Category: Decline of the West

Moral Community and Civil War

Malcolm Pollack writes, and I respond in blue:
 
Visited your blog today . . . and saw this striking passage:
 
But also: haven't the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all? 
 
I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?
 

It's not verboten – I think it's pretty clear that the foe has already asked it of our side and found us fit for exclusion. (Joe Biden's "Red Speech" made that plain enough.)

BV: Yes. Biden's 'semi-fascist' is a weasel-word equivalent in meaning to 'fascist,' which itself is an abuse of a legitimate term.  The Left's favorite 'F' word is a toxic blend of psychological projection and Orwellian subversion of language. Leftists drain the term of its descriptive meaning so as to employ it as a semantic bludgeon.

But it is chilling, nevertheless, to be asking it in serious immediacy, rather than as a speculative, worst-case example of where we might get to if we aren't careful. It seems though, that now we really are pretty much there, and that is – even for folks like us who have been thinking so hard about the road ahead for so long – a grim mile-post.
 
BV: Yes, we appear to be reaching a critical juncture at which  we will either put the destructive Left in its place and start the long march back to comity, or else advance into hotter and hotter forms of civil war, thereby weakening ourselves over against our geopolitical adversaries who believe we are ripe for collapse if the right shocks are administered. (For example, what has the Biden administration done to protect the power grid? Nothing. The ChiComs could easily knock out most if not all of it. The Biden admin, however, thinks delusionally that the non-threat of 'white supremacy' and the very distant possible threat of 'climate change' are imminent existential threats.) 
 
What makes our predicament so dire is that the worst of the threats to the Republic are not external, but internal, emanating as they do from the extreme ('woke') Left which has infiltrated all of our institutions aided and abetted by a vast number of Useful Idiots  who do not understand what is happening.
 
I have read a great deal in recent years about the history of civil war, and when things get to this point – when large numbers of people begin seriously questioning whether their fellow-citizens have forfeited their claim to moral inclusion (which really is the same as saying they are no longer to be seen as fellow humans) – then a nation is approaching the final exit. 
 
BV: Yes, if you are using 'human' normatively and not merely biologically. I am reminded of someone who when asked how many men he had killed, replied in effect, "Not a one, I killed only communists."
 
What strikes me here is to look back over your own slow and cautious approach to this point over these many years: always thoughtful, always trying to hang on to the better angels of the American nature, and always wary of the most inflammatory and divisive voices on the Right. 
 
BV: You understand me, Malcolm, and I am deeply appreciative of that fact as well as of your gentlemanly conduct even when I was unduly harsh in my responses to you. You and 'Jacques' [a Canadian academic philosopher who must use a pseudonym to protect himself against the depredatory Left which is apparently even more vicious up there than down here] have had an influence on me.
 
But here you are. (And so am I.) When those who hate you have branded you as unpersons, and make clear that they want you dead and gone, to keep your own circle expansive enough to include them is just unilateral disarmament, and suicidal folly. Woe that we should have lived to see such times in America.
 
BV: I should make clear, though, that when I asked in the passage you quoted "whether the barbarians have forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration," I was not asking rhetorically. I was not making a statement but genuinely  asking a question. And the same goes for the question whether they, the barbarians, form a moral community with us at all.  By barbarians I mean  the BLM and Antifa thugs and all who would erase our history and traditions together with the criminal element in which blacks are 'over-represented,' as well as all the civilized-looking enablers of the explicitly barbarous from Biden on down, and let's not leave out the hidden operatives who pull the strings of puppets such as Biden.
 
As a philosopher, my interest in these questions is not just here-and-now practical, although it is that inasmuch as I cannot do philosophy if I am dead or in prison. I am no Boethius.  My interest is also theoretical.  We are not just clever land mammals, bits of the Earth's fauna. We are also persons, rights-possessors, and as such equal regardless of race, sex, and other biological differences.  Here is a mighty bulwark against the biologism of the (true) fascists.   To the extent that the alt-Right moves in that direction I must oppose them.
 
