This Just In From the Cultural Authorities: "Civilization" a Bad Word

A new update of Kenneth Clark's famous "Civilization" mini-series turns Clark upside down.

Kenneth Clark's "Civilization" mini-series, produced by the BBC and aired on American public television in 1969, celebrated the Western art and culture it depicted and explained. The show was one of the most widely watched and re-aired shows of its kind at the time, and is still discussed today, almost fifty years after its television debut.

In fact Clark, the famous British art critic who hosted the original show, was unambiguous about why he was doing the show in the first place. According to Eric Gibson, who reviewed public television's new update of the show, Clark "developed his series as a response—even a rebuke—to those 'advanced thinkers [of his time]…who have begun to question if civilization is worth preserving."

One wonders what he would say of the new show.

Called "Civilizations" (note the additional 's' in the title), the new program isn't nearly as keen as Clark was on the civilization on which it purports to be describing. Rather than focus on Western civilization, which apparently fallen into disrepute by the cultural philistines who run things like public television, the new show takes a "global approach."

Says Gibson, the very word "civilization" is now politically charged, "implying as it does hierarchies of achievement and value judgments, not to mention its opposite: barbarism."

That someone would say that our culture is better than any other or that some other culture is deficient in some way is the kind of thing that causes fainting spells among our intellectual class. They have reached such a high level of cultural sophistication that they can now declare that all cultures are good--except the one they live in.

But this is the thing about those who pretend to be value-neutral: The very moment after congratulating themselves on the fact they they don't make judgments, the contradict themselves.

"But there is one respect in which “Civilizations” is decidedly not value-free," says Gibson, "and that is in its attitude toward the West. If there are any barbarians in this series, they are the denizens of Europe, who are nearly always depicted as racists, conquerors, looters, slave owners, colonialists and originators of the lurid 'male gaze' in art."

No viewpoint is better than any other (except your own). There are no barbarians (except the people you don't like).

And as we might expect from the postmodernist cultural elites, there is a bias against traditional religion: "The history of Christianity is recounted variously as propaganda or 'a blood sacrifice' along the lines—and I’m not making this up—of the Aztecs’ ritual practices."

Are we supposed to take that as a slight on Christianity, which these people hate? Or as a PR upgrade for the Aztecs who, being indigenous Americans, are a privileged race? It is hard to tell.

As Gibson points out, all fifteen episodes of the original "Civilization" series are on Youtube. If you want an account of our civilization by someone who is on the side of civilization, you'd best go there.

Why the pedophile scandal in Hollywood was hushed up

My post today at Intellectual Takeout:

According to Hollywood logic, if you sexually harass underage boys, for Heaven's sake don't also say that you're gay.

In recent days, the floodgates have opened, and the cesspool of sexual harassment inside Hollywood is being revealed for all to see.

Hollywood... you know: the people who like to give the rest of us sanctimonious lectures at their self-congratulatory awards ceremonies about how we should act?

It started out with Harvey Weinstein, a film producer and former studio executive. The news about Weinstein has been followed by actresses' accounts of sexual harassment that they received at the hands of other Hollywood figures. 

But as it turns out, Hollywood's male sexual predators are not out only for young (adult) women, but boys. We've moved from sexual harassment to pedophilia.

The first revelation came when Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey of sexual harassment when Rapp was 14 years old. Now it is coming to light that the scandal is much bigger.

Matthew Valentinas, an entertainment lawyer, has produced a documentary film about the sexual abuse of teenage boys in Hollywood called "An Open Secret." On an episode of the WEMU public radio show "1A" that aired on Wednesday of this week, Valentinas described a world in which boys run a gauntlet of sexual predators.

There is, says Valentinas, a "well-coordinated, planned out grooming system in Hollywood which is very well organized." Boys are lured in by the promise of fame and fortune, are then given drugs, get "passed around," all the while having their careers carefully controlled by their abusers.

And, as the title of Valentinas' film attests, this is not something other people in Hollywood didn't know about. But despite this having gone on for years, none of the people who are constantly lecturing the rest of us on our political and social priorities thought to say anything.

They didn't have much to say about the systematic sexual predation that infected the whole industry, but they have plenty to say about one errant remark by Kevin Spacey.

Spacey's depredations are one thing. But you know what many in Hollywood are really steamed about? That he announced he was gay after his lechery was discovered.

Everyone knows it is absolutely impermissible to imply that there is any relation between being gay and pedophilia. Pedophilia is bad, but attributing it to homosexuality is the unforgivable sin.

Why did Spacey reveal this about himself when he did? For the same reason Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida did it in 2006 when it was discovered he had been sexting teenage boys. For the same reason that former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey announced in 2004 that he was a "gay American" in the wake of revelations that he had had an affair with a former male aide.

This is what in-the-closet gay men do when it is publicly revealed that they are pedophiles. They do it because they know that being gay usually earns them cultural bonus points. What they don't count on is that their bonus points are taken away by the very people they're trying to impress, all of whom are standing behind the television cameras mouthing "Shut up, you idiot!!!"

Ever wonder why the "open secret" of male-on-male pedophilia gets hushed up in places like Hollywood? Maybe because it might look bad for a favored political group.

Lexington mayor issues open invitation to every crazed White supremacist in the country. Bad idea. #Racism #

From my article at Intellectual Takeout yesterday:

Okay, so the last time someone took down a Confederate monument, hundreds of racists showed up and precipitated a violent class with anti-racist demonstrators some of whom unwisely brought weapons themselves. The result was someone dying. 

