Collapse: The Blog

The Crisis of Modernity is the Falseness of Modernity

Modernity offered, in contrast to the experiential paradigm of the vast majority of human history, a very different vision of man, society, in the universe. As such, it needed a narrative to establish the legitimacy of its vision, which we may summarize thusly:

Primitive man lived in darkness and ignorance, kept their by religious superstition-peddlers. We enlightened thinkers and scientists succeeded in liberating man from his squalor and have set him along the path toward his gradual perfection.

This narrative may have been believable in the 17th and 18th centuries. We, today, know better. Man's liberation from religion has not perfected him. It has loosed horrors beyond counting on the world.

The "crisis of modernity," as such, is the spontaneous recognition of the falseness of this narrative -- and therefore the falseness of everything which has come to be because of it, including our social order, our ethical life, and our self-understanding.

Because modernity is false (and everyone knows it), it cannot be sustained. There are only two options: to return to that which is normative, historical, spontaneous, and organic, that is, to religion, to the traditional family, and various other institutions; or else to soldier on ahead, dropping only those parts of the modern condition that clearly cannot be salvaged.

Western society by and large has chosen the latter course. It has elected to drop, among other things, the idea of a coherent narrative; indeed, it is now characterized by suspicion or distrust of narratives. This, we call "postmodernism." It has also jettisoned its concern for reason, rationality, and the realness of reality. This, too, is part of postmodernism; we call it "deconstructionism." It has retained everything else of modernity, including its parousiasm and dialectic historicism.

But modernism-lite is really no more sustainable than was modernism-regular.

On the Vileness of Modern Pseudoconservatives

I spend a lot of time beating up on liberals, I know. Let's take a moment to remember that the modern "right" aren't our friends, either.

Remember Jonah Goldberg having the temerity to draw a connection between de Maistre and the Nazis? Or his and Norman Podhoretz's celebrations of sodomy? Or his and Ross Douthat's celebration of feminism?

Don't forget the endorsement of the abolition of marriage from Fox News, for Heaven's sake! Or their silence concerning (or even mild support of) the forced homosexualizaiton of the Armed Forces.

Let's also not forget the warmongering chickenhawkery, or the emotive revolutionary bluster we hear from "conservatives" any time some policy is enacted that they dislike (forgetting, always, the Biblical admonition to submit to authority). Their revolutionary impulse easily matches that of the left, which I suppose stands to reason; but the left is at least honest about its revolutionary ambitions, as history has amply demonstrated.

These are the people who, in the interests of fighting the really important battles of making sure we get payroll tax cuts that offer people like me a whopping $8 a biweekly paycheck, have agreed to shut up about our ongoing abortion holocaust, or at least agree to do nothing really serious to put an end to it. And who cheer, in the interests of supporting the troops, the taxpayer-subsidized glorification of sodomy.

To Hell with them.

It's Election Time

I absolutely detest American elections and everything about them, not least of all the hysteria. Each successive election is said to be even more important than the last -- the stakes are higher this time! the future of the republic hinges on this pivotal moment! -- yet this is the exact opposite of the truth: each successive election (regardless of who wins) further cements the leftist consensus and witnesses the further organizational, intellectual, spiritual, and moral collapse of the right.

So vilely leftist has modern political discourse become that the chief criticism of Ron Paul circulating among ostensibly right-wing "thinkers" is that he isn't sufficiently left-wing. Check out Jonah Goldberg's criticisms of Paul not being antiracist enough. (Goldberg... how I detest the man. Henceforth, his name shall ne'er be written again on this blog: he shall be known only as Dagon -- in the Lovecraftian, not the Amoritic, sense).

Look, there's plenty not to like about Paul's politics, but this isn't it. Why in the world should the right be enforcing the left's strictures, especially when we all know and complain about their obvious bogosity? I'm no fan of white nationalim (which I regard as dangerously misguided, especially given that the majority of reactionaries' enemies are white -- and almost certainly a majority of whites are reactionaries' enemies), but surely we can acknowledge that particularist loyalty, properly constrained, is generally a good? Must we indulge the left's inquisitorial impulse? Must we adopt their irrational value system? Must we embrace their puritanical spirit?

Break out your barf bags; this election's going to be especially nauseating.

The Best Evidence for the Falseness of Modernity

The best evidence for the falseness of modernity is that it lacks explanatory value. Not only can it not fully account for itself, it also cannot fully account for those outside of itself.

When a Marxist atheist like the late Christopher Hitchens says he opposes religion because he wants man to be "free," we know exactly what he means. He means that he wants to destroy the natural order of being because it imposes on man duties and obligations he is not free to choose or avoid. He is, in some sense, declaring war on God -- and thus on reality itself. He doesn't merely object to political tyranny. He objects to (what he sees as) the tyranny imposed on him by biology, by the circumstances of birth, by his own nature as a human being. "Freedom" for him is the total freedom of his will, unfettered even by the material facts of reality.

