Socialism, Totalitarianism, Irrationalism, Indecency, Gnosticism
I am not sure if this violates my Lenten oath to avoid writing articles on politics during Lent, which, unfortunately, happens to coincide with the day, 22 March 2010, future historians will regard as the modern parallel to the publication of the Reforms of Diocletian. (Diocletian’s Reforms permanently placed the economy of the empire on a statist footing, in effect nationalized agriculture, introduced the crack along which the Empire would split, dropped the pretense that the Imperator was a magistrate ruling citizens rather than an overlord commanding subjects, and so started the long, slow, and inevitable decline and fall.)
However, the following is concerned mostly about history, civilization, and philosophy, so perhaps it can be allowed. It is a rejoinder to a reader who proposed that the political Left in American are supporters of Anglo-American Law and Greco-Roman Philosophy, and that their opposition to Judeo-Christian ethics does not necessitate they cease to be supporters. The comment is so outrageous that neither innocent ignorance nor malignant dishonesty can explain it.
What is the specter that haunts the modern age? It goes by many names, all of them misleading, and takes many forms, and therefore resists classification. Let us define it by use of apophatic statements. Let us say what it is not.
Western civilization is based on two pillars: Judeo-Christian faith and Greco-Roman philosophy. The English speaking civilization is based on a third pillar, the Anglo-American law. The modern English civilization is based on a fourth pillar, the science of economics as understood by Smith and Ricardo, Say and Bastiat, Hume, Malthus and Mill.
In the current age, the Western civilization for good or ill has overshadowed and dominated the other literate civilizations of the planet, such that China is ruled by a political-economic philosophy developed in England by a German Jew, and such that India retains the forms and institutions of Anglo-American law, such as trial by jury, independent judiciary, a parliament, a prime minister, and so on.
There are four centers of opposition, one eroding each of these supports of civilization.
1. Economics
The political economics of Marx and his epigones is rightly called socialism. Socialism is little more than a denial of the axioms of economics. Where economics regards the scarcity of resources and the disutility of labor to be an innate property of any economized good or service, socialism regards the scarcity of resources and the disutility of labor to be political phenomena reflecting an imbalance in power, as if they were crimes that good laws rigorously enforced would abolish. Where economics regards the prices, wages and rents to be defined by a law of supply and demand, and therefore innate to any exchange, socialism regards prices and wages to be political phenomena reflecting an imbalance in power, as if prices and wages were set by the fiat of the investors and manufacturers, and therefore could be set, with no loss of price calculation information, by the fiat of political leaders.
Economists following Marx are basically conspiracy theory nuts, and regard natural market operations to be evidence of hidden mechanizations by some powerful and secret group. Marx and those following him identified the investors as this conspiratorial group, and he went so far as to describe the activity of investing in stock (which can be done by any individual in the market, rich or poor, who has capital to lend) as if it were a social class, like the landed gentry of old, protected by special laws and institutions: Marx spoke of a Capitalist “class” even though, obviously, investment is a category of economic action, not a social class composed of men.
Hitler and those following him identified Jews as this conspiratorial group. Since the conspiracy does not exist, Marxists and Hitlerians take the absences of evidence as proof that the conspirators are powerful and ruthless and deceptive.
There is something of the psychology of an inferiority complex at work here, since the Marxists and Hitlerians see themselves as grappling with an enemy of superior intelligence and infinite resources who somehow sabotage their five and ten year plans for prosperity at every turn.
Modern Fabian socialists follow a watered-down or nonviolent version of this play-pretend version of economics, but the psychology goes along with it. This is why we see resentment and victimization as an endless leitmotif running through Leftist speeches, books and artworks. In reality, these bold crusaders against the conspiracy are fighting reality, no human person.
They have merely set themselves as enemies of the scarcity of resources and the disutility of labor, and enemy of the law of supply and demand. As if they were an inmate of Bedlam who declared war on the law of gravity, and is pulled painfully to Earth each time he attempts to fly, the Left finds itself battered by reality, but blames the failure on the sabotage of the conspiracy.
The psychology of monomania also is in play here: they simply try the same policies that defy economic reality in the same way, again and again. And when they fail again, they find something on which to blame the failure, but the idea of repealing the policy and allowing the free market to operate according to natural law does not and cannot occur to them. It is not a psychological insanity but a political one: a policy that attempts the same act under the same circumstances but expects a different result is an insane policy. Even if those who promote and carry out the policy are technically sane each considered as an individual, their group action is neurotic, or even psychotic.