Now you're the major of an arguably Southern town, and what do you do? You announce to the country that you're going to take down a Confederate monument. 

Yeah. That'll calm everybody down.

Read the rest here.

You Are Here 'A Handmaid's Tale': Now in Feminist Imaginations Everywhere

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

And the award for most contrived, unrealistic, and preachy television drama goes to... 

I’ve always thought that the best way to ruin a book’s audience is to make a movie out of it. Once the movie is made (and if it is successful), no one wants to read the book anymore. I'm thinking Lord of the Rings here, The African Queen, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump. 

But ruining the book may be the one and only good thing about “The Handmaid's Tale,” Hulu’s dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel. It might at least save us the trouble of reading about a young woman who is a concubine in a male-dominated future society brought about through some unexplained and improbable coup ... 

Read the rest at here.

Why We Like Monsters: A Halloween Meditation

Get a link to my newest post on why our popular culture is so fascinated with the dark and the demonic here.

The Subtle Bias of the Courier-Journal Shows Itself Again

I will be commenting on an online story today in the Louisville Courier-Journal today about Fayette County Family Court Judge Tim Philpot's recent remarks critical of same-sex marriage to a religious group over the next couple of days. In the meantime I'll just remark that the dishonesty of the media reaches proportions that are sometimes epically astounding. 

The CJ titled the online version of the piece, "Family judge: Gay marriage like 'jumbo shrimp'." 

C'mon.

I'd love to attribute the headline to the simple ignorance of the kind I encounter all the time when I use an analogy about a relationship between two things and the person responding just doesn't get the difference between the similarity of two things (which is not what this kind of analogy expresses) and the similarity of two relationships between two pairs of things (which is what this kind of analogy does express).

For example, in a discussion the other day, a person protested my comparison between the idea that you can choose your gender based on your feelings and that you can choose your race based on your feelings. If the latter is unacceptable, then why is the former acceptable? The person's response was: "You cannot try to compare race with ... sexual identity. What you are doing is called a logical fallacy."

Uh, no. Sorry. 

A comparison of the process by which you determine gender and the process by which you determine race is not a comparison of gender and race. You are not saying "Gender is comparable to race"; you are saying "The relationship between the way we feel about our gender and what our gender actually is is the same as the relationship between the way we feel about our race and our what our race actually is. 

A is to B as C is to D—Not A is similar to B.

And the similarity of these two relationships is unmistakable, which is why someone who is actually male who thinks he is female is just as preposterous (in fact, even more so, since gender goes deeper than race) as Rachel Dolezel, the former chairman of the NAACP who, despite actually being White, claims she is Black because she feels Black—a point not dissimilar to the one Philpot was making.

The fact that people no longer get this is a commentary, not only on the general decline in the ability to think, but in the decline of the ability to think analogically. Maybe this is why the College Board took analogies out of the SAT after years of declining scores in that section.

Philpot did not say that "gay marriage is like jumbo shrimp"; he said “Same sex marriage to me is an oxymoron…kind of like jumbo shrimp." Not only is that a completely different statement, but a true one. The primary argument of those opposed to same-sex marriage is that it violated the very definition of marriage. Philpot's remarks are only another colorful way of making the same point.

Of course, I'm not averse to attributing ignorance to journalists. It abounds. In this case, however, the obfuscation of Philpot's position in the way the headline was written was clearly the result of media bias against anyone who questions the Politically Correct position on gender, which, if you're on the lookout for goofy things, ought to stick out like a sore thumb.

So, while much of the story is quite fair and some of it not entirely unflattering, the CJ (I don't know whether it was Andy Wolfson or an online editor) was clearly banking on peoples' ignorance about how analogies work to distort what Philpot actually said. They also had to know that, however fair much of the story was, the headline is what people will remember. 

This is the subtle way that media bias works, and it's a commentary on the integrity of newspapers like the CJ that they do this kind of thing on a regular basis.

Deport Hollywood, Not Hispanics

This year's Enemys—er, excuse me, Emmys—reminds me once again that I don't know why we're talking about deporting a bunch of Hispanics. They're hardworking, family-oriented, and, according to statistics, generally stay out of trouble. And they've got an awesome culture that can only enrich our own.

It would make far better sense to talking about deporting the entire Hollywood entertainment caste that, far from enriching our culture, seems bent on degrading it. These people have not only been trivializing and degrading our entertainment media, but systematically dismantling the values this country built on and are now part of the movement promoting the persecution of people who mostly want to be left alone to believe the things they've always believed.

Imagine no Barbara Streisand

It's easy if you try

No George Clooney in front of us

Above us only sky

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

The Lindisfarne Option: A Celtic Interpretation of the Benedict Option

Now that Archbishop Charles Chaput has proposed, in response to Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, what amounts to the Augustine Option, I'm reticent to offer another Option, since there's just way too many Options going around.

I'm for fewer Options, not more. That's why I don't like Subway, where they give you so many options that you basically have to construct your own sandwich. After I have answered about the fifth question about what I would like on my sandwich, I'm ready to ask them to pay me for it. It's also why I don't like going to the Cheesecake Factory: The opportunity cost is just too high.

