Thursday, June 25, 2020

Volk Lives Matter

The moment we're living through seems more consequential than can be discerned from the usual media hysteria.

Come to think of it, being that the media is always hysterical, it is impossible to determine the importance of an historical event based upon how Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or the New York Times react to things. Besides, is girlish hysteria ever the appropriate response to anything?

More generally, it is difficult if not impossible to gauge the cosmo- or world-historical importance of this or that present moment. Some people magnify the moment out of all proportion, while others can sleepwalk through the most significant events in history. (As to the latter, one must only notice how the MSM is ignoring what is by far the greatest political scandal in American history.)

So, we're attempting to use our pure Coon Vision to drill down to the ground of this moment, in order to discern what's really going on. As mentioned in yesterday's post, we insist that it is possible to do this via the Pure Thought described therein, i.e., to read the Signs of the Times.

And again, this does not mean it can be exhaustively described in an apodictic, systematic way, because this would constitute ideological Gnosticism and not open engagement with the ground; it would reduce to the wrong answer, whereas a Raccoon is always in search of the right questions in the correct order.

All we're asking for is a little peek outside Plato's Cave or beneath Jeffrey's Rug, and we are absolutely convinced that this is possible, otherwise there would be no need to put the honest prophets to death.

Now, this hardly means we cannot read the signs incorrectly. We all know this happened once, and we've already apologized for it. No prophet bats 1.000, not even Petey. We admit when we are wrong, even if a part of us still believes the Monkees will some day enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Let's begin with an analogy. Let's say the historical moment is like an ocean. Certain qualities of the ocean are apparent -- waves, tides, wind currents -- while others are hidden, for example, large scale circulation and depth. Who could tell by looking at the ocean that certain currents have been stably flowing for thousands of years?

Indeed, Prof. Wiki claims that some currents have "a transit time of about 1000 years" and that current velocities can range "from fractions of centimeters per second" to sometimes more than a meter per second.

This makes the analogy even more useful than I had hoped, because history also flows at different rates of speed in ways that are impossible to discern by looking at the surface, AKA journalistically.

To take only the most obvious example, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection continue to reVerberate and flow through history, usually in an imperceptibly slow way, occasionally in dramatic fashion (for example, in the American revolution, which was at once rooted in a generation-long spiritual awakening which was in turn nested in a much longer arc of salvation and evolution, AKA salvolution).

We're in danger of running out of time before we ever get to the bloody point. Perhaps I should just jump ahead to the point, and flesh it out out as we proceed.

Much of what I'm about to say has been provoked by another providential collision with a timely book, this one called The Selfhood of the Human Person. It is so dense with implications that it's a slow read, even though the material itself isn't beyond the abilities of the average Christian Subgenius.

Concur with this reviewer:

This is a brilliant essay on the human person following the personalist/phenomonological line of thought (a philosophical approach taken by our beloved pope John Paul II).

To do this book justice, a single reading does not suffice; it needs several readings, not because it is hard to follow -- not at all! Crosby is very readable -- I found it very comprehensible and I am not trained in philosophy.

No, it is simply because there is so much in this book; such as the role of immanence and transcendence in the human person -- what does it mean to say that persons possess a kind of incommunicability?

What I want to focus on is the critical distinction between the group/collective and the individual/person, and how the Present Moment is showing us a very different conception of this from the traditional American and Christian view (the former current thoroughly embedded in the latter, as per the above).

For us -- i.e., for both Christians and Americans -- the individual is not only sacred, but a kind of intra-historical telos. You could say that the achievement of the Mature Man is the point of this whole cosmo-historical flow, and that it took a very long time to get here (only 50,000 years or so of human development).

But now we are faced with a very different historical movement (to be precise, it is an anti-historical movement, a turning back from maturity) that wants to efface individuality and plunge us back into the tribe, the race, the volk.

And just look at the intellectual and emotional maturity of the human specimens producing and produced by this movement! You can't reason with them, any more than you could teach algebra to a pig or economics to AOC.

Identity politics is a lack thereof, i.e., of proper identity and personhood; or, it is collective identity effacing personal identity rooted in trinitarian intersubjectivity.

To be continued....

45 comments:

Gagdad Bob said...

Exactly:

Isn’t it fundamental to all Bible-based religions that we are all created in God’s image, that God has no race and that Adam and Eve, from whom we all descend, had no race? If you are a Christian, do you see Christians of other races first as fellow Christians or first as members of their race?

... Does an ideology that affirms the significance of race have an honorable pedigree? Has it ever led to anything good? Isn’t that exactly what Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan advocated?

