Freedoms of Speech & of Religion Open & Allow the Race to the Bottom

The basic problem with freedom of speech and of religion is that in principle, and then inevitably in practice, it opens the agora to the discussion of the pros and cons of every alternative cult. No topic is prohibited. So, no sort of doctrine or rite is forbidden within the pale. There ensues a proliferation and interpenetration and confusion of heresies and petty foreign cults. The cult of Moloch is then sooner or later bound to enter the lists. Where there is freedom of speech and of religion, no one will be able to prevent that entry legally.

Where it is legal to advocate and to practice Molochism, it will sooner or later be advocated and practiced, by at least some few.

Guest Post: What is Christian Politics? (Part II)

The Creation of Adam (ca. 1512) by Michelangelo (1475 – 1564)

The following is Part II of the essay “What is Christian Politics?” by Tsoncho Tsonchev. Part I is here.

The dream of success is the narcotic of the modern age and when its dazzling effect disappears a spiritual devastation follows. We speak about personal “success” and the “national.” There is no essential difference between these two. Both “successes” require sacrifices for the achievement of an imaginary goal, and the greatest and most troublesome of all is the sacrifice of morality. Morality is tightly connected with Christianity and natural inclinations (the moral sense in the “heart” of man or the so-called natural law). When Christianity disappears from politics and social relations, and only “success” is left, competition and striving follow. Moved by desire for success and a corrupted sense of competition, Cain killed his brother. Disappointed by the “success” of Abel and by his supposed “failure,” Cain committed the greatest crime. God asked him, “Why are you so angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; you are its object of desire, but you must master it.” (Gen. 4:6) Cain should not be angry, because the success of Abel was a result of his natural inclination, of a gift through which he serves the society of men and God. Cain should do what is right, that is, should accept his situation, as Paul advises, and respect the dignity of God and his brother, and continue to abide in his calling. His service would be certainly accepted, as God tells him, and it would be accepted even with a greater favor, because he would pass the test of time, and would prove that his service is perfect, that he is not under the power of sin, but masters it with his profession of “fruit-giving.” But he did not abide. He separated himself from what is right, and fell under the power of sin.

“A complete separation of morality and politics constitutes one of the prevalent errors and evils of our century,” Vladimir Soloviev writes in his introduction to the National Question in Russia (1891).[1] From a Christian point of view, the domain of morality and the domain of politics should be connected, Soloviev argues. He says that “in the common life of humanity, the kingdom of Evil and discord is a fact; but the goal is the kingdom of God, and towards this goal the intermediate transition from ugly reality is called Christian politics.”[2] Soloviev points out that there is a constant confusion in the understanding of the word “national interest.” If the national interest is considered as “supremacy,” “outward might,” “wealth,” upward “mobility” on the international stage, if it is related with the Dream for individual national success, then this understanding would “justify,” as it has been noted, “all sorts of crimes.” As a Christian, Soloviev insists that “national interest” as upward mobility towards supremacy is not the goal of state politics. He explains that “true patriotism” must be in accordance not with greed for power and influence, nor with the competitive spirit for world dominance, but with “Christian conscience.” When Satan took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world with their glory, and told him, “All this I will give you, if you fall down and worship me,” how did Jesus answer? “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.” (Matt. 4:8-10) Jesus abode in his situation and calling, and he listened to his conscience. He did not revolt against the authority of God. Christian conscience is the collective inner feeling that makes the nation abide in its service, respectful of the authority of other nations and to the will of God, and that tells the nation (or the person) what its true mission, calling, and aim are. Therefore, the interest of the truly Christian nation “does not require and absolutely does not permit international cannibalism.”[3] The slogan “My nation first!”—a cry for dominance and individual national success—is a result, basically, of daemonic temptation that would end, inevitably, in ruin. This has been proved time and again in history.

Guest Post: What is Christian Politics? (Part I)

Cain leads his followers into the Land of Nod

The following is Part I of the essay “What is Christian Politics?” by Tsoncho Tsonchev, currently a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he is writing a doctoral thesis on Nicolas Berdyaev. Mr. Tsonchev hails from Bulgaria, but has been living in Canada for a bit more than a decade.

“For to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” (Gen. 33:10)

Christianity is political, but does not have a “political program.” It is revolutionary, but does not call for a change of political regimes. Christian politics is not the secular politics, the politics of power competition and fight for rights and privileges. It is “unconventional” by the standards of contemporary political theory and practice. The Christian understanding of politics is neither paradoxical nor perplexing, yet many fail to admit the adequacy of its concepts and prescriptions, many would argue that to be political means to have a political program, and to be revolutionary means to strive for a change of the political order and power. These are the arguments of those that have no clear sense of the nature of politics and that have no knowledge of the nature of Christianity as the most political and revolutionary teaching in human history.

