Thursday, January 26, 2017

Alt-Facts ? How did we get here ?


For a long time Truth was handed down in Tradition, worked out over centuries from contemplating transcendent realities, but now, liberated from the past, it is our own subjective perceptions, though a mere crack of lightning in the night of history, that we look to illuminate the truth.

Colgero uses Marcel Lefebvre's historical analysis :

 
“Subjectivism... claims that reason constructs the truth. Things are no longer what they are, but what I think. Historically, the main figures in the development of subjectivism were:

Luther (individual inspiration of Scripture)
Descartes (the cogito knows only itself)
Kant (things are unknowable in themselves)
Rousseau (truth is public opinion or general will)

This ends up in this:

The thought of the individual is going to be dissolved into the public opinion, that is to say, in what everyone or the majority thinks; and this opinion will be created by the techniques of group dynamics organized by the media, which are in the hands of the financiers, politicians, etc.
Subjectivism, by exalting freedom of thought, results then in the crushing of thought.

...the reign of individualism; the basic unit of Liberalism is the individual. The individual is an “absolute subject of rights”, without countervailing duties binding him to his Creator, superiors, or fellow creatures. Ultimately, however, it leaves the individual alone, isolated, and without defense against the crowd which swallows him.”




Rather than liberating individuals from older religious worldviews , the ego is now dependent on the public to inform it’s perspective, which itself is cut off from historical wisdom.

As Donoso puts it:

“The supreme interest of that school [The general Liberal Western tradition]  is in preventing the arrival of the day of radical negations or of sovereign affirmations; and that it may not arrive, it confounds by means of discussion all notions, and propagates skepticism, knowing as it does, that a people which perpetually hears in the mouth of its sophists the pro and the contra of everything, ends by not knowing which side to take, and by asking itself whether truth and error, injustice and justice, stupidity and honesty, are things opposed among themselves, or are only the same things regarded from different points of view.”


Cologoro adds,

“So we are forced to take one or the
other “side” of the debate, when what is really necessary is to understand one’s fundamental assumptions.”

Monday, January 23, 2017

Sex for the sake of the rich, notes on feminism and capitalism

Baudrillard famously saw the sexual revolution, and feminism in particular, is just capitalism freeing up woman for producing and consuming in the market.


From the The Last Psychiatrist (2013):

"I know what you’re thinking. You’re worldly, you’re cynical, your skeptical. You don’t go for all this love crap…. You’ve figured out that love was a construct pushed by the patriarchy to keep women tied to the home, to deny them orgasms with multiple penises and vaginas; to prevent them from getting jobs, money, power. Am I right? Ok, then let’s play by your rules, let’s say you’re right that love was used to keep women down — then what does today’s suppression of love signify? Could it be that the abandonment of love doesn’t also serve the system’s purpose? Or is only the former the trick, the latter a discovery made by your genius + sophistication + expert reading of human emotions?

You think you’ve figured out that true love doesn’t exist, that it’s all been a kind of romantic lie sold by TV and the media, that real life isn’t like that; but what I am telling you is that you didn’t figure this out, you were TOLD this. Now, constantly, by every modern TV show, by Lori Gottlieb and the zombies at The Atlantic, by your friends, by your parents — the trick was to get you to think you figured it out on your own.

The system’s ideal woman is the single mother, she’s produced with her uterus and is willing to go all in on production/consumption, she has no choice. I’m not saying she wants to be a single mother, I’m saying that’s what the system wants her to be. That’s feminism. You can get married too, as long as he’ll make it so you get in at 8."





In a interview James Bowden notes,

"the Gloria Steinems of the world are the central bankers’ useful idiots. What I mean by that is that due to things like inflation and economic malfeasance it was impossible for the single breadwinner to have a family and these women were out there thinking that they were suggesting something radical by suggesting that women go to work, but really they were just justifying and maybe even sugarcoating the economic decline of the Western world.

There was a theorist in the 1920s called Wyndham Lewis who wrote a book in 1926, I think, called The Art of Being Ruled in which he suggested that capitalism was the real motivating force behind feminism, because the whole point was that the family was an archaic and reactionary institution that was pre-modern and floated uneasily in the marketplace and dammed up any alternative lifestyle. All these producers and consumers that could be let loose, but they could only be let loose if women were prized out of the home and were treated as auxiliary men and were used in the workplace in that manner."
And that miserable frenchman Houellebecq links the sexual revolution with capitalism quite well in his novels :


“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.” 


“In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and levels of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. On the economic plane Raphael Tisserand belongs in the victor’s camp; on the sexual plane in that of the vanquished [...] Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.”  
- Whatever

It's interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.” ―  The Elementary Particles


As  Pedro Sousa says  :

The sexual revolution was the application of market values (expanded consumer choice, disposability and interchangeability of objects, merciless competition) to human relationships.

Damon Linker, talking about the great Leftist social critic Christopher Lasch explains 

"...one of the most controversial element of Lasch's argument, then no less than now, was his assertion that the Left's advocacy of the sexual revolution was in fact a betrayal of both women and the working class. Whereas the family was once a "haven in a heartless world" (to cite the title of the book in which Lasch first advanced the claim), the sexual revolution encouraged its near-total assimilation into the capitalist order of consumption and exchange. 

Men and women now both pursued careers outside the home, spreading the spiritual malaise deeper into the life of the nuclear family, which turned unplanned pregnancies into inconveniences and additional children into burdens rather than blessings. This, in turn, required parents to hire expensive professional child-care providers to serve as surrogate caregivers, provoking waves of ambivalence and guilt in both parents."



