Month: May 2014

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A message for nice guys

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Meet the late Elliot Rodger, 22-year-old serial murderer and self-proclaimed “supreme gentleman,” who blamed his killing spree on his inability to attract a lover.

There’s a lot that can be said about Mr. Rodger from a sociological perspective — from whence his narcissism, his self-entitlement, his will-to-power? — but regular readers of the Orthosphere could likely anticipate such an analysis or produce a better one on their own, so I don’t feel the need to write one. Instead, this post is aimed at those in a similar situation as his (on the off-chance that any might read it), those who have ever asked themselves, “I’m a nice guy; why can’t I get a girlfriend?”

If you have ever uttered these words, you are almost certainly a beta male.

Continue reading →

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The Year Civilization Collapsed

At The Brussels Journal, I review Eric H. Cline’s new book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Cline’s topic is the “Catastrophe” that afflicted the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age. Cline’s service is to have correlated the large monographic literature on the “Catastrophe” and to have organized it in complementary narrative and analysis.  The review is here:  http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/5134

I offer an excerpt:

Just before reading The Year Civilization Collapsed I read Gregory R. Copley’s Un-Civilization: Urban Geo-Politics in a Time of Chaos (2013).  Copley sees the existing global economy as a distorted, unstable system already embarked down the slope of collapse.  The malaise of the contemporary system in Copley’s analysis stems from many of the distortions that Cline cites as contributing to the end of the Bronze Age: Centralized bureaucratization of the societies; overspecialization within the total mercantile network such that a disruption anywhere must spread its effects like ripples everywhere else; vulnerable infrastructure, such as, in the modern instance, the electrical grid; unregulated, massive migrations of peoples; and the development of enmitous social factions within societies, in some cases massively immigration-driven.  Copley predicts a crisis, one effect of which will be plummeting depopulation leading to the desertification of the distended World Cities.

The parallelisms between Copley’s assessment of the contemporary situation and Cline’s hypothesis about the causes and character of the Catastrophe are quite obvious and quite disconcerting.  Copley differs from Cline in his willingness to include moral failures as playing a role in the impending (as he sees it) debacle.  Cline explicitly disavows any gesture of “laying blame,” as when he criticizes invoking the “Sea Peoples” as agents of a general destruction in the concluding phase of the Catastrophe.  Nevertheless, The Year Civilization Collapsed is extremely valuable.  The Catastrophe is little-known – unlike the specious “Fall of Rome,” so often celebrated in novels and cinema.  It ought to be better-known, as it would serve as a useful reference in getting people to understand the terrible fragility of the civilized accomplishment.  One ingredient of total social calamity at which Cline hints but which he nowhere fully develops is the complacency of the people, their dumb belief that nothing can change in the way of life.  The psychological inertia of complacency plays a large role in the stultification of the existing “global order,” which more and more resembles ambient disorder.

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The nature of solidarity: Donoso Cortes vs. the socialists

The nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary Juan Donoso Cortes occupies an intriguing place
in the history of Reaction. His critique of liberalism is distinctly theological; he grounds all his social principles in Christian doctrine: the nature of the Trinity, its manifestations in creation, mankind’s collective Fall, and its collective redemption. In some ways, he anticipates the Christian communitarians and Radical Orthodoxy schools of our own time. Unlike them, he was tied to an actual, living traditional society, and he defends kings, hereditary aristocracies, Catholic establishment, and many other things that would cause today’s communitarians to faint from fear.

Throne & Altar reader William McEnaney has kindly sent me a copy of Dononso’s main work, his Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism. Bill works with Preserving Christian Publications, a small business that sells out-of-print pre-conciliar Catholic books. I would be pleased for such ventures to flourish and so am happy to offer this bit of free advertising.  What follows will be an exploration of one key theme in Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.