Jesus advised, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matt. 22:21) What is the meaning of these words? The secular mind would quickly interpret them as a command for obedience to State and Church, as an example of the Christian social and political conservatism. This command, many have argued, asks the people to have a slavish, apolitical behavior; it legitimizes the autocracy of kings and priests. We find this interpretation in the works of great political minds like Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx, but this does not mean that we should accept it uncritically. Because, as it has been said, if Christianity is the most political and revolutionary teaching in history, then, it cannot ask for slavish obedience nor it can legitimize a regime, temporal or spiritual, that is against the freedom of personal conscience.

So, what is the meaning of Jesus’ advice, according to the Christian interpretation? First of all, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” means that man should respect authority. What is authority? Authority is the power that serves the common good. As power serving the common good, the authority should respect man. The authority has the same obligation as the man (or people) under authority. It should “render unto Man (or people) the things that are man’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” As authorities, both God and Caesar, who is a man, are servants of man.[1] The authority has no other goal but to promote justice. Authority is authority only as an act of justice. Authority without justice is autocracy—the rule, the will, and the individual good of autos kratos (self-power). Autocracy is not authority because it does not care for the common good. It is a despotic self-containment and self-sufficiency. Justice, as Aristotle says, is always about the “other,” it always includes more than one person. It is about common good. Justice is possible only in society, under authority, not under autocracy. Justice, in authority, has no other goal but to promote the equity in human society. And equity has no other goal but to defend the dignity of each person in society.

Gustave Le Bon on the Professoriate

Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931)

In the following extract from his Psychology of Socialism (1899), Gustav Le Bon discusses the appeal of socialism for the intelligentsia; the discussion includes Le Bon’s amusingly unsparing characterization of the professoriate — a class of people comprised, in his coinages, by demi-savants and doctrinaires, which he rightly despises.  Here, then, from Chapter IV, “The Disciples of Socialism and Their Mental State” –

It is because the half-science of the demi-savant obscures the instinctive intuitions, that its intervention in social affairs is so often harmful.

Social failures, misunderstood geniuses, lawyers without clients, writers without readers, doctors without patients, professors ill-paid, graduates without employment, clerks whose employers disdain them for their insufficiency, puffed-up university instructors — these are the natural adepts of Socialism. In reality they care very little for doctrines. Their dream is to create by violent means a society in which they will be the masters. Their cry of equality does not prevent them from having an intense scorn of the rabble who have not, as they have, learned out of books. They believe themselves greatly the superiors of the working man, and are really greatly his inferiors in their lack of practical sense and their exaggerated egotism. If they became masters their despotism would be no less than that of Marat, Saint-Just, or Robespierre, those excellent types of the unappreciated demi-savant. The hope of tyrannising in one’s turn, when one has always been ignored, humiliated, thrust into the shade, must have created many disciples of Socialism…

Meditations & Divagations on Two Sonnets

The Sacred Grove (1886) by Arnold Boecklin (1827 – 1901)

Of the French Symbolist School of poetry, Nicolas Berdyaev writes in his Crisis of Art (1917) that its contributors not only acutely sensed the profound spiritual crisis that had shaken and shattered Western culture since the Eighteenth Century at least, but attempted a new, redemptive synthesis that would function as the equivalent of “the sacral art of the ancient world and of the Medieval world.”  (The translation is that of Father S. Janos.)  The Symbolist poets, as Berdyaev plausibly describes their aspiration, “wanted to lead art out of the crisis through a return to the organic artistic era”; they sensed that the arts “are a product of differentiation” of an historical type, and that they “derived from a temple and cultic origin… developed from an organic unity” and “were subordinated to a religious center.”  The Symbolists, Berdyaev asserts, were the last Western artists to strive for pure beauty before the schools of aschemiolatry, in a spasm of “empty freedom,” began their program of bespattering the cosmos with mud and offal.  Berdyaev even ascribes to the Symbolists a theurgic propensity.  In The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), he defines theurgic art as “creating another world, another being, another life,” even to the extent of “creating beauty as essence, as being.”  (The translator identifies himself only as “D. A. L.”)   For the Russian, theurgy in art consists in a revelation of “the religious-ontological, the religious meaning of being.”  Theurgy, as “free creation,” seeks to imitate, under the limitations of mortality and temporality, the original creative act of the World Maker, not so as to challenge, but only so as to imitate, the God whose image man bears.  The Symbolists in this way make themselves followers of such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Johann Sebastian Bach, artists who attributed their creativity hence also their creations not to themselves but, as faithful Monothreeists, to the Three-in-One.

Berdyaev’s observations in The Creative Act and The Crisis are themselves strongly indebted to the poetry and prose of the Symbolists, not least to the musings of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, but also to the works of Richard Wagner and Alexander Scriabin.  Like their Kiev-born inheritor, the Symbolists were mainly reactionary – as the cases of Baudelaire and Wagner well illustrate.  Again like Berdyaev, the Symbolists combined in their creative work and in the explanations thereof their keen sense of transcendence, their anthropological clarity, and their profound vision of cultural decline.  Such men were somewhat paradoxically modern in asserting new genres in their respective artistic domains while at the same time both rejecting modernity per se and advocating for the virtues of the West’s pre-modern phases, sometimes in the Middle Ages and sometimes in antiquity.  The Symbolists also tended to valorize Christianity.  In Mallarmé’s Coup de dès or Roll of the Dice (1897), for example, whose bewildering anti-verses seem in their typographic dispersion to represent the chaos of false freedom, Christ appears as “Le Maître,” “The Master,” who is also the early Nineteenth Century Right-Catholic critic of the French Revolution, Joseph de Maistre.  Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), whom Mallarmé took as his model, explicitly identified himself as the successor of the same Maistre.  In these essential gestures, Symbolism links itself to the larger reactionary critique of “progress” and “revolution” that first becomes explicit in Edmund Burke and in the very same Maistre.  The Symbolists must then exert considerable allure on the reactionary, anti-modern consciousness of the early Twenty-First Century – one hopes.

