Gnosticism

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New Article on the Destruction of Education

An article of mine has appeared at The Brussels Journal under the title, “Hannah Arendt and Richard Weaver on the Crisis of Western Education.” It is accessible at: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/5141

Here is a sample:

Arendt writes of assuming responsibility for the inherited world, as the conservative or curatorial heart of education. A strikingly complementary notion occurs in the work of one of Arendt’s contemporaries who also wrote about the perils threatening education in the period of the Cold War. This writer saw in the self-styled progressive pedagogy of his day, which in his view had already begun to subvert traditional education, an essential ‘irresponsibility to the past and to the structure of reality in the present.’ Indeed, he saw that the assumptions of this revolutionary coup-d’état in the classroom could never ‘serve as the foundations of culture because [they] are out of line with what is.’ It was the case that ‘where [these assumptions] are allowed to provide foundations,’ or to allege to provide foundations, ‘they imperil the whole structure.’

The other writer is Richard Weaver (1910 – 1963) and the lines quoted above come from the chapter on ‘The Gnostics of Education’ in his book Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (published posthumously, 1964). Arendt was a woman of the Left; Weaver was a man of the Right. That their separate and independent commentaries on the same topic, appearing in book form within three years of one another, should be so convergent and complementary is striking. What explains it? A commitment to civilization, shared across the political frontier, might be the best answer to the question. Both Arendt and Weaver, in contrast to the advocates of avant-garde pedagogy whom they criticize, see education in its conservative or curatorial role as a civilizational, rather than as a social, institution. When the high-school English teacher in Santa Monica brought his portable stereo to the classroom and invited his students to listen to Wagner, he appealed to them in the name of civilization, not in the name of society. At the time, society’s idea of music was The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones. When I challenge students to read and appreciate Tono-Bungay by Wells, I do so in the name of civilization, not of society, whose notion of literary challenge is non-existent.

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The Puritan question

A guest post by commenter JMSmith:

In an interesting post, Foseti returns to the Puritan Question, and affirms that “one key tenet” of Neoreaction is that Progressivism is a “nontheistic Christian sect.”  No doubt there is much to be gained by understanding Progressivism as a messianic movement, and much to be regretted in the fact that Progressive chiliasts were so long cosseted in the cradle of Christian culture, but Progressivism is not a nontheistic Christian sect.  It is that old skin-changer Gnosticism, now divested of Christian symbols, acting under a new guise suited to the sensibilities of nontheistic men and women.

I suggest that the real Puritan Question is, what exactly is Puritanism?  To frame the question in Aristotelian terms, we should ask, which attributes are essential to Puritanism, and which are accidental?  And then, more specifically, we should ask, whether Christianity (however loosely defined) is one of these essential attributes, or whether it was only accidentally, contingently, and temporarily associated with this essentially alien spiritual tendency?

My answer is, obviously, that the association was accidental.

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Freedom, value, and the modern left

Over at What’s Wrong with the World, Tony M. reports that a former APA head claims to have cured hundreds of homosexuals of their disordered desires. The Southern Poverty Law Center is up in arms, of course, which prompted this remark from commenter “Thomas Aquinas”:

Odd though that if a man goes to a plastic surgeon and permits the physician to carve him up and inject him with hormones so that he may look like a girl, even though he is in fact not a girl, we have to all pretend that he is a girl, or face severe punishment. On the other hand, if that same man were a homosexual, sought treatment to change his condition, and then claims to have succeeded after many years of arduous discipline, this is supposed to be an assault upon reason itself. In fact, we have to publicly deny what he and he alone can know, that he has in fact changed. In the case of the transgender, we have to all affirm what all of us can plainly know is false: you can no more make a girl out of boy than you can make a dolphin out a thalidomide baby.

So what’s the deal? Why do leftists celebrate the free choice of certain classes of people to sodomize one another or mutilate their own genitals, but not the free choice of those same people to remain celibate or seek treatment?

All of us reactionaries know that freedom and value are in some tension, in the sense that our values tend to restrict our freedom of action. For instance, a man who values marriage will find that this valuation restricts his freedom of sexual action by obliging him to remain faithful and chaste. In a properly-ordered society, freedom would, in fact, not be terribly important, concerning mainly prudential judgments (“Should I become a husband and father or a celibate priest?”) and arbitrary preferences (“Should I stop for lunch at McDonald’s or Burger King?”).

The leftist inverts this (and most other things) by subordinating values to freedom. To the extent that values restrict freedom, then, they must be deformed or destroyed, the better to liberate us from their shackles. Hence no-fault divorce laws, readily available and publicly financed abortions and contraception, gay “marriage,” open marriages, and every other innovation which destroys the value of marriage. They probably won’t abolish marriage outright, of course, and people can stay “married” if they like. But that’s the only reason they’re allowed to marry and to stay married: because they like it, not because they value it, and certainly not because it is objectively valuable.

