Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Life Amidst the Postmodern Ruins
Another post or two about Orthodoxy before we move on. This was another “speed post,” so forgive any typos or other infelicities of language....
I was very impressed with how Chesterton, although writing in 1907, had already diagnosed the pathologies of the left. In fact, his ideas mirror exactly what Polanyi wrote some 50 years later about the “moral inversion” of the left, i.e., the dangerous combination of radical skepticism and an unhinged, ruthless moral perfectionism unbound from tradition.
Chesteron writes of the socialist that although he may have a “large and generous heart,” it is “not a heart in the right place.” And only a human being can have a heart dangerously set in the wrong location. It generally occurs “when a religious scheme is shattered” as a result of their intense skepticism. When this happens, “it is not merely the vices that are let loose.” Rather, “the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage.” Just because someone has a moral code, it hardly means that they are moral.
I have written a number of posts on the dynamics of this pathological process, which I thought that Polanyi had been the first to recognize. But Chesterton also writes of how “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” Most every destructive policy put into place by the left can be traced to some Christian virtue gone mad — i.e., feed the hungry, so steal from “the rich” and call it “giving,” or defending abortion on the basis of the sanctity of “liberty,” or encouraging every manner of deviancy under the guise of “tolerance.” They have the bizarre idea that it is “easier to forgive sins” if “there are no sins to forgive” — except for the sin of believing they exist.
Or the leftist might extract and focus upon a single virtue to the exclusion of others, which creates a dangerous imbalance, for example, “a merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity.” John Edwards’ campaign is based almost solely upon this idea, but again, what he calls “charity,” the rest of us call coercion. And boundless charity in the absence of any obligation on the part of the recipient is a recipe for anthropological disaster.
Schuon would agree with Chesterton that the leftist is “really the enemy of the human race — because he is so human.” Of all the animals, only a human being can sink beneath himself — and even beneath the animals. And he does so primarily by imagining that an animal is all he is, for when human intelligence is in the service of animal instinct, the result is hell on earth — and bear in mind that Chesterton was writing before the great atheistic movements of the 20th century — the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, et al, so he clearly grasped the principle before it actually played out in history.
And Chesterton could prophecize in this manner because he could see directly into the “principial” world of timeless truth embodied in revelation. Again, revelation instantiates metaphysical truths with which it is possible to “think beyond the surface,” both in space and in time, interior and exterior. Thus, unlike postmodernists who believe that “perception is reality,” he writes that “man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself.” This leads to the erosion of universality and the elevation of particularity to the ultimate — which quickly devolves into nihilism.
Conversely, the part that a man doubts “is exactly the part he ought not doubt — the Divine Reason.” But this inversion obviously persists — indeed, it is practically the fault line that runs between left and right — and is responsible for a range of pathological ideas, from multiculturalism, to moral relativism, to the belief in “self esteem,” to reducing standards in general to achieve some preconceived end.
The left also practices a “false humility.” After all, it can sound like a plea for humility when the postmodern multiculturalist asks, “who am I to say that I can possess the truth, or that one culture is better than another?” But this attitude is a “more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic.” That is — and this is apparently a subtle point, so listen closely — “The old humility was a spur that prevented man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.”
This is one of the reasons that the left habitually attacks motives instead of substance, for they first undermine the idea that you can know anything objectively, and then insist that the purpose of knowledge is domination and oppression anyway. For the last several years, “job one” of of the left has been to make us doubtful of our aims in Iraq, in the hope that we will simply become demoralized and surrender.
But they do this so selectively that it is mind-boggling. For example, surely there was more credible evidence that Saddam had WMD than that the earth is undergoing catastrophic manmade warming. But in both cases, their main argument is that people who disagree with them have venal motives. In the case of President Bush, he really wanted to invade Iraq because he thought it would somehow enrich his already wealthy “friends.” And in the case of global warming, those who reject the theory are simply on the payroll of Bush’s wealthy friends. So for all practical purposes, humility is not possible on the left, since their conspiratorial form of thought means that they always have the answer. And it sounds humble to the stupid, since they are always opposed to the intrinsically racist-sexist-homophobic America.
So, just as the left engages in the moral inversion of detaching virtue from tradition, they engage in a weird “cognitive inversion” that combines “intellectual helplessness” with a kind of monstrously arrogant omniscience. This is how you can spend some $100,000 plus on an elite university education, only to learn that truth doesn’t exist and we possess it.
