Smoke Without Fire

Everyone is familiar with the expression, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”  This means, of course, that rumors are very often true.  And they are most often true, it is generally supposed, when the rumor is “persistent,” “recurrent,” and will not be “laid to rest.”

The Feminizing of Culture, and Male Self-Hatred

The Brussels Journal is defunct. This article still seems relevant but is now nearly impossible to find. It does not appear as a search result under articles I have contributed to TBJ, so I am making it available here.

Warren Farrell gives an account of how men and masculinity became demonized, how the emphasis on “compassion” became so prevalent and how the vogue for male self-hatred got started – The Feminizing of Culture, and Male Self-Hatred.

 

Review of Faye’s Understanding Islam

At The Gates of Vienna, I review Guillaume Faye’s recent book Understanding Islam.  The review also contains a discussion of V. S. Naipaul’s two books from the end of the last century on the Islamic world.

Upstate Consolation University Celebrates First Graduating Class in New Degree Program

College Graduate in Educationally Mismatched Job

“Higher education is not about knowledge or skills,” says Upstate Consolation University Executive Deputy Chancellor of the Committee on Investor Communications Marl Flaybiter from behind the large mahogany desk in his office overlooking West Campus’s scenic Green Parking Lot; “no – higher education is about respect.”  A few years ago, on being appointed to his incumbency, Flaybiter began noticing how little respect graduating degree-holders from UCU were receiving when they entered the job market and presented their credentials to prospective employers.  While escorting potential investors around Uppchoock-on-the-Lake, the small, northerly city where his institution is located, Flaybiter observed that many of the service personnel in the local coffee bars and chain restaurants were recent UCU graduates.

Flaybiter counts off the many types of prestigious UCU-granted degrees held by these disrespectfully under-employed new alumni: “At least three of those kids – bright kids – had come out of our Social Justice and Sustainability Programs; five or six had bachelor’s or bachelorette’s degrees in Women’s Studies, and others came from Adventure Education, Puppet Arts, Safe Space Organizing, Slut-March Planning, and Critical White Privilege Sciences.”  Flaybiter pauses to shake his head sorrowfully.  “I just couldn’t bear to see those kids – I mean, those young people – so shamefully disrespected by having to work as baristas, cashiers, waiters, and waitresses while living in their parents’ basements and going to work in their pajamas.”  As Flaybiter sees it, “The mismatch between the education and the job is, well, a tragedy, not just for the kids, and not just for the pajamas, but for the community.”

The Second Reality Crumbles — Short Take III

Chaos, as Hesiod puts it, “was the first thing that came to be.”  In a three-generation struggle, Zeus at last succeeded in imposing civilized order on the chaotic substrate of the cosmos.  Chaos, for Hesiod, might be first, but order is last; and order is infinitely preferable to Chaos.  In Hesiod’s story, after Zeus settles matters with the violent Titans (the Jotuns of Scandinavian myth), he must face one more challenge in the arousal of Typhon or Python, the Chaos-Monster.  In Hesiod’s vision of things, Chaos always lies in wait to erupt on order and subvert it.  Order is a struggle.  Chaos is the lapse back into what is easiest and most primitive.  So too in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the Several States of America, order is a latter imposition on Chaos, but Chaos lurks in its lair, ready to squirm out again and mess up the just apportionment of the civilized dispensation.  Thus, as the Drudge Report rehearses, “Agitators Plot Inauguration Chaos.”  What else would they plot?  After all, their motto is, “It is forbidden to forbid.”  That is to say, order is forbidden; Chaos is mandated – and the Law is the enemy of the crowd.  Drudge quotes a Daily Caller story as follows: “On the day of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration protesters are planning an anti-capitalist march, road blockades and disruptions to inauguration balls…

The Second Reality Crumbles — Short Take II

As the Left’s second reality collapses, the Lefties still believe that they can dig themselves out of the sinkhole of their abysmal expectations.  The Left being a purely collectivist entity, it responds to every crisis, as to this crisis, by amassing itself in crowds.  As Gustave Le Bon remarked in his study of The Crowd (1895), crowd-behavior is de-individuated, non-conscientious, and essentially religious or sacrificial.  An individual who might, left to his own soul-searching, renounce such things as morality-renunciation and participating in hatred-inducing activities, will find relief from his qualms in the degree to which he congregates with others, whose collective massiveness assuages his guilt-pangs.  Once a nucleus of moral self-betrayers has gathered in close proximity, conscientiousness, which is individual, no longer impedes the impulse to action.  Guilt is distributed.  The subject, forfeiting his subjectivity, may do as he wills, however basely he wills, without the smart of any remorse.  The religiosity of the crowd is primitive religiosity, of course.  It wants to feel Karl Marx’s revolutionary Blutrausch in the spectacle of immolation, even if external social strictures prevent the immolation from being real but rather confine it to being only symbolic.  (Policemen murdered in ambushes are actual victims; men of European ancestry pilloried by female multiculturalists at “White Privilege” seminars are symbolic victims, who are permitted walk away with their humiliated lives.)

