ShrinkWrapped

In His Own Words

One of the under-reported stories from the 1960's is a fundamental change that took place at that time in the male rite of passage.  Ever since the first humans began the arduous trek from primitive tribal societies to civilized society, the male adolescent's progression to adulthood included some rite which demarcated childhood from manhood.  Most of the time this rite of passage was explicitly designed to evince the young prospective man's physical prowess and courage.  There is a clear line of communication from the young tribesman who was expected to kill a lion or bring down a buffalo by himself and the British aristocrat training at Sandhurst.  There were always those who did not take part in such rites, but for the culture's elites, evidence of courage were considered a sine qua non to entry into adulthood.

The mass mobilizations of the last centuries allowed everyman to take part in this rite of passage.  The Bands of Brothers of WWII, in the retrospective popular imagination, were the apotheosis of courage under fire, solidarity, and steadfastness.

During the Vietnam War the children of the elites, to a much greater extent than in previous wars, avoided serving.  This was especially prominent in the children of the liberal elites.  As with any complicated and conflictual behavior, all sorts of psychological reactions ensured.  Via the beauty of the reaction formation, the covert anxiety felt by many was transmuted into its opposite.  The moral of the Vietnam War struggle, for the counter-culture,l was that the truly brave fought against the unjust, imperialistic war.  However, beneath the defensive bravado, the anxiety persisted.  Mark Rudd documents this in his Washington Post op-ed over the weekend:  [HT: Trevor Loudon]

An ex-Weather Underground radical on the Tucson shootings and political violence

In 1970, when I was 22 years old - the same age as Jared Loughner - I was a founder of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. That spring, a small contingent of the Weathermen, as we were known, planned to plant three pipe bombs at a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J. Our intention was to remind our fellow Americans that our country was dropping napalm and other explosives on Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I wasn't among the bombmakers, but I knew what was in the offing, and to my eternal shame, I didn't try to stop it.

I considered myself an agent of necessity in a political revolution. I'm not sure if Loughner, who seems to suffer from mental illness, can be considered an agent of anything. But I'm sure that if, as alleged, he pulled the trigger, he had convinced himself that he was doing what needed to be done.

At his age, I had thought myself into a similar corner. My willingness to endorse and engage in violence had something to do with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. I wanted to prove myself as a man - a motive exploited by all armies and terrorist groups. [Emphasis mine-SW] I wanted to be a true revolutionary like my guerrilla hero, Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I wanted the chant we used at demonstrations defending the Black Panthers to be more than just words: "The revolution has come/Time to pick up the gun!"

Mark Rudd's use of his own experience to somehow illuminate any aspect of the Tuscon shootings is curious at best.  What is more interesting is that he cannot yet question his own politics:

On March 6, 1970, the Weather Underground's bombs, assembled in a New York townhouse, exploded prematurely. Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins - three brilliant and passionate young people who had decided that they must become terrorists - were killed. Only by their deaths was the greater tragedy we were plotting avoided. Emotionally shattered, I dropped out of the Weather Underground but remained a fugitive until 1977.

After I turned myself in, I spent the next 25 years trying to figure out why I had made so many disastrous decisions as a young man. One of my conclusions was to pursue only nonviolent action - righteous action still, but without anger or brutality.

It was never Mark Rudd's goals that were problematic, only his means, yet once the Left determines that its goals no longer justifies its means, it is no longer a revolutionary force, but an emasculated one.  If you are fighting oppressors who are tormenting the innocent and helpless, every means must be used; after all, true heroes will risk all to protect the innocent.  The young Leftist must either question his assumptions or condemn himself as a coward. 

Some in the modern Left believe they can attain their goals by stealth; the election of 2010 has made that problematic.  At this point the Left is being repudiated throughout the Civilized world.  As Walter Russell Meade has pointed out, the Social Welfare model of the last half of the 20th century has failed and we have not yet found a  new model.  The great problem for the Left is that they have failed spectacularly.  The Soviet Union is now a kleptocracy surviving off oil; China is a State run Corporation; Cuba can barely feed itself and its much vaunted healthcare system is a shambles for all  but the well connected who can obtain western (Capitalist) medical care; Venezuela is going off a cliff despite its oil; everywhere Socialism has been tried it has failed to do anything but terrorize and consign its people to perdition.

For the new generation of Mark Rudds, who have not yet surrendered their Utopian ideology, there are few options for exhibiting their courage.  They can engage in mindless violence with the anarchists; they can support the oppressed by joining the murderers fashioned in the image of those most lovely of sociopathic killers, "Che" or Yasser; or they can attempt through subterfuge to achieve an impossible dream which has already been repudiated.

The true heroes, men and women of courage, are those few willing to stand up against barbarism in defense of our way of life.  This is an intolerable state of affairs. 

Mark Rudd has the self awareness to recognize that he desperately needed to prove he was not a coward even as his ideology precluded the possibility of doing so; a generation of 60's radicals are still trying to prove their courage and importance; it would be sad if they weren't still dangerous.

Our Post-Modern Left

The story of the week is the response of the Left-Liberal intelligentsia to the Arizona shootings.  By now, all but the most partisan recognize that the shooter was a seriously disturbed psychotic man who was responding to his own internal delusions and had no relationship with the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, or any Conservative ideology.  The attempt to hijack this incident for political gain is noxious in the extreme; sadly, it is further evidence of the Left's need to demonize its opponents rather than engage their arguments.  There is a relatively simple reason why they need to follow this well marked path:  Leftism, as an ideology, has failed, is incoherent, and is truly post-modern; in other words, there is no core belief system for Leftism, there is merely emotional resonance disguised as rational argument.

For the Left, the use of martial metaphor and terminology by the Right creates a climate in which violence, even when non-political or coming from the Left, is caused or increased.  At the same time, political violence from the Left and their allies is never considered to be symptomatic of Left wing excess.  At one time this formulation worked to control the speech and thinking of most people; the Media was the gate keeper, not only of information, but of narratives, and when you hear the same story line repeated over and over again, most people do not spend the requisite time and energy to question the narrative.  As I have noted on many occasions, our brains and our minds (which may overlap in the space they inhabit but are not equivalent conceptually) are conservative, that is, they aim to limit the expenditure of energy.  In other words, biology is lazy.  There is nothing wrong with recognizing that truism, but it does mean that when the narrative imposed on reality is limited, it is, for most people, too much work to question.  That has changed with the advent of new media.  The great problem for the Left is that the new media narratives are easier to understand and better reflections of most people's quotidian reality than the more complex narratives constructed by the post-modern Left.