Once again, Chesterton was a prophet with regard to the problem of the “tenured radicals” who have hijacked our higher educational system: “The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.” How did he know about the narcissistic boomers 40 years before the first one was born?
Chesterton writes that “there is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” It is the thoroughly irrational thought that our thoughts have no relationship to reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings. This radical skepticism was “the ultimate evil against which religious authority was aimed,” which is why, “in so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof that cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.”
For if the converse were true — i.e., the blind materialism of natural selection — “it does not destroy religion but rationalism,” for it nullifies the mind that can know truth. It is the equivalent of “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”
Thus, “it is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin.” For we have already seen the effects of this gloriously unbound, “free” thought, since the results are strewn all around us. Indeed, we must try to get through the day — and our lives — by making our way through its ruins.
posted by Gagdad Bob at 11/27/2007 08:13:00 AM 36 comments links to this post bttt
Very interesting philosophical discussion. My philosophy is that we ought to oppose leftism on the very fundamental philosophical level:The sophist argues from the assumption of his own wisdom, resulting in the trivial argument, "I am wise and you are not. You disagree with me. Therefore you are wrong." The philosopher replies, "I do not claim to be wise, but I love wisdom and am ready to hear your facts and your logic. But not your claims to superior virtue which you cannot prove."
- "philosophy" means "love of" (philo) "wisdom" (sophy).
- "sophistry" means wisdom.
It is my opinion that journalism as we have known it all our lives is not something which always existed, but something which is an artifact of the telegraph and the monopolistic Associated Press. In the founding era papers were often weeklies, or even irregularly published - and therefore did not deliver news any faster than you could get it by word of mouth. With the advent of the high speed printing press the printers had bandwidth they needed to fill, and became aggressive in pursuing news stories to fill up space. The AP filled that need admirably - and gave the news editor sources which the general public did not have access to.
When the editor had that, he was in a position to talk down to the reader, and he used his propaganda power to promote the conceit that journalism is "objective." Note that I did not say that the editor said he was objective and other journalists were not - it is critical to understand that journalism in general had to be set up on a pedestal because they all have the same source and are essentially fronts for the Associated Press. At root, journalism as we know it is a monopolistic enterprise - the establishment in America, if that term has any meaning at all.
There is no proof - no way to prove - that journalism is objective. The lack of bias is an unprovable negative, and the con of the journalist is that the fact that it couldn't be proved if it were true shows that we must assume that in fact it is true. It would be impolite to say otherwise, just as it would be impolite to say that a woman is immoral just because she cannot prove that she did not sleep with twenty different men last year. But the situations are not comparable because
First, assuming that you are objective is the very essence of subjectivity. Second, journalism claims to be not only objective but important, and yet journalism does not do things but only criticizes those who do. Theodore Roosevelt said that "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . ." But journalism not only criticizes the doer, it praises the fellow critic by applying the positive labels "liberal" and "progressive" to him.
- claiming to be objective is logically very similar to claiming to be wise (is there any such thing as "unwise objectivity?"), and that means that the journalist's claim of objectivity puts me at an unfair disadvantage if I disagree with the journalist about something important.
- there is evidence that the claim of journalistic objectivity is false.
And third, of course, is the historical record of cases where journalism has promoted - often, continues to promote - notions which are provably false. It was patent from the beginning that Michael Nifong was abusing his office when he tried the Crystal Mangum charges in the newspaper. It was patent from the moment that Dan Rather made his "Killian memos" charges that, having only copies and not originals of the putative memos, and no chain of custody for them, CBS could not possibly know that the "memos" were authentic - and it was very quickly demonstrated that it was extremely improbable that the documents had been produced on a machine which even existed at the time the "memo" putatively were written. And on and on; one could go down the list of charges of bias which Ann Coulter lays and documents in Slander.
In sum, leftism is simply criticism and second guessing of the doer by those who take no responsibilty for results. It is supported by the propaganda power of a monopolistic news industry which selectively throws data at us in a confusing cloud to obscure the lack of evidence for the wisdom of its worldview, and is comfortable making baseless ad hominum arguments. Journalism as we know it is inherently leftist - and leftism is sophistry.