Pray to the Saints in Purgatory for the Spirit of America; for her life as lived in us her children.
Liberalism
Wherefore Patriarchy?
A commenter this morning asked me to write an apology for “patriarchy,” and this I did, albeit with considerable misgiving. My misgiving springs from the knowledge than such requests are, as often as not, simply fishing for evidence of deplorable moral turpitude in the apologist. But I decided to accept “Emma’s” question as sincere, and so in this case “took the bait.” After reading our exchange, T. Morris suggested that I promote it to a post.
Here is what Emma wrote in her comment.
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Arnold Bertonneau on Patriotism & the Franchise
Arnold Bertonneau (1832 -1912); Photograph from the mid-1860s
My great-grand uncle Arnold Bertonneau (1832 – 1912) traveled from New Orleans to Boston and Washington D.C. in April, 1864, to present his Creole Petition to Congress, which ultimately rejected it. On 12 April Bertonneau responded to an invitation by the Massachusetts Republicans to speak on the merits of his proposal. After an introduction by Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, Bertonneau delivered the following words:
BEFORE THE OUTBREAK of the rebellion, Louisiana contained about forty thousand free colored people, and three hundred twelve thousand persons held in slavery. In the city of New Orleans, there were upwards of twenty thousand free persons of color. Nearly all the free persons of color read and write. The free people have always been on the side of
law and good order, always peaceful and self-sustaining, always loyal. Taxed on an assessment of more than fifteen million dollars — among many other things, for the support of public-school education — debarred from the right of sending their children to the common schools which they have been and are compelled to aid in supporting, taxed on their property, and compelled to contribute toward the general expense of sustaining the state, they have always been and now are prohibited from exercising the elective franchise.
When the first fratricidal shot was fired at Sumter, and Louisiana had joined her fortunes with the other seceding states, surrounded by enemies educated in the belief that “Africans and their descendants had no rights that white men were bound to respect,” without arms and ammunition, or any means of self-defense, the condition and position of our people were extremely perilous. When summoned to volunteer in the defense of the state and city against Northern invasion, situated as we were, could we do otherwise than heed the warning and volunteer in the defense of New Orleans? Could we have adopted a better policy? In the city of New Orleans, under the Confederate government, we raised one regiment of a thousand men, the line officers of which were colored.
Lawrence Auster on the Root Cause of Why We Are Letting Our Culture be Destroyed
From the late, great traditionalist blogger Lawrence Auster comes this min-essay clarifying the meaning of transcendence. Auster points out that unless our activities, loyalties and institutions have meanings that transcend their merely physical elements, we cannot understand them, love them, or act to protect them.
In a postscript to the essay, Auster observes:
My main purpose in this discussion is to get at the root of why we our letting our culture be destroyed. I’m saying it’s because we have lost the experience of the transcendent as it is related to our specific culture, and therefore we don’t have the will to preserve or defend our culture. [Emphasis added] The transcendent needs to be understood not only in relation to the idea of God, but in relation to culture. If the transcendent is only experienced in relation to universal morality or God, then we end up with modern conservatism, which worships universal ideas of democracy and puts 99 percent of its moral energy into opposing abortion, but which fails to defend our culture as a culture from the innumerable ills that threaten it from without and within. It is no coincidence that both neoconservatives and evangelical Christians favor mass non-European immigration. It is because they lack a sense of the transcendent quality of our particular culture and nation.
Here is the essay: (Source.) Continue reading
José Ortega y Gasset on Self-Satisfaction and Specialization
Joaquin Sorolla (1863 – 1923): Portrait of Jose Ortega y Gasset (1918)
The Revolt of the Masses (1930) by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955), like many books openly critical of modern trends, was once celebrated and judged to be something of a contemporary classic, but it has gradually, over the last four or five decades, vanished from awareness even among the supposedly educated. I read it for the first time in the early 1970s when I pursued (rather fitfully, I confess) my undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. The College Library possessed two copies, an indication of how widely the book circulated in the middle of the Twentieth Century. Were one to canvass today’s English or History faculties, familiarity with Ortega’s book would likely be non-existent; it would be a rare incident even if so much as the name Ortega registered with humanities professors in their thirties and early forties. The Revolt nevertheless speaks to the present moment with increasing pertinence, as do many similar books of its day, such as Oswald Spengler’s Hour of Decision (1934) and Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952), which likewise have lost all currency. The Revolt also describes those who know not of it and who think that knowledge is circumscribed by the syllabus of their graduate studies. The Revolt illuminates a remark made by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012): “Modernity has given birth to the most empty civilization mankind has ever known.” Two chapters of The Revolt offer themselves as especially relevant to the situation of the West in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century – “The Self-Satisfied Age” and “The Barbarism of Specialization.” First, however, a brief summary of Ortega’s general argument is in order.
