Ideas

Pete Davis on the Soul of Facebook Venting

Over at the porch:

“Perhaps we see in those upsetting anecdotes a post-Protestant demon — social sin peeking out from behind the social order. Perhaps the tension that must be vented is our uncertainty in the presence of such sin: Am I going to be tricked by this evil or am I going to be aware enough to see it at work? Am I going to become part of it or am I going to reject it? Am I on its side of the great divide or am I on the side of the redeemed?

Facebook venting resolves this uncertainty. By pasting a link to a news story and properly identifying the social evil at work – “This is racism!” “This is bigotry!” “This is evil!” – you stand at the digital altar and testify to your awareness of social sin. By ranting against the news story, you validate that you have rejected this sin, broadcasting that you belong among the redeemed. When you click submit, your uncertainty about your moral goodness is temporarily washed away: you can proceed with confidence that you are one of the elect. …

Of course, the reality is that we cannot be deeply involved in addressing every social ill that bothers us and we are still going to be tempted to rant on Facebook when we see upsetting news. For such moments, here’s an idea for an alternative form of Facebook venting: the next time we want to release the tension from an upsetting news story, we should (1) take time to find and research a person or organization actively working to heal the underlying social ill about which we are upset, (2) donate $5-10 to them and then (3) post about their work and our donation to them.”

The Land of Cockaigne

The slave morality of sexual liberation

In the early 20th century there were enough young Marxists eagerly awaiting a sexually liberated, post-revolutionary society for Lenin to comment on it:

Youth’s altered attitude to questions of sex is of course ‘fundamental’, and based on theory. Many people call it ‘revolutionary’ and ‘communist’. They sincerely believe that this is so. I am an old man, and I do not like it. I may be a morose ascetic, but quite often this so-called ‘new sex life’ of young people and frequently of the adults too seems to me purely bourgeois and simply an extension of the good old bourgeois brothel. All this has nothing in common with free love as we Communists understand it. No doubt you have heard about the famous theory that in communist society satisfying sexual desire and the craving for love is as simple and trivial as ‘drinking a glass of water’. A section of our youth has gone mad, absolutely mad, over this ‘glass-of-water theory’. It has been fatal to many a young boy and girl. Its devotees assert that it is a Marxist theory. I want no part of the kind of Marxism which infers all phenomena and all changes in the ideological superstructure of society directly and blandly from its economic basis, for things are not as simple as all that. A certain Frederick Engels has established this a long time ago with regard to historical materialism.

Clearly Lenin wasn’t on board with it, but you get the idea that the desire for this type of sexual liberation was a peculiarly communist interest. I don’t think that the Tsar and his cronies had to worry about the supply of readily available sex. As every teen comedy has shown us, the inability to get laid is the mark of a loser. Communism is the revolt of the losers.

I definitely don’t subscribe to Nietzsche’s philosophy, but his concept of master-slave morality seems salient enough to (loosely) borrow. Slave morality is defined by the and values and wishes of an overworked peasant. A great illustration is the land of Cockaigne, depicted in the featured image of this article. From Wikipedia:

Cockaigne or Cockayne is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheeses). Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth.

…roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one’s mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one’s feet. The weather is always mild, the wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth.

All of this is what “good” is particularly from the perspective of someone with low-level physiological concerns.

For the man who doesn’t get laid, the most important thing about sex is how attainable it is. All other considerations are secondary. Increased supply of easy-access sex is the promise of sexual liberation. Some spillover is bound to happen, and the involuntary celibate wants to get splashed. He doesn’t care about the virtues of human sexuality higher up the pyramid as long as he is thirsty.

I’ve started calling this Mariani’s Law: In general, how keen someone is on sexual liberation and sex-positivity is inversely proportional to how attractive that person is.

But are there virtues to sex beyond just having a lot of it? Faithful couples seem to think so, and for what it’s worth, so does the Catholic Church. Even from a utilitarian standpoint I think we need to look at this with some scrutiny. I bet that the average sexual encounter in Iran is hotter than than the average sexual counter in the United States, even though there’s more sexual encounters per capita in the US. The point is that there’s tradeoffs in changes of a society’s sexual mores. The side that favors quantity above all else are the “slaves.” The other side is concerned with values that transcend that calculation.

I’ve reaped the dividends of the sexual revolution, and in all probability it’s been a net gain. Sex is awesome per se, and that’s precisely why we don’t need a value system telling us that we should be promiscuous. That kind of value system doesn’t serve monogamous couples, it serves the sexually frustrated.

Awkward internet Marxists who get miffed about “slut shaming” definitely are at slave-level:

Video of Jack Ross’s book release at the National Press Club

Here’s the whole event, videotaped for your convenience by the Freda Utley Foundation:

Here’s a link to the text for my bit. I’ll collect other transcripts here if they are posted online. Go like the book on Facebook too, and if you’re in the Midwest, check out his speaking dates out your way in the next week.

better-call-saul

Vince Gilligan’s critique of rationalism

The following guest post is by Jon Bishop, who writes from Massachusetts. His essays, fiction, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Boston Literary Magazine, Ethika Politika, PJ Media, Millennial, FreightTrain Magazine, and the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

I’m just going to come right out with it: Vince Gilligan is the most thoughtful person working in television today — and his two companion shows, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, demonstrate a willingness to challenge not only genre conventions but also the culture at large.

