The Devil’s Latest Dictionary, Part I

[In the spirit of Ambrose Bierce.]

Note: Most of these definitions assume a certain point of view without which they become incoherent.

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Fundamentalist. Noun. When you believe your religion is true and / or you support your people. Synonyms: bιgοτ, deplorable, suprεmαcιsτ.

Mansplain. Verb. To be competent and confident.

Equity. Noun. More for us, less for you.

Democracy. Noun. A political outcome or system which gives results we like.

Fαscιsμ. Noun. A political outcome or system which gives results you like. Synonyms: ωhιtε sυprεmαcy, institutional rαcιsm.

Protestor. Noun. Someone publicly taking our side.

Rioter. Noun. Someone publicly taking your side.

Diverse. Adjective. More of us, fewer of you. Synonyms: vibrant, inclusive.

Tolerant. Adjective. Demanding things be done our way.

Intolerant. Adjective. Wanting things to be done your way.

Cμlτμrαl αρρroρrιατιοη. Noun. When you play with our toys and we hαtε it because we hαtε you.

Rαcιsτ.  1) (Archaic noun) One who hαtεs people only because of their rαcε. 2) Adjective. The quality possessed by anything nonωhιτεs don’t like. 3) Noun or Adjective. ωhιtε people and their activities and achievements.

Science. Noun. A discipline or study which confirms our beliefs.

Superstition. Noun. A so-called discipline or study which denies our beliefs.

Crιτιcαl Rαcε Thεοry. Proper noun. You bad, we good.

Whιτε Prινιlεgε. Noun. Your ancestors established the culture of their nation according to their preferences.

Hαtε. Noun. Disagreement with our doctrine.

Love. Noun. Agreement with our doctrine.

On Conflation of Grammatical Persons as a Tactic of Our Enemy

I harp from time to time on the first and crucial importance of linguistic tradition, as the indispensable foundation of almost all others. We cannot very well maintain a social order if in discussing it we have no way to be each and all clear on what it is, exactly, we are talking about.

This is no original thought. Confucius was saying the same thing 2500 years ago. And Orwell saw clearly that deforming the language would deform – and ruin – culture.

The Leftist Establishment is hard at the ruin of language, with the recent risible emphasis on pronoun protocol.

Traditionalism is the Reductio of Modernity

The tradition of modernity is to repudiate tradition per se. It’s right there in the term: ‘modern’ is from Late Latin modernus, from Latin modo, “just now.” So ‘modern’ means “what is just now.”

Traditionalists take the modern tradition with utmost seriousness, thoroughness, and consistency: they repudiate the tradition of modernity.

Traditionalists are the iconoclasts of iconoclasm. So likewise are they then the true postmodernists. In their hearts and in their minds, and so far as is possible in their acts, they live into whatever it is that shall inevitably ensue, once modernity has finished eating itself, and collapsed; once the people have awakened and shaken it off like a nightmare or Soviet Communism.

Traditionalists are ransacking the cupboards on the morning after Belshazzar’s Feast, looking for the coffee as the sour dregs of the Party lapse into biliary nausea, bitter existential regret, and alcoholic coma, and as the Persians begin to assemble their siege engines.

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.

More Knife-Edged Comedy from J. P. Sears

Social Justice in 1940

The phrase “Social Justice” was used by Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979) for his weekly newsletter (1936 – 1942). Distinctly right-wing, Father Coughlin wanted to keep the U.S.A. out of foreign wars. He also wanted to keep the Federal Government out of everyday life. I remember several professors at UCLA in the 1970s who knew of Coughlin and made a point of denouncing him. No one, particularly on the Left, knows of Coughlin nowadays. The irony runs rich.