2. Law
The erosion of Anglo-American law is based on a simple centralization of power: the conceit that the further distant a government is, and the more centralized it is, the better it is cuts directly against the idea of all men sharing equality before the law, and each individual having right not even the King can overstep. What is sought is total control over all aspects of human life, and therefore this movement is correctly called totalitarian. The excuses and justifications for the totalitarianism differ from decade to decade and region to region, but the conclusion is always the same. The need for Eugenics to deter the lower classes from breeding, for example, once so popular among intellectuals, lost its cachet after the Hilterian war; but the need for conservation of natural beauty has been metastasized to take its place, and so now we have control of the marriage and reproduction of the lower classes justified by ecological worries rather than eugenic ones, but the conclusion is the same.
Merely to deflate a counter argument before it arrives, it has been common over the last century to qualify totalitarian as a phenomenon equally of the political Left as of the Right. This is done by the simple sleight of hand of labeling the National Socialists Worker’s Party in Germany, and the Fascists in Italy, as “Rightwing.” Both Hitler and Mussolini sought control over the economy, installed wage and price controls, determined the wage and profit margins, and defined lines of production, and with the expected result of creating poverty and misery. Despite what was reported, Mussolini did not get the trains to run on time: the Italian rail system under his socialist mismanagement was among the worst in Europe. The totalitarians are enemies of proponents of limited government. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao all favored gun control. Their opposition favors a natural right to keep and bear arms be recognized by the state. The idea of an armed and free citizenry employing a limited government to protect its jealously-guarded individual rights cannot be conflated with the idea of a totalitarian state organizing its subjects to serve the will of the state. No matter what verbal trickery or mislabeling is practiced, the side that hates arms is totalitarian and the side that cherishes them is not.
The other counter-argument is that the "’Right” seeks control over personal morality, in the form of laws against pornography and pederasty, bestiality and slander and public intoxication, whereas the “Left” seeks control over economic affairs, wage and price controls, anti-discrimination laws and set-asides, and so on. This counter argument is that both sides are totalitarian, albeit in different areas. The Left want freedom in the bedroom and not the business realm, the Right wants freedom in business matter but not in the bedroom. This is a misleading analysis, because the two areas are fundamentally different. One deals with the type of self-indulgent vices, such as drunkenness and fornication, which , if left unchecked, erode the public morals and manners, eventually to the point where the commonwealth does not have the manhood or character needed to survive. We have seen clear enough evidence of that coming from Britain in recent years. A mob of selfish, self-seeking, self-indulgent hedonists does not have the character or courage needed to reproduce, to pass its values on to the next generation, to act in concert to defend itself, to produce any great works of art or literature, or even to raise an objection when hostile emigrants occupy the land and demand their own laws and customs take priority over native laws and customs. The victimless crime laws of the Right are merely an expression of Judeo-Christian ethics, and not an attempt to rule over anyone’s life. They establish no hierarchy and grant no one any discretionary power. They are not totalitarian in that they erect no office to dictate terms and commands. They merely outlaw what has always, since the times of the pagans, been outlawed.
On the other hand, control of the economy necessarily requires making acts that have never been illegal into breaches of the law. Control of the economy mandates day by day supervision of every minute detail, both of production and consumption, and officers and bureaucrats to administer it, and specific individuals told what to do and what not to do. The difference is between a law, which applies universality, blind to favoritism, and a regulation, which is a sergeant giving orders to a private, and directing his speech, action, and thought; which is nothing but favoritism.
3. Reason
The erosion of Greco-Roman philosophy is based on the dehumanization of man. Classical philosophy differed from the writings of the Indians and Chinese in that it held the natural world to be rational and decipherable by reason. The modern antiphilosophies that deny this openly or tacitly are almost too numerous to mention: Hegel held that concepts have no fixed meaning; Nietzsche held that morality is a matter of willpower; Existentialism that existence had no innate meaning; Wittgenstein held that words have no innate meaning (including, one assumes, the words he himself used to make that statement); Logical Positivists decreed as a matter of universal metaphysical principle that no universal metaphysical principles exist; B.F. Skinner held that the contents of the human mind were merely the mechanical epiphenomenon of surrounding stimuli (including, one assumes, his own mind with its conviction of Skinnerism); various forms of materialism hold that man is just a meat machine, lacking consciousness and identity; thoughts are merely ‘memes’ and free will is held to have been scientifically proven not to exist (one assumes the proof was coerced from the scientists unwillingly, since he himself evidently also lack free will).