So maybe we should call it the "Lindisfarne Interpretation" of the Benedict Option.  But for convenience sake, we'll use the shorter title.

The Island of Lindisfarne became the center of the Church's evangelical operations in Britain in the 6th century. And I think the nature of the island contributed to the effectiveness of what the Church did there.

Lindisfarne is a tidal island. This means that it is an island when the tide comes in, but connected to the mainland when the tide goes out. It is therefore isolated half of the time, and engaged the other half. 

I have never been completely clear on the exact nature of Dreher's idea. There seems to be an element of retreat in it, but, as he recently said in response to Chaput's remarks (and has said before), "the Benedict Option is not really about actual, physical withdrawal (though it could entail that), but about learning how to live as orthodox Christians, resiliently, in an anti-Christian culture."

Actually, I think that withdrawal is not a bad idea if done the right way. It certainly didn't seem a bad idea to Our Lord, who was wont to practice it on frequent occasions.

An army needs a rest. A painter or a writer sometimes just needs a walk in the woods. I write for a living, and when I get stuck, I'll go pick up my guitar and play for a couple of minutes. Ask my wife (who has to listen to it, but sees its tonic effect on me): It works.

I think the PR problem with the Benedict Option is that people don't know how to view it except as a proposal to retreat. And the people for whose ears it is intended don't want to retreat, since retreat means they have to unwillingly pick up their cultural things and move further back and they have been doing too much of that recently. And a plan to do the same thing willingly doesn't seem like much of a solution.

I know that my friend Rod is working on a more extensive explanation of his idea, but in the meantime I would propose the Lindisfarne Option as a way of clarifying this.

I think cutting ourselves off from the culture about half the time--and engaging it the other half--would be a great idea. And the reason is that we get so involved in our culture that we live our entire lives on the cultural mainland. 

I see it all the time among socially conservative people. They get so caught up in the news cycle (Which is what now? Hourly?) that they lose all historical perspective. This is largely due to the prevalence of technology. It certainly has many benefits, but it has the tendency to speed everything up. It traps us in the Now. And it's hard to see, from the perspective of the Now, that there was also a Then, and that, very soon, there will be another Then.

But in the technological Tyranny of the Now, everything looms large. Every good event is a final victory, every bad event a hopeless defeat. If we win, we celebrate, and if we lose, we panic.

I helped pass Kentucky's Marriage Amendment. I'm the one who walked in into the state senator's office, who then filed it. It passed and was ratified by voters. And when the Supreme Court struck it down (it was one of the cases decided in Obergefell), I wasn't too happy about it. Not only do I not like to lose, but I don't like to be cheated. And that's what the Court did to me and to the voters of a number of states who put these laws in place through the agreed upon rules that the Court changed ad hoc and ex post facto.

But I didn't panic. And the reason I didn't panic is because of my front porch. That's where I sit on summer afternoons, away from the television. Away from the Internet. Away from my smart phone.

Away from the World.

I sit in my oak rocking chair looking out on about 20 miles of corn fields and cattle pasture. After a day of enslavement at my computer, I sit there free, with a glass of bourbon, and I read. I read a lot of different things--novels, literary criticism, philosophy, poetry. But one of the things I read a lot of is history. And when I read history it makes realize that things change, sometimes, historically speaking, very quickly.

History tells me that the victories that seem so definitive now will last for a day, and the defeats that seem so crushing and permanent today will be forgotten tomorrow. It is the lesson of Shelley's "Ozymandias." Every ruin testifies to it.

History tells me that what seems to permanent today is always temporary, that the course of history can change in a historical instant--with a death, with a word, with a mistake, with a rallying cry, with the single act of cowardice or courage of one man.

In fact, what strikes me most is how a battle can be lost with the mere loss of one man, and can be won by the mere return of another. If you read history, you see this again, and again, and again. This is what the so-called conservatives who have bailed on the marriage issue don't see in their Now-induced panic: that with the mere application of a little courage, even one of them could change the course of history.

But, again, this requires courage, and courage is hard to come by in the Now, where our leaders have let themselves be trapped.

In fact, this is one of the reasons I do not trust any politician (not to mention anyone else) who does not take his leave of the Now and give himself time to read. Books. With actual pages. On their porch (Computers or Kindles don't count).

There are few porches on the mainland, where the houses have only basements in which to hide.

And yet the answer to the problems of our time isn't to abandon the mainland. It is to get away from it for a while, so we can understand it better. If we decide to leave it completely, if we retreat to an island, we give up on it. But if our lives are a tidal island--"an image," says Richard Foster, "of withdrawal and engagement, of the base and the field, of prayer and action"--it will increase, not diminish, our influence.

We will not have our base in the middle of the battlefield (if we can vary the metaphor), where it is vulnerable, but behind the lines, in a place from which we can see the whole battlefield and know better what we should do.

Perhaps a porch would serve the purpose.

Why the Academy's effort to diversity its membership is a bad idea

White men smiling at the Oscars.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has announced that it will be "diversifying" its membership. This is one more blow to guilty White liberals who dominate the leadership of elite organizations and who use their positions to lecture the rest of us on how to act, even though, in occupying these positions in inordinate numbers, they undermine the very Politically Correct principles they espouse.

The action by the Academy—taken in response to protests by non-guilty non-White liberals who took umbrage at the fact that, for the second year in a row, all 20 of the acting nominees were White (most, if not all of them liberal and probably guilty about it)—will further hamper the privileged status of these people who are constantly preaching to the rest of us about the evils of such privilege while enjoying it themselves.