This bring me to the topic of tribalism. I have been strenuously opposing it. Unfortunately, it appears to be the historical norm (statistically, not normatively).  If the reversion to the tribal is inevitable, then I fear that humanity is finished given the existence of WMDs.
 
Still and all, I have been considering that a pro tempore white tribalism might be necessary, though not in itself desirable, given the vicious assault on Western civilization that we are seeing.  We should discuss this, Malcolm, practically and theoretically. What is to be done by people like us who are not about to withdraw into the petty particulars of private life, but want to do our bit to preserve a civilization that has made it possible for us and so many around the world to live long and productive lives. You and I are not about to acquiesce in the suicide of the West or accept dhimmitude, whether of the Islamist, Communist, or 'woke' variety. And so it becomes quite the pressing question whether our political enemies have forfeited their normative humanity and can still be tolerated. Toleration, you have heard me say, is a great value of the classical liberalism of the Founders. But toleration has limits, as I have also repeatedly said. We are approaching those limits, and the patience of patriots is wearing thin.
 
If the USA, as she was founded to be, collapses, there will be nowhere left to escape to. The rest of the Anglosphere is shot.

‘Democrats’ Aping National Socialists

Biden - Hitler

Excellent commentary here:

In two years, the Nazis went from being a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the German government and people. It was then that they unleashed their previously subdued anti-Semitism, from boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation (Nuremberg laws) and, finally, to the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that, if we asked any German in 1932 whether it would be okay to enslave and murder Jews, he would most certainly have said no. But within two years, Jews would officially be defined as an inferior race and have their political and economic freedoms curtailed. Within a decade, millions would be murdered.

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came,” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public.

So it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would want you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade. For just over two years, we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold as it’s never held sway before. Consider the following:

In the summer of 2020, Democrats rained hell down on America by allowing, encouraging, and funding urban terrorists who destroyed property, attacked citizens and the police, and killed dozens of people.

In 2020 and beyond, despite years of watching Democrats assail election integrity, anyone who questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election was branded as an anti-democratic conspiracy nut and accused of supporting insurrection.

The riot that occurred on January 6, 2021, was labeled an “insurrection” and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists, and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail. At the same time, among the crowd were provocateurs in whom the FBI was suspiciously uninterested.

By politicizing the Department of Justice, the Biden administration and other Democrats have used the “insurrection” pretense to harass, intimidate, arrest, and jail Trump’s supporters, members of his administration, and his legal team. This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender.

Beginning in 2020, in response to COVID, primarily Democrat-run states and municipalities across the country instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses, and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced school shutdowns, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were unconstitutionally muzzled when the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and de-platform them.

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger; then coerced private enterprises to enforce them. Questioning that policy or non-acquiescence with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime, so the government and allied businesses threatened and destroyed livelihoods.

When Americans stood up to school boards, complaining about their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or being accused of being racists because of the color of their skin, Biden’s Justice Department branded them as terrorists.

The Biden administration’s threatening, intimidating, and jailing of its opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech on September 1, when he stated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” This was not a campaign speech; this was the President officially addressing American citizens…and calling 70 million of them terrorists.

Continue reading “‘Democrats’ Aping National Socialists”

Rod Dreher: Floating Above the Fray as Usual

Here:

We are somewhat insulated from this in America because we don't face the hideous energy crunch that Europeans do. Do you really think, though, that the US is going to be fine when one of our largest trading partners goes belly up? We are going to crash too, and crash hard. A word to my fellow conservatives: if you think the return of the buffoonish Donald Trump is going to be sufficient to deal with what is here, and what is coming, you are almost as deluded as the libs. You are as much a prisoner to emotionally satisfying Narrative as they are. We are in bad, bad trouble, and it's going to get far worse before it gets better. (Emphasis added)

What is your solution, Rod? I have just read your three most recent articles and all I get is more analysis, lamentation, and hand-wringing. What is to be done, my man? And which side are you on? Do you disagree with the policies Trump implemented? Calling the man a buffoon won't cut it; I want to hear a reasoned, fact-based case against Trump.