And Wendell Berry agree's,

In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty. Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of “sexual partners,” orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication that the body is somehow a limit on the idea of sex, which will be a great deal more abundant as soon as it can be done by robots.

How did the elites do this ? Well James Kalb observes :

"...if you want women to be totally available for use by employers, and you want purchased goods and services—like daycare and fast food—to replace home production, and you want government policy rather than domestic, cultural, or religious influences to determine how children grow up, you won’t be favorable to family and community life. One way of suppressing them is to substitute social service agencies for family and community, disrupt informal traditional arrangements through mass immigration and comprehensive promotion of diversity, and encourage people—through the media, educational system, and culture industry—to concentrate on career, consumption, and other individual pursuits, and view nonliberal arrangements like religion and the family as irrational, oppressive, and morally problematic."


And of course the poor want to imitate the rich, GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB remarking on Adam Smith points out, 

"The liberal or loose system is prone to the "vices of levity" — "luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc." Among the "people of fashion," these vices are treated indulgently. The "common people," on the other hand, committed to the strict or austere system, regard such vices, for themselves at any rate, with "the utmost abhorrence and detestation," because they — or at least "the wiser and better sort" of them — know that these vices are almost always ruinous to them. 

Whereas the rich can sustain years of disorder and extravagance — indeed, regard the liberty to do so without incurring any censure or reproach as one of the privileges of their rank — the people know that a single week's dissipation can undo a poor workman forever. This is why, Smith explained, religious sects generally arise and flourish among the common people, for these sects preach that system of morality upon which their welfare depends."

So, resistance ? Sally cline, and other feminists, are proposing celibacy to break out,

Celibacy raises eyebrows because it is an act of rebellion against the sacred cow of sexual consumerism. This is a consumer society. An assumption built into it is that we should all be eager consumers of sexual activity.”






Sunday, January 22, 2017

Liberalism is dead. Now what ?

Extremely important and clarifying, if you’re curious how we got here, and why, what has to go and what has to stay, this is from Patrick Daneen linked at bottom. It’s long, here are the money quotes :



"Liberalism's two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity in the service of the fulfillment of the self. 

Liberalism rejects the ancient and preliberal conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to govern their base and hedonistic desires....Societies that understand liberty this way pursue the comprehensive formation and education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of self-rule.

Liberty, so defined, requires in the first instance liberation from all forms of associations and relationships—from the family, church, and schools to the village and neighborhood and the community broadly defined—that exerted strong control over behavior largely through informal and habituated expectations and norms.

These forms of control were largely cultural, not political—law was generally less extensive, and existed largely as a continuation of cultural norms, the informal expectations of behavior that were largely learned through family, church, and community. With the liberation of individuals from these associations and membership based upon individual choice, the need for impositions of positive law to regulate behavior grows. 

....gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a near-universal pursuit of immediate gratification: Culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past toward the end of cultivating virtues of self-restraint and civility, instead becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting a culture of consumption, appetite, and detachment. As a result, seemingly self-maximizing but socially destructive behaviors begin to predominate in society.

....the endless quest for fewer obstacles to self-fulfillment and greater power to actuate the ceaseless cravings of the human soul requires ever-accelerating forms of economic growth and pervasive consumption. L

The sole object and justification of this indifference to human ends—of the emphasis on “Right” over the “Good”—is nevertheless premised on the embrace of the liberal human as a self-fashioning individual and self-expressive consumer. 

Liberalism can function only by the constant increase of available and consumable material goods and satisfactions, and thus by constantly expanding humanity’s conquest and mastery of nature. No matter the political program of today’s leaders, more is the incontestable program. No person can aspire to a position of political leadership through a call for limits and self-command.

The twin outcomes of this effort, the depletion of moral self-command and the depletion of material resources.... 

So long as the dominant narrative of individual choice aimed at the satisfaction of appetite and consumption dominates in the personal or economic realms, the ethic of liberalism will continue to dominate our society.

The right embraces a market orthodoxy that places the choosing, autonomous individual at the center of its economic theory...It seeks to promote family values but denies that the market undermines many of the values that undergird family life. The left commends sexual liberation as the best avenue to achieve individual autonomy, while nonsensically condemning the immorality of a marketplace in which sex is the best sales pitch."

Patrick Daneen



Friday, January 20, 2017

Das Transexual

The strange inversion of Trans/Gay issues backed by massive amounts of Corporate money and political power, while the working class now feels itself to be the marginalized outcasts, I think of the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman's observation on our modern concepts of purity and order :

“In the postmodern world of freely competing styles and life patterns [...] one needs to be capable of being seduced by the infinite possibility and constant renewal promoted by the consumer market, of rejoicing in the chance of putting on and taking off identities, of spending one's life in the never ending chase after ever more intense sensations and even more exhilarating experience. Not everybody can pass that test. Those who do not are the 'dirt' of postmodern society.”

The “dirt”are the those who cannot conform to the postmodern lifestyle of dynamic identities and lifestyle consumption, as John Milbank says :



"....the poor or relatively poor simply cannot afford the experimentation with sex, drugs and lifestyle that can be afforded by those cushioned by wealth. Thus the result of sexual liberalism and the decay of marriage as a norm for working people is too often women left on their own with babies, and young men (shorn of their traditional chivalric and regular breadwinning dignity) driven to suicide."