Ketanji Brown Jackson. See post for details.
I'm feeling a little lazier than usual this morning, so I'm going to quote some quoteworthy passages from The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self, and we'll see if they arouse me from my torpor.
When G.K. Chesterton was asked what was wrong with the Church, he replied: "I am." When Rousseau asked what was wrong with the world, he declared: civilization. The obvious moral conclusion to which this view of things leads is that the challenge facing humanity is not that of renouncing sin but that of changing the social order. Thus modernity.
The old systems so perfect no one will have to be good.
We've written before of how the left's business model revolves around politicizing psychological, existential and even ontological problems for power & profit. But this isn't easy in a Christianized culture, so it must never stop undermining religion while commandeering the educational establishment, such that people come out of it stupider than when they went in.
Like me, for example. If someone were to ask me what's wrong with higher education, I could well reply: "Bob."
The State imposes obligatory and free instruction, for making a stupid man still stupider at the public expense.
I resemble that remark! Just last night I was telling the boy that when I came out of college I knew less than nothing, being that so much of what I knew wasn't just wrong but truly topside-down and insight-out. On the other hand, I was confident in my ignorance, so there's that: Mssrs. Dunning-Kruger meet Dr. Gagdad.
Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda.
I don't know how intact my mind was, but the point is well taken. I was a bit of a... of an infrahuman animal, or at least a pliable blob of instinct macerated and drifting in the general cultural rot.
Man is an animal that can be educated, provided that he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.
That's a bingo.
We've also written of how the victim culture of the left is the transparent appropriation of a vulgarized and enfabled Christianity, which is why it only works in a post-Christian culture, i.e., one that was once Christian but is still rolling down the tracks of history from sheer momentum, since any connection to the engine of the divine victim has been severed.
Bailie identifies Rousseau as patient zero in this civilizational disease and deformation, for
His innocence depended on his claim to be a victim. In retrospect we can now see that Rousseau deserves the dubious distinction of being the person who discovered and popularized a piece of moral prestidigitation that now goes by the name of victimary thinking, a curiosity that floods a moral environment shaped by Christianity with so many claims to the solicitude that Christianity accords to victims that the moral system, overloaded with such claims, collapses in empathy fatigue and is easily overrun with Rousseau epigones elbowing one another for their moment in the sun -- or, perhaps better, their moment as the Son.
I don't know if we want to go so far as to label Rousseau sane, but another writer suggests that "his persecution saved his sanity," which is a psychologically astute remark, since there are millions of people whose tenuous claim to sanity depends not only upon having someone to hate, but equally important, to be hated in return.
It's why they never stop projecting such outrageous ideas and impulses into our heads, from racism to sexism to transphobia and all the others. Imagine unhappiting such an incontinent psychic worldspace of paranoid delusion!
Social problems are the delightful refuge of those fleeing from their own problems.
Thus, the leftist has the privilege of participating in her own subjugation.
We'll have more to say about this subject in coming days, since our current book is The Voegelin Reader. It's somewhat surprising that he appears nowhere in the A. of the S., since I see many connections. Then again, I see connections between anything and everything, so that's not dispositive.
Back to the greasy pols of victimhood: think of how the entire argument of the left vis-a-vis state mandated racial discrimination hinges upon this. Nowhere was the debate more heated than over the heretical idea that Asians could be victimized by Africans, when the university is far from the only place where such hate crimes occur. And now they accuse Asians of being hateful allies of us white supremacists, so, welcome to the clubbed.
Imagine being as stupid as Ketanji Brown Jackson. She is truly the poster child for the sick systematic racism she defends. I suggest we rename Dunning-Kruger KBJ Syndrome. Or maybe Joy Reid Syndrome. Can you believe she only got into Harvard because of her race? I shan't believe it!
Pity the egalitarian. What a misfortune to ignore that there are ranks and ranks above our mediocrity.
The left's radicalization of "the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner" has led to... whatever the Current Thing:
The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition (Bailie).
I see Voegelin raising his hand in the back, but he'll have to be patient. Yes, Nicolás?
Socialism is the philosophy of the guilt of others.
The left is made up of individuals who are dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with who they are.
If the leftist is not persecuting he feels persecuted.
"Social justice" is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.
The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another's goods but the one who defends his own.
When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence.
Blogger's pet!
Pipe down, Eric. I said we'll get to you, and we will. It doesn't help that it takes you a whole book to say what Nicolás does in a sentence. If only someone could distill those 34 volumes into a convenient 400 page anthology... (https://www.amazon.com/Eric-Voegelin-Reader-Politics-Consciousness/dp/0826222897/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1HNTSC3RN28V2&keywords=the+voegelin+reader&qid=1688579715&s=books&sprefix=the+voegelin+reader%2Cstripbooks%2C175&sr=1-1).