A brief example should suffice:

For the Left, Anthropogenic Global Warming was an excellent narrative when it was first proposed.  It explained warming trends, justified a massive expropriation of money and power from the wealthy world to the power brokers of the international elites (under the rubric of helping the poor who rarely ever saw a fraction of the appropriated money and none of the power), and it served as a useful weapon against the hated capitalist system.  The problem was that as time went on the dire consequences of the world failing to end on time meant that the narrative had to be amended time after time.  Now we are told that human derived CO2 is causing Climate Disruption or Anthropogenic Climate Change, née Anthropogenic Climate Warming.  Granting there is a non-zero risk that through so far unexplained and undiscovered feedbacks, tiny increases in trace gases in the atmosphere are throwing the entire system into chaos, the current Conservative narrative is simply easier to understand and fits the visible facts better than the Ptolemaic epicycles built by the AGW proponents.  That is, climate varies naturally, probably in relation to the sun's output and other long term variables over which man has no control; technology will increasingly allow us to reduce our dependence on carbon emitting energy sources; and the single greatest protection we have against Climate Change, human derived or otherwise, is increasing wealth, also enabled by our burgeoning technology.  Game, Set, and Match to the AGW skeptics!

Because the post-modern Left has no core beliefs, they are capable of the most overt contradictions.  For example, if they truly believe that martial verbal productions create a climate of fear and violence, then they should be appalled at what occurs on a daily basis in the Muslim World.  Professor Barry Rubin explains:

If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?

When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman named Jared Loughner  starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning the state of their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?

America this week is awash in a huge and passionate debate over whether angry political disagreements and harsh criticisms of certain views or groups inspired the attack on an American congresswoman (Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, by the way). I’m not going to enter into that argument right now but I want to point out the Middle Eastern ramifications of what's going on here.

Every day for more than a half century, Arabs and Muslims have been inundated every day with hatred for Israel, America, the West, Jews, and often Christians. You can read transcripts of Syrian broadcasts or Palestinian speeches from 50 years ago that sound just like what is being said by their successors  now.

Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, extremism, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.

In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether. It's all one-sided.

And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy is farther away from reality than anywhere else in the world. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western academic and journalistic standards decline).

And in addition to those three points, while extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least setting the terms of discussion--throughout the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds.

Thus, the level of incitement, imbalance, lies, and the hegemony of hatred in that region towers above that in the West like the World Trade Center towers over an anthill.

Oh, the World Trade Center doesn't exist any more. Well, that has something to do with this situation, too, doesn't it?

Or to put it another way, in the Middle East, the crackpot is often (usually?) given more credit than the rational or factual.

I won’t take your time with lots of examples but one might start with the widespread belief that the U.S. government or Israel carried out the September 11 attacks, coupled with the contradictory belief—held often by the same people—that it was something to be proud about. Or all the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Israel, as in the cases mentioned here and here. Or the editorial in al-Ahram, the most important Egyptian newspaper, that claimed all terrorism in Iraq was a U.S. plot to divide Muslims.

Read his whole post; it is replete with smart insights and includes a wonderful image that should be seen and savored.

Once again, the lack of core beliefs dictates that the Left must create its post-modern ideology on an ad hoc basis.  There are general guidelines, such as "Capitalism bad, Socialism good" and "America and Israel bad, Arabs and Europeans good" but there is no coherence to the structure.  As a result, those who follow such a belief system are forced to censor their own perceptions and attempt to limit the perceptions of others; too much reality threatens the narrative. 

Please watch Melanie Phillips explain to an Israeli interviewer how abysmally Israel has failed in their hasbara, ie public relations; especially pay attention to her explanation of the difficulty Israel's positions have in gaining any oxygen among the British intelligentsia:

My fondest wish is that Melanie Phillips appear more often and in more venues.  Americans still tend to hear better when a speaker has a refined and delightful British accent, perhaps a remnant of the respect one has for one's parents even after having declared independence from them.

The committed Leftist cannot help but force all data to fit his narratives; when the narratives change, the data is reinterpreted to fit.  They have created a protean ideology that has no core and is impossible to combat in the realm of ideas (in part because they can not and will not argue ideas but can only argue power and money.)  The Left and the parts of the economy that they dominate are losing power and influence as the need to become more efficient in producing the tangible assets requisite for life becomes ever more overt.  Their livelihoods are threatened since they are fundamentally parasitic; (when was the last time a Left wing Professor of Literature produced anything of tangible value?) and as with any life form that feels its life is threatened, their defensive struggles are only going to become more and more vicious until they are marginalized and defeated. 

If we are lucky, 2008 will one day be seen as having been the high water mark of Leftism, the moment when its inevitable decline into irrelevance began.  More likely it will persist and return to threaten the freedoms of succeeding generations; in the future, however, the growth of uncontrolled information sources means that they will never again be able to control the narratives as they once did.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

In the last century evil ideologies emerged which denied human nature and were consciously devoted to enabling the emergence of a "New Man," Utopia to follow.  These ideologies were socialist in nature and required that those who were not "part of the solution" would need to be removed so that the Utopian socialist vision could be realized.  We remember one of the versions of socialism, National Socialism, (collectivism based on ethnicity rather than class) as the most profoundly evil system, one based on the genocide of innocents.  Yet, while Communism has been responsible for more death and destruction than Nazism, the Left has managed to obscure its historical roots in genocide and retains the moral high ground in much of its posturing.

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.* [...] They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust."**

- Karl Marx

*Marx. People's Paper. April 16, 1853

**Journal of the history of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1981

Genocide is a necessary component of any ideology that professes to believe in the need for the development of a "New Man"; certainly the modern Left would prefer to raise consciousness by education (and coercion), but when their desire for power is thwarted by "counter-revolutionaries", the only answer is to destroy their enemies.  Note how the rhetoric of the (true believer) radical environmentalists has become increasingly eliminationist as the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been increasingly repudiated. 

The idea of improving the volk by eliminating undesirables is an old belief of the Progressive movement and goes back to its roots.  It usually surprises Liberals-by-Temperament when they are told that Planned Parenthood, for example, explicitly promoted abortion and birth control in order to rid society of undesirables:

How Planned Parenthood Duped America

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

This does not mean that all Leftists, or any Liberals-by Temperament for that matter, support genocide.  Almost all would be horrified to accept that those most committed to their ideological preferences, inevitably must support evil once they accept that their end (saving the planet, protecting the people from [projected] enemies, ensuring dominance for one's ethnic or religious group) justifies any means. 