Writing in 1851, Donoso saw the great issue of his age as an ultimately theological battle between Catholicism and socialism. Catholicism had dignified both authority and obedience by locating the former’s source in God. Even the legitimate authority of fathers (as opposed to their mere primacy of age and power) is explicable primarily through the Trinitarian relation it reflects. Alongside the family and state, Catholicism fosters a vast network of associations, each embodying it its own way the fundamental law of unity-in-diversity rooted in the Trinitarian heart of Being. Socialism would destroy all of this, reducing the order of mankind to a vast and unitary yet illegitimate statist tyranny.

In the twentieth century, all of this would be explained in terms of the supposed Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. As you’ve often heard the story, the Left basically owns solidarity, and Catholics criticize Leftists only for neglecting the second principle of subsidiarity, a vague council to–all other things being equal–favor small and local agency. This is inadequate for a number of reasons.  Donoso gets to the real heart of the matter. What’s wrong with socialism is not that it is solidarity unchecked; socialism is solidarity denied, misunderstood, reduced to a shadow of its true self. The socialist believes in solidarity too little, rather than too much.

Continue reading →

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Who is the Holy Spirit?

From time to time, a stubborn and longstanding perplexity resolves suddenly into an intelligible pattern. An opacity clarifies, a lacuna is illumined, and one sees for the first time how to begin thinking about it. The ordered relations of a great mass of ideas are revealed as a new node in their net is neatly knit together, and unsuspected connections to other domains of inquiry suggest themselves. Thoughts that had been stymied by confusion pour forth in a generous, refreshing cascade. Things fall into place.

This recently happened to me respecting the Holy Spirit. I had never known quite how to think about him, had never understood quite what he does within the Trinity. He doesn’t get much attention, compared to the other two Persons. When he does, he is usually spoken of as the Love that flows between the Father and the Son, or as the Life of the Trinity. But these characterizations, while true enough, don’t get at the nub of it. The Holy Spirit is a person, and a person is not just his love or his life, but rather their subject.

What is it that the Spirit experiences, then, that is different from what the Son and Father experience of each other? What does he add to what they are, and know, and do? None of the explanations I had read quite hung together; there seemed to be little to hang them on. I had nothing to work with, nothing I felt I could lay hands on, until the other day, when at last pneumatology began to open to me.

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Repost: The City of Man

This is a heavily revised and expanded version of an essay that was originally published (under another title) on my now-defunct personal blog.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last centuries, the nations of the West have been both secularized and democratized, moving from monarchy to liberal democracy while at the same time experiencing a dramatic drop in religious faith. As belief in democracy as the best or only legitimate form of government became all but universally accepted, Christianity entered a still-ongoing decline, the occupants of church pews growing ever older and fewer, and the historic beliefs and practices of the Church increasingly seen as a barbarous and outmoded. Today, most Westerners are—at least functionally—atheists, agnostics, or adherents of a vague, wishy-washy “spirituality” which issues no substantial dogmas and imposes no significant duties. To be sure, nominal Christians are still in the majority in some countries, but genuine belief is going the way of the dodo. (My own country, Norway, is an excellent case study. Its Lutheran church was established until 2012, and counted almost 79 percent of Norwegians among its members as recently as 2007. But the attitude of Norwegians—including much of the clergy—and their government towards traditional Christianity has for many years consisted of indifference mixed with hostility.) Data gathered by Gallup between 2006 and 2011 show that the majority of people in most Western European and Anglosphere countries do not regard religion as an important part of their daily lives[1]. And perhaps even more importantly, today’s opinion-makers, be they intellectuals and educators or comedians and columnists, are often not just apathetic towards Christianity, but actively hostile to it. Continue reading →

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Immergence

When a complex orderly phenomenon such as consciousness arises in matter, it is these days often ascribed to a mysterious emergence of properties implicit in those of its material substrates. But really it goes the other way. Consciousness – ordered form in general – does not emerge from the material substrate of our world. It rather immerges thereto, from elsewhere. Novelty of all sorts is added to history from without.

