I just loved Noemie Emery’s article. She points out something I’ve noticed, too: what seems to be a growing disaffection for “expertise” among the American populace at large. She doesn’t go into the details, into all the “whys” of the situation. That would make for a really interesting project, IMHO.
Perhaps the reasons can be traced to a conscious or even unconscious “reaction” among the populace to the inroads that American-style social progressivism have steadily made into the fabric of American life over the past century.
As Jonah Goldberg argues in his excellent article, “Richard Ely’s Golden Calf” [National Review, December 31, 2009], American-style socialism has never been of the Marxist type; at least not so far. Historically Americans have rejected the Marxist model of socialism on grounds of its “faith in abstract universal laws, its atheism, and its anarchic violence.”
Instead, American social-progressive “movements” have tended to marry features of Bismarck’s “Prussian model” of state socialism with the Christian Gospel. Evidently Goldberg would characterize Richard Ely — “bar none, the most important lay proselytizer of the progressive social gospel” — as a kind of John the Baptist of this uniquely American model of social progressivism.
Goldberg writes:
Bismarck’s “top-down socialism” was, in the words of liberal historian Eric Goldman, “a catalytic of American progressive thought.” A young Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck’s Prussia was the most “admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected” in the world….Which to me is like saying there are no immutable or universal laws of human nature. But I digress:Much of the philosophical rationale for Bismarck’s top-down socialism came from the “historical school” of German economists…. Imbibing heavily from Hegel and Darwin, the historicist economists believed that all economic facts are relative and evolutionary, contingent upon their time and place. Historicists rejected laissez-faire economics on grounds that there are no immutable or universal laws of economics. [emphasis added]
“The most fundamental things in our minds,” Ely said of himself and his new generation of intellectuals, “were on the one hand the idea of evolution, and on the other hand, the idea of relativity”….Anyhoot, marry the Prussian model to the “preferential option for the poor” at the heart of the Social Gospel movement (a/k/a Liberation Theology) — so to "evolve" a new regime in which “technocratic experts” become the “new priests” — and you have an explosive, but quite effective tool of totalizing politics.History, like evolution itself, was moving toward greater social cooperation. And it fell to experts to decide how to advance that process…. Not only did this vision provide a perfect rationale for empowering social planners, it necessarily consigned the rights and liberty of the individual to being an afterthought — hence Ely’s advocacy of what he called “coercive philanthropy.” [LOLOL! Note the oxymoronic “double-speak” here!] If experts can glean which way social betterment lies, who is the individual to object? The job of the economist is not to consider discrete questions about how to, say, maximize productivity or measure discretionary income. It is to fix society in all its relations, right down to each individual…. Whether the individual wanted that . . . was irrelevant. [emphasis added]
Whatever the case, according to Goldberg, “it was Ely's core conviction that the age of salvation could be reached through the judicious application of welfare-state policies”….
Thus Ely stands before us as a utopian thinker and spinner of a Second Reality.
So it might be asked, what is a Second Reality? In a first approximation, it is a programme for transforming the First Reality in which human beings actually live by changing the way we think about it. Its stated object is always the putative "improvement of the human condition" as conceived in the abstract, according to the standards and judgments of self-selected, “expert” thinkers (and doers).
As Goldberg notes, “The philosopher Eric Vöegelin famously warned against ‘immanentizing the eschaton’…. To immanentize the eschaton is to attempt to establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth,” after having eliminated God from the picture. “God’s funeral” is the absolutely necessary requirement for “expert intellectuals” to come into their own, flourish, and prosper.
What united the socialists, the progressives, the social gospellers, the pragmatists, the nationalists, the fascists, the Marxists, and the other factions of intellectuals who rallied at the wake of “God’s funeral” was the idea that old ideas needed to be thrown away. These new intellectuals insisted that the “crust of custom” . . . had to be broken, and that the dogmas, assumptions, rules, and habits associated with the old order had to be either ignored or, better, destroyed. This was from the outset a moralising mission because, as they saw it, the old notions of universal truths were created for the benefit of the greedy haves in order to oppress the have-nots.Or at least, that’s the excuse that is always being offered by our would-be “expert savior class.”