The problem is this: In shaming guilty White liberals who use these positions to work out the deep-seated guilt associated with being White and possessing such privilege, the Academy is underscoring their hypocrisy, which will undoubtedly result in even higher levels of guilt needing to be atoned for. But since the only avenue guilty White liberals have to do penance for their Whiteness and their privilege is to lecture other people from privileged positions about how evil these things are—and such opportunities are diminishing because of actions like that of the Academy which actually apply the principles they are always lecturing the rest of us about but never following themselves—we will be putting these people in an untenable position.

How does the Academy expect guilty White liberals to deal with their shame now that they have been divested of the opportunity to engage in the hypocrisy that, until now, no one has bothered to notice?

How bad should we feel about how bad college protesters feel about how inadequately bad the rest of us feel?

The nation's colleges and universities have been roiled by demonstrations by minority groups protesting insensitivity toward minorities by college officials who have given inadequate demonstration of how badly they feel about how badly minority students feel about how inadequately bad college officials feel about the feelings of minority students, resulting in the resignations of many college officials who have openly admitted the inadequate level of guilt they feel about the state of the protester's feelings.

Meanwhile, many normal Americans who are watching all of this are feeling bad about the fact that these students are squandering all their time feeling bad about how insufficiently bad other people are feeling, partly because it is making everyone feel bad.

We should all feel very badly about this. In fact, we do, which is really bad.

One of the things that made minority students feel bad at Harvard University recently is the fact that the university was founded by a slaveholder, making Harvard a White supremacist institution which is now, in consequence, under the obligation to feel bad about itself.

Of course, it has never been a secret that Harvard was founded on the basis of a bequest from Isaac Royall. So why it is that none of this has mattered until now?

Some observers (i.e., me) think that it is the result of a whole generation of students who have spent so much of their lives worrying about their feelings that they are completely ignorant of history, about which, if they had known anything, they would be even more upset than they already are.

In fact, other observers (i.e., also me), think that it is probably a good thing that these students are so wrapped up in feeling bad about how inadequately bad other people feel that they don't know very much history.

"What you have to realize," said one expert on the subject (me), "is that history is filled with bad things. And because these things are bad, they make people feel bad. And this, of course, is even worse. So it is perhaps best that people who feel bad about bad things that happened in the past--and who get upset when people in the present don't feel badly enough about them--should be careful about their exposure to what actually happened in the past."

"In fact," he continued, "the past is the last place you want to investigate if you don't want to feel bad."

This particular observer (me) wondered what would be the end result of all the bad feelings if more people knew about their own history. "We would all have to resign," he said.

"And just imagine how bad that would make everyone feel."

G. K. #Chesterton and the Metaphysics of Amazement: My Interview on the Quiddity #Podcast at the CiRCE Institute

My interview at CiRCE's Quiddity Podcast in which I discuss the disturbing disenchantment of our times, the problem with modern science, and books (of all kinds). The discussion touches on G.K. Chesterton, children's literature, reading habits, Walter Scott, gravity, Charles Taylor, fairy tales, and more.

Multicultural Follies: #Politicalcorrectness and the narrowing of the American mind

The Cultural Authorities still don't get the irony inherent in their use of terms like 'Tolerance' and 'Diversity', terms they use to counteract the very attitudes they purport to champion. They are used as cultural bullying words to beat unsuspecting Americans into compliance with their narrow left-wing program of tearing down every traditional cultural convention.

These are just two of the words that now pass for wisdom among American educators--educators who apparently think that political sloganeering constitutes an acceptable substitute for things like knowledge and understanding.

I remember when the Ayatollah Khomeini unseated the Shah of Iran and so-called "students" (of which, it was later revealed, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the now former prime minister of Iran, was one) took over the American embassy in Tehran and held its occupants hostage.

I remember thinking, do these "students," I don't know, study between their assigned hostage-keeping hours? Do they patrol the embassy with their machine guns from 8:00 to 4:00 and then go prepare for mid-terms in the evening? In fact, I don't remember any of the many news images from the time showing these "students" actually doing any school work. All they ever did was wave guns and chant slogans in the street.

For the political left, education is seen as inherently political. Rather than use them to pass on a culture from one generation to the next, schools are now simply vehicles for political or social reform. Today's "students" don't wave guns around or march through the streets (Americans, fortunately, are too lazy for that), but the term 'Diversity' in particular seems to be a part of every piece of propaganda pushed by the people who run our schools.

There is another word used to accomplish the same purpose: 'multiculturalism'. This word, in fact, was probably the first of the bully words to enter our modern political lexicon, becoming a sacred part of the secular theocratic rite that we have seen instituted over the last two or three decades.

Like the other terms we constantly hear chanted by the supporters of our modern Liberal Caliphate, the secular theocrats don't see the hypocrisy in their use of the term.