For some reason, Dreher, blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome, and perhaps in the grip of the womanish side of his personality, cannot look past Trump's somewhat repellent style of self-presentation, his lack of gravitas, his alpha-male strut and stride, to see Trump's virtues.   (Please follow the hyperlink to Tom Klingenstein's sober and superb presentation.)  In consequence, Dreher cannot grasp that Trump is our only hope for turning things around.  This is a well-founded hope because of Trump's accomplishments while in office. He has proven himself as Dick Morris amply explains. De Santis has not proven himself to the same extent, and his being a career politician makes him more likely to cave under pressure. And yet Dreher does command a very clear view of the nasty predicament we are in:

Our leaders are liars and ideologues who are destroying the West. The ruling class — the State, the media, the financial sector, woke capitalism, the universities, every institution — is actively betraying the people they are meant to serve. This is not just crackpot Internet speculation. It is actually happening, right now — and as far as I can tell, the American people are being kept in the dark, figuratively. It's about to become literal in Europe. Watch this clip from Tucker Carlson, one of the few major journalists who tell the truth. He's pointing out that Americans aren't being told that Europeans are teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Very good, Rod. I couldn't agree more with your description of the present state of affairs. But it is just more talk. What do you propose we do?  

The other side of the argument, of course, is that Trump is so repellent to so many that the net effect of supporting him will hurt the conservative cause. And of course it is the cause that matters, not the man Trump.  But unless it can be shown that there is someone more likely to succeed in implementing the cause, we should support Trump.

A political cause that is not implemented is practically nothing. Politics, though informed by theory, is practical, not theoretical. Is that not blindingly evident?

 

Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option

A re-post from 20 July 2015.  Things are falling apart so fast that July 2015 seems  like a long time ago, even to an old man for whom tempus fugit is an understatement. The original posting occurred roughly four and a half years before the annus horribilis of 2020. And here we are more than half-way through 2022. The Amerikan police state is metastasizing as we speak. 87,000 new IRS agents armed with semi-automatic pistols and carbines to persuade the hyper-lawyered billionaire fat cats to 'pay their fair share' — to ape the idiom of Fauxcahontas Warren? Think again you of the ovine and bovine and usefully-idiotic persuasion. It is one of the several modes of what I am now calling the Assault on the Middle. More on this, anon.

……………………………..

Excerpt:

You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.

I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.

Granted, there is no formula:  there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option.  But there ought to be discussion — not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece — of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.  

Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
 
What from your fathers you  received as heir,
Acquire if  you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)

So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse.  The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left.  You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure.  All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever.  The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth.  You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.

Is this an alarmist scenario?  I hope it is.  But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options. 

It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.  A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal.  One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially.  One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one:  how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?

And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance.  This is especially vexing for Christians.  Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed?  On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion.  It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from.  On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?

If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.

We are indeed living in very interesting times.  How can one be bored?

Adeimantus, Machiavelli, Bloom, and Strauss

Owl of Minerva bookishly bewingedRecent events make it clear that the West is on the wane. The sun is setting on the Land of Evening. As the West goes under, the philosopher, like the proverbial owl of Minerva, spreads his wings in the gathering dusk so as to attain an altitude from which to survey the passing scene.  He soars and he strains, to com-prehend and understand, and if he is of the tribe of Plato, he seeks to discern what might lie beyond the scene he surveys.  His flight is fueled by the thoughts of his great predecessors.

 

I found the following in Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic which is appended to his translation thereof. (Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Basic Books, 1968, p. 371, correction and emphasis added.)