Anonymous said...

It was mostly blacks who demolished the statue of the heroic abolitionist Heg, in Madison.

This is what a mob looks like. Not much different from the NFL fan mobs of old, tearing up their city in celebration of winning the Super Bowl, exuberant in their mass movement, oblivious to sanity. Tribal identity ideologies are just milder versions of the same thing. We get to feel more powerful for a while.

I doubt any of them will come forward and say: "Aw damn. All we saw was a statue of a white guy standing in front of a big government capitol building... Sorry."

Sometimes reform is as messy as a Super Bowl win.

Cousin Dupree said...

I liked Dems more when they were just sleepy sheep instead of woke volk.

Petey said...

Agreed: "the focus on race needs to be replaced with a focus on the cognitively-challenged of any race. THAT'S the issue after all." Has anyone ever heard an Antifa member or BLM activist who wasn't retarded or disabled in some way?

julie said...

But now we are faced with a very different historical movement (to be precise, it is an anti-historical movement, a turning back from maturity) that wants to efface individuality and plunge us back into the tribe, the race, the volk.

I still think we should round up every rioter and agitator, every looter and statue toppler (including those who just encourage and support it from the comfort of their own homes) who shrieks about the horror of America, and send them on a one-way trip to the communist utopia or 3rd world paradise of their choice. They get what they want, we get what we want, everyone wins.

It's not about race, it's about reality.

Anonymous said...

As someone pointed out, the problem with assessing history, even at a distance, is the over-simplification that comes with judging the past through the prism of current fashionable morals. Historical Good Guys, over time, become Bad Guys. Thomas Jefferson’s status as Good Guy was over-simplified, likewise his current status as Bad Guy. History is a disturbingly tangled web and it requires the kind of study and effort that are beyond most people, particularly the tenured these days.

And it takes real effort and struggle to become a genuine individual. Seduction by the collective is easy to understand; it’s a vacation from personal responsibility. And it can bestow the feeling that one is actually “spiritually evolving”, depending just how utopian the collective vision is.

Hey, sharks swim around in the deep currents, and some sharks are said to incredibly aged. One such photographed recently is thought to have been alive in Shakespeare’s time. These guys, metaphorically, are “sharkoons” ...... “sharcoons”? Anyway, they inhabit the depths and know the deep currents.

will

Anonymous said...

The first step is getting them to say "ask" instead of "aks". The second would be extensive study courses in the philosophical theories of Polybius, Jefferson and Michels.

But my battle lies elsewhere, mostly against the scourge of techno. There's something really wrong with the entire band consisting of just one guy pushing buttons and turning dials. A truly bad sign of the times.

I would go back to my mothers old country, but it's a techno paradise.

julie said...

Will, that's a good way to put it. They're not spiritually evolving, they're suffering from nitrogen narcosis...

Anonymous said...

Christian faith and salvation is at the individual level - it is not at the group or collective level. It is a one to one relationship - creator to creature and back. Christianity is not compatible with any form of collectivism and therefore must be eliminated by any and every means necessary. All forms of collectivism require people to be sheep that can be herded into pens and controlled.

American greatness is rooted in individualism which is rooted in the personal relationship between each individual creature and their creator.

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes and no. In my opinion, a trinitarian metaphysic properly situates the group/individual complementarity without defaulting to one side or the other, i.e., anarchy or libertarianism on one side, socialism and fascism on the other.

Gagdad Bob said...

There's also the whole body of Christ thingy, which certainly speaks to a higher group unity that transcends the primitive tribalism of the woke volk.

julie said...

I can't wait to see more of this. The only sad thing about this video is that an army of like-minded individuals aren't walking up to join him in taking out the trash.

River Cocytus said...

The problem is, you can't *avoid* race. It's not possible in our current era to address the significance of race because rather than being defined in a logical fashion, it is a mere tool of politics, kind of like trying to define what the difference between a Hatfield and a McCoy was during the feud.

A good example of this confound is that Africans and Black (African) Americans are probably not the same race of people, if rigorously defined. For starters, Black Americans have a significant degree of European admixture that is not present in Africans at all.

Likewise, when you look at the racial ideas Hitler's crew came up with, they were glosses based on common sentiment, and useful only for channeling common sentiment. It's hard to overstate how they were based on a kind of naturalistic metaphysics; not nature because not justifiable at all empirically, but not really metaphysics because unable to establish a logical consistency necessary to be genuinely metaphysical.

