Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

Today is Weimar; Today is the Reign of Elagabalus; This is Belshazzar’s Feast

I remember back in the 70’s reading about Weimar and Elagabalus and Nero, and thinking, “How could anyone have been so nuts as to believe any of that obviously perverse and stupid stuff, let alone act on it?” Yet we seem to fall into such fantasies pretty regularly, especially in times of general prosperity and calm. Any number of other such wild and absurd episodes could be adduced: the French and Soviet Revolutions, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, ancient Persian Mazdakism, the Marquis de Sade and his circle (he must have had a pretty extensive circle, who bought his stuff, or we could never have heard of him, no?), Bloomsbury, the Frankfurt School, transhumanism, on and on.

Also, less violently but more radically and pervasively, Freemasonry and the occult – theosophy, New Age, and so forth.

I.e., Gnostic Pelagian utopianism, in all its instantiations.

And, now, right now, today, abortion, porneia, divorce, wokeism, globohomo, transsexuality, and – especially, and at their root, and at their most energetic and fulsome – anti-Christianity; which is to say, when abstract doctrinal push comes down at bottom to pragmatic bloody shove, infanticide and the genital mutilation of children.

That’s where it always ends, no? These Gnostic transvaluations of value always terminate upon the mutilation and death, or just the prevention, of children; i.e., of humanity.

The Phenomenology of Error → ¬ ¬ Free Agency

Last night at choir rehearsal our choirmaster casually refuted the notion that Benjamin Libet’s justly famous experiment showing that neural activity manifesting decisions precedes conscious awareness thereof falsifies free agency.

Can Atheism Be Carried Into Practice?

I was listening this afternoon as I drove along to a broadcast on EWTN in which the presenter, Al Kresta, was talking to EWTN host and Catholic psychologist Ray Guarendi about the 3 years he suffered horribly from clinical depression in the early 80’s. His episode of acute depression – for which he was twice hospitalized – was triggered in him by an encounter with a book by an atheist, entitled The Illusion of Immortality. Reading it in preparation for writing a book of his own, Kresta was suddenly overtaken by profound despair. He reflected that the reason the text – which regurgitated arguments he had long before encountered and defeated to his own satisfaction – had such an impact upon him was that the author seemed like a good guy who was simply sincere about his atheism, in a way that most atheists are not.

As Kresta spoke, his offhand phrase “the horror of the atheist notion of reality” hit me really hard. I began almost to weep at the image of that notion, carried through (in the imagination only) to reality – treated, i.e., as if it were really true (as if that could even happen). This feeling, of horrified tears at being perched for the first time in my life at the edge of a precipice that verged upon an abyss of pain without bottom, persisted throughout the conversation between Kresta and Guarendi. I could feel a boundless ontological void opening beneath me, unlike any I had ever suspected.

It was the horrible vacuum in which nothing can have any meaning, purpose, or point, and nothing is therefore worth anything; in which, i.e., nothing can be about anything, or for anything; in which nothing is any good.

Beauty is Salutary, Ugliness Noxious

My wife and I are enjoying a short vacation with my in-laws in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It is a lovely place, rendered sublime along the western edge of the valley by the unearthly majesty of the Grand Tetons. The Tetons seem to the eye of this experienced outdoorsman one of those sublime landscapes in which natural beauty is so intense as to verge on numinous sanctity (other such places I have sojourned: Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley, the Snæfellsjökull Peninsula in Iceland). Such places command awe, and foster an inward hush.

Superstition & Subscendence: An Essay in Honor of Tom Bertonneau

Bear with me here. I hardly know where I am going with this, although I feel I have caught the spoor of something Tom would find delightful – that he would join with me joyfully in this new hunt. I’m confused because all I have is that spoor, and my spirits are in a hurry and a muddle due to his too soon death. I miss my friend of many years – of too few! I am not yet sure how to do with the world that, henceforth, shall miss him.

Tom has been a valued colleague since we first encountered each other. We corresponded often – not often enough, alas – about our hopes and worries in respect to our work, much of it coordinate here. We sometimes asked each other for editorial advice upon that work. I could rely on Tom for sound counsel. I hardly know how I shall manage without his sagacity.

