My prediction in 2013 that the androsphere was ripe for conversion to Traditional, orthodox Christianity, or else to nothingness – are there any real alternatives to these two ultimate destinations, ever? – was controversial. Our friend Dalrock was then already one of the three or four most important sex realist bloggers, and wrote from an overtly and stoutly conservative Christian perspective (his guest post here is the fifth most read in our history). And there have been other like-minded bloggers in the androsphere. But most of that sphere was then dominated by purely secular pick up artists, interested to understand the sexes – especially the female sex – only as a way to manipulate as many women as possible into fornication of some sort. So my prediction met with a fair degree of skepticism.
Decadence
Everything You Do Is Worship
We think of worship as something we do mostly in church. It is time we dedicate especially to God. But every moment of our lives is dedicated to something or other; and we would not be doing anything we do if those things to which they are dedicated were not important to us; if we did not think them worthy of our attention, and of our effort.
Understanding Concupiscence
I do what I know I should not, and I fail to do what I know that I should. I am tempted to sin, even though I know it to be sin, and thus both wrong in itself and so also bad for me. Why?
Such is concupiscence: the inclination to sin, indeed literally the strong desire to sin.
If we – even we who have been washed by the waters of Baptism and the Blood of the Lamb from all taint of our Original Sin – know that sin is sinful, why would we desire to sin? Why should there be such a thing as temptation, at all?
The Press That Cried Wolf
I’m in the investment business, so I was particularly alive to the market correction of last week in belated response to news about the corona virus.
The Epidemiological Case for National Borders, Autarky, & Xenophobia
Res ipsa loquitur, no?
While we’re at it, there is a strong epidemiological case for sexual modesty and chastity, for parochialism, for patriotism, and for cultural conservatism in respect to morals and customs. What is more, the humanely small scale of Schumacher and Christopher Alexander, Moldbug’s Patchwork or localism or Catholic subsidiarity, and the traditionalism of William Morris, of Chesterton, of Carlyle, and of de Maistre and Bonald all make great epidemiological sense. Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Tolstoy, the Wrath of GNON, and of course we here at the Orthosphere; all echo the same notion:
Stay small, stay local, stay close to home, stay close to nature, and within the span of your own hands. Small steps, not great revolutionary saltations.
Three Late-Antique Narratives (Part II)
Fresco from Pompeii (Late First century)
III. The centuries of Late Antiquity were those, as Gilbert Murray notes, of “a failure of nerve,” which is indeed the title of one of his chapters. The original Greek Enlightenment of the Classical period, summed up in a literature that reaches from Homer to the philosophers, was supremely confident in its power of knowledge and in its understanding of the natural, the supernatural, and the human worlds. Wars for empire sapped the will of the Classical world, however; while relentless sophistic criticism undermined trust in inherited concepts, with superstitions from the East filling the conceptual vacuum thus created. For Murray, the “Mystery Cults” and related movements of Late Antiquity epitomize the phenomenon. They represent for Murray a retreat from rational religion in a widespread “loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of normal human effort,” as well as in “despair of patient inquiry,” all accompanied by “an intensifying of certain spiritual emotions.” In the second of its two aspects in Satyricon, the Priapus cult functions as a salvation cult, offering to the convert an exit from the unpleasant brothel-labyrinth or Cyclops-cave of a degraded social scene. What of Lucius Apuleius? In addition to his talent as a storyteller, Apuleius lectured on Plato’s philosophy and worked as a civil adjudicator in his North African hometown of Madaura. Apuleius also held sacerdotal office in one of the most prominent of the Second Century mysteries, those associated with the cult of the syncretic goddess Isis, whom worshippers identified with Aphrodite, Demeter, Artemis, Hera, and every other motherly deity.
Tradition or Meaninglessness?
One of the main functions of tradition is to pass down to successive generations a comprehension of the meanings of the customary and traditional praxes and language. If the Tradition fails at that, then the praxes become meaningless and stupid, and are soon discarded as extraneities worthily subject to Ockham’s Razor: to the first principle of order, which is deletion. That’s when you get iconoclasm, whether intentional or not.
Intentional iconoclasm knows the meanings of the icons it destroys. Unintentional iconoclasm does not. The former is effected by destruction; the latter by desuetude.
Once the meanings of the cultural praxes are gone, the praxes themselves soon follow; for, there is then no longer any reason for them, that anyone knows or remembers. And that’s when the culture decoheres.
High College Costs, Low Student Achievement, Driven by Warmish Climate-Change Trend – Researchers Say
Opening Ceremony of Upstate Consolation University’s Conference on the Warmish Climate-Change Trend
In a conference convened by Upstate Consolation University, researchers from California State University, Van Nuys, and Central Michigan Teacher Pre-Preparation College, Farwell, claimed this week that the warmish climate-change trend is the primary cause of both the declining academic performance among North American college undergraduates and the rising costs associated with a baccalaureate degree. The conference-goers revealed details of their three-week-long multiple-perspective study, carried out by a select committee recruited from the two schools. The team systematically surveyed multiple self-evaluations and statistical-anecdotal probability memoranda culled from a wide variety of auto-probative and theosophical sources appearing in carefully vetted blogs posted on the Internet since February. “This is one of the most exhaustive studies of its kind to be carried out by institutions of our accreditation-level, whether in California or Michigan, during the past seventeen and a half months,” said Dr. Michelle Mausse, a CSUVN Diverse Arts Practical Instructor, who is acting co-chair of the project and supervising gender-fairness editor of the semi-final quasi-executive summary of the project’s yet-to-be-published Full Report – the very same summary that has just been issued as a mass-email attachment. Mausse also said that, when the Full Report appears, she expects a storm of hostility from commentators on the right. She added that such commentary, obviously originating in structural racism, would itself exacerbate the warmish climate-change trend, thereby degrading student performance even further and raising the price of a college education even higher.