All this makes sense to us. We recognize it for what it is: rebellion against God, as old and uninteresting as the demons which inspired it.

But it makes no sense to him. Our talk of God and the natural order of being sounds like gibberish to him, and he responds to it as if it were gibberish, with a kind of frustrated dismissal and gasping irritation. The best he can come up with as to why people don't see the world as he does or experience reality in the same way he does is that they're just stupid, irrational, superstitious, or dishonest (but he will continue to say, always, that reason is enough, that man is a reasonable creature, and he will never reconcile this in his head with the fact that, by his own standard, the vast majority of man is irrational); and he will continue to believe it even as he meets plenty of intelligent, reasonable, and diligent people who disagree with him.

This is a serious, glaring deficiency on the part of the modern mode of being: it cannot account for the fullness of the human experience, even as the reactionary mode of being can -- and does.

The whole modern mode of being is such a stupidly rickety thing, hastily slapped and bandaged together, gushing steam from its joints and creaking noisily as it stumbles blindly through the world. Nothing but ignorance of and dishonesty about its own nature keeps it going. So radically deficient. And that which is deficient cannot last: entropy will claim it before long.

What if Tim Tebow Were Muslim?

Asks a Salon columnist.

Assuming Muslim Tim Tebow would be as high-profile as Christian Tim Tebow, they'd probably regard him with suspicion and contempt as he prostrates himself on the sidelines facing east, touching his forehead to the turf. And probably, in this alternate universe, some Salon columnist would be asking, "What if Tim Tebow Were Christian?" and he would be adored by the leftist establishment instead of slathered with its hatred.

Evidently, we're to regard Christians as hypocrites for not feeling warm-n'-fuzzy about Muslim athletes. Why should they, though? Christians worship Christ, not generic displays of piety. It's precisely this that makes them not hypocrites and their religion not merely the empty and insubstantial theatrics their secular enemies accuse them of being. Why should they feel anything but unease toward the practitioners of what they see as a false religion? No one reasonably expects anything else from Muslims.

Here's a better question: what if Tim Tebow were Christian but America was Muslim? Would the social reaction to him be analagous if the roles were reversed and it was Christian America reflecting on Muslim Tebow? I think we all know the answer to this.

Tucker Max Has Gone to Therapy

Is this some kind of elaborate practical joke?

The Normative and the Universal

One of the ways spiritual autism seems to manifest is a failure to grasp distinctions (perhaps explaining the relentless reductionism of the modern mind). One of the greatest such failures concerns the distinction between the normative and the universal.

The normative simply describes general norms, pertaining to the forms or essences in which people participate. A norm is universal only in a loose sense: it describes the universal form or essence. It doesn't require that any particular person fall under the purview of that norm.

A good example: men are taller than women is a normative statement, because they are. There are to my knowledge no societies in which men are shorter than women, and we would all rightly regard such a society as an aberration and question what has produced it. It doesn't matter that there are individual men who are quite short and individual women who are quite tall -- these are deviations from the norm. Very short men and very tall women are exceptional.

(Does the exception void the rule? If it did, it would not be an exception. If it wasn't an exception, it could not void the rule.)

In a loose sense, the norm is a statistical average; but it's not precisely the same thing. The statistical average is the mathematical expression of the norm. It is evidence that the norm exists without being the same thing.

Or consider "the reproductive system is ordered toward reproduction." Hardly a leap. That's what it's there for, that's why we have one. Common sense, as they say. A normative statement. Everything we know about it lends credence to that claim: the nature of the act, the nature of the desire for the act, the physical structure of the organs involved, etc.

Yet somehow the fact that the reproductive system doesn't always lead to reproduction (whether due to chronic or periodic infertility, withdrawal, the fact that the system can be used in some other manner such as with masturbation, etc.) is evidence that there is no norm, to the modern mind. Because he interprets it universally.

In other words, the modern mind will accept a statement only if it is true everywhere and always, when r = 1. But r = 1 only in the case of tautologies, so nothing but tautologies are true; so, functionally, nothing is true.

But just because r does not = 1 does not mean that r = 0.

There are, in fact, an infinite range of values between 0 and 1.

How better to express the modern condition than as totally insensibility to the infinite?

On Cilantro and Picky Eating

Recently, my girlfriend took me to a Vietnamese restaurant. I'd been to one before but never tried what was apparently the staple dish: pho, a soup dish of beef, noodles, and various greens in a thin broth. Her description of it sounded wonderful. But what was placed in front of me was a stinking, fetid bowl of animal waste, reeking to high heaven. Girlfriend loved it and happily devoured hers, but no sooner did I put a slice of beef to my tongue than my eyes began to water. It tasted antiseptic, like meat that had been deep-fried in a vat of hand soap. I promptly swallowed (without so much as chewing) and pushed the bowl away, touching not one more bite.