In each case, the modern philosopher is in the position of the idiot in a tree busily sawing off the branch on which he sits. Each of these philosophies undercuts support for any philosophy at all, including itself. If concepts are not fixed, they are not concepts, and with no concepts, no rational understanding of the universe is possible; if morality depends on fiat, even the basic honesty needed to answer questions about the universe goes by the wayside; if existence has no meaning, philosophy has no meaning; if words have no meaning, likewise; the various positivists, behaviorists, and materialists who reduce man to a mere animal or to a mere machine or to a mere cloud of selfish self-reproducing atomies produce a chimerical creature, something between a golem and a tape recorder, that cannot perceive the universe, reason or deduce. The idea of science proving men have no free will is too comically self-refuting even to bear repeating. In each case, either the universe is irrational, or man is, and the effort of the Greco-Roman philosophers to deduce truth and beauty from nature is dismissed.
4. Ethics
Of the overthrow of Judeo-Christian morality, little need be said. The Church established the university system in the Thirteenth Century, along with its ideals of academic freedom and free inquiry. The Revolution has no need of scientists—these famous words were used when Lavoisier, the world famous chemist who deduced the periodical table, ran afoul of the head-chopping zealots of the French Revolution. Pol Pot decided to eliminate all booklearning in his utopia of Year One by killing everyone who wore glasses. Nazi Germany drove out Jewish science, including Einstein, the most accomplished physicist in history. In its non-violent form, the freethinkers of the Left gather in Academia and in the courts of law to censor, harass, forbid and terrify anyone who does not recite the rubbish of self-contradictory nonsense called Political Correctness. The freethinkers thoughtful method of promoting correct thought is to scream like mindless sirens, and shout mindless bromides, like frightened witch-doctors attempting to scare away a boogieman with their mumbo-jumbo, and not like one mind attempting to convince another mind.
The Church discouraged, discouraged, punished, and abolished the ancient practices of infanticide, gladiatorial games, pederasty, sodomy, polygamy, slavery, and a belief in magic. Where the Church has grown weak, and Christian civilization driven back, those things return, with the exception of gladiatorial games, which have returned only in a pretend form, hyperviolent cinema and torture-porn taking the place of satisfying bloodlust by proxy, where no actual bloodshed is involved.
5. Gnosticism
Judeo-Christian ethics and orthodoxy is the prime target of the specter, and Greco-Roman philosophy and Anglo-American law being revered by the Left only in those areas where they assist in the corruption of Judeo-Christian ethics. For example, a postmodernist who claims that all language is an act of oppression meant to cow the weak into accepting the societal myths of the strong, if he were logically consistent rather than politically consistent, would also condemn science as merely one more narrative myth of oppression. However political consistency trumps intellectual consistency. Respect for the expertise of science is trotted out where convenient, such as during a debate on man-made global warming; but the respect evaporates with remarkable suddenness if the debate turns to other scientific matters, such as the difference between I.Q. scores of whites and blacks, or the relatively low number of women excelling in math and science. When the scientists actually investigate false claims with rigorous scientific skepticism, such as during a debate on man-made global warming, the various political tactics used to quell dissent from the narrative myth of oppression are eagerly employed and justified by the self-same postmodernist. And, in a like fashion, those part of the Anglo-American notion of liberty the Liberals see as undermining Judeo-Christian morality, such as the liberty to commit prenatal infanticide, or the liberty to commit sodomy and demand public celebration, nay, to compel Churches to perform and recognize such perversions as matrimony, those are somehow found in the Constitution of the United States or the Magna Charter. The freedom to express unpopular political views, to practice one’s religion, or to keep and bear arms, these are regarded as peripheral to the Constitution.
6. Conclusion
So the specter is not just a political movement nor a philosophical one: nor are all four pillars of civilization under equal attack.
Against economics, the attack is called socialism, and it is directed against reality, and also against the free market institutions that operate successfully within the context of reality.
Against Anglo-American law, the attack is called totalitarianism, big government, and political correctness.
Against Greco-Roman philosophy, the attack is various forms of irrationalism and polylogism. The various branches are postmodernism, which attacks language, Positivism, which attacks metaphysics, Materialism, which attacks reason, Behaviorism, which attacks ethics, Modernism, which attacks beauty, Relativism, which attacks truth, and Existentialism, which attacks all of the above. There are countless variations and movements within these broad outlines, but the leitmotif which recurs in all of them is their simple self-refuting character: an idiot sawing off the branch on which he sits. All these modern philosophies are non-spiritual approaches to the question of man, which therefore treat man as a soulless, thoughtless, or even an inanimate object to be studied—and the student never seems to realize that if man is an inanimate object of study, he cannot be a studier. Only rational creatures study the universe.