Because value and freedom are in conflict, to the leftist mind, it is not enough to freely choose to do a thing. The choice to do a thing cannot be value-motivated, cannot be anything more than an arbitrary exercise of the utterly sovereign will, or else it is not truly free. The distressed homosexual who seeks treatment or opts for lifelong celibacy may be making a choice, but his choice (to the leftist’s horror) involves the endorsement of a value system and thus the denial of freedom-as-the-highest-good. They are freely choosing not-freedom — and this choice, in the leftist worldview, is one they are not free to make.

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Is Ideology Anti-Christian? (The Argument in Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean)

Introduction. Paul Johnson, usually acute, prejudices the case against Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) in the chapter that he devotes to the instigator of modern drama in his Intellectuals (1993), where the author of Emperor and Galilean (1873) keeps company with the likes of Karl Marx, Berthold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, and Lillian Hellman. Johnson can classify Ibsen under the pejorative label of an “intellectual” only by ignoring Ibsen’s text and concentrating on the biographical details, which indeed make their subject look like a contemptible piece of work. This criticism of Johnson by no means invalidates Johnson’s definition of an “intellectual.” On the contrary, Johnson has defined the “intellectual” brilliantly and his treatment of the phenomenon must bear instructively on any analysis of Ibsen’s play about Julian the Apostate. According to Johnson, the “intellectual,” who appears first in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a politically committed character for whom “a utopian, socialist future [is] plainly a substitute for a religious idealism in which he [cannot] believe.” An intellectual is often the master of a narrow slice of specialized knowledge who, however, feels “no incongruity in moving from [his] own discipline… to public affairs.” Yet when examined closely, even the specialized knowledge of the intellectual, his peculiar theory, tends to be unconvincing and perverse – a type of pleading by the person to himself to protect his theory from inconvenient facts and to preserve his vision of himself as someone qualified to “counsel humanity.” Writing specifically of Rousseau, Johnson remarks that intellectuals see themselves, not as “servants or interpreters of the gods but [as] substitutes” – that is, of both the gods or God and the sacerdotal clerisy. Johnson writes of that “most marked [of the] characteristics of the new secular intellectuals,” namely “the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny.”

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Cartesian meditations on the social sciences

I’ve already shared my complaints about the humanities and the natural sciences; now I’d like to turn to the social sciences.  As with these other disciplines, my “problem” with the social sciences has more to do with a general attitude I sense pervading the whole enterprise than with any particular result.  That attitude can be summed up in the following statement:  the correct way to understand a human being or a social system is to look at it from the point of view of a hostile outsider.  The hostile outsider has a privileged perspective.  The ways human beings and social organisms understand themselves are illusions; they are unscientific; they are masks behind which hide the reality of structures of oppression, unconscious desires, blind economic or sexual striving.  Thus, the skill college students are to learn above all else is critical thinking, which basically means learning to assume the perspective of the hostile outsider.  They are to critically question the assumptions of their upbringing (unless, of course, they are from urban Leftist homes).  And if the student decides his inherited religion and ethnic loyalties are defensible?  Well, then, he obviously hasn’t thought critically enough!  The “questioning” of gender roles and inherited tradition has a predetermined outcome.

Needless to say, social scientists–psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists–are, by and large, my political enemies.  However, my ultimate objection is philosophical.  I don’t disagree that one can study human beings in terms of their psychic desires, or that one can study societies in terms of economic forces and structures of coercion.  Nor do I deny that some insights can be drawn from this.  What I do deny is that this gives us the ultimate truth about men or communities.  It is an exercise in abstraction, of systematically ignoring aspects of the subject in order to more clearly focus on some particular structure of interest.  The most important thing about a social practice is how it is experienced and understood by its participants.  Even when the things critics claim to find “beneath the surface” are really there, it’s the “surface”–the lived conscious reality–that is most fundamental and most real.

This is even more true when it comes to the study of the individual human being.  I myself have had two types of encounters with psychology.  (My experiences with the psychiatric profession I’ll save for another post.)  First, as a teacher I’ve been exposed to some of the results of research on how people learn.  Overall, this work is empirically grounded and consistent with common sense and my own experience.  The studies of memory, cognition, visual perception–basically of any type of mental activity that we humans are conscious of performing–also seem relatively healthy by soft science standards (although I am here speaking without much knowledge).  On the other hand, as a reactionary I am also exposed to psychological claims purporting to explain my authoritarian, homophobic pathologies.  That I might actually have reasons for my beliefs is dismissed out of hand.  This type of psychology demands that human behavior have explanations rather than reasons.  The explanations involve my unconscious fear of new experiences, my unconscious fear of my father, my unconscious homosexual urges, or some other such unconscious prompting.  None of these claims has any credible evidence behind them, and they all clash with the evidence of direct introspection–hence the recurring need for “unconscious” qualifiers.

“The unconscious mind” is one of those things that people are afraid to question for fear of being thought “unscientific”; I’m sure I’ll shock some readers with even the basic observation that “unconscious mind” is a contradiction in terms.  