But let’s skip the quality of the storytelling and the acting and the directing for now, because many people have talked about them, and so there’s not too much to add to the discussion. And this is not a review.

What I want to focus on here is what Gilligan has to say on rationalism, which can, in this sense, be taken as a synonym for freethinking or even secularism. It is the rationalism that rejects everything but reason.

For the longest time I wondered why Gilligan chose Saul Goodman as the Breaking Bad character to get his own show. Sure, I thought, he’s appealing and funny, but he’s comic relief. Why not select instead the rugged Mike Ehrmantraut or the quiet but monstrous Gus Fring? Learning more about them would make for great television. Then I realized it: Saul is a lawyer, a profession that pairs nicely with the scientist. Why? Both are symbols of the rationalist.

(more…)

unnamed

The Socialist Party and the Old Right

The text of my talk last night at the National Press Club is now online over on the Porch, here’s some of it:

Greetings. As the token conservative on the panel, I intend to get to what the Socialist Party has to say to us, but I’d like to begin, true to form, by complaining about the liberal media.

In September of last year, the New Republic released a 100th anniversary anthology with a more insurgent title than the magazine has ever earned, called “Insurrections of the Mind,” curated by their recently deposed editor Franklin Foer. In it he offers a succinct summation of what one might call Crolyism for the 21st Century: “the marriage of welfare statism and civil liberties is essentially the definition of American liberalism.”

In the Baffler this month, the estimable left-wing writer George Scialabba corrected him, noting the marriage in question “has actually been a love triangle,” with interventionist foreign policy as the third leg.

As the New Republic and its counterpart the Nation go through their anniversary retrospections, one in its 101st year and the other in its 150th, both have published long essays taking stock of their past. In the New Republic’s case, we might have hoped for a critical reevaluation of its mostly unbroken century of interventionism, before both World Wars right up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Instead, what we have is an extended mea culpa of a cover story about the magazine’s support for welfare reform and its failure to hire a diverse enough staff. Whatever the merits of this newfound sensitivity, to focus on that to the exclusion of the magazine’s militarism seems like a cop-out. In 2015, to diversify a magazine will earn you plaudits from all corners of respectable society. To question war and empire, on the other hand, usually means sacrificing one’s reputation.

Read the rest here. Photo above courtesy JD Gordon

Christians in the Closet

untitled

Ace points us to this Rod Dreher account of his interview with a “deeply closeted” Christian professor at an “elite law school.” It’s long, but worth it, if you like that feeling of wanting to punch someone in the mouth.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

The rest might make one more and more depressed, the farther one gets into it: coming attacks on Christian schools, purging of professional organizations, removal of opportunities for Christians in the corporate world, etc. There are, naturally, references to The Benedict Option.

I believe Dreher and others are overlooking some key and unique cultural points about the United States. First, there are at least 200 million private firearms in the US, many if not most of them in the hands of cultural conservatives. Second, most “elites” can’t operate a gun, or even hold one in their hands without urinating in their pants suits. Third, the national government (“Feds”) hasn’t quite seized complete control of every aspect of life from the states.

Our good and faithful elite Christian law professor paints a picture of American Christians gradually giving in on all points, retreating from politics and the courts, and, especially, not getting fighting mad. Probably, he’s never been to a Knights of Columbus meeting.

fascisiti

Here’s my alternative scenario of the future: Certain elements in the  “red states” resist the liberal fascisiti. I think we now know that this isn’t going to be the Governors, considering the simpering performance of Pence and Hutchison, but some conservative legislative majorities would probably risk being boycotted by the NCAA in order to make a statement. More pressure, financial and legal, is brought to bear from DC and the Gay Corporate Mafia. Decent people from around the country rally ’round the besieged state(s). Some even move there, or at least camp out with rifles…and then, magically, an Enclave of Sanity independent of the Blue State sewers will be carved out of Flyover Country, the gays will go back to sodomizing each other in New York and Hollywood and everyone will live happily ever after…

Yeah, I’m not buying it, either.

I guess all I’m sure of is that America ain’t Rome under Nero, American progressives don’t have the moral certainty nor the backbone to actually kill American Christians, and American Christians aren’t as a body going to hide in the closet from sodomites and their “allies.”

The men who lie with men, the women who lie with women, the men who think they’re women, the ones who want to sodomize animals and children, and their elite enablers: Are threats of boycotts and Twitter hate campaigns and not getting hired at UCLA really going to cause American Christians to pretend to approve of this? To turn their faces away and pretend not to notice?

If so, it really is the End, and I’ll shut up and go in the closet and watch the show.

And sharpen my sword.