Against Judeo-Christian ethics, the attack is Indecency. This is not a preference for indecency. It is a philosophy which promotes perversion (sexual and otherwise) for its own sake, under various claims that drug abuse expands the mind, that sexual perversion is merely liberation from an unreasoning fear of sexuality, that shocking the conscience displays courage and creativity, that various other self-destructive behaviors are signs of enlightenment, liberation, liberty, and moral superiority. Ironically, the partisans of Indecency by and large disport themselves with more sobriety and chastity that the opposite camp: a large number they are not perverts themselves, but are pervertarians, people who see it as a good in and of itself to destroy traditional notions of temperance, moderation, chastity, courtesy, decorum and decency.
Against the Christian Orthodoxy is the root and heart of all these other movement. The enemy of Christianity is Gnosticism, which is the radical rejection of reality in favor of an inner esoteric reality, a promise that man is god, and a defiance that all surrounding reality is radically evil and must be overthrown. Some versions of Gnosticism are strictly ascetic; some versions are wildly libertine. The Modern is a wildly libertine version. It preaches that all attempts at moral and ethical behavior are a conspiracy of the powers ruling the world to enslave, deceive and oppress the enlightened, and that the true calling of the enlightened is each man for himself to write his own ethical commandments in a private Decalogue.
The one strange mutation of modern Gnosticism is that it is atheistic rather than theistic in character. Ancient Gnostics thought there was a perfectly good and perfectly weak god existing outside the universe, and that Jehovah was an usurper imposing on mankind cruel and meaningless commandments in order to keep us enslaved. The mission of the Gnostic was to fight against the lies of Jehovah and release the inner spark of purity, a divine self, that would fly up out of the universe and merge with the Pleroma, where the true god dwells.
The modern Gnostic rejects the supernaturalism but keeps the ethical narrative intact: the mission of the Enlightened is to overthrow all the lies and deceptions of the world-system, which is radically evil and oppressive, including such institutions as marriage, laws, economics, and the spoken language. Everything is an instrument of oppression; everything must go. Once the lies of the world-system are gone, the Enlightened will free himself from “hang-ups” by “finding himself” and indulging whatever his deepest and most authentic passions might be, and the idea here is that your “true and inner self” much like the true spark of the divine in the ancient Gnostic, is without sin and without error and no passion indulged honestly and authentically can be bad or produce bad side effects. Only inner sincerity counts, not outer reality.
Once the divine self is released from the smothering burden of Judeo-Christian Ethics, Anglo-American Laws, and Greco-Roman Philosophy, and especially once the Enlightened are free from the sinister conspiracy of Jews and Wall Street Bankers that produce the evils of scarcity of resources, disutility of labor, and the law of supply and demand, then all goods and services will be more abundant than a cornucopia, pie will fall from the sky at dinnertime, swords will be bent into ploughshares, the lion will lay down with the lamb, and the government will wipe all tears from our eyes. Without the need of God, the Enlightened will make all things new.
In this narrative fairy tale, those of us who believe that reality is real and A is A, and who think words and thoughts should be true to fact rather than false to fact, who believe in honor and decency and not stealing or expropriating the work and lives of others, we are the enemy, the immoral, the stupid, the mouth-breathing Neanderthals who walk on our knuckles, the benighted. Because they are sarcastic and illogical and empty-headed and hysterical, and because they can get a mother to kill her own baby in the womb rather than love and protect it, they regard themselves as the moral and mental superiors of those of us who are honest and rational and learned and calm, and who have a respect for reality, law, ethics, reason and God.
This combination of socialist and totalitarian irrationalism, with esoteric and agnostic Gnosticism hangs like a smog of phosgene gas over the modern and postmodern world. It is hard to define because it has no central focus or philosophy or ethics or metaphysics. It is a body without a skeleton, amorphous and indistinct. To call it ‘Leftist’ is misleading, because this is a term dealing with politics, and only tangentially related to economics, philosophy, law and ethics.
It has no form because its form is defined by what it opposes. This specter is the spirit of anti-Christ. It is not for anything in the long run, it is merely against Christianity in particular, and specifically Roman Catholicism.
By no coincidence, despite the claims of tolerance and antiracism which shriek from this formless specter, and despite the large number of secular Jews allied with the specter, it is anti-Semitic to its core and has been since time out of memory.
The specter is the opposition to the four pillars of civilization. Whether the partisans of the specter believe civilization can survive without its supports, or whether they seek the return of the darkness of barbarism for its own sake, I leave as a question beyond my capacity to answer: the first assumes extraordinary stupidity on their part, the second assumes extraordinary malice. Since these partisans loudly trumpet at every possible opportunity their alleged moral superiority and mental supremacy to every honest man of ordinary decency, this writer is speechless with wonder, and therefore speculations of the motives behind the specter I leave to the reader.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