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The Heterosphere

Blogger Joseph of Arimathea, a frequent commenter here, has noticed a site that catalogs various phenomena in the penumbra of the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church that are, to put it in the kindest possible way, heterodox. Do you think the burlap banners and acoustic guitars are bad over at St. Thomas Aquinas? Do you wince at the priestess down at St. Albans? Do you grind your teeth at the secular liberal pieties suffusing the sermon at St. Georges? Are you reeling in amazement at what the congregation wears to services at Gethsemane Methodist? Appalled at the clumsiness of the trite ad libitum prayers you hear at First Baptist? I hate to say it, folks, but a quick tour through the Museum of Idolatry demonstrates that these insults to orthodoxy, taste and good sense are nothing – nothing at all.

Want to know what happens when you throw out all denominational discipline, all liturgical standards, and all theological orthodoxy? Wait, are you sure you really want to know? I warn you: a visit to the Museum of Idolatry is like a tour of a railway accident.

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SlutWalk and the gnostic temptation

Remember SlutWalk? From the Wikipedia page:

Participants protest against explaining or excusing rape by referring to any aspect of a woman’s appearance.[3] The rallies began when Constable Michael Sanguinetti, a Toronto Police officer, suggested that to remain safe, “women should avoid dressing like sluts.”

It’s one of the peculiarities of the modern condition that advice of this sort is taken as an exercise in moral blame-assignment rather than simple, prudential wisdom. “X is a bad idea so don’t do it or Y might happen,” where, in this case, X = “Getting ruinously drunk in a sexually-charged environment surrounded by people you don’t know, then walking home alone through a bad part of town at 2 AM on a Saturday” but could just as well mean lots of other things, means just what it says and nothing more. And if Y happens, the fact that you’re not morally culpable for Y doesn’t mean X wasn’t, therefore, a bad idea.

Why, then, the leftist/feminist griping that this constitutes “blaming the victim”? Here’s a useful graphic of the typical SlutWalker demographic that gives us some insight into what’s going on in their heads:

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Liberalism and the religion-shaped hole in the human heart

From the recent discussion on “Liberalism is a Religion” comes an intriguing comment from Bill:

Leftism is to religion as phyto-estrogens are to estrogens.

There are “estrogen-shaped holes” all over the place in the human body. Phyto-estrogens (which are not exactly the same chemically as human estrogens), fit into these holes not-quite-exactly-right and therefore have some but not all of the properties of estrogens.

There is a religion-shaped hole in the human psyche. Leftism (which is almost but not quite a religion) fits it not-quite-right.

Reading this, I was forced to reevaluate my earlier diagnosis of the modern condition as one of “pervasive insensibility to the sacred.” Well, not so much reevaluate as re-express. The modern mind is absolutely insensible to what is actually sacred, but his sacral sensibility is, itself, intact. He is capable of experiencing the awe attendant on sacred things. He is capable of reverence, and the outrage that arises from violations of sacred things, people, and places. It is his sense of what is sacred that his wrong, not his capacity for experiencing it. His is a problem not of deficiency but perversion.

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Liberalism as Cultural Atavism: Voegelin’s Theory of Gnostic Modernity and Girard’s Theory of Sacrifice

Introduction. The conviction and jailing of an Englishwoman for speaking her mind on immigration policy during a subway commute and the prosecution of an Austrian woman who accurately characterized the founder of Islam remind us how much the Western elites, those who currently control the society and wish to use their authority to alter and reconstitute the established order, have parted company with longstanding Western traditions, including the sovereignty of conscience. The mutation of classical liberalism into contemporary politically correct totalitarianism is not surprising, however, since liberalism began as the cautious younger sibling of the revolutionary spirit that found its emblem in the destruction of the Bourbons and its articulation in the slogan-like promotion of equality, fraternity, and liberty as the new mandatory themes of human order. Quite apart from the facts of its awful bloodiness on the one hand and its meaningless abstractness on the other, left-radical activity has implied from its beginning implacable hostility to custom and habit. The new republican-type nation-states that followed the model of France arose, as had the French Republic itself, through the violent disestablishment of the smaller, ethnic polities that characterized the long period of feudalism in Europe. Insofar as Western Society still today exhibits coherency, much of that coherency derives from the period before the emergence of the modern republics. Western society is what it is, therefore, because it stands in a continuum of vital experience and articulate symbolization stemming from those oddly matched wellsprings, Greek philosophy and Hebrew morality, in their unlikely, long-term cultural dialectic as mediated by a thousand years and many local manifestations of Gothic Christianity.

Western society, including North American society, is, then, positively something, rather than anything or nothing, a “this” and not a “that,” whose plasticity, while ample, nevertheless falls short of the limitless and whose viability if not mortality corresponds to those limits. A successful attempt to “change” this society, such as the one currently being organized by Barack Hussein Obama and his political minions, will be indistinguishable from a successful attempt to destroy the society.

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