. Conservatives don’t seem to realize that their proxy arguments are always going to be inferior to the real thing. This doesn’t mean that the progressives are wrong — they are just operate in the same kind of criticism-insulated environment that the medieval scholastics existed in.

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