The late-Nineteenth Century, according to Ortega, saw the sudden rise in Europe of economies of abundance. This mounting wealth resulted, in the first part of the Twentieth Century, in mass man, a social and cultural phenomenon that adapted itself, but in no positive way, to the advent of material ease and comfort. Mass man reaped the benefits of a civilization to which he had in no way contributed, which he failed to understand, and which he took entirely for granted, identifying it as the natural background to his existence. By the power of number alone, mass man, in Ortega’s phrase, intervenes everywhere, breaking down the hierarchical aspects of society and culture, while assimilating to himself – that is, to his limitation and incapacity – every institution. Mass man undertakes no projects, but contents himself with diversion. If he labored, it would be reluctantly, without commitment, and for the sake of diversion. Ortega defines mass man as “he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes drifting along.” This Homo novus has proliferated with such celerity that he overwhelmed any possibility of education. Thus, in Ortega’s words, “heap after heap of human beings have been dumped onto the historical scene at such an accelerated state, that it has been difficult to saturate them with traditional culture.” Mass man experiences a privative consciousness bereft of history, ignorant of the ancestors, and by tendency self-centered. He is egocentric in the extreme, in fact, but with the codicil that his ego remains at an infantile level of development.
What Is It Like To Suffer a Preference Cascade?
What is happening right now, globally, in re the Chinese Flu, is an inflection point in human history. This is so, no matter what the facts might actually turn out to be – the facts medical, epidemiological,, financial, economical, political, cultural, you name it – which now all appear to all of us so obscure, and (we cannot but think) intentionally obfuscated and obscured, by those in the higher reaches of the global culture interested in this or that outcome, for their own purposes, rather than for the sake of the good, the true, the beautiful. It does not really matter what those facts might turn out to be. Ex post, they shall, certainly, tell. But, for the moment, being mostly unknown, they simply cannot; almost every datum is now somewhat masked by countervalent noise of some sort. So, we proceed all of us on the basis of what we know. And what we know extends not much further than our own households, and beyond that our familiar networks, intimately connected via the web despite their geographic dispersion.
Letter To an Investor
A client wrote me over the weekend, asking if I thought recent news of apparent flattening of the curve of new infections of Chinese Flu in Italy, Spain and, perhaps, even New York City, portended incipient prevalence over the virus. I responded:
Diversity in a Time of Plague
The Wuhan Virus pandemic, having shut down the campuses and sent the undergraduate cohorts into a wide diaspora, teaches a lesson about multiculturalism and diversity. Dissenters from the reigning New Puritanism think of multiculturalism and diversity as abstract and arbitrary schemes for a total and malicious re-ordering of society. They are right, but it is possible to go further. Multiculturalism, the doctrine, and diversity, the implementation, root themselves in a grossly corporeal way in the compulsory physical crowding of human masses – which is why colleges and universities, with their large numbers of student-residents, furnish the primary ground for the radical re-ordering project. It is not a wrought thronging-together of individuals, but a wrought thronging-together of groups with the aim, among others, of abolishing individuality by preventing its formation. This marshaling of the multitudes, once they are present, commences with the division of them into groups – or to be precise, into one heterogeneous group with numerous sub-groups and another group conceived of, falsely and invidiously, as entirely homogeneous. The division bases itself mainly on skin-color but also on traits like homosexuality, which the “woke” claim as ontological but interpret morally. The supervisors of the project regard the heterogeneous group as embodying the “good” side of their Manichaean morality and the homogeneous group the “evil” side of the same. Thus does embodiment in its dumbness advance to the fore. Multiculturalism and diversity exhibit no interest in the spiritual character of the individual person; in fact, multiculturalism and diversity exhibit fierce hostility to the individual person, considered as spirit. Rather, multiculturalism and diversity emphasize the body, its biological traits, and quantities of bodies. The institution recruits bodies to serve its ends – and its ends justify its means. When events have dispersed the bodies from their vulgar concentration, however, the diversitarians pull at their marionette strings in vain.
The Secular Androsphere Begins Its Turn to Christ
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.
Readings of Winter-Spring (Selections)
Nicholas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948), The Philosophy of Inequality (1918; published in 1923 – translated by Father Stephen Janos): Berdyaev appends an elaborate subtitle, Letters to My Contemners, Concerning Social Philosophy, and indeed the book avails itself of the epistolary style, addressing the “contemners” directly via the second person plural. (The translator makes deliberate use of the archaic Ye.) Written during Berdyaev’s ordeal under incipient Bolshevism, but published only after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, which occurred in September of 1922, The Philosophy of Inequality consists of fourteen letters on a carefully calculated sequence of topics, beginning with “The Russian Revolution” and ending with “The Kingdom of God.” With The Philosophy of Inequality, Berdyaev achieves a rhetorical tour-de-force. In the age of Leftwing “wokeness,” Berdyaev’s book reacquires its knife-edged relevancy, conveying to its readers, among many other things, that while the revolutionary mentality might justify itself in its vaunted progress, it remains mired in the dreary slogans of 1848, which themselves in their day never rose above the crassest ressentiment. “The world is entering upon such an arduous and answerable time,” Berdyaev writes in the opening of the First Letter, “in which religiously there has to be exposed everything duplicitous, twofold, hypocritical and unenduring.” The proper instrument for this exposure is “the sword that Christ has brought.” According to the philosopher, “By the spiritual sword [there] has to be a cleaving apart of the world into those standing for Christ and those standing against Christ.” Under Berdyaev’s conviction, Christ stands not with the advocates of equality. He stands rather with those who first acknowledge and then strive to realize His redemptive gift of the person. In the Second Letter, Berdyaev writes of the insurrectionists how, “Ye deny and ye destroy the person, all ye proclaimers of materialistic revolution, socialists and anarchists, radicals and democrats of various stripes, leveling and making a hodge-podge of all, ye proponents of the religion of equality.”