Growing up, I'd always been a picky eater. I was the kid who would sit at the table for hours, sullenly pushing his food around on the plate because he couldn't stomach one more bite. (Parents were not very understanding in this regard). The worst dish, the one I could tolerate least, was mother's chicken gumbo. I've simmered down a lot as I've grown older, and some things I once couldn't tolerate I now love -- sauerkraut is right up there. But keep the gumbo away from me.

Anyway, girlfriend and I sat and tried to figure out what the problem was with the pho. Our dishes both tasted exactly the same, or at least both tasted the same to each of us -- good for her, nauseous for me. Clearly, I was reacting to something in the recipe that she wasn't.

The offender, it seems, is very likely cilantro:

Cilantro lovers say it has a refreshing, lemony or limelike flavor that complements everything from guacamole to curry. It's a key ingredient in a range of ethnic cuisines, including Mexican, Indian and Chinese.

But few foods elicit such heated negative reactions. Many people say it tastes soapy, rotten or just plain vile. Just a whiff of it is enough to make them push away their plates. ...

Cilantro haters complain that it is showing up in unexpected places. Erin Hollingsworth, a 26-year-old editor at an environmental Web site, says she detected it in a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder she ordered at a New York lunch place.

"I thought to myself: 'No, it couldn't be. Really. Is this a joke? Who puts cilantro in Manhattan clam chowder?'" she wrote in her blog, "I Hate Cilantro: A Look Inside the Life of a Cilantro Hater and Food Lover." Ms. Hollingsworth says she now lies to waiters, telling them she's allergic to cilantro. "People take you seriously that way," she says.

Could also explain why I hate pico de gallo, which tastes the same to me.

Modernity and Spiritual Autism: A Question of Chickens and Eggs

I have previously diagnosed modernity as the ascendence of rebellion against the order of being. And this, I have argued, arises from spiritual autism, the inability to experience the order of being as sacred. The predictable result is the demand for ever-more freedom: first political freedom, then freedom from want or need, then freedom from social conventions, from morality, and finally (I hope, anyway) from biology itself. (Taxpayer-subsidized elective sex changes for all!)

I have, in other words, regarded insensibility to the sacred as having causal priority over rebellion agaisnt the order of being. I wonder now if that is the correct ordering of things. Is it possible that man's atheism is instrumental -- that he denies God because he yearns to be free of the order of being, not vice-versa. It is the distinction, in other words, between spiritual autism as akin to literal autism (a simple pathological defect of understanding, will, and spirit) and as the intentional affectation of ignorance so as to rationalize the unfettering of one's will from basic rational and ethical considerations.

Discuss!

Masturbation, Prostrate Cancer, Stats, and Science

Remember that famous study according to which men who masturbate more frequent are less likely to develop prostate cancer, the one that has since been used as evidence that everyone everywhere simply must masturbate and if you disagree then you want people to get cancer? You know the one. (The idea, supposedly, is that routine masturbation flushes out the carcinogens that build up in the prostate without exposing the masturbator to the risks of STD transmission). I recently came across a study ("Sexual activity and prostate cancer risk in men diagnosed at a younger age," BJU International, 2009) which refines that finding -- specifically, finding that it only applies to men in their 50's. Masturbation exposes younger men to greater risk of prostate cancer. Who would've thought drowning your body in steroidal hormones would be bad for you?!

That got my gears turning in light of my recent pondering about statistics and the scientific enterprise, so I sought out a copy of that original study. I couldn't find one, but every newspaper report I found about it strongly suggests the original study was merely correlational. That stands to reason since it was probably intended to be exploratory, i.e., hypothesis-generating, the first in a longer line of research that, for whatever reason, seems not to have materialized.

Look at it this way. Suppose this study had not simply been compromised by type I error, measurement error, improper sampling, or any of the other problems that bedevil modern methodological research. Suppose, in other words, that men who masturbate really are at lower risk for prostate cancer later in life. Is the only possible interpretation available to understand this that nonmasturbation causes cancer? Is it completely impossible that anything else at all could relate these two things to one another? Isn't it possible that, say, the antecedents of prostate cancer inhibit sex drive? Problems with the prostate are, after all, associated with all kinds of sexual dysfunction, including anorgasmia and erectile dysfunction. Or that the kinds of healthy behaviors that reduce risk of prostate cancer (such as regular exercise) also boost sex drive (by improving cardiovascular health)?

So what we have is what is probably a perfectly reasonable statistical analysis which lends itself to a very, very narrow, exploratory interpretation -- within an arbitrary range of certainty probably inflated by the failure to meet methodological assumptions to violations of which those tests are not very robust. Which scientistic leftists (who, bear in mind, are so much smarter than you!) have, for whatever reason, misapprehended, falling for what ought to have been a very humiliating mistake warned against on the first or second day of every statistics 101 course.

Is the deception intentional, born of dishonesty in service to an evil agenda of utilitarianism and sexual subversion? Or is it born of ignorance, scientific illiteracy, and functional retardation from a group of people who insist (with the silent collusion of the researchers who never correct their errors) that science alone is the authoritative ground of all knowledge despite their inability to distinguish correlation from causation?