Yet in all of this remains that diversity is a disaster, people want to be with people like them (and race, as perceived, is a dimension of this) and so on. Even more than this, there are genuine conflicts between groups of people and a number of those definitely fall along racial lines. Our government, rather than seeking to remediate these conflicts, stokes them for its (various) reasons.

The thing I think we can agree is that these divisions can only be resolved in the Body of Christ. There is absolutely no other hope.

Gagdad Bob said...

Interesting that volks who claim it is impossible to know what it's like to be black also claim to know exactly what it's like to be white -- interesting, as in "the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise."

Anonymous said...

Identity politics is a lack thereof, i.e., of proper identity and personhood; or, it is collective identity effacing personal identity rooted in trinitarian intersubjectivity.

Fancy language! So beautifully structured, it's almost like a work of art. First, tell blacks for a few hundred years that they aren't really persons by law or custom. Then when they get tired of that and try to organize to demand their rights as persons, tell them that in doing so they are "effacing personal identity".

If they awarded a Pulitzer for pompous pseudo-intellectual justification of racism, you would definitely be a nominee!

Anonymous said...

In other words, anti-racism is racism.

Dolf said...

First, tell Germans for a few hundred years that they aren't really entitled to lebensraum by law or custom. Then when they get tired of that and try to organize to demand their rights as a race, tell them that in doing so they are "effacing personal identity"!

River Cocytus said...

@dolf

Interestingly, I'd argue that neo-nazis, more than the average national socialist in that era, effaces their identity. At least the original national socialists had a living Leader; the modern kind only have notions about their race.

As a general law, as it has progressed, democracy has become more insane. Certainly there have been outbreaks of extreme democracy from time to time that come and go-- its general telos however remains a progression towards insanity.

As an aside, our founders did not want democracy... and did some work to arrest its development with the Constitutional government (our second government.) It was not a stable system - you can trace the first real failures in it to about the time that the last of the founders died.

Anonymous said...

First, tell Germans for a few hundred years that they aren't really entitled to lebensraum by law or custom. Then when they get tired of that and try to organize to demand their rights as a race, tell them that in doing so they are "effacing personal identity"!


Yeah that's a real parallel situation alright. What a mind.

It's pretty impressive to accomplish Holocaust denial and slavery denial both within such a short space.

Anonymous said...

You left out pronoun denial.

Anonymous said...

Look, men can menstruate, and looting a widescreen is reparations for slavery, bigot!

Anonymous said...

So the Christopher Columbus statue in Boston which was beheaded shall be replaced.

Apparently Native Lives Matter are still incensed over America’s discovery. In close voting for whose head shall replace the severed head, it’s still a dead heat between Tom Brady and Donna Summer. However, votes for Bill Belichick are mounting, mostly due to the fact that it’s easier to sculpt an evil emperor-ish hoody than it is mellow flowing locks or an angry buzzcut.

Practical people those Bostonians, in spite of their notorious liberality.

Anonymous said...

No racism here!

Anonymous said...


Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell
Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his ax
See the raw hide lash rip the skin from their backs -

Dylan, from My Own Version Of You

w.

Petey said...

As the stupid are surprised by stupidity and the corrupt by corruption, the racists of the left are surprised by racism. Or pretend to be, anyway.

Anonymous said...

Racist NY Times shocked, shocked by racism.

Petey said...

Institutionalized racism will persist so long as does the institution of the Democrat party.

Friedrich said...

Let us admire the skillful counterfeiting with which white Democrats imitate the trademarks of virtue, even its resounding tinkle, the golden sound of anti-racism!

Anonymous said...

The problem with always blaming the Democrat party for everything is the color of their pills. As we all know, we have the red pillers and we have the blue pillers, which of course correspond to the colors of their ideologies.

But unbeknownst to either, let alone disregarded, there is another color.

They are the black pillers. The doomers, the nihilists, the hopeless cynicals who believe that neither red nor blue will ever do anything for them. I do believe that these are the rioters we've been talking about.

Petey said...

Ultimately there can be only two pills: God or nihilism. The rest is evasion.

Cousin Dupree said...

Resistance to Trump is obedience to Karen.

Anonymous said...

Their numbers are growing Bob. If Christians armed with red pills don't work, then we may have to use our guns.

Gagdad Bob said...

"May"?

Anonymous said...

I'm currently working on a white pill, but the FDA found out so it'll be a while before the marketing can happen.

Anonymous said...

I haven't been this upset since I found out that Don Knotts was a womanizer.

It's always something with you damned people!

Cousin Dupree said...