Continue reading →

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“They made a schism with the whole universe”

The whole body of this new scheme of manners, in support of the new scheme of politics, I consider as a strong and decisive proof of determined ambition and systematic hostility.  I defy the most refining ingenuity to invent any other cause for the total departure of the Jacobin Republic from every one of the ideas and usages, religious, legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearing herself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formed resolution of keeping no terms with that world.  It has not been, as has been falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had only broke with their old government.  They made a schism with the whole universe, and that schism extended to almost everything, great and small.  For one, I wish, since it is gone thus far, that the breach had been so complete as to make all intercourse impracticable…

My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter France, not as a state, but as a faction.  The vast territorial extent of that country, its immense population, its riches of production, its riches of commerce and convention, the whole aggregate mass of what in ordinary cases constitutes the force of a state, to me were but objects of secondary consideration.  They might be balanced; and they have been often more than balanced.  Great as these things are, they are not what make the faction formidable.  It is the faction that makes them truly dreadful.  That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of France, that informs it as a soul, that stamps upon its ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the same general passions and the same general views in other men and in other communities.  It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, pernicious, a desolating activity.  Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that France to shake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner that we behold…

As for me, I was always steadily of opinion that this disorder was not in its nature intermittent.  I conceived that the contest, once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion, but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last.  I never thought we could make peace with the system; because it was not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself that we were at war.  As I understood the matter, we were at war, not with its conduct, but with its existence–convinced that its existence and its hostility were the same.

The faction is not local or territorial.  It is a general evil.  Where it least appears in action, it is still full of life.  In its sleep it recruits its strength and prepares its exertion.  Its sprit lies deep in the corruptions of our common nature.  The social order which restrains it feeds it.  It exists in every country in Europe, and among all orders of men in every country, who look up to France as to a common head.  The center is there.  The circumference is the world of Europe, wherever the race of Europe may be settled.  Everywhere else the faction is militant; in France it is triumphant.  In France is the bank of deposit and the bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state.  It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and too mischievous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any other country whilst it is predominant there.  War, instead of being the cause of its force, has suspended its operation.  It has given a reprieve, at least, to the Christian world…

It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed:  in ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors.  They saw the thing right from the very beginning.  Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its objects, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it.  It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all.  It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations:  it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France…

– from Letters on a Regicide Peace

Edmund Burke was actually far from the contemptible “slow-and-steady path to surrender” advocate his twentieth-century admirers made him out to be.

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Atheism, Agnosticism and Cultural Low Self-esteem

I think … the skeptics are taking over atheism. …I am an agnostic,

because I believe that is the human condition, and I am a skeptic,

because I believe that is the most efficient way to live my life.

A recent comment at the Orthosphere

 Atheism and its twin brother agnosticism are usually descriptions of individuals. But they’re also cultural forces, shaping society and in turn being shaped by the society in which they live and move and have their being.

[For brevity, I shall refer to them both as “atheism,” for they’re essentially identical at the level of day-to day operations.]

What has atheism to do with low cultural self-esteem? Just this: Atheism, especially today’s variety, makes a virtue of not believing. But skepticism weakens a man and a nation, leading ultimately to ruin unless countered by a renewal of belief.

Think of it: What character trait is today nearly-universally held to be the greatest virtue? Which trait is most praised? The absence of which trait is loathed most deeply and punished most harshly?

Tolerance, of course.

It does go by other names: nonjudgmentalism, openness, diversity, anti-racism, etc. But whatever it’s called, the supreme virtue of the modern age is not to believe. Continue reading →

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Socrates, Techno-Speak, and Similar Issues

I have some new or newish pieces up on the current regime and how to fight it. There’s one just out at Crisis Magazine about how bad ideological pluralism is (for starters, it’s a particular system of social control that obviously can’t be pluralistic). There are also a couple at Catholic World Report about why the Church can’t use modern public language to speak to modern man (it’s a sort of technological Newspeak), and about Socratic questioning as a way to disrupt the flow of sophistical patter. And then there’s a piece published at Crisis Magazine during Lent about how to how to be a bit more Lenten if you happen to be a political ranter.