The greatest threat facing Civilization today is the alliance between the Left and Sharia Islam.  Most Liberals-by-Temperament have bought into the belief that Islam is under assault by the Right wing in this country.  The lack of anti-Islamic hatecrimes (whose numbers are dwarfed by anti-Semitic hatecrimes) does not impact this belief, a belief actively being promulgated by apologists for, and collaborators with, genocidal Islam.  Patrick Poole summarized the state of the "stealth Jihad" for Pajamas media last week:

2010: The Year of Islamist Infiltration

While the domestic terror trend has continued unabated, elements of pre-violent, or rather stealth, jihad are taking firm root in our government, military, judicial, and educational institutions, without the slightest opposition from the Obama administration and our homeland security agencies. In fact, if we’ve seen anything this year, it has been the willingness of government officials to lend their support to aid this stealth jihad.

The failure to recognize the “civilizational jihad” being waged against us is a bipartisan problem. Driven mainly by Muslim Brotherhood front groups and pushed by non-violent Islamist organizations in the West, the threat remains badly underrated by our national security establishment. But it was placed front and center by the report titled “Sharia: The Threat to America,” issued by the Team B II panel of national security experts including former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former DIA Director Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster.

His summary, offered after voluminous documentation of the ways in which radical Muslims have insinuated themselves into our government, is telling:

This list is not exhaustive. Certainly more examples could be cited. The Obama administration’s failure to understand the problem of Islamic radicalization and terrorism is fundamental, fueled with an outreach-to-anyone-at-any-cost policy that is perhaps best typified by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s July statements that his foremost mission was to improve relations with the Muslim world. What these twelve examples demonstrate is that our national security, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic establishment are utterly defenseless before the stealth jihad that is attacking the heart of our Western society.

If 2009 was the tipping point for domestic terror, 2010 is sure to be remembered as the year that the “civilizational jihad” continued apace. Hopefully in 2011, it will be clear to at least some of our political, civic, and religious leadership that a dramatic change in national policy is urgently needed.

In my opinion, our President is more ideological than the usual Liberal-by-Temperament and is quite comfortable with totalitarians and murderous thugs; he barely can rouse himself and his administration to criticize atrocities committed by the varied thugs who comprise much of the International Community, ie the UN, is tolerant to a fault of attempts to limit the freedoms of individuals, whether at home or abroad, and is facilitating the spread of pernicious ideas that can serve to enable International Law, with all its limitations on speech and behavior in the name of combating bad thoughts (hate speech), to supersede American Constitutional protections for the individual.

The current war being fought between the regressive and repressive forces allied with political Islam and Western Civilization will not be fought with massed armies on battlefields; it will not even be fought primarily in terror-counterterror struggles; it will be fought in the realm of ideas; ideas, which when they finally are allowed to come to their fullest fruition, mandate the death and enslavement of millions in service to the perfect ideology. 

If we close our eyes to the battle that is already underway, just as we have been blinded to the past, we will lose.

The film I have embedded below is long and painful to watch.  It is a worthwhile antidote to those who imagine that their ideology (whether a modern pathology like Socialism or an ancient scourge returned like political Islam) justifies any and every horror inflicted upon its (real, imagined, or manufactured) enemies: [HT: Dr. Sanity, who is once again blogging regularly.]

The Soviet Story

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…

The current Left-Islamist alliance is the heir to the Communist-Nazi (and concomitant Nazi-Islamist) and post-WWII Communist-Islamist alliance of WWII.

The evil that is/was an inextricable aspect of Communism and Socialism has been effaced from our historical memory.  It has been a remarkably effective whitewash; just as remarkable is the current self imposed blindness of the West to the evil that infects Islam.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

-Verbal, aka Keyser Soze

Passionate Intensity

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The Second Coming -- William Butler Yeats

In the aftermath of the Turkish inspired Gaza "Humanitarian" incident, Israel has been attacked with a frenzied passion not seen since the days of the Third Reich.  A great many words have been written attempting to make sense of the reactions of the sophisticated, mostly liberal, European and American elites, which have at times mirrored the mindless rage of the Palestinians and their enablers.  Two of the more important discussions are worth highlighting.

Walter Russell Mead has written a much linked post discussing the recurrence of a, perhaps naive, facilitation of atrocity, by those who Stalin once referred to as "useful idiots":

Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands

When ‘Understanding’ Becomes Collaboration

Worse, some of the ‘good guys’ sympathized with and made excuses for the bad.  Germany was resentful and bitter, they said, because the Treaty of Versailles was unfair.  Let Adolf Hitler have his ‘reasonable’ goals of reuniting ethnic Germans under one roof, and Germany would become a peaceful and satisfied country, a bulwark of European order.  This sounds crazy now, but it was the conventional wisdom among the intelligentsia and literati (except for the Communists and their closest sympathizers) during the 1930s; this is why voices warning of war like Churchill were so isolated.  War was so destructive, argued the false prophets of fake enlightenment, that only a madman would start one.  And while Hitler was alarming, the apparatus of the German state was sane.  There were moderate Nazis, with limited goals; given western forbearance, wise concessions and enough time, the moderates would edge the Nazi radicals out of power.

That was the standard refrain about Germany from 1933 through 1939 and at every crisis or turning point academics and journalists stepped forward to plead for patience and to predict an imminent triumph of the ‘moderate’ Nazis over the ‘radicals’.  In the meantime, anti-Nazi rhetoric and boycotts in the West only empowered Hitler and united German opinion behind him. Give him the Saar, Austria, yes and the Sudetenland: sooner or later he would calm down and the world would be at peace.  When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich proclaiming that simply by giving Hitler the Sudentenland (the then-German speaking part of Czechoslovakia that happened to include the country’s mountainous border areas and natural defenses) he had won “peace in our time”, nobody was happier than the fatheaded peace clergy — unless it was the enlightened class of journalists and professors who set the tone for upper middle class enlightenment at the time.