Notice this “haves vs. have-nots” statement is merely an assertion for which no evidence is offered. Yet it is embraced as a first principle upon which all their further arguments depend.
Maybe we need to ask, “What is Reality?” Reality as a noun in the English language dates back to circa 1550 A.D. The word means [according to Webster’s New Explorer Encyclopedic Dictionary, 2006]: (1) the quality or state of being real; (2 [a 1]) a real event, entity or state of affairs; (2 [a 2]) the totality of real things and events; (2 b) something that is neither derivative nor dependent but exists necessarily.
Which of course invokes the meaning of “necessary” (adjective), which the same source gives as: (1 [a]) of an inevitable nature: INESCAPABLE; (1 [b 1]) logically unavoidable; (1 [b 2]) that cannot logically be denied without contradiction; (1 [c]) determined or produced by the previous condition of things; [1 [d]) compulsory; (2) absolutely needed: REQUIRED.
As evidence that progressivist second realities do not meet the reality test as just described, we can consult the word of one of the highly influential social progressives of the past century, J. Allen Smith: “The real trouble with us reformers is that we have made a crusade against standards. Well, we have smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left.”
If I am not entirely mistaken, it seems to me here we have a kind of "confession" from an "elite, expert insider" that — boiling it all down — "God's funeral" entails the funeral of human reason and logic; for to "destroy God" is to destroy the very radix on which human reason and logic wholly depend....
And so it seems to me the progressives of our time that so afflict us are not only trying to “bury God,” they are trying to bury logic and reason itself. When logic and reason are finally “gone,” then all that is left is: mass insanity. And with that — it almost goes without saying — the death of Liberty.
* * * * * *
Anyhoot, I highly recommend the Goldberg article!!! Sorry to run on so long, dearest sister in Christ! I’ve just been thinking about these subjects lately, under the light of the German novelists I told you about, and just wanted to see if I could sketch out some preliminaries here, as I had the opportunity.
You know how I worry about such things!!! LOLOL!
A new dialectic? - Ely's 'Second Reality being the synthesis?
I'm getting really tired of being reshaped.
J. Allen Smith's confession is telling, because as you say when they try to pretend God doesn't exist, they have no ground for logic and reason.
I also find it telling that Richard Ely appeals to science (evolution and relativity) as if it constitutes justification to fabricate a second reality.
snip: If I am not entirely mistaken, it seems to me here we have a kind of “confession” from an “elite, expert insider” that — boiling it all down — “God’s funeral” entails the funeral of human reason and logic; for to “destroy God” is to destroy the very radix on which human reason and logic wholly depend....
And so it seems to me the progressives of our time that so afflict us are not only trying to “bury God,” they are trying to bury logic and reason itself. When logic and reason are finally “gone,” then all that is left is: mass insanity. And with that — it almost goes without saying — the death of Liberty.
All so very true. Yet if we ask ourselves what they were trying to escape knowledge of by way of self-delusion, then we come to the spiritual root of revolutionary nihilism. It is this: death. They fear death and more specifically, the eternal reality of heaven and hell.
For example, as Karl Marx probed the question of Gods’ existence, his line of inquiry marched almost in lockstep with Aquinas formulation for the existence of God. Reaching the same conclusion as Aquinas, Karl Marx knew without a doubt that God Is. It was by an act of will that Marx turned from God and in doing so, freely chose to ‘fall’ into darkness: self-delusion, egomania (’I am god’ said Marx), paranoia, schizophrenia, belief in peculiar ideas, and other vices and torments of conscience.
As Plato pointed out and Augustine later refined, man cannot turn away from He Who is mankinds’ very ground of being without downward-spiraling consequences, one of which is belief in peculiar ideas. From the moral insanity displayed by todays’ rank and file rebels to the egomania of Obama, Soros, etc., it appears we are headed for anarchy.