I was reminded of all this when I read the essay by British philosopher Roger Scruton at one of the best blogs going: The Imaginative Conservative. Scruton rightly diagnoses multiculturalism—and the whole tolerance regime, although the terms 'tolerance' and 'diversity' had not yet assumed their prominent place in our lexicon when this article was written in 1994—as the narrow-minded program it is and contrasts it with the truly multicultural traditional curriculum:

The word “culture” is used in many senses. Advocates of the multicultural curriculum cheerfully assume that they and their readers know exactly what is meant by such a thing, and that all would agree in recognizing the “monocultural” nature of our traditional education. A typical “multicultural” curriculum will concentrate on the lore, language, and literature of the modern pro­ letariat; on the history and “struggles” of minorities; and on the lowest and most popular forms of music, art, and entertainment. This monotonous study of ephemera can be encountered everywhere in America, Canada, Britain, Australia, and Scandinavia. I would be tempted to describe it as “monocultural,” were I convinced that it is capable of imparting any culture at all. By contrast, our grandparents studied the languages, religions, and literature of ancient Palestine, Greece, and Rome; they were brought up on the fairy tales of Arabia, the folklore and music of Germany, the art and architecture of the Mediterranean, and the history of the world. If the word “multicultural” means anything, then it should certainly be applied to their curriculum. It is precisely this openness toward culture in all its forms that is the essence of European civilization.

Liberals, who wouldn't even be allowed under other cultures, love every culture but their own. It's part and parcel of the Liberal Death Wish--the subconscious, nihilistic impulse to destroy the very culture that makes them possible. 

The agenda that goes under the multicultural label is really the worst kind of cultural jingoism. On the one hand, it sees every other culture through the distorted lens of the modern secular liberal mindset, making them merely the delusional mirror image of itself. On the other hand, it wants to impose its own uniquely secular technocratic attitude on cultures which, in reality, aren't really what liberals think they are.

If liberals are going to hate on the Christian West (and that's what Western civilization really is—the Christian West—which is why liberals hate it so much), then they're going to have to do things that liberals themselves hate. If they're going to embrace non-Western cultures—particularly those in the underdeveloped world that liberals pretend to value, then they're going to have to teach racism, sexism, cannibalism, human sacrifice, "classism," "homophobia," and every other "ism" and phobia—real and imaginary—the left fears and hates because they are rampant in the cultures of what used to be called the "third world."

They couldn't produce enough sensitivity trainers in a hundred years to address the problems they would encounter in just one corner of one non-Western country in one week.

But of course teaching what real non-Western countries believe will never happen. These people will continue to cling to their comforting delusion that non-Western world is exclusively the projection of their own non-smoking, gender-bending, radical egalitarian political and social selves.

But the left can't even hear these criticisms. That's the beauty of being a liberal: If there is something you don't want to hear, you just chant your slogans louder.

The Great Political Twitch: Donald Trump and New Politics of Nihilism

Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark in "All the King's Men."

Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, mentioned that Donald Trump reminded him of Huey Long, the populist demagogue who served as governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932. This was amusing to me, since I had just finished Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that portrayed the political life of Willie Stark, a thinly disguised version of Long, from the perspective of the fictional Jack Burden, one of his close aides.

Dreher, partly because he is perspicacious, and partly because he is a Louisianan, saw in Long what I had seen when reading through the novel of Willie Stark―an inverted analogue of Trump.

In Warren's novel, Stark, a country boy and self-professed "hick," rises from mean circumstances to being a candidate for governor. But he suffers from the idea that the best way to reach the voters is intellectually, giving them arguments, facts, and figures. Politics to him is a cognitive enterprise, to be conducted by capturing people's intellects.

His aide Burden watches the bored crowds, listening to Stark in a numbed stupor.

One day, after giving another fact-filled speech, Stark asks Burden what he thinks of his speech and how things are going, and Burden gives him this advice:

"Yeah," I said, "I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak, erring pall, or make 'em think you're God Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty  years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to tive 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But or Sweet Jesus' sake don't try to improve their minds.

One night, after a shell-shocked Burden finds out that his childhood sweetheart is having an affair with Stark, he gets in his car and drives west―through darkness and drizzle, ending up on his back in a hotel in Long Beach, California. He relives the events of his life and his childhood with the girl he loved, who, he now decides, was really no better than any other girl, and his love for her no more significant than any other feeling. There is not even any "better" or "worse" in the total scheme of a world that has no metaphysical order. Nothing, in fact, means anything:

...for names meant nothing and all the words we speak meant nothing, and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through.

Jack has discovered nihilism, or at least he has given its god a name: He calls it the "Great Twitch." Jack has really been a nihilist all along. His advice to Willie about how to give political speeches was nihilist advice: Apply some electric current to the voters, and they will feel alive again, or, like the frog, they will at least look like it.

Willie takes his advice, and in one of the most powerful scenes in the book, Stark ditches his facts and figures, and administers the electric shock therapy, telling the crowd that he's just like them, that he's angry with the establishment that plays people for fools, that he's going to stand for them against the powers that be. His speech ends with Willie's pages of facts and figures blowing away in the wind.

The change in tactics results in Stark's rapid ascent to power. His fiery populist rhetoric serves to give life to the lifeless who come to hear him.

Another Louisiana writer, Walker Percy, honed in on the nihilistic culture and the lifeless men and women who people it. Percy lived before the popularity of the zombie craze, but he would have seen in it the very image of modern men. The wise men of the twentieth century―Percy, John Updike, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor (an honorary wise man), as well as early twentieth century existentialists such as Albert Camus―sent the dispatches home to tell us what we were: bored, purposeless, and dis-integrated

We spent most of the 20th century trying to fill the inner void, and developed entire industries to serve the purpose: the resort industry, the pornography industry, Hollywood.