14 comments:
The State imposes obligatory and free instruction, for making a stupid man still stupider at the public expense.
I managed to get through college taking a bare minimum of English/ writing classes. According to my alma mater, I actually took far less than the minimum, but was able to argue my way past the requirements with a writing sample and a persuasive discussion with the dean of the English department. Truth was, after reading the school newspaper and occasionally encountering English majors, I was legitimately concerned that if I took writing classes there I would indeed come out far stupider than when I went in. That was a couple decades ago, I shudder to think how much worse it must be today.
I think I was saved by my adolescent rebellion, since I still was one at age 30.
A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt.
College:
It is a place where certain ideologies are so far in ascendency that they cannot be discussed let alone criticized: America’s endemic racism, climate-change catastrophism, and patriarchy lead the list. These should be understood not as systems of belief so much as symptoms of cultural confusion. Contemporary college is so lacking in a coherent intellectual core that anything that students run into that rings of passionate advocacy wins admiration. Black Lives Matter zealotry, transgender raving, antisemitic bloodlust, and postcolonial or indigenous fabulism each attract cultic worshippers who mistake their idols for “critical thinking.” Why not? They have been brought up to believe that “critical thinking” means attacking whatever stands in the way of today’s version of “social justice.”
On the other hand, what a fun place to be an adolescent disrupter challenging the pieties and orthodoxies of the NPC authoritarians.
One thing that's been interesting to see is how some of the younguns push back against a lot of the wokeness. They go out of their way to say the most outrageously racist things to and about each other, they mock a lot of the pride BS that's constantly shoved down their throats at school, and when they get a glimpse of something real and true they tend to latch on for dear life. It's weirdly convenient to be a rebellious adolescent in a time when living according to the truth is truly a revolutionary act.
Reminds me of this by JP
Re. Voegelin, Internet Archive has a pretty big collection of books both by and about him, in case anyone wants to dive down that rabbit hole without committing to the price tag.
Those are all free? Some are quite accessible, such as The New Science of Politics and Political Religions.
All free, you just need to sign up and it's a virtual library. They also have music, software, and a ton of other stuff which I admittedly don't use. It's a great resource especially for older, hard-to-find materials sometimes. For a lot of my kids' school texts, that's how I get them now. Probably saved us a couple hundred backs the past two years.
"Bailie identifies Rousseau as patient zero in this civilizational disease and deformation,"
I'd go along with that, so long as we don't put the cart before the horse, and instead recognize that the disease came first (or at least modernity's mutation of it), courtesy of Descartes' viral DIY (Doubt It Yourself) Reality, without which, no one would've paid much attention to Rousseau's whining.
Julie said..."Re. Voegelin, Internet Archive has a pretty big collection of books both by and about him..."
Yup,I read his book on Hegel being a gnostic sorcerer, from IP. Some you don't even need to 'check out'. 👍👍
"moral prestidigitation...victimary thinking...empathy fatigue...Rousseau epigones...."
Gotta write these down!
In my little world, the problem with the church is all the mammon. Which leads to hate, which leads to suffering, which leads to climate change denialism.
Think about it dear Christian reader. Why isn’t climate change embraced as proof positive of the revelations revealed in Revelations? Wouldn’t there be more hopefelt solidarity in waiting for a rapture and then leaving all those gas guzzling teeth gnashers behind to cannibalize the remains of a sin-devastated earth?
Because we love our cars! And our quads and our lush lawns and all the plastic trinkets and toys we can get our greedy little hands on. So we can laugh at all the dusty little Muslims living small in Arab lands, before being told our mob needs to move on to mocking men wearing women's clothing.
“But the men in Arab lands wear dresses!” I exclaim. “And now they’re trying to steal golf!”
But to no avail. The Kochs and Wilks machinations are far too pervasive. Word has it, they’re trying to rewrite the Book of Revelations so that trans groomers were the ones they'd predicted to bring about the end of the world.
Which begs the question: If getting raptured is supposed to be a really good thing, then why are we trying to stop it?
We've written before of how the left's business model revolves around politicizing psychological, existential and even ontological problems for power & profit.
This is literally projection. Modern capitalism is all about politicizing psychological, existential and even ontological problems for power & profit.
Wouldn’t it seem more credible to say that the left’s business model fails because the concentrated power it demands leaves everybody else subject to the psychological whims of those who gain that power? Or that part where nepotistic crony elites arise in leftist environments too, leaving their own young hopeless enough to want to quiet quit themselves into video game incel oblivion, just like ours do in our own late-stage capitalism.
Sheesh. Didn’t anybody learn anything from watching our great movies of great cultural significance, Wall Street and Bananas? It’s not the quality of the system that matters, but the quality of the elites we allow to dominate our perceptions. Jesus needs to be our elite that dominates our perceptions, doncha think?
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