Pin-Up Art & the Metaphysics of Sex

Peter Driben (1908 – 1968)

In an age, on the one hand, of renewed, anti-sexual Puritanism and, on the other, of freely available Internet pornography the names of Peter Driben (1908 – 1968), Gillette Elvgren (1914 – 1980), Earl Moran (1893 – 1984), Alberto Vargas (1896 – 1982), George Petty (1894 – 1975), and Earle K. Bergey (1908 -1985) are largely forgotten although from the late 1920s through the mid-1960s they held a place in the American popular imagination and not only among males.  Notoriety attached itself to these men because they produced the cover-art for a plethora of what went by the name of “glamour magazines,” with titles such as Wink, Flirt, Eyeful, and Beauty Parade, to list only a few.  Unlike Playboy and its later offshoots, which would drive them from the newsstands, the “girlie mags” featured no nudity, but limited themselves to what might be called the scantily clad or, on occasion, the accidentally scantily clad – young women in lingerie, bathing-suits, tennis outfits, and short skirts who sometimes by mischance display in public more limb than they would intend.  Whereas the interiors of these periodicals used black-and-white photography, the house always printed the covers in bright polychrome.  Often the poses are humorous.  The young woman is overburdened with packages, her shorts have come unbuttoned, and she bends her body and pins her elbows against her hips to keep her culottes from slipping away.  From the expression on her face, however, her plight and embarrassment communicate themselves, and her struggle to maintain dignity becomes sympathetic.  Ice-skating and roller-skating accidents sometimes occasion a revelatory maladroitness, but the revelation obeys strict limits.  Men never enter the picture.  The artist invariably portrays the female twenty-something as independent and as going – playfully, of course, but sometimes with bad luck – about her own business.  If she flaunted her comeliness, which qualifies as exceedingly comely, it would be in private and with an excusable girlish vanity.

Liberalism is the Enemy of Everything

Any commitment is bound to bind behavior within certain boundaries, for at bottom, and when carried into practice, every commitment is somehow moral, and so goes to inform and to constrain acts. Commitments then are per se somehow nomological, at least implicitly: a commitment cannot but impose a moral duty, and a judgement of what constitutes moral crime.

Philosophical liberalism takes the autonomy of the individual as ultimate. Any sort of commitment to anything else is bound to derogate that autonomy. So liberalism cannot but construe commitment to any other thing than individual autonomy as a moral crime.

So liberalism sets itself against all other commitments. It is the envious enemy of every other love. So is it destructive of all things, including eventually itself; for, human selves and their liberties all supervene society, which is a nexus of commitments to things that transcend the self.

Poe’s Psychic-Atomist Critique of Wayward Modernity – Part II

Joseph Mallord Turner (1775 – 1851) – Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834)

PART TWO. The worldwide, instantaneous ekpyrosis of “Eiros and Charmion” illustrates Poe’s thesis dramatically.  In “Eiros and Charmion” Poe wrote the first cosmic-collision story, to be followed fifty years later by H. G. Wells in “The Star,” and popular ever since.  Cosmic-collision stories tend to be end-of-the-world stories, a pattern set by Poe’s dialogue.  Earth passes through the tail of a large comet, the chemistry of which draws the nitrogen from the atmosphere, leaving only the oxygen, at which point everything combustible, including the human body, bursts into flame.  Eiros, who died in the extinction-event, narrates the last moments of life to Charmion, who had graduated to “Aidenn” by ordinary death prior to the cataclysm: “For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things”; then – “the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name.”  Eiros quotes the Apocalypse of St. John and remarks on the hauteur with which the humanity of the time dismisses the ancient lore of comets.  In those passages subsists the criticism of wayward modernity: The mentality of the End-Times adhered only to “science” and rejected its connection to the cosmos – to God.  Comets once signified, but they have become mere phenomena, “divested of the terrors of flame.”  The awe that people once felt in respect of cosmic manifestations the final generation will need to re-learn in the moments before its demise.

Are Politics and Metapolitics No Longer Mainly About Conservatism Versus Liberalism?

Some thinkers say yes. I say, in one sense, yes. In another sense, no.

Starting around 1970, the New Left, having failed in their 1960’s attempt to seize open power through Revolution, shifted to the strategy of completing the takeover of institutions by leftist thinking through the use of legal and incremental means. This takeover had started in the Nineteenth Century, but it kicked into high gear when the Left began their modern campaign.

Like the proverb of the frog whose water temperature jumps suddenly, this move of the left inaugurated the era of open political battle between leftists seeking to conquer society by instituting leftist laws / rules and installing leftist officials, and conservatives seeking (often halfheartedly) to block leftism. The dominant paradigm of political warfare consisted of rival candidates seeking elected office, rival legislative factions seeking to pass or block laws, and citizens opposing or supporting laws (at the governmental level) or regulations (at the private sector level), all of which involved masses of voters or constituents exerting force by collective action.