It was the same thing with Stalin.  Half of the peace movement was in love with Communism; the other half thought that poor Stalin had no choice but to be brutal and tough because he was surrounded by hostile states.  Recognize Stalin, trade with him, stop calling him nasty names.  Treat him with dignity and respect, they said, and everything will work out for the best. There had been plenty of sympathy for Stalin in the West during the thirties — even as he was carrying out mass murder on a scale that poor Pol Pot could only envy, Stalin never lacked for apologists and defenders among the chattering classes in those countries where they were still permitted to chat.

It is a remarkable and inescapable conclusion when reading Walter Russell Mead's review of the history of such a strain in the body politic to recognize how history is repeating.  Substitute Hamas, or Iran, or Hezbollah, or Turkey for Russia and Germany and the sense of deja vu is profound.  Consider our current "Peace movement":

It is just not true, historically speaking, that ‘peace movements’ lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.  We can be very grateful that Ronald Reagan and the NATO leadership turned a deaf ear to the nuclear freeze movement; had those besotted idealists had their way the Soviet Union and the Cold War might be still with us today — along with nuclear arsenals much larger and much more dangerous than anything the US and Russia now have.

Not so long ago we had a word in our society for tiger-strokers: people who thought that if you soothed the savage passions of irrational dictators by treating them with respect and giving them treats then the dictators would become less dangerous.

We called them ‘appeasers’.

Professor Richard Landes addresses an important question concerning these people, many among the most privileged in the West, who appear to be collaborating with those who would enjoy nothing more than to cut their heads off:

From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century “Intellectuals”

So why would a late 20th century progressive sympathize with, support, run interference, even lie and deceive, for a movement that manifested all the worst traits of totalitarian megadeath from the 20th century – the cult of death, the embrace of nihilism, paranoia, and genocidal hate-mongering? At least the fellow travelers of the early and mid-20th century had a noble ideal for which they carried out their campaigns of misinformation. But now, we have intellectuals from a wide range of fields running interference for Islam, even in its most regressive forms.

And of course, at this asymmetrical stage in the war that Global Jihad wages against the West, nothing is more critical to the capacity of Jihad to mobilize – to recruit, indoctrinate, train, and deploy – its forces than a cognitive victory in which its targets in the West are kept in the dark about its real intentions. And given the yeoman job that apologists like John Esposito, Noah Feldman and Juan Cole perform in this sense, I think it worthwhile to use the expression “useful infidel” for this new breed of fellow travelers. Nothing is more useful to Jihadi ambitions to subject the entire world to Sharia than non-Muslim intellectuals who insist that Islam is a religion of peace that is perfectly consonant with democracy, and that the terrorists represent a tiny, marginal, deviation from true Islam.

I want to argue that this astonishing paradox – Islamic Jihad is the last thing one would expect reasonable, progressive intellectuals to support – strips away the pretence of naïve good intentions that the older “useful idiot” used to plead. Once we confront the “irrationality” of useful infidelity, and realize the urgency of trying to understand a phenomenon that pushes us in the direction of cultural, even civilizational suicide, we must confront the underlying (self-destructive) emotions.

...

Demopaths and their Dupes

It seems to me that the phenomenon of useful idiocy revolves around a particularly dysfunctional relationship, that between demopath and dupe. Demopaths arise in response to democratic cultures, which they target in a cognitive war suited only to assaults on such societies, that is, ones that embrace principles of a human right to freedom. They themselves embrace authoritarian principles of dominion by force, what Lee Smith has chronicled so chillingly in his latest book, The Strong Horse. Their line of attack: “you (democratic target) do not live up to your commitments; and in particular, you violate our (demopathic belligerent) rights in preventing us from participating in your democracy.”

The key to demopaths is their hypocrisy: they have no commitment to democratic values or human rights. On the contrary, they despise these values, and they have no intention of, once in power, respecting the rights of others. Their motto: “Use democracy to destroy democracy.”

Richard Landes argues that at least some of the genesis of such "useful infidels" stems from cognitive dissonance (the inability to tolerate the collapse of their world view when the Communist Utopia finally and unmistakably failed in 1989), envy (of Jews and Americans, successful cultures and successful peoples) and unacknowledged fear (of Islamists and their rage.)

Both Walter Russell Mead and Richard Landes have made important contributions to understanding how so many in the West can be willing, to paraphrase Lenin, to sell the Islamists the knife with which to behead them.

I would add an additional element. The superannuated Progressive sophisticate in the 21st century, as his forebears before him, prides himself on his distance from the primitive.  Passion in recreational sex is idealized but passion in defense of one's Civilization and its accomplishments is beneath them.  Yet passion, while it can be hidden, does not disappear and die.  In the progressive, passion  lives on vicariously through the idealized "noble savage."  If Rousseau's noble savage was never more than a caricature, it was a caricature that expressed a deep, even primal, yearning for a return to a state of innocence and passionate engagement which the modern man felt was lacking within himself.  If there is no God, there is no passion in religion.  If there is no divinity in man, he is merely a beast and all his passions must be simultaneously denied and expressed in carefully hidden and externalized ways.  Today, the"noble savage" is the Palestinian and the Jihadi.  These are people who are free to express the most primitive passions, and they are held as innocents at the same time.  In this view, they have been driven to extremis by the depredations of the evil, fallen West.  If one is beaten by such savages, it is understandable; they were driven to it and in reality are simply "nobles savages" fighting for the basic rights we take for granted and have denied them.  After being nearly beaten to death by a mob, "journalist" Robert Fisk expressed these sentiments beautifully:

UK journalist beaten by Afghan mob

"It doesn't excuse them for beating me up so badly but there was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much.

"I don't want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They had every reason to be angry - I've been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me."

Passionate rage is powerful and exciting.  Fisk could never express such rage simply for his own sake or for the sake of his country; that would be unseemly, unsophisticated.  Yet he could easily express such rage vicariously through those who are willing to express their inchoate rage freely and without reservation or guilt.  For those who are emotionally stunted and crippled by their anomie, such noble passions are admirable.  As a bonus, such passion is generally accepted, within  their social milieu, as entirely appropriate if directed at the hated and envied Jews and Americans.  As a bonus, the Jews and Americans will rarely even murmur a word of protest, let alone threaten your life.  You can even pretend you are "speaking truth to power" and receive a frisson of pleasure at your temerity, without having to actually risk anything at all!

In a civilized nation, we must  learn to tame our passionate rage, the pleasure we gain from destruction and terror.  Those who do not find compensating, more sublimated outlets for their aggression, may find themselves peculiarly susceptible to the siren call of the passionate intensity of the imagined "noble savage."  Thus are "useful infidels" formed, from the intersection of the personal and the political.