But I must. I bid you all help me in that project, in which we may hope we can all together proceed for many more years to come. That would be a fitting legacy of his penetrant honest cheerful mind.

I propose that this essay be an early installment in something like a festschrift for Tom. Let us all try to limn what it was that he taught us. Perhaps we might make a book out of it. Or maybe just something on the scale of an issue of Amazing Stories, circa 1935: the sort of thing that was an important source of grist for the mill of his wits. That would please him, perhaps above all things we might do to honor him.

Kill Ill: Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, wrote The Visit[1] (Der Besuch der alten Dame) in 1956.  Dürrenmatt is a twentieth century Swiss playwright (1921-1990) who gets mentioned alongside Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht. Like them, he is interested in examining moral dilemmas with wider social import, bearing a tendency toward the nihilistic, and a “you just can’t win” attitude, such as can be seen in Sartre’s Men Without Shadows (Morts sans Sépultures), No Exit (Huis Clos), and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The Visit is overtly “philosophical” in the manner of existentialism: a despairing morality play.[2]

In The Visit, Claire Zachanassian has been wronged by the town of Guellen (Liquid manure town) located “somewhere in Central Europe,” and Alfred Ill, and she has returned forty-five years later to exact her revenge.[3] Claire and Ill were lovers. Claire became pregnant but Ill wanted to marry someone else who had a shop and money. He bribed two witnesses to say that they had also slept with Claire. Claire’s paternity suit is thrown out and the town sniggers as she is forced to leave town for the life of a prostitute. In this capacity, she meets and marries a billionaire and a succession of other husbands until she is the richest woman in the world. In her capacity as such, she represents an all-powerful monster capable of bending the world to her wishes. A grotesque figure, two of her limbs have been replaced by protheses; an ivory arm and a leg. At one point Ill asks, “Claire, is everything about you artificial?” She uses a lorgnette. These spectacles with a handle held away from the face, suggests she has her own very particular outlook on things and creates a distance between her and the people she observes. Claire has returned to Guellen with a macabre retinue who include the false witnesses whom she has castrated and blinded, the judge who presided over her case and who is now her butler, a black panther, two bodyguards, her husband number VII, and a coffin.

The Quaintness of the Regia Aeronautica in World War II

Fascist Poster from 1938 Inviting Young Men to Try Out for the Air Force

Italian participation in World War II started late and ended early.  Italy only entered into combat when the Germans had rolled their Blitzkrieg over France and were conducting the final maneuvers that led to the armistice of 22 June 1940. The members of Benito Mussolini’s Grand Council, with the assent of the king, declared war on their Gaulish neighbors and attacked.  The main action took place in the air with the Regia Aeronautica or Royal Air Force making attacks on French fortifications and airfields.  The bombing and strafing raids were largely ineffective however because while the Italian air arm looked good in propaganda films, it deployed few modern types and of those — few proved themselves efficient in combat.  The obsolescence of Italy’s air-inventory had its roots in Mussolini’s participation in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Nationalists.  In 1936 the Regia Aeronautica deployed an air arsenal that included up-to-date types, like the Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 trimotor bomber and the Fiat CR.32 biplane fighter.  The latter acquitted itself marvelously against the inferior French and Russian aircraft fielded by the Republicans.  The Cucaracha, as it came to be called, represented the perfection of the biplane interceptor and could also undertake ground-attack and close-support duties.  A Fiat V-twelve with six cylinders in each bank propelled the sleek, streamlined airframe pulled through the air by a two-bladed metal propeller.  The CR.32 had a maximum speed of about 230 miles per hour, fast when Italy introduced the type in the early 1930s.  The Cr.32’s two machine guns stood as adequate for the time.  The SM.81 followed the planform of a Savoia-Marchetti airliner, which meant that it had not begun life as a proposed military type.  Again, SM.81 performed adequately considering the opposition, as it had in the Italo-Abyssinian war of 1935 – 37, against no opposition at all.  Italy sent other types to Spain, including the Breda 65 ground-attack aircraft, which even managed to score a few victories in air combat, a role for which its designers did not intend it.