I haven't been the same since Bob Crane got whacked.

Cousin Dupree said...

And what about when Liberace was outed? I'm still processing that.

Anonymous said...

Anyways...

I've never seen a phenomena like so many black pillers rioting before. A few depressed souls in mama's basement? Maybe. Probably been that way since Schopenhauer. But tens of thousands of creepy young Schopenhauers taking to the streets? Not really.

The Romans kept their creepy young mobs under control with bread, circuses and well-armed centurions. Plus if you didn't like it, you could either become a gladiator or just off yourself, honorably. I don't know how such things can be accomplished in the modern age.

Cousin Dupree said...

It's not about race, it's about dysfunction. Why does our society produce so many dysfunctional people?

Easy. Just take an average person of any race and remove father, a functioning educational system, and religiosity, and indoctrinate him into believing his dysfunction is due to another race. That's not just a recipe for disaster but a roadmap for Democrat success at the polls.

Anonymous said...

Hello Elitist Overlord here.

Take your medicine. Any color pill is fine.

Work your ass off.

Pay your taxes on time and in full.

Let us handle the riots.

Any Questions? No?

Alright then. Get to it. You get a 30 minute lunch and two 15 minute breaks. And that means on weekends too.

Anonymous said...

Cousin Dupree is on KP and will remain so for one full month.

julie said...

Good lord, I knew there was nothing original about today's lunatic left, but I had no idea the presentation was this rigidly archetypal:

Fresh from 1868, the Karens have always been with us (emphasis mine):

"To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own."

Anonymous said...

It's worse. And I know that Julie, devoted critic of the latest satanic avante garde expressions, will appreciate this.

During that rare occasion when a doomer pulls back his hoodie or black beanie to reveal his hair, do not look. It’s as horrifying as a badly pruned shrub. Two large tufts of hair will jut outwards crazylike, parted evenly into halves by a large bald spot. I don't think that Schopenhauer got many chicks either.

Speaking of incels, I’d like to think that I can empathize, somewhat.

As a high school teen I was a year ahead and at least three years behind, physically. That’s about four years smaller than my peers. I witnessed the evils of sexual evolution/sinning when my once beloved kindergarten girl friends, now beautiful young women, could only see me as somebody to seek advice from regarding their alpha jock boyfriends. They’d complain that their boyfriends would beat people up, race cars while drunk, treat them badly and cheat on them all the time. They’d cry: “How can I get them to change?”

Of course I’d supress the urge to do my best Sam Kineson: “YOU CANT!! BECAUSE THEY’RE FUCKING ASSHOLES YOU IDIOT!! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

Of course I couldn’t do that. I far too nice. I was always the nice little friend, always helpful and always trying to be a good Christian brother.

Over time, sometimes much time, my attractive female friends did eventually grow up to settle for reasonably nice doctors or dentists or somebody else good at making lots of money. And luckily so did I. Grow up. Finally. When I was like 25 or something, reaching normal size. It was like, gee thanks God. But maybe he had plans.

Fortunately I also did wind up handsome. But the happy ending didn’t happen for me, at least not right away. I was now socially backwards from having been teeny tiny most of my life. I was utterly clueless about human mating rituals and what really made men attractive to the opposite sex, despite of the baloney the opposite sex proclaimed. Sure, I did have the occasional bored middle aged wife at the grocery store “accidentally” dropping cucumbers into my shopping cart. My friends mother did keep patting me on the hiney at a bar once, but she was really drunk. And I was hit on by gay males mistaking my naivite for latency all the time. But all that was a long time ago.

So I can empathize with todays blackpill incels. But I think there’s more to it than just being an ugly, wimpy, nice, introverted loser with no dates. It used to be a guy like that could just walk down the street and get a job at a grocery store or gas station, or as a painter. If he stayed off the drugs, he could work his way up and successfully land an equally ugly, wimpy, nice, introverted wife, buy a home together, and live a life of constant bickering when not watching game shows on TV.

Today Omega males have far fewer opportunites the way Omegas from my generation once had. I really don’t think the reason for all the angst is just video games, liberal and social media. The opportunities for them are going away. Maybe we need to help them.

Anonymous said...

Julie, history is cycles within cycles within cycles, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. On occasion you find a cycle that honestly believes that it will wrest itself from the wheel of cycles. Nah.

Now, *individuals* can transcend cycles, mass of people, no.

w.

Anonymous said...

Is it possible to avoid another cycle by making sure the right individuals are in power, in the first place?

Throwing out the bums has gotta be easier than we know.

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