In his classic "self help" book, Lost in the Cosmos, Percy noted that,

[b]ecause the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying it out.

Camus underscored the meaninglessness and absurdity of the modern condition when he opened his book The Myth of Sisyphus with these words: "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide ... I have ever seen anyone die for the ontological argument ... On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living." There are plenty of people who commit suicide, of course, far more than in the previous ages that believed in God and recognized the existence of an ordered and meaningful world, but rather than commit suicide, most of us try to find various ways to pinch ourselves to assure us we're still here.

This is why Merseault, the protagonist in Camus' The Stranger, kills the Arab on the beach: "Because," he tells the judge, "of the sun." In other words, there is no reason. But it at least provides something to relieve the boredom of life.

The Great Twitch is in his nihilistic heaven and we humans here on earth go to ever more fantastic movies, or ever more extreme sports (note, despite the otherwise obsessive concern with safety in everything, the popularity of cage fighting), or watch pornography, or obsess about the climate, or join ISIS―anything to jolt ourselves alive.

But it never seems to last. Percy pointed to modern fashion as an example of how we try to fill up the emptiness, but never seem to be able to:

Gradually the new style becomes everyday, quotidian, rendered neutral. No matter how exotic it is, like a morsel to which an amoeba is attracted and which it surrounds and takes into itself, it is devoured and becomes part of the transparent flowing substance of the amoeba.

The empty utilitarianism of our education system, the cynicism of the political class, the self-righteousness of new politically correct commissars of gender and racial politics, all of these have helped create a society of people who aren't even alive, most of 'em, and who are seemingly in need of a pair of political or cultural jumper cables.

Hollywood feeds off of this need, and since politics is now an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of the entertainment industry, so does politics.

Unlike Stark, Trump is no hick (No one with a private 757 is a hick). But he has realized that what the voters need is something to jolt them out of their stupor. The modern electorate is jaded, and only the most extreme measures can now revive them. Only something entirely different can relieve their boredom. And Trump is not only different, he is outrageously different.

Peter McWilliams once said that boredom is "hostility without enthusiasm." The voters have long harbored a latent hostility, but now Trump is providing the enthusiasm.

Between the alternatives of weak, erring pal and God Almighty, Trump has chosen to offer himself up as the latter. He's making 'em mad, even mad at himself, which is why he doesn't care if he makes outrageous statements about people. He even thinks, after all the things he has said about Mexicans, that he can get the Latino vote (Shades of Stark calling his audiences whose votes he was asking for, "hicks"). He's stirring 'em up, not caring how or why, and their loving it and coming back for more.

He'll tell 'em anything, and, unlike everyone else running for president, he is certainly not trying to improve their minds. Hand it to him: He's figured this much out.

Donald Trump is the anti-Adlai Stevenson. He is Robert Penn Warren's Willie Stark turned upside-down.

But like all such jolts, it only last so long. Even the Greatest Twitches soon subside. The question is, how long will it take Trump to be taken into the nihilist cultural ameoba and become part of our transparent flowing substance.

Personally, I'm hoping it happens before the election.

Scalia: "No social transformation without representation"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, from his dissent in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision striking down marriage laws in all 50 states, on just how unrepresentative of America the elite judges who now rule our country are:

Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular con­stituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surpris­ingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

Read the rest here.

What libertarianism has in common with Marxism

I have observed before that the difference between libertarians and traditional conservatives lies in the fact that libertarians see freedom as an end in itself, whereas conservatives see freedom as the means to the end of the common good.

This is, by the way, why libertarianism militates toward pure democracy, something the founding fathers eschewed, while traditional conservatism naturally inclines toward republican forms of government like that of the United States. In this sense, libertarians are at odds with, rather than inclined toward American constitutionalism.

As Aristotle points out in his Politics, each form of government has its unique aim. The aim of democracy is freedom. Republican forms of government, on the other hand, contain mixed aims, since a republic is a hybrid form of government.

This is why I think you will see (as we already have) so-called "libertarian conservatives" supporting Internet voting and multi-day elections and other means of "democratizing" the election process. And the next time the electoral college becomes an issue, just watch libertarians—who talk a good game on the Constitution, but don't seem to know much about why it was written the way it was written—line up in support of changes to make it a purely popular election irrespective of the role of the states.

The founders put all kinds of complicating factors into the system to balance it and keep it stable and to protect it from the destabilizing forces of pure democracy.

In any case, since libertarians have largely appropriated the "conservative" label these days, it is probably useful also to point out one way in which libertarianism is similar to Marxism.

Under Marx's "materialist dialectic," it is material factors that determine socio-political realities through socio-economic factors. In this sense Marxism is all about economics. Economics determine everything.

Under traditionalist conservatism, non-materialist values have played at least as much, perhaps a larger role in the well-being of a society. This is why values issues have always loomed large in conservative political rhetoric—always, until recent years.

For traditionalist conservatives, values matter, because they shape events more than material factors. But if you listen carefully to libertarian rhetoric, which now focuses almost exclusively on pocketbook issues, you will detect the implicit assumption that values don't matter (unless they are "market values," whatever that means). In fact, many so-called "moderate" Republicans say this outright: politics is exclusively about material issues.

This is why libertarianism can be referred to simply as the "materialist right." It is the materialist right that, unlike traditionalist conservatism, has given up on the culture.