Adeimantus' objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli's: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities. It is foreign policy which makes the devotion to the good life within a city impossible [sic; read: possible]  One must be at least as powerful as one's neighbors and must adopt a way of life such as to make this possible. Poverty, smallness, and unchangingness cannot compete with wealth, greatness, and innovation. The true policy is outward-looking, and cities and men are radically dependent on others for what they must be. Without a response to this objection— which Machiavelli thought to be decisive for the rejection of classical political thought — the very attempt to elaborate a utopia is folly. (p. 371)

My gloss: An enlightened nationalism, while chary of intervention, cannot be isolationist.

And the following I found in Leo Strauss' essay "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, University of Chicago Press, 1988, originally published by The Free Press, 1959, pp. 40-41, emphasis and hyperlink added.

The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He tried to effect, and he did effect, a break with the whole tradition of political philosophy. He compared his achievement to that of men like Columbus. He claimed to have discovered a new moral continent. His claim is well founded; his political teaching is "wholly new." The only question is whether the new continent is fit for human habitation.

In his Florentine Histories he tells the following story: Cosimo de Medici once said that men cannot maintain power with pater-nosters in their hands. This gave occasion to Cosimo's enemies to slander him as a man who loved himself more than his fatherland and who loved this world more than the next. Cosimo was then said to be somewhat immoral and somewhat irreligious. Machiavelli himself is open to the same charge. His work is based on a critique of religion and a critique of morality.

His critique of religion, chiefly of Biblical religion, but also of paganism, is not original. It amounts to a restatement of the teaching of pagan philosophers, as well as of that medieval school which goes by the name of Averroism and which gave rise to the notion of the three impostors. Machiavelli's originality in this field is limited to the fact that he was a great master of blasphemy. The charm and gracefulness of his blasphemies will however be less strongly felt by us than their shocking character. Let us then keep them under the veil under which he has hidden them. I hasten to his critique of morality which is identical with his critique of classical political philosophy. One can state the main point as follows: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a Utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualization is highly improbable. Let us then cease to take our bearings by virtue, the highest objective which a society might choose; let us begin to take our bearings by the objectives which are actually pursued by all societies. Machiavelli consciously lowers the standards of social action. His lowering of the standards is meant to lead to a higher probability of actualization of that scheme which is constructed in accordance with the lowered standards. Thus, the dependence on chance is reduced: chance will be conquered.

I will take a stab at a gloss of the italicized passage. It is a grave error to aim at a utopian resolution of our political predicament. To seek the unachievable best is to preclude the attainment of the achievable good. The pursuit of unrealizable ideals will make hypocrites of us and what is far worse, murderers who will be able to justify mass murder  to achieve perfection as if anything truly straight could ever be made by human effort from the crooked timber of humanity.

 

Jerking (and Twerking) toward Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not to 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 jerk-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 his direction: the end of civilization as we know it.

The Decline of the West Proceeds Apace

Roger Kimball:

Angry at the Gyndes River for sweeping away and drowning one of his sacred white horses, Cyrus decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle. This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past in order that we might gambol undisturbed in distracted present-tense ignorance. An illustrative case in point is the Princeton classics department, where woke educationists panting for relevance recently jettisoned the requirement that its students learn Latin or Greek, never mind both. At the same time, they publicly celebrate the fifty-seven varieties of racial-trans-wonderfulness that have become the focus of academic obsession. It is a situation that is as absurd as it is malignant.

In The Present Age(1846), Kierkegaard described the jaded spirit that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. They continue to look like educational institutions: leafy walks, imposing libraries, impressive buildings. But most of the activities they sponsor are inimical to real education, inciting thousands of puny Cyruses to divert and stymie the waters of tradition in order to polish the mirror of their narcissism.

The sun is setting in the Land of the Evening. Our going under may be inevitable, but there is no use in supposing it to be so. Man up, fight on, calmly but daily. Your alma mater asks for money? Refuse her. That's one thing you can do. All understand it. Money is the common currency of fallen man. 

Memorial Day?

What's to celebrate in a nation so decadent that it cannot preserve its monuments and memorials from leftist thugs and their globalist enablers, a nation so decadent that its 'leaders,' complicit in the erasure of history and the erosion of standards, have no plans to restore what has been destroyed?