As Richard Landes and Walter Russell Mead both recognize, and  as the great poet once noted, in such grim times events take on a momentum of their own and the outcome is unlikely to be promising.

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Western (White) Guilt and Suicidal Moral Masochism

We are all familiar with the person who "has it all" yet manages to ruin their life.  Not all such individuals have unconscious guilt which causes them to seek ways to punish themselves, but unconscious guilt as a motivator for masochistic, ie self damaging, behavior is an extremely common occurrence.

The predominantly white European world from which our Civilization emerged was, like any civilization past, present, and future, comprised of many different elements.  Much that was evil was committed in the name of Western Civilization yet there are more people alive today, living in relative comfort and security, with more personal freedom, than any Civilization has ever managed before.  Our technological civilization would never have come into being if not for the acts, often excessive, of those who came before.  Yet our very success in the midst of overwhelming evil, penury, and sorrow, engenders feelings of guilt in those who do not feel that they have earned or deserve their privileges.  There are a great many among us who, once having jettisoned God, are left struggling to understand why luck has granted them such ease while so many others struggle and die in abject despair and poverty.  The liberal impulse, to help others, is a healthy response to such guilt but it can become so intensified as to tip over from a well meaning desire to help others into a less conscious desire to harm oneself (or those like oneself) in order to diminish the disparities that are so intolerable.

When the unconscious guilt is leveraged by a Narcissistic investment in the desire to "heal the world" and erase disparities, a toxic societal Moral Masochism can result.

Part of the rot at the center of many of our elite institutions is the result of just such over-valued Utopianism, an outgrowth of unconscious guilt, and the corresponding compensatory Moral Masochism.  The academic who declares that "Amerikkka" is uniquely evil or the Cleric who preaches that "white folks' greed runs a world in need" are emerging from a weltanschauung that embodies an unconscious need for punishment for our successes.  (The fact that these people are richly rewarded for their attacks on our legitimacy is a measure of the degree of Moral Masochism that our culture has accepted.)

The desire for equality (ie, to erase disparities) can be a rational and reasonable response to inequality, but in recent years it has become a dangerous source of instability in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies.  Thomas Sowell writes in Race and Politics:

Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.

You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stay away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed.

...

Obama has promoted to the Supreme Court a circuit judge who dismissed a discrimination lawsuit by white firefighters, whose case the Supreme Court later accepted and ruled in their favor.

He preceded this appointment by talking about needing people on the court with "empathy." That is a pretty word but the ugly reality is that it is just another euphemism for bias. For generations, white Southern judges had all kinds of empathy for other white Southerners, which is to say, bias against blacks.

The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. [Emphasis  mine- SW] Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don't need to repeat in the United States of America.

Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country-- now called Sri Lanka-- that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.

...

We know-- or should know-- what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A "race card" is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.

When society regresses under duress, once unified societies undergo pathological splitting.  Where once was e pluribus unum, there ensues a descent into civil strife.  Yesterday Richard Landes linked to a very troubling article describing the descent of South Africa into racial conflict; he drew some conclusions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the experience of South Africa.  In fact, his conclusions have much broader implications: 

South Africa’s Second Coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome

The reason I have written so little art this blog (and not participated in the excelllent discussions) recently is because I’m preparing the manuscript of my book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience for Oxford U. Press. One of my chapter deals with the Xhosa Cattle-Slaying of 1856-7. In trying to keep up with the recent literature on the subject, I ran across an article by Achille Mbebe, a Cameroonian post-colonialist writer who has penned a blistering indictment of the post-Apartheid government of South Africa which i thought would interest the readers of this blog. Here it is, below, with comments.

Among other things, it underlines two major points: 1) the difficulty of establishing a working democracy; and 2) the almost certainty that any Palestinian state - a fortiori a “one state solution” to the Arab-Israeli problem would produce a failed “democracy.”

South Africa’s second coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome

Achille Mbembe, 14 June 2006

A dozen years after apartheid ended, a dangerous mix of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South Africans to commit political suicide, writes Achille Mbembe.

The deputy chair of the South African Institute of International Relations, Moeletsi Mbeki speaking recently at Witwatersrand University, made an arresting comparison between the current political situation in South Africa and the one prevailing in the period leading to the Xhosa cattle-killing in 1856-57.

As is his wont, Richard's post is long, but it is very valuable; read the whole thing.

Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize because when South Africa gave up apartheid he led the way to a peaceful transition and eschewed revenge in favor of enabling the emergence of a functional multi-ethnic democracy.  This is now failing in South Africa.  Governance in South Africa has been poor and the economy is failing its people.  It is now a nation descending into magical thinking, splitting, and paranoid delusion.

In his comments, Richard Landes makes an important point that is never considered or even recognized by so many who so easily criticize the West:

One of the sad and difficult things for liberals to learn is that before the advent of modern civil polities (with some rare exceptions like the Jews), elites have never treated their own people well. The idea that the black elite would treat blacks better than whites did was a liberal fantasy. (And in this case, the whites hardly treated the blacks well.) In the case of Israel, the observation that just does not compute with liberals and progressives who blame Israel, is that they treat Arabs better than Arab regimes treat Arabs. And all those Palestinians who want to be in Israel rather than in Palestine makes it clear that they understand.

By surrendering to our unconscious guilt and our need for self punishment, we no longer support fundamental elements of Western Civilization, especially the dignity and autonomy of the individual, that have led to more people being treated better than at any time in human history.  Our Moral Masochism damages our ability to speak up for those who are less fortunate.  It is no coincidence that a President who emerged from the elite Academic left and received spiritual sustenance from Reverend Wright would be disinclined to support the Iranian people in their efforts to escape the tyranny of their masters or is blind to the tyranny of the Palestinian "freedom fighters" with whom he is so sympathetic.

Notice that Black Power groups, La Raza, Islamist groups, and a myriad of separatist and supremacist ethnic groups who in reality represent majorities in various parts of the world are now accepted as simply part of the fabric of America.  Yet the mention of White Power or White Pride instantly (and correctly) conjures up images of neo-Nazis and Christian supremacists.  What our guilt blinds us to is that the separatists and supremacists of non-"White" ethnic groups are as evil and dangerous as any White Supremacist group could hope to be.  The difference is that Western Civilization, whether in its American, European, Australian, Canadian, or Israeli iterations, (and overwhelmingly White), have repudiated, as a society, notions of ethnic or religious supremacy.  This is a healthy response to past excess.  The corresponding refusal to condemn non-White Supremacists, who often have mirror image goals to the White Supremacists we all condemn, is a measure of our Moral Masochism.*  It is suicidally self indulgent and it represents an ongoing threat to the coherence of our society.