The Second Reality Crumbles – Short Take I

The Left believes itself to be historically inevitable.  The Left vehemently execrates anyone who denies its fundamental premise that it is historically inevitable.  To the Left, people who think otherwise than that the Left is historically inevitable are not thinking at all: Such people are ignorant, boorish, and very likely incapable of thinking – or, as the Left has long called it, “critical thinking.”  (I note in passing that the phrase “critical thinking,” like the phrase “social justice,” conforms to the Leftist linguistic pattern of taking an ordinary and perfectly well-understood noun and obliterating its standard meaning by the prefixation to it of a modifier which is actually a negation.)  Leftist “critical thinking” forecast the outcome of the 2016 presidential election many months in advance.  The election would go “inevitably” to That Woman.  The fix was in and the fix was cosmic or perhaps ontological.  Nothing could un-fix it, right?  However, the “inevitable” outcome failed to manifest itself.  For the Left, this constituted a cognitive, but more importantly an emotional, catastrophe, the equivalent of Krakatoa suddenly erupting in San Francisco Bay and spoiling everyone’s fun at the Gay Pride Parade.  The Left has always lived in a second reality, but now events had shaken that second reality to its phantasmal foundation, and the whole illusory structure began to collapse.

After Lust, Disgust

“From whence commeth these swimmings of the brain, these headaches, this continual heaviness to sleep, this gripe of stomach, these fiery eyes, this weakness of sight, this stiffness of sinews, this palsy, these stinking breaths, these hot burning agues these ulcers in the legs, and a thousand other such like, save only of drunkenness?” (Filippo Beroaldo, A Contention Between Three Brethren [1581])

I was reminded of this passage this morning as I examined a mug shot in our local newspaper.  This showed the puffy and somewhat blotched face of a young woman recently arrested on a charge that she “hit a man she was dating with a metal baseball bat.”  “That,” I said to myself, “is the face of a boozehound who has very recently tied one on.”  I cannot, of course, attest her “stinking breath,” but there was no mistaking that diagnostic combination of “heaviness to sleep,” “burning agues” and “fiery eyes.”  “That,” I said to myself once again, “ is the face of a woman in the grip of profound disgust.”

An Ogre Hates My Patch of Blue Sky

“Once religious imagination and yearning have departed from a culture, the lowest, grimmest, most tedious level of material existence becomes not just one of reality’s unpleasant aspects, but in some sense the limit that marks the ‘truth’ of things.” (David Bentley Hart, In the Aftermath (2009)

For years I have had a recurrent daydream.  It may have originated as a sleeping dream, but it is now a staple of my waking imagination.  This daydream steals over me whenever I feel myself slipping under the anesthetic of a committee meeting, or I am forced to wander through a wasteland of what Hart calls “epic drabness,” or I am closeted with a vampiric atheist who invites me to loosen my collar and close my eyes.  With this daydream, my imagination proposes that all of these experiences are, at bottom, one and the same experience.  I am of a romantic disposition, so I take the propositions of my imagination very seriously.

The World is Reborn in Bethlehem

On the Eve of Christmas under the reckoning of our Orthodox brethren, we are pleased to offer a Guest Post by Mark Citadel:

At a time when Eastern Christianity celebrates Christmas (as per the Julian calendar), the importance of Christ’s birth is more often misunderstood than it is underemphasized. Indeed, for the true Christian who sees beneath the surface of what holidays have become, Easter (or Pascha) is far more important than Christmas, for it contains the recognition of action on the part of Christ to redeem mankind so that he may not perish from the Way. Whether this action is more fully defined by sacrifice or victory is irrelevant to the event’s significance as such. Events surrounding the death of Christ are adorned with symbolism, and areas of vagueness that have intrigued theological study for centuries. Yet of course without birth there is no death, and thus to ponder the Incarnation itself is necessary for a richer understanding of His final significance.Frithjof Schuon wrote on the nature of the risen Lord:

If the Incarnation has the significance of a “descent” of God, Christ is thus equivalent to the whole of creation, containing it in a way; he is a second creation, which purifies and “redeems” the first.