Politicians who won't take action are not worthy to honor those who died in action.

An Oligarchic Pathocracy

That may well be what we have going in the good old USA at present. You decide.

Oligarchy: a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes. (Merriam-Webster)

Pathocracy: "A system of government . . . wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people." (Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism,  Red Pill Press, 2022, p.  195.)

What are some characteristics of normal people? Normal people understand and can explain the difference between men and women.  Normal people grasp instantly the unfairness of allowing biological males to compete in female sporting events.   Normal people understand that "Words mean things" (Rush Limbaugh) and must not be hijacked to Left coast destinations. Normal people have moral sense enough to know that it is wrong to lie in the manner of Joe Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas and the rest of the pathocrats in control of the country.  Normal people understand that 'equity' is a sham construct designed to elide the self-evident distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.

From the Pathocracy Blog:

Pathocracy

from Greek pathos, “feeling, pain, suffering”; and kratos, “rule”

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes.

Characteristics

1. suppression of individualism and creativity.
2. impoverishment of artistic values.
3. impoverishment of moral values; a social structure based on self-interest and one-upmanship, rather than altruism.
4. fanatical ideology; often a corrupted form of a valid viable ‘trojan’ ideology which is perverted into a pathological form, bearing little resemblance to the substance of the original.
5. intolerance and suspicion of anyone who is different, or who disagrees with the state.
6. centralized control.
7. widespread corruption.
8. secret activities within government, but surveillance of the general population. (In contrast, a healthy society would have transparent government processes, and respect for privacy of the individual citizen).
9. paranoid and reactionary government.
10. excessive, arbitrary, unfair and inflexible legislation; the power of decision making is reduced/removed from the citizens’ everyday lives.
11. an attitude of hypocrisy and contempt demonstrated by the actions of the ruling class, towards the ideals they claim to follow, and towards the citizens they claim to represent.
12. controlled media, dominated by propaganda.
13. extreme inequality between the richest and poorest.
14. endemic use of corrupted psychological reasoning such as paramoralisms, conversive thinking and doubletalk.
15. rule by force and/or fear of force.
16. people are considered as a ‘resource’ to be exploited (hence the term “human resources”), rather than as individuals with intrinsic human worth.
17. spiritual life is restricted to inflexible and indoctrinare schemes. Anyone attempting to go beyond these boundaries is considered a heretic or insane, and therefore dangerous.
18. arbitrary divisions in the population (class, ethnicity, creed) are inflamed into conflict with one another.
19. suppression of free speech – public debate, demonstration, protest.
20. violation of basic human rights, for example: restriction or denial of basic life necessities such as food, water, shelter; detainment without charge; torture and abuse; slave labour.

Christianity and Individualism

Mark Tooley:

Easter is a timely reminder of Christianity’s development of individualism, which is now widely derided by many on both sides of the political spectrum. 

Yes.

Many on the post-liberal left replace individualism, which they equate with greed and capitalism, with raucous identity politics stressing communal identities based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or some other category of victim group. Many on the post-liberal right disdain individualism as self-centered autonomous materialist hedonism disconnected from family, religion and community, degenerating into endless categories of personal expressivism. They propose hierarchy, tradition and subordination to institutions as alternatives.

That's right.

Easter is the supreme example of extraordinary, supernatural inspired individualism. Jesus the individual, as God Incarnate, redeemed the whole world through His suffering, death and resurrection. He was shunned by all, His people, His followers, His family, yet He sacrificially prevailed against all sin, death and hell. Humanity was not saved by the collective but by one individual.

Jesus is the exemplar of the anti-tribal whether you accept his divinity or not. But isn't the God of the Old Testament a tribal god, the god of the Jews who sticks up for them and smites their enemies?  Maybe so, but God himself is not a member of the tribe of gods. In himself, God is anti-tribal. His identity is not a tribal identity. If we are made in his image and likeness, then we are meant to be individuals too.  Normative individuality is pre-delineated in our divine origin. In simpler terms, God made us to be individuals, and it is our vocation and task to achieve individuation by lifting ourselves out of the social and the tribal from which we must start, but in which we must not remain.  Perhaps  we could read Christ as the highest manifestation and achievement of radical self-individuation.