Now as you listen to the campaign leading up to this next election, note the almost complete dependence of Republican rhetoric on economics—even among candidates who are ostensibly traditionalist conservatives.

This is also why, by the way, the Republicans will lose again—because they have given up on the heart issues. Voters vote their hearts, not their pocket books. That is why Reagan won—and Obama (It's also why Obama won re-election—right in the teeth of an economic crisis).

Just watch it happen again.

Why I would be less bothered by a new mosque in my community than a new state college

The conservatives who are so worried about the threat of Islam should look a little closer to home for the real enemies.

If you asked most conservatives to identify the greatest threat to America, they will inevitably point outside the United States, usually to ISIS. Undoubtedly ISIS is a threat, and could some day actually affect the U.S., which it doesn't seem to be able to do right now.

And then there is always the lurking suspicion of Muslims in the United States who, almost without exception, mind their own business and don't bother anyone.

It is hard to figure out why liberals are so indulgent toward Muslims. My theory is that it is easy for liberals to be magnanimous toward Muslims. Unlike Christians, there are not a lot of them. And because of their low representation in the population they don't affect the culture much. In the United States, they're pretty harmless.

Christians are dangerous because they are still culturally influential. That's why Muslims are tolerated and Christians aren't.

But this inordinate fear of Islam is rife among rank and file conservatives. How many times have you heard someone say they believe Obama is a Muslim? Every time I hear a friend say this my response is the same: "We would be a lot better off if Obama were a Muslim. Think about it: He would be pro-life, against gay 'marriage,' and impatient if not condemning of the mindless egalitarianism he and his liberal friends are using to destroy the culture. No Muslim would take the positions Obama takes on issues of cultural significance.

And this brings me to my main point, which is this: We have a lot less to fear from Muslims from faraway places than we do from liberals right here at home.

It isn't Muslims who are destroying American culture: It is liberals who are destroying American culture, which leads me to a corollary observation: The average conservative American has far more in common with the average Muslim than he does with the liberal anchor of the news program he watches every night, or with the liberal professor at the university down the road, or with the liberal bureaucrats who run our government, or with the drug-riddled, serially monogamous, animal rights activist celebrity who appears on his television set every night. 

In fact, one uncomfortable fact we don't want to face is that many of the excuses used by radical Muslim groups to oppose the United States are perfectly valid. We hear all about how how Arab Muslims are upset with the United States because of our over-involvement in their internal affairs. But that is not the main reason America is hated overseas by so many people—Muslims and non-Muslims.

When I hear people talk about "exporting democracy" to other countries, I just laugh. Is that really what we export to the world? Here's what we export to the world: pornography and rap music written by misogynist thugs. And then we give them lectures on how to treat women!

If you are a person in a traditional community living in a foreign country and you saw the garbage America was sending into your country, how would you feel? The world—and the underdeveloped world in particular—has become the cultural trash dump for America.

This is not a justification for the violence perpetrated on Americans. If Americans are killed, we should go after the perpetrators and destroy them. But it sure does make it a lot harder to occupy the moral high ground when you are giving these people legitimate reasons to stir people up.

The only thing saving us from being hated worse than Isis is that Isis cuts peoples heads off and enslaves women and doesn't apologize for it. Fortunately most people think that's worse than self-righteous Americans who simply corrupt their culture and pretend they're doing them a favor.

I mentioned to a friend the other day, after having seen a very large new mosque just outside of Toledo, Ohio, that I would be less bothered by a new mosque moving into my town than by a new state college. Even if the mosque contained Islamic radicals, it could not come close to matching the cultural destruction perpetrated by the class of people occupying academia who seem determined to destroy the very beliefs, traditions and customs that have always held our society together.

I'm less concerned about what Hillary Clinton let Al Qaeda radicals do to Americans in Libya than I am about what Hillary Clinton would do to America from the Oval Office.

Go watch a Muslim wearing a burkha, bowing down and peacefully saying his morning prayers. Then go watch a man in a gay pride parade, in dark leather and metal spikes (before the police crack down on him for public lewdness). And then ask which thing bodes most ill for American culture.

Are you more disturbed to know someone is shouting "Allah Akbar" 5,500 miles away, or someone saying "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go!" a half an hour down the road?

The barbarians aren't at the gate. They're inside the gate pretending to manage the defenses.

Bruce Jenner and the Emotive Theory of Gender

If you tried your hardest you could not make up the farcical drama we have seen played out on the national stage over the last two weeks in regard to Bruce Jenner (now calling himself "Caitlyn"), who has convinced a credulous national media that he has been able to change his sex by the simple expedient of a little cosmetic surgery and the donning of a corset for a national magazine.

The whole XY chromosome thing that we were all told in high school science class was the way to determine gender in human beings is now a victim of political fashion. Now, in a move hard to justify as an actual scientific improvement, gender is determined by feelings.

You are a man if you feel you are a man. You are a woman if you feel you are a woman. The actual biology is now incidental. Let's call it the "Emotive Theory" of gender determination, on contrast to the "Biological Theory" of gender. And of course the move to the Emotive Theory doesn't clarify anything; in fact, it makes things a lot more confusing, partly because, unlike the Biological Theory, where there are hard and fast rules, under the Emotional Theory of gender determination, anything goes.

One chapter in the historical chronicles of the early 21st century will be about why, in a time when science is worshiped with more reverence than any god, scientific principles got thrown to the wind when it came to anything having to do with sex.