Bostonians

This post is prompted by a remark made by Kristor under his recent item The Orthosphere Has Begun to Succeed.  Responding to a commenter, Kristor writes:

Your mention of Massachusetts nails it. The high minded poison in North America has flowed ever from the banks of the Charles River, and it goes back at least as far as Emerson. Or – of much greater relevance these days – to Salem. I say so despite my profound respect for Emerson, and deep as his insights truly were. Ditto for Whitman and Thoreau, and indeed for all the Bostonians. You can’t become as influential as they if you are spouting sheer shouting nonsense.

Henry James wrote a novel called The Bostonians (1886). James saw Boston in much the same ways Kristor sees it. In his novel he explores the genetic relation of feminism, lesbianism, spiritism, and a degraded transcendentalism. Back in 1995 (it seems like forever ago) I published an article in Anthropoetics, one of the first online scholarly journals, on The Bostonians. That article may be accessed here. Camille Paglia once characterized The Bostonians as the only James novel with a truly manly protagonist. Basil Ransom is his name, a Confederate veteran. He visits Boston to see his cousin Olive Chancellor, who has glombed on to a teenage girl, Verena Tarrant, who is a rising star in the Boston séance circuit.  James brilliantly illustrates through his narrative the intimate intermixture of “progressive” politics, the flim-flam of spiritism,  and sexual degeneracy. Olive takes in Verena, obviously wanting to groom her to be her partner in life. I won’t spoil the plot for someone who wants to read the novel, but I indeed recommend reading it.

At one point, Verena is supposed to appear before a crowd in a large auditorium; but she is late. Here is a passage from James:

It had become densely numerous, and, suffused with the evenly distributed gaslight, which fell from a great elevation, and the thick atmosphere that hangs forever in such places, it appeared to pile itself high and to look dimly expectant and formidable. He had a throb of uneasiness at his private purpose of balking it of its entertainment, its victim–a glimpse of the ferocity that lurks in a disappointed mob.

Two Poems – George Sterling & Clark Ashton Smith

Odilon Redon (1840 – 1916): Vision (1883)

The name of George Sterling (1869 – 1926) has not figured for a long time in the educated consciousness perhaps because the educated consciousness suffers from a contraction of its horizon.  The name of Clark Ashton Smith (1893 – 1961) possesses more currency today than that of Sterling, but only within a circle of genre fanatics.  Ironically, Sterling more or less discovered the young Smith, encouraged him to write, and found venues for his early poetry.  After Sterling’s suicide, Clark made a frugal living by selling his prose to the pulps, tales of necromantic extravagance mainly, and amalgams of horror and science fiction, written for the most part for Weird Tales, one of the specialist sub-genre-journals of the mid-Twentieth Century.  Smith’s name circulates more widely today than it did in his lifetime in that his complete work in poetry, prose, and correspondence is available in print.  Very little of Sterling’s output remains in print; he is a phenomenon, more or less, of the antiquarian book market.  In Sterling’s lifetime however he stood at the head of the California Symbolist School, which, centered on San Francisco, took its cues from the verse of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.  Ambrose Bierce and Jack London praised Sterling in his lifetime.  Sterling enjoyed the reputation of being the “King” of California’s “Bohemia.”  Young poets looked to him for guidance, which he gave generously.  Anticipating the Beats, he indulged in alcohol, marijuana, and other, stronger drugs whereupon the toll of vice, not least mounting debt, led him to the taking of his own life by cyanide.  Smith’s modus vivendi no doubt protected him from a similar imbroglio.  Sticking to remote Auburn in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Smith avoided the citified pressure that exacerbated Sterling’s difficulties.  Sterling’s personality, more egocentric than Smith’s, carried a trace, unfortunately, of snobbism; he criticized Smith for his ambition to publish in the pulps and even for reading them.  Smith’s taste ran catholic – he would eventually translate almost the entirety of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal into English, knew Greek and Latin literature well, but delighted also in the stories of his fellow Weird Tales contributors.