[* This is one part of an answer to Noah Pollack's question, Why Does the New York Times Only Cover Some Kinds of Anti-Semitism?]

This morning, Bookworm notes two classic examples of the expression by predominantly white Western elites of their unconscious racism, which is fueled by and fuels their guilty Moral Masochism:

Getting a closer look at why liberals continue to feel that blacks should be held to a different standard

A few days ago, in the wake of a concerted (and almost certainly fraudulent) attack against the Tea Party by claiming its members are racist, I wrote a post in which I said that, if I’m going to be called a racist, I get to define the term to accord with my understanding of race.

I was wordy (so, sue me; so was Charles Dickens), but it boiled down to my firm belief that, while blacks needed a helping hand in the immediate aftermath of first wave of Civil Rights (the mid-1960s), the system has become perverted, encouraging blacks to become dependent on rich white liberals.  I contrasted the black experience with the Asian immigrant experience (or you could contrast it with the Irish immigration experience, or the Jewish, or the Italian…), all of which show groups that had the same handicaps as post-Jim Crow blacks — illiterate, poverty stricken, and ghettoized — but that nevertheless managed to mainstream within a generation.

The problem, I said, does not lie with blacks; it lies, instead, with liberal policies that persist in treating blacks as if they are helpless, intellectually incapable, non-rational beings.  If I’m racist, it’s because I look at blacks and think that, without the smothering influence of white liberal guilt, they are, as a group, every bit as competent, capable and rational as any other group.

And:

Even self-styled victims have lines their fellow-travelers aren’t supposed to cross

We all know that Palestinians are victims, right?  That’s why they get a free pass for eating up billions of dollars in foreign aid without establishing viable communities, for launching tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, and for periodically boarding Israeli buses or entering Israeli restaurants to get an up-close-and-personal approach to massacring Jews.  Still, even self-styled victims have their limits.  In Israel, Palestinian women in Israeli prisons drew the line at being portrayed in Turkish television shows as the victims of sexual assault.  Their gripe is that it makes them look so . . . so . . . victimish:

For the White left, racism is the worst possible thought-crime.  They remain unaware of their own unconscious racism and project it into their enemies.  (All Republicans, Conservatives, even liberals who slip from the assigned ideological line, are incipient racists until proven otherwise by adopting the Left's ideology.)  Their intolerant Morality, an expression of Moral Masochism, finds fault with all that emanates from Western Civilization and excuses all evil done by non-Westerners, ie, non-Whites, which expresses their racism in a hidden manner.  It is ugly and very destructive of Civilization.  When groups are excused from adhering to the basic lowest common denominator of civilized behavior, merely by virtue of their ethnicity, while those who struggle to uphold civilization's norms are constantly under assault, the greatest danger is that, in the immortal words of the poet:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Civilizational Insecurity

In a comment to Surrendering to Army Ants, David Foster, the proprietor of Photon Courier linked to his post from last month, Sleeping with the Enemy.  (His link was to an introduction to the post on his blog; I have linked to the full post at Chicago Boyz.)  In his post, David discusses a forgotten novel:

Sleeping with the Enemy

Why has the western world shown such loss of will in defending itself from radical Islamic terrorism? Why, indeed, do substantial numbers of people–particularly those who view themselves as intellectuals–endlessly make excuses for dictatorships and terrorist movements whose values are completely at odds with their own stated values–and even romanticize these goons? I think some clues can be found in a forgotten novel by Arthur Koestler.

The Age of Longing (published in 1950) is set in Paris, “sometime in the 1950s,” in a world in which France–indeed all of western Europe–is facing the very real possibility of a Soviet invasion. Hydie Anderson, the protagonist, is a young American woman living in Paris with her father, a military attache. Hydie was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection:

David's essay is rich and deep, well worth your time.  Koestler joined the Communist party in 1931, in his mid-20s, but became disillusioned with the evils of Communism by the end of the 1930s.   In 1940 he published his devastating anti-totalitarian novel, Darkness at Noon.

As noted, The Age of Longing (which I have not read) was published 10 years later and did not achieve the acclaim of his earlier book.  However, the excerpts David Foster quotes illustrate Koestler's facility with language and ideas and the artist's ability to penetrate to the soul.  The story is complicated.  The heroine, Hydie, rejects a man who is appropriate in favor of a committed Communist, Fedya.  The characters are all awaiting the inevitable invasion of western Europe by the Russian army and Fedya is part of the Soviet vanguard:

At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestler–himself a former Communist–does a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)

The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialist–and, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.

Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of names–the names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activities–and did nothing to stop them–while she was blissfully unaware.

Hydie is the epitome of the Western "useful idiot" but it is not her soft ideology that Koestler and David Foster emphasize but rather her reflection of the dissolution and dissipation of the Western idea.  David quotes Koestler, and adds his summation:

“Listen, please,” he said. “We have talked about these matters often before. You don’t like that we make scientific studies of human nature like Professor Pavlov. You don’t like revolutionary vigilance and lists on the social reliability of people, and discipline and re-education camps. You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”

“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”

Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…

One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but emphasizing this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty.

I could simply quote the entire essay but suggest you go to his post and read the whole thing.  It has become trite to note the feminization of the West and the price we are paying for our insistence, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that all people are not just created with equal value (which is actually a fairly vapid idea once any reference to God is removed from societal discourse)  but that the absence of equal outcomes must denote societal disrepair.  These reflections of our commitment to Political Correctness are a measure of the soft collectivism that even the Republicans have adopted.  It is possible that the overt collectivist policies that the current Democratic leadership is pressing will evoke enough of a reaction to stop our progress toward a 21^st century quasi-Socialism, but what I find most interesting is that the "ground up" zeitgeist is increasingly at odds with the overt diminution of the rights and responsibilities of the individual.

Societies, as in Europe and parts of Asia, who transition from the potential of empowered individuals to a cheap narcissism risk demographic collapse.  If there is nothing more important than the self, sacrifices for another (ie, offspring) are unthinkable and undone.  They are then left with no ability or inclination to defend against the predations of more confident Collectives, an apt description of Islam in its current incarnation.  A warrior wiling to die for his beliefs is always more appealing to a young woman, who owns the future after all, than an effete, dedicated narcissist.