This fearsome call to the individual has animated all of Christendom and bequeathed to us concepts of individual dignity, purpose, duties and rights, which ultimately resulted in societies that aspired to equality and opportunity for all. What is sometimes called classical “liberalism” is the respect for individuals and their consciences that unfolded across several millennia thanks to the Biblical God’s summons to each person.

This is my view as well. It is presently under assault both from the post-liberal Left and the post-liberal Right, e.g. Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, et al. 

Addressing one prominent contemporary critic of individualism and “liberalism,” Hanssen warns: “[Patrick] Deneen needs to be more careful, in taking aim at radical autonomy, that he doesn’t cast aspersions on the entire tradition in which Christianity has played a crucial role in elevating the dignity of the individual. It is the individual substance of a rational nature that is immortal: not the family, not the community, not the state.”  

Exactly right!  Speaking for myself: 

1) The individual is the primary locus of value, not the family, the clan, the tribe, any group, association, race, sex . . . .

2) Self-individuation is a task, a project, and for the believer, one presumably extending beyond this life and into the next.  We are to become who we are, and to be who we are becoming.  

3) Tribalism is tearing us apart. We are on a path toward increasing social malaise as a result.

4)  The cure for tribal self-identification is not an opposite tribal self-identification. White tribalism, for example, is not  a truly ameliorative and long-term answer to black tribalism.  I do concede, however, that tribalism pro tempore may be tactically necesary, here and there, for purposes of self-defense.

Madeleine Albright Dead at 84

I will now have to leave off calling her 'Madeleine None-Too-Bright,' at least for a time. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, et cetera. This Revolver piece covers the essentials. 

Unfortunately, Madeleine Albright’s long career represents all the failures and mistakes that, in just thirty years, have taken America from its superpower apex to the brink of imperial collapse.

Be it in Eastern Europe or the Middle East or East Asia, a United States that followed the exact opposite of Albright’s foreign policy vision would almost certainly be a richer, happier, and less divided nation than the fading colossus America has become in 2022.

Albright embraced America’s disastrous pattern of global interventionism

As Christopher Caldwell wrote of Albright back in 2003, “For her, every conflict is a replay of the Munich conference of 1938, with a camp of the ‘farsighted’ on one hand and a bunch of ‘appeasers’ on the other.” The best way to be farsighted, it turns out, was to be aggressive in using U.S. force abroad. Albright enjoyed referring to America as “the indispensable nation,” reflecting an assumption that every dispute and every crisis the world over needed, and would benefit from, U.S. meddling and oversight.

According to her own 2003 memoir, during her days as Secretary of State Albright feuded with then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, arguing in favor of more frequent and aggressive use of American military power abroad: “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”

For more than two decades, Albright’s toxic enthusiasm for military force has been the closest thing there is to conventional wisdom in Washington. It is not only the attitude that gave us the Iraq War and 20 years in Afghanistan, but also missile strikes in Syria, undeclared drone war in Yemen, and useless regime change in Libya.

But what really angered me about Albright was her talk of 'fascism' in connection with Donald J. Trump. She was a European who didn't know what fascism is:

Perhaps it makes total sense that such a feminized, passive-aggressive foreign policy tool was instituted by a female “trailblazer” with the childish view of international relations as a bunch of schoolchildren playing in the schoolyard with the United States as the schoolmarm spanking the “schoolyard bullies.”

Albright was a neurotic who saw “fascism” lurking everywhere, in need of aggressive confrontation

Ever since Donald Trump descended the escalator in 2015, America’s most powerful media and tech outlets have been shrieking about the danger of “fascism” in America, and have used this phantom fascism to justify ever-more-restrictive crackdowns on free speech and freedom of association. And Albright, for her part, was proud to lead the chorus in yelping about a fascist danger lurking everywhere, at home and abroad.