It wasn't too long ago that Paul Gross and Normal Levitt could write a book like Higher Superstitions: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, about the political distortions of even basic science. It was greeted with accolades by the hard-nosed scientific community at the time. Today the academic and popular left has become so predominant in academia and the media that Gross and Levitt would be thought old-fashioned, and scientists expected to tow the party line.

In 1996 Alan Sokol took the criticism of postmodernist thought to new and hilarious heights when he wrote a paper filled with deliberate nonsense and submitted to Social Text, a prominent postmodernist academic journal. The editors published it, making themselves a laughing stock among their academic colleagues and attracting the derision even of the public that had never heard of Social Text.

Again, here we are in 2015 living in a time when what Sokal wrote in his paper is no more nonsensical than what you hear on E! television, or the View, or CNN. The heights of nonsense have been scaled and conquered.

Some day history is going have a good laugh at the expense of our generation, which has managed to confuse itself so badly about gender that it has literally rendered itself incapable of making sense of the common, everyday world. And not only that but they are even more confused about the reality they have created for themselves.

Their ideology makes them scratch their head about the world, so they create another one for their own political convenience that ends up making them scratch their heads even harder.

I would say that the Emotive Theory of Gender awaits its Alan Sokal, but in reality I don't think there is anything more nonsensical than what the media feeds us on a daily basis. You could try to make up something more ludicrous than what we are now seeing with the Bruce Jenner story, but you just wouldn't be able to do it.

Not only are the doctrines of the Emotive Theory nonsensical in themselves, but they blatantly contradict themselves.

How many times have we been told that our distinctions between the masculine and feminine are arbitrary and socially constructed. But right on the tails of that lecture, we watch Anderson Cooper's interview last week with Buzz Bissinger, where he solemnly asks,

AC: You've spent hundreds of hours with Bruce Jenner, a lot of time with Kaitlyn, are they different? Do they seem different? You know obviously their appearance obviously ... 

Buzz: Yes they're very different, very different in appearance obviously. 

And they blather on about this, making no sense at all, going so far as to refer to the "soul of Bruce" being replaced by the "soul of Caitlyn."  It's amazing what reconstructive surgery can do nowadays.

For one thing, how can Bruce become a woman if he has already been one from the beginning, which is what he claims? If he is simply bringing his body into alignment with his soul, then why are we all gushing about him "becoming" Caitlyn and the "soul of Bruce" leaving (and by the way, were exactly did it go?), and the "soul of Caitlyn" inhabiting this highly trafficked body?

And for another, are there now really two Jenner selves--one inhabiting the body before the transformation and another entering it and taking over after the transformation? And when did this transformation occur? When he started taking estrogen? When he shaved his legs? When he put on the corset? Is the seat of the soul now the breasts, of which Bruce got a brand new and significantly larger set?

What happened to masculinity and femininity being arbitrary social constructs? If they are arbitrary and don't reflect reality then how can Bruce be said to be different from Caitlyn?

We now live in a society that believes that men and women are not fundamentally different from one another unless they have been first switched through reconstructive surgery.

You just can't make this stuff up.

CNN's Chris Cuomo criticizes Fox's Duggar interview, in denial about Bruce Jenner's deadbeat dad past

CNN's Chris Cuomo criticizes Fox's Duggar interview for being a "conversation among friends." That's nothin'. He should check out his own network's treatment of deadbeat dad Bruce Jenner, who hurt his children far worse--and while they were wide awake, no less.

In fact, the double standards and self-righteousness have reached fever pitch at CNN over the Duggar interview. Armies of psychologists have been enlisted in the campaign to lecture the Duggars about whether they did enough to protect their daughters from a brother who groped them in their sleep (as opposed to humiliating them fully conscious before the public, which is what CNN has done).

We have yet to hear words of advice and reproval about what Bruce Jenner did to his children, who, by the way, are still dealing with what he did to them--as opposed to the Duggar children, who are over what Josh did to them and are now dealing with what CNN is doing to them.

Where are the calls, like those CNN has been issuing for the Duggars, for Bruce to undergo treatment to come fully to terms with his deadbeat past (not to mention is self-indulgent present)?

No. They are too busy rubbing the noses of the victims in what their brother did to them.

These people are a menace to society.

Is Morality Declining in America? Most Americans Think So

A new survey has found that a majority of Americans think America is morally declining:

'In the poll, taken in early May, 72 percent of respondents said that “the state of moral values” in America is “getting worse.” Only 22 percent said it is “getting better.”'

That's good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the majority of Americans are right about the decline in morality. The good news is that they still have enough sense of morality to know that it's declining.

As I pointed out in my essay earlier this year in Canon and Culture, it's the point at which you start feeling warm that is the signal you are about to freeze to death. At least Americans are still moral enough to realize how threatened their morality is.

T. S. Eliot and the Politics of the Permanent Things

From "The Permanent Things of T. S. Eliot's Politics" at The Imaginative Conservative:

The expectation of change, in the twentieth century, has been greater than the expectation of continuity, nearly everywhere. And the permanent things, as Eliot called them—those enduring truths and ways of life and standards of order—are awash in the flood of sensual appetite and ideological passion. As Eliot expressed this phenomenon of decadence, referring to standards of education, in his book Notes towards the Definition of Culture, we are “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” 

Read more here.