The present essay proposes to examine two short Symbolist poems, both sonnets, and both from the early phases of the movement.  These are “Vers dorés” (1846) by Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 1855) and “Correspondences” (1857) by Baudelaire, the latter appearing in the poet’s famous verse-anthology Les Fleurs du Mal or Flowers of Evil.  In its commentary on the two poems, the essay will bring to bear the insights into Symbolism of Berdyaev, certain elements of the anthropologies of Maistre and René Girard, and the Weltanschauung and generalized convictions of the reactionary consciousness of the Twenty-First Century.  The mixture might strike readers as a bit arbitrary or even as vertiginous, but its fundamental coherency should gradually make itself evident.  It is a premise of the reactionary consciousness that art is fundamentally conservative and that in its highest expression it is a species of prophesy or apocalypse, at once illuminating the fallenness of the world and pointing the fallen creature towards transcendence of its condition.

Some thoughts about male and female feminists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbtKAYdcZY

Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the Transcendent

Scruton comments: “The old way of teaching the humanities was as objects of love. This is what I have loved. This is what previous generations have loved who handed it on to me. Here. Try it out and you will love it too. Whereas the postmodern curriculum is a curriculum of hatred. It’s directed against our cultural inheritance.”

Peterson, describing that postmodern point of view: “This is the best of what the best of us could produce and it’s nothing. Why should you bother?”

When asked why someone would adopt a man-hating ideology, Scruton suggests that with a loss of a culturally inherited religious tradition and church attendance feminists feel something to be lacking in their lives but do not know what it is. They then surmise that it has been stolen from them.[1] They look at people who seem to be at peace with themselves and the world, the socially successful, who seem fairly content, and imagine it is they who have taken it.

Mimesis is Logically Implicit in Game Theory; &c.

The following is a record of a brainstorm triggered by a recent post of my Orthospherean colleague and friend, Thomas Bertonneau. Because it is as yet no more than a brainstorm, I here report it as I first recorded it, and as it precipitated upon me from the Realm of the Forms – namely, as a series of impacts, occurrences more or less related:

In any population of evolving strategies for winning games (of any sort, no matter the rules (bearing in mind that the rules of such games are themselves subject to evolution)) with each other, imitation of strategies that win – or that have lately appeared to win under cogent criteria of local near term winning (bearing in mind that these criteria, too, are subject to evolution) – is a requirement of survival. Survival is the sine qua non of all other values; for, one must first be, in order then to realize any other value whatever; and so, no value is effectually valuable – is, i.e., valuable in actual practice – except insofar as it enables survival, which is the precondition of any other value.

If my group learns language, yours must do so too in order to survive against us. So for all other acts. If I attack you, you must attack back harder, or die. So human mimesis is a survival strategy for the individual within the group, and for the group as against other groups. Humans naturally imitate each other because that’s the only way to stay competitive, and so to survive.

The Modern Cosmopolitan Cult Tends to the Cult of Moloch

The Cult of Moloch drives out all others.

The established Modern Cosmopolitan Cult is the Cult of No Cults. It is the Cult of Nothing. Only a Cult of Nothing could risk much room within its temenos for other cults – the Christian, the pagan, the Mohammedan, and so forth. For, all those other cults have positive principals, each of whom with his worshippers would be at odds with the others, contesting for dominance over the hearts and acts of the cosmopolitans, until one of them achieved the victory and established his own cult. Were any of them established, they would make no such room for their competitors within their own precincts. So all such positive cults will tend to engender a state of affairs in which they may be established and their competitors driven out.

The Motive Urge of the Leftward Ratchet: No Pain, No Gain

Virtue signalling – in sharp contrast to virtuous behavior – is free. You get what you pay for. A sacrifice that costs you little gains you little. So the virtue signalers have to keep at it. They cannot ever rest.

The Acid Eating at Tradition is Not Capitalism, But Cheap Information

Reactionaries often blame capitalism for eviscerating tradition and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator. But capitalism – i.e., free exchange – is not a recent phenomenon. It was not invented by the Franciscans, forsooth, but rather discovered by them as a subject amenable to moral, theological and philosophical analysis, and so to discourse, development and elaboration. Capitalism has been around since the beginning of human society. It is no more than a fancy word for exchange that develops surplus, after all; for mere trade, and commerce. For almost all of human history, capitalism supported and indeed mediated local tradition – or, at least, did not vitiate it.