For Albright, fascism was indeed lurking everywhere, and the leaders of enemy states were nascent Hitlers in waiting. Fear of lurking fascism drove Albright’s desire to intervene in Kosovo and to contain Saddam Hussein. More recently, it motivated her attacks on domestic political foes. In 2019, in the twilight of her life, Albright published “Fascism: A Warning”, where she argues that fascism “now presents a more virulent threat to international peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II.” Naturally it’s all Donald Trump’s fault:

“I am drawn again to my conclusion that a Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have. Throughout my adult life, I have felt that America could be counted on to put obstacles in the way of any such leader, party, or movement. I never thought that, at age eighty, I would begin to have doubts.

The shadow looming over these pages is, of course, that of Donald Trump. … Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history. On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself. If transplanted to a country with fewer democratic safeguards, he would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead. This frightening fact has consequences. The herd mentality is powerful in international affairs. Leaders around the globe observe, learn from, and mimic one another. They see where their peers are heading, what they can get away with, and how they can augment and perpetuate their power. They walk in one another’s footsteps, as Hitler did with Mussolini—and today the herd is moving in a Fascist direction.

Of course, a lack of concern “with the rights of others” and a willingness “to use violence and whatever other means to achieve its goals” would describe both the foreign and domestic policy of the Globalist American Empire. But for Albright, just like the rest of the D.C. elite class, the “fascist” danger was always among her foes, who needed to be crushed.

Albright is a leading example of how the diversity agenda quashes reasoned thought.

Moral Progress in the West and its Benchmarks

A London correspondent writes,

A question for you: is there a set of verifiable practices that would act as a benchmark for the Western Enlightenment? I can think of (i) widespread (but not universal) respect for science (ii) separation of church and state (iii) end of judicial torture (iv) abolition of slavery, etc.

1) I will assume that moral progress, both individually and collectively, is possible, both in moral theory and in moral practice. This is not obvious inasmuch as one might insist that while there has been moral change, there has been  no moral progress. Progress, by definition, is change for the better, and a moral/cultural relativist will claim that there is no better or worse with respect moral beliefs and practices.  

2) If moral progress is possible, is it also actual? I would say so.  Holding as I do that slavery is a grave moral evil, I also hold that we in the West have made progress in this regard.  The same goes for penal practices. We in the West no longer punish in the barbaric ways still employed in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Example are easily multiplied.

3) Is overall moral progress consistent with a certain amount of moral regress? I would like to say so. Mass murder and mass enslavement in Germany 1933-1945 are recognized in the West for the moral abominations they were. The Germans have come to their moral senses.   But what about the situation in the East under communism, in particular the communism practiced in China as we speak? I am thinking of the forced labor in China's Xinjiang region.

4) We cannot overlook the moral degeneration of the West, which suggests that while we made progress in the West, it is now being undone.  The Biden administration, for example, is the most lawless in American history; as a matter of policy it aids and abets criminality and then lies about what it is doing.

5) As for the benchmarks of progress, the ones listed by my correspondent are essential.  I would also add the following: religious liberty, limited government, the rule of law, equality of all citizens before the law, due process, universal suffrage, open inquiry and academic freedom, free markets, and the right to free speech  and freedom of assembly without fear of reprisal.

More Malcolm on Mass Formation

Here at Motus Mentis, the weblog of Malcolm Pollack.  Pollack is an uncommonly good writer as you will see from the quotation below.  More importantly, he speaks truth against the current madness. In my earlier post on his American Greatness essay, after acknowledging his even-handedness, I suggested that 

. . . he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse.