Pre-industrial Collectivism was the norm.  Tribes and ethnically homogeneous groupings were the rule.  Individuals were subordinate to the group ethos.  Gradually, as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution matured, ie as increasing numbers of people became increasingly empowered, Collectivist solutions diminished.  In reaction to the excesses of Capitalism, Karl Marx introduced a new structure that leveraged the foundations of tribalism (deprivation and envy.)   Communism showed itself to be a monumental and monstrous failure in the most human terms; more people were murdered by Communism in the 20^th century than in all the religious (ie, tribal) wars before it.  If we add in the other 20^th century Collectivist ideology, Nazism, a tribal ideology based on race, he deaths attributed to our primitive tribalism in modern guise, numbered in the hundreds of millions.  the left was thoroughly discredited by its failures but the collectivist urge, based as it is on the twin human banes of deprivation and envy, can never disappear.  No matter how wealthy a society becomes, there will always be some who have less than others, and always some who have less than they desire.  Yet, in the 21^st century, there is a growing tension between the individual and the collective that is moving powerfully against the collective. 

Our technology, in its accelerating acceleration, is making each of us potentially more powerful than individuals have ever been before.  There will soon come a time when small communities, perhaps even individuals, will be able to live with all the accouterments of modern high tech existence, with minimal interaction with governing bodies and those who act in the name of the Collective.

It should not be a surprise that just at a pivotal moment when the rights, abilities, and responsibilities of the individual are set to make a quantum leap to a new level, we have a reaction form those who are most insecure about the future.  The Left continues to think of itself as the vanguard (no longer of the proletariat perhaps, but of the future course of society.)  They pride themselves on being  progressives, keepers of the future, yet the most progressive ideas today all involve empowering the individual.  

If we surrender to the siren call of pseudo-security, protected by a benevolent government from the vicissitudes of life, we will continue to descend into the morass of Civilizational Insecurity and will find ourselves less and less able to defend our liberties against those who would encroach upon them.  Many of our institutions have already surrendered (as for example, our failing and fading Mainstream Media who will almost dare never utter a word that might offend our enemies.)  It is likely that the next two election cycles will determine whether or not We, the People, are ready to follow.

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part II

Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I

Avatar is a deeply religious movie and is nothing so much as a visual statement of Pantheism and Gaiaism.  In the movie, the biosphere is all connected, communicating through the trees.  Spirits/souls live on independent of the flesh and as a result there appears to be no gratuitous violence, warfare, or all the other ills fallible humans have been prone to.  In a paean to the idealized American Indian of contemporary myth, hunters apologize to their prey and thank them for their contribution to the people.  It is a lovely vision of a Godless religion, one that can be imagined to have evolved without benefit of a Deity.  It is scientific and decidedly amoral, in that morality requires choice and when one is always part of the greater collective, there is no necessity for moral choice.  One is defined by the collective mind, follows those who are closer to the biosphere's "mind" (apparently made up, in part, of the spirits of those who came before) and an individual ethic is unnecessary.  At least, within the confines of the movie, the only people forced to make moral choices are the humans from planet Earth.  That their moral choices are so obvious and overt is a tribute to the limitations of the filmmaker's imagination as opposed to any potential reality of the situation, but that is immaterial here.

Returning to the Ted Kaczynski saga in the Atlantic, what is striking is the implicit splitting in the stance of the Harvard professors, those paragons of complexity, in their approach to the Gen Ed curriculum's attempts to inculcate an appreciation for the Judeo-Christian ethic.  From Part I of The Roots of the Unabomber

The committee's report, General Education in a Free Society (1945), was known, for the color of its cover, as the Redbook. The solution that the Redbook committee offered was a program of instruction that, in the words of the education historian Frederick Rudolph, called for "a submersion in tradition and heritage and some sense of common bond strong enough to bring unbridled ego and ambition under control." The Redbook's program of reform caught the imagination of educators across the country. By the mid-1950s more than half the colleges in America were offering programs of general education modeled along the same lines.

Although at Harvard the name caught on, the philosophy behind it did not. Gen Ed was doomed from the start.

By 1950 the Harvard faculty was divided between those who, chastened by their experience in World War II and especially by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw science and technology as a threat to Western values and even human survival and those -- a majority -- who saw science as a liberator from superstition and an avenue to progress. Both these views found their way into the Gen Ed curriculum. The dominant faction had little sympathy for the Redbook's resolve to inculcate Judeo-Christian ethics. Because of the majority's resistance, many Redbook-committee recommendations were never fully implemented. And those recommendations that were incorporated into the curriculum were quickly subverted by many of the people expected to teach it. These professors in fact emphasized the opposite of the lesson Conant intended. Rather than inculcate traditional values, they sought to undermine them. Soon "Thou shalt not utter a value judgment" became the mantra for Harvard freshmen, in dorm bull sessions as well as in term papers. Positivism triumphed. [Emphasis mine-SW]

Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be an optimistic one, concerning the perfectibility of science and the inevitability of progress. It taught that reason was a liberating force and faith mere superstition; the advance of science would eventually produce a complete understanding of nature. But positivism also taught that all the accumulated nonscientific knowledge of the past, including the great religions and philosophies, had been at best merely an expression of "cultural mores" and at worst nonsense; life had no purpose and morality no justification.

Even as positivism preached progress, therefore, it subliminally carried -- quite in contradiction to the intent of Gen Ed's framers -- a more disturbing implication: that absolute reason leads to absolute despair. G. K. Chesterton wrote, "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad ... mathematicians go mad." Hence Gen Ed delivered to those of us who were undergraduates during this time a double whammy of pessimism. From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture of despair was not, of course, confined to Harvard -- it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. But it existed at Harvard in a particularly concentrated form, and Harvard was the place where Kaczynski and I found ourselves.

To very briefly review and summarize: among the cognoscenti, religion and religious belief became synonymous with primitivism.  G-d was not only unnecessary but in fact his influence was invidious.  Our predecessors, because of their belief in such primitive nonsense, had little to offer sophisticated modern, post Nietzschean ("God is dead") man.  The modern philosophical edifice threw out several thousand years worth of human struggle with the questions that reside at the core of morality and ethics.  For the modern sophisticate, moral judgements are unnecessary and delusional.  Modern man is far too sophisticated to accept such morally loaded terms as "right" or "wrong".  As well as throwing out the foundations of morality and ethics, the modern existentialist atheism managed to toss out meaning as well, leaving a vast hole in the soul (for want of a more appropriate, less archaic term) that people remain eager to fill:

Spirit Quest

I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.

