What is the Evil One up to? That's a question I often ask myself, but again, since the Devil is himself absurd and promotes absurdity in his friends and sympathizers, it can be a fruitless exercise.
In an article in Tablet called France’s Nightmare Is Yours Now: How the Oct. 7 Massacres in Israel Gave Birth to a Global Pogrom, in which the author asks,
What am I watching?
I was staring at my phone in blank incomprehension watching the worldwide demonstrations of enthusiasm that followed the bloodiest pogrom since World War II -- the “gas the Jews!” of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Sydney, the “fuck the Jews!” in London, the Nazi salutes in Paris, the Nazi flags in New York.
I was scrolling through footage from some of the most prestigious universities in America sinking further every day into their own shit -- the Washington University pro-Hamas students yelling “fuck Israel!”
Moreover, there were the
Columbia students gathering to celebrate the massacre in Israel one day after a Jewish student was beaten with a stick outside the main library; the Cherry Hill East high school student who screamed his hatred to his Jewish fellow classmates in the hall; the antisemitic demonstrations at UCLA. There was the Stanford professor who forced his Jewish students to identify themselves before grouping them in a corner so that they could feel “what the Palestinians feel,” the UC Davis associate professor who warned the “Zionists journalists” that they should “fear us” (whoever that “us” is) because “we can find their addresses and their children’s schools,” and who ended her post with hatchets and blood-drip emojis....
Etc., etc., yada yada.
It made no sense.
Except for a nihilist, in which case making no sense is the sense. As Michael Walsh wrote a couple of days ago, "In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,"
I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is… nothing.
To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.
One of the first books I pulled out to in order to review what the Devil might be up to was Fr. Rose's Nihilism. In it he traces a fourfold and seemingly inevitable path from the classical liberalism of the founders to our contemporary illiberal leftists and their openly genocidal sympathies. Rather than starting from scratch, I searched some old posts, and here are some highlights: "the desire for revolution"
is what distinguishes the left from classical liberalism. It "has a theological and spiritual foundation, even if its 'theology' is an inverted one and its 'spirituality' Satanic." The revolutionary impulse is destructive and nihilist at its core, although always disguised as a desire for "change."
Destruction, of course, must precede the change, but it turns out that destruction is the change....
Now, "construction" is not possible in the absence of truth. This is as true on the material plane as it is on the abstract/metaphysical. Just as you cannot build, say, a functioning airplane without knowing about the laws of nature, you cannot have a functioning civilization without knowing about the nature of man....
Rose alludes to the nihilist "revelation" that "there is no truth," which is functionally equivalent to the death of God. For if one is intellectually honest -- and cognitively adequate -- one understands that the choice is between God and Nihilism. There can be no third, except in an imaginary or magical sense....
Formal atheism is merely "the philosophy of a fool," whereas "antitheism is a profounder malady." While the former "errs through childishness" and "plain insensitivity to spiritual realities," the latter "owes its distortions to a deep-seated passion that, recognizing these realities, wills to destroy them."
"It may be doubted, indeed, if there exists such a thing as 'atheism,' for no one denies the true God except to devote himself to the service of a false god." You gotta serve somebody, as the Poet said.
It is important to note that these hyperkinetic zombies are anything but spiritually "lukewarm." Rather, they are on fire for the Evil One, a truth easily discerned in the demented faces of their howling mobs....
Fr. Rose quotes the anarchist Proudhon, who wrote that "The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature.... Every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity.
.... the left's spiritual illness revolves around "envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, rebelliousness, blasphemy -- one of these qualities predominating in any given personality." (He left out raw stupidity and refusal to learn -- or more generally, refuse to submit to, or even recognize, one's superiors -- which is often mingled with the others.)
"This rebellion, this messianic fervor that animates the greatest revolutionaries, being an inverse faith," is driven to destroy its "rival faith." Thus, we commonly see how "doctrines and institutions" are "reinterpreted" by the left, "emptied of their Christian content and filled with a new, Nihilist content" (ibid.).
And lately I've been wondering if anti-theistic nihilism is one of those inverse vertical analogies of the proper kind of nihilism. Is there a theistic or even "Christian nihilism" on which progressive nihilism is parasitic? Toward the end of the book, Rose has this to say:
And indeed the Christian is, in a certain sense -- in an ultimate sense -- a "Nihilist"; for him, in the end, the world is nothing, and God is all.
However, this is
the precise opposite of the Nihilism we have examined here, where God is nothing and the world is all; that is a Nihilism that proceeds from the Abyss, and the Christian's is a "Nihilism" that proceeds from abundance.
Same word, totally different sense. And it is only the latter "who can squarely face the Abyss to which Nihilism has conducted men."
Then I thought of the Aphorist, who said it all before, in various ways:
An irreligious society cannot cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be.
Because he presumed he was capable of giving fullness to the world, modern man sees it becoming emptier each day.
History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.
If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.
Hell is anyplace from which God is absent.
Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.
Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing.
Humanity is the only totally false god.
Can our nihilism beat up their nihilism? Rose ends on an uncharacteristically optimistic note:
It is the great invincible truth of Christianity that there is no annihilation; all Nihilism is in vain. God may be fought: that is one of the meanings of the modern age; but He cannot be conquered, and He may not be escaped...
Resignation, I guess. But
Resignation must not be an exercise in stoicism but a surrender into divine hands.
6 comments:
Can our nihilism beat up their nihilism?
Only in the way that light vanquishes darkness, something overcomes no-thing, or presence negates absence.
"Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude,” Walter says, “at least it’s an ethos.” The nihilists, Walter implies, are somehow worse than Nazis, and that seems to apply to the Hamas terrorists of 10/7.
"*Paradoxically*, many of the pro-Hamas enthusiasts are members of the very demographic groups whom the objects of their adulation have openly sworn, in writing and deed, to murder.
"Hoffer maps out the necessary elements for a fanatical movement, including whom it recruits, how it recruits them, and how it holds them. In short, a fanatical movement seeks bored underachievers, offers purpose for their aimless lives, and discourages questioning. In many ways, an alarming proportion of Generation Z, which includes today’s college cohort, has been primed since infancy for such recruitment—by professors, by K-12 teachers, and by their parents.
“There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed.”
“[Followers] must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”
“The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.”
Our church had its annual carnival last weekend. While we were there, I spotted a guy wearing a smirk, one of those Palestinian scarves, and carrying a backpack. He was there with a big, normal-looking family group including kids so presumably just an asshole hipster who thought it would be cool to subtly show his support for Palestine at a Catholic fund raiser.
The really worrisome thing, though, is how literally nobody else seemed to even notice. This is technically San Bernardino, they can't even honestly say "it couldn't happen here." How quickly people forget.
"The postmodernist claims to know that epistemic nihilism is true and thus that all agreement about how to interpret the world seen as a text can only be a matter of one person or group imposing its will on to another.
"But, if epistemic nihilism is true, they cannot possibly know this and thus they can have no justification for their imposition of force. If we do know that epistemic nihilism is true, then it is in fact possible to distinguish fact from fiction, text from reality, and truth from lies, and thus epistemic nihilism must be incorrect.
"The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath. Reason and logic can only hurt him, so he disparages them. Why limit yourself to what is rational and logical? If power is everything, then I will shut you up. That is how they have decided to win a debate. By not having one in the first place."
Sure that tome would be the Yfelspel of Hell in fact...
Post a Comment