I assumed that he would accept my mild criticism and he has (emphasis added):

Alas, in such times as these – in the growing heat of a simmering civil war – for an observer to comment on social tectonics from such a remote altitude makes him seem almost blithely unconcerned with the great battle shaping up on the plain far below. As a result, commenters and correspondents have taken me to task for being too even-handed in my description of the phenomenon; for making it seem as if the craziness here in 2022 is symmetrically distributed between both factions in our current social and political conflict. Our old friend Bill Vallicella was among them; you can read his post, and my response (from which some of this post is adapted), here.

I think that’s a fair critique, and in my article I should have made it clear that right now, when it comes to the psychological manipulation of public narratives in order to focus an anxious and atomized public’s attention on objects of fear and loathing, there is no equivalence at all between the two great factions. “Mass formation” in today’s America is overwhelmingly a “Blue”, not a “Red”, phenomenon.

Readers of American Greatness, and of this blog, will need little convincing on this score, but a few points are worth mentioning:

First of all, it is a tremendous advantage in the manipulation of mass opinion to control the flow of information, and for many years now the American Left have controlled mass media, social media, internet-search technology, and education to the point of near-total information dominance.

Second, the artificiality of the public narrative blaring from the towering minarets of our institutions is shown by its transience: as soon as one story collapses (remember “Russian collusion”, and “hands up, don’t shoot”?) another takes its place (think of Jussie Smollett, or “two weeks to flatten the curve”). Likewise, the extent to which these narratives are in fact calculated propaganda offensives is given away by the aggressive censorship of dissenting views. (Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, the old saying goes – “Truth is great, and will prevail” – but to make falsehood prevail requires some assistance.)

Third, that the dominance of the Left’s message in America today relies upon a widespread psychological vulnerability is further demonstrated by the extent to which it has managed to override both tradition and common sense in getting large numbers of people to deny what, until now, have been understood by everyone everywhere to be objectively existing features and categories of the natural world.  To participate in polite society today – or, to put that more accurately, to be able to keep your job, get a college degree, or avoid being deplatformed from most media – we are expected to go along with things that most people know in their hearts are simply not so: that sex and race are purely social constructs; that men can become pregnant and bear children; that biology and heritability have nothing to do with human traits, and with their statistical distribution in populations; that cultures and peoples can be mixed and jumbled together at random without affecting the cohesion and stability of formerly homogeneous societies; that “equality” means that people cannot vary in talents, abilities, and aptitudes; that the greatest threat to American society is “white supremacy”; that everything in the modern Western world, from mathematics to nuclear families to pumpkin-spice lattes, is racist; that intelligence is a meaningless and unquantifiable concept; that when different identity groups perform differently on qualifying tests for education and employment, those tests should simply be discarded; that for nations to control their borders is inherently immoral; that the interests of criminals trump those of law-abiding citizens; that parents should have no say in how their children are educated; that members of various, designated groups are not to be considered responsible agents; that the way to deal with rising crime is to stop arresting people; that the 2020 election was squeaky-clean; that the January 6th protest was an assault on a par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (while the three-day siege of the White House by BLM and Antifa, in which hunrdeds of officers were injured, and the First Family had to be evacuated, was not); that the protests of that summer were “mostly peaceful”; and no end of other obvious falsehoods and absurdities.

Above all, what marks the current mental state of the American Left as psychologically abnormal is its suicidal self-abnegation. I can think of no other example in all of history of a coherent, prosperous and homogeneous society, with a robust civic culture and a proud historical mythos, suddenly deciding en masse to reject and denounce its heritage, declare its cherished cultural traditions shameful and immoral, fling open its borders to engage in deliberate ethnic, religious, and cultural dilution, and cheer on the accelerating displacement of its majority population and the gradual decomposition of cohesion and civil order. This all seems, when compared to the normal behavior of human societies, completely insane.

Considering all this, then, I hope it is clear that, although the phenomenon now being called “mass formation” has been observed in all ages and cultures, and must be considered in some sense a “universal” feature of our nature, its current manifestation in the United States is anything but symmetrical, and is overwhelmingly an affliction of the Left —  and that those of us who wish to have any chance of preserving the great American experiment must, in this hour of crisis, fight it with everything we’ve got.