Category: Culture Matters

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

No, not capital punishment or corporal punishment, but Camille Paglia.  From a recent interview:

Do you believe that politics and in particular social justice (i.e., anti-racism and feminism) are becoming cults or pseudo-religions? Is politics filling the void left by the receding influence of organized religion?

Paglia: This has certainly been my view for many years now. I said in the introduction to my art book, Glittering Images (2012), that secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.

But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.

My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite. I take Marxist social analysis seriously: Arnold Hauser’s Marxist, multi-volume A Social History of Art (1951) was a major influence on me in graduate school. However, Hauser honored art and never condescended to it. A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.

That's very good, except for the bit about art substituting for religion.

Matthew Schmitz at First Things:

These are the culture war’s true battle lines. On one side are well-scrubbed members of the managerial class who believe that any constraint on the free movement of labor, goods, and capital is a violation of “global values.” They are fully committed to the central project of neoliberalism: the insulation of markets from democratic pressure. They also wish to protect desire from any legal, cultural, or moral restraint. On the other side are unwashed people of varying political stripes who intuit that economic life should be subject to political authority, which today rests in the nation. They believe in moral norms and national boundaries.

Christians need to practice cultural realpolitik. No explanation of the meaning of marriage, however ­rigorously argued or scrupulously secular, can overcome the power of a managerial elite that is wholly opposed to the kind of society for which Christians hope. Refusal to see this has been fatal to the traditionalists’ cause. While ­arguing against liberal social changes, they have cheered economic policies that harm their natural allies and aid their opponents. They have handed a shovel to their own gravedigger.

Progressives now stand with global capital, as the Pride Parade so clearly shows. Christians in turn should stand with the working class, which is more religious, more diverse, and more patriotic than the managerial elite. Only by reducing inequality and restraining corporations can Christians avoid being buried. Only by challenging the ideology of free markets and open borders can they advance their view of the common good. The struggle between woke capital and the working class will determine the outcome of the culture war.

Fine observations on class, status, and wealth by Victor Davis Hanson. Concluding paragraphs:

Take the case of Nancy Pelosi. She goes by her first name among constituents to stress her bond to common men and women, and yet her net worth is $100 million and she owns a palatial Napa villa. Though she acts ordinary in some ways, she is insulated from the ramifications of her own ideology, which harms the very people she purportedly models herself after. When she dismisses tax cuts and bonuses for the middle class as “crumbs,” are we to assume she is not an out-of-touch elite? Or does “Nancy’s” virtue-signaling politics of redistribution camouflage her own privilege and agenda?

One reason billionaire Donald Trump won the Electoral College was that he was transparent. He did not fake a southern drawl or an inner-city patois in the manner of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Unlike Mitt Romney, he exaggerated rather than apologized for his wealth. His loud clothes, garish jet, and American boosterism were in your face, and allowed Americans to draw their own conclusions—and, in contrast, made vastly rich progressive activists like Tom Steyer and Al Gore seem disingenuous.

Visible class distinctions of the past were a result of pride in achievement and old-fashioned snobbery. But their practical effect was to warn that the interests and agendas of the elite were not always the same as those of the public. Today’s billionaire hipsters blur these ancient distinctions. But just because a Master of the Universe looks like us does not mean that his dogged pursuit of tax exemptions, offshoring and outsourcing, and vertically integrated monopolies is in our interest.

Here:

Should we assume that every people in every land is equally capable of shaping its own destiny? The notion that largely tribal Muslim societies can march to democracy on the same path as Americans who elected their own pastors and collected their own taxes has caused endless mischief. Time and again, Rice’s prescription comes down to “assume a civil society,” where none ever has existed.

[. . .]

Culture doesn’t matter for Condoleezza Rice, who reduces the world to simple ideological categories. Her contribution to misguided American policies has been substantial. America hasn’t begun to pay for the consequences of her mistakes. The Bush Administration and its successor spent over $4 trillion to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nearly 7,000 American dead and more than 50,000 wounded. What do we have to show for it?

Culture matters. This is why a nation has a right to defend and preserve its culture by enforcing its borders and by refusing to allow subversive elements to immigrate. 

We are not all the same whether as individuals or as groups. We don't share the same values or want the same things.  Not all cultures are equally conducive to human flourishing. 

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