“Given the cutting-edge status of our conclusions and the transgressive methods employed during our strenuous three weeks of research,” Mausse said, “you can bet that President Trump, Fox News, and Chick-Fil-A will be working overtime to sap public confidence in our assertions.” According to Mausse, the best way to undermine such bigoted resistance would be “to appoint Greta Thunberg to the Supreme Court, ban SUVs, and approach the Taliban with an ecologically friendly attitude.” As stated in the semi-final quasi-executive summary, “Last year’s harsh winter in the Northeast and this summer’s record-breaking cool weather across the Upper Midwest prove incontrovertibly that the warmish up-trend is rising steeply.” In an informative autobiographical aside in the summary, Dr. Mausse states that her consciousness about the warmish climate-change trend began in earnest in the late 1960s, when she had just entered high school, with the appearance of Dr. Anton Schmellij’s prophetic Heat-Death by 1970 – No Doubt about It. Mausse attributes her conversion to environmentalism, not to her actually having read Schmellij’s book in its entirety, but to her having once perused the Utne Reader’s “condensed” version of the treatise while writing her Feminist Studies thesis at Mannless County Community College, near New Mytilene, Ohio, in 1994.
Traditionalism: A Primer
Gustave Moreau (1826 – 1898): Hesiod & the Muses (1860)
Fish know not that they swim in the sea, nor birds that they swoop in the air. No more do the denizens of the prevailing era know that they live out their lives in a philosophically narrow, righteously conceited, anti-human, and anti-natural dispensation, calling itself modernity, which can trace its immediate beginnings only to the Eighteenth Century, and which represents a radical break with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom gleaned painfully from a massive human experience. No doubt but contemporary modern people, when they hear an invocation of the Eighteenth Century, locate that century in a periwigged past, thinking that it could not possibly have anything to do with them, as they exist, in the transient now. This very attitude betokens, in fact, an essential feature of modernity, which idolizes the present moment as the figure of a so-called progress that is self-consummating and that makes obsolete everything belonging to any moment in the historical continuum that precedes it. Indeed, the modern mentality necessarily rejects history; it is fundamentally non- or anti-historical, which also makes it anti-memorious, devaluing not only history, but memory. Thus the modern mentality has conveniently forgotten the violent origins of its perpetually disruptive mode. The mendaciously self-designating Enlightenment, rejecting the moral and intellectual inheritance of the European Middle Ages, viciously attacked the vestiges of the past and in so doing set the stage for the mayhem and terror of the French Revolution. The violence of modernity would perpetuate itself through the centuries, murdering a hundred million people in the middle of the Twentieth Century, always in the righteous name of that selfsame progress. The convulsion of modernity, however, provoked a response, and that response took the form of Traditionalism – a critique of modernity that seeks also to curb modernity, and to curb it for the sake of a human restoration. In Traditionalism humanity remembers itself. Traditionalism attempts to revive an immemorial wisdom and to place it once again at the memorious center of institutions.
The earliest representatives of Traditionalism gained prominence with the onset of revolutionary agitation in France in 1789. The Terror of September 1793 to July 1794 and the executions of the royal family, beginning with Louis XVI in January 1793 and concluding with Louis’ ten-year-old son and heir apparent in 1795 galvanized them. The Jacobins labeled the original Traditionalists reactionaries. But the term reaction requires a context. Reaction originates, in fact, in the revolutionary mentality itself, which reacts, or rather rebels, against the Tradition. Such names as Joseph de Maistre (1753 – 1821), René de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848), and Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) stand at the center of Traditionalism and produced the heart of its classical expression. In Contra Mundum – Joseph de Maistre and the Birth of Tradition (2017), Thomas Garrett Isham makes an important point about both Maistre himself and the loosely organized movement that Maistre initiated. Isham tells of Maistre’s adherence to the Catholicism in which he came to manhood and of his loyalty, both as citizen and public servant, to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. When in 1792 the Revolutionary Army invaded Savoy, the Piedmontese départment where Maistre’s parents had brought him into the world and raised and educated him, the magistrate and senator experienced the bloody barbarity and atheistic intolerance of revolutionary-nihilistic politics at first hand; the dispossession of his property and his forced exile to neighboring Switzerland provoked in Maistre a colossal reorganization of his philosophical and theological assumptions.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Study of John W. Campbell & Company
Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee: Cover (Daystreet Books)
I review at The University Bookman Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, a study of the “Golden Age” of science fiction in the 1940s and its chief protagonists . Aficionados of The Orthosphere know of my interest in science fiction. Nevala-Lee’s account of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding in its heyday, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, A. E. van Vogt, and others disturbed me greatly. Whatever literary merit one ascribes to their work – and I am increasingly skeptical about their collective literary merit – in their intertwined personal lives, with the possible exception of van Vogt, the biographical details are disappointing if not, at base, repellent. I have come to the belief that the literary merit of 1940s and early 1950s science fiction resides elsewhere than in these authors. A recent attempt to reread Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1960) failed about forty pages into the novel. Hubbard might be the central scoundrel, but Campbell abetted Dianetics, the early version of Scientology, and Heinlein and van Vogt were complicit in it, at least for a time. Asimov remained skeptical, but his lifelong Harvey-Weinstein-like behavior has forever tainted him in my opinion – not to mention that his prose is primitive and boasts no human depth whatsoever.