She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather than anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.

.

A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.

Glenn Reynolds had the best comment on the new spirituality:

YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.

Religious belief has been systematically devalued by the liberal elites since the early days of the last century.  Pure reason has been insufficient to temper our inherent desires to control others and destroy opponents.  Rationality led to the worst excesses of the 20th century.  national Socialism imagined itself to be based on rationality; Communism offered a "scientific" approach to social problems.   Both led to unfathomable destruction.

The newest iteration of a purely rational, scientific approach to understanding can be found in the eco-religion of AGW.  If the Warmists had their way, billions of people would be consigned to extreme poverty, technological progress would be aborted, and millions would die, all to satisfy their unacknowledged religious devotion to Mother Earth.

[Ed Morrissey documents the religious devotion of our liberal MSM in relation to AGW; they literally cannot talk about heretical data: Another American media failure.]

We desperately need some humility.  Homo sapiens is not yet ready to replace G-d.  For those who reject belief in G-d, I would suggest a new version of Pascal's wager.  The most rational, non-religious view is that G-d is an idealized projection of our collective Superegos.  In this case,  it has survival value for the human race to believe in a Deity; no other source of moral authority would ever be sufficient to control our basest desires and our extraordinary ability to rationalize those desires.  Perhaps, 100 years after his death, one could argue we need G-d more than ever.

What Are You Willing to Die For?

[Update at end]

In post-religious, secularized Western countries, the answer to the title question tends to devolve to "nothing" beyond the self and its interests.  Western elites are fond of instructing their inferiors to sacrifice for their Utopian ideal of the moment but sacrificing one's life for the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for others is typically seen as the province of less well educated, less sophisticated, non-members of the elite.  America still has enough young people who value what this country has to offer that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, but Europe has long since surrendered to the progressive forces of history and eschews self-defence of their ideals.   For Western elites, people who are motivated by religious beliefs, usually overlapping with those too ignorant to avoid the military, are essentially the equivalent of cannon fodder, ie, they do not count.  Our elites pride themselves on their functional atheism.  Politicians may from time to time profess their deep religious convictions but most often on the left this is a rather transparent attempt to appeal tot he rubes and when a politician appears to have genuine religious convictions, as for example Sarah Palin, they are savaged by the elites in media and academia.

Because religious belief has been so discredited by our elites, they tend to see anyone who believes as either a charlatan (using their beliefs to scam people) or as at best ignorant if not overtly intellectually limited.  The idea that there exist people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die for their deity does not reach the threshold of consciousness for our elites.  They may occasionally give lip service to the idea (though less often since we are no longer at war with Islamic terrorists) and may admit that the Islamic foot soldiers of Iran, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah are religious radicals, but they insist that the leaders of such groups can be approached as rational actors.  Greg Sheridan, in the Australian, points out how we fool ourselves by imagining our enemies to be rationally motivated:

Tehran on path to our destruction

Iran has been determined to acquire nuclear weapons for a long time. It is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes it, something of a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guard assuming more and more power. It is still also, however, a theocratic dictatorship. The purpose of the state is to serve theological ends.

Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state's behaviour.

The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways. In Mao's China tens of millions of people died in famines directly caused by state policy. North Korea has driven its people into starvation. Pol Pot not only committed genocide on his own people, he then attacked Vietnam so that it would destroy him. Saddam Hussein was such a canny, realist calculator of the odds that his regime ended up gone and he ended up dead.

It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.

Melanie Philips' comment on Greg Sheridan's article is apt:

It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.

Even among seasoned and reasonable observers who have been involved in thinking about the Middle East for a very long time, there is an implicit assumption that the belief structure of the enemy can be approached using rationality.  In the course of an article about Andrew Sullivan's antipathy to Israel* and himself, Jeffery Goldberg notes that he has for a long time worried about Israel becoming complicit in its own destruction:

Andrew Sullivan is Going to Tear Me To Shreds

I've been writing since 2004 that Israel will one day be considered an apartheid state if it continues to rule over a population of Arabs that doesn't want to be ruled by Israelis. That is why it is vital for Israel to establish permanent, internationally-recognized borders that more-or-less adhere to the 1967 border. Unlike Andrew, I believe that Israel has tried to free itself from ruling these Palestinians (the pull-out from Gaza is an example, as is Ehud Olmert's recent, unanswered offer to the Palestinians to pull out from virtually 100 percent of the West Bank). But the reality remains: It will be very dangerous for Israel to engineer this pull-back, but it will be, over time, fatal for it to stay in the West Bank.  Anyway, more to come, eventually.

According to this fairly common point of view, Israel has the choice of continuing to "oppress and occupy" West bank Palestinians, which will inevitably lead to the delegitimization of the Jewish state or they must engineer a (unilateral) Peace agreement which would be tantamount to Israeli suicide.  There has never been any indication that any Palestinian leader, no matter how "moderate" would be willing to accept a Jewish state.  The current favored Moderates of the PA insist upon an unlimited right of return and indefensible borders for Israel. 

It is sophistry to pronounce that a Peace can be accomplished in which the Palestinians accept some financial inducements and a token right of return in exchange for permanent Peace.  There is no evidence, zero, that any Palestinian could cede the right of return and survive, let alone continue to rule.  To believe otherwise is delusional, an invention of the Western, rational mind.

Unfortunately, this is the current choice; there can be no compromise with people who believe that compromise, and the continued existence of the state of Israel is an anathema to their deity.  They are certainly willing to kill for their beliefs, more significantly, they are willing to die for their beliefs.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can not end until the Palestinians, and their Arab backers, accept the legitimacy of Israel, yet they cannot do so and remain loyal to their religion.  Islam believes that it is the superior faith, that the Koran is the final, perfect word of Allah.  An independent Jewish state, especially one that has repeatedly humiliated the Arab world (in War and in Peace) threatens to destroy Islam merely by its continued existence.  After all, how can Allah be supreme when the hated Jews, who proclaim their G-d the one true G-d, remain victorious over Islam?  Islam, in its current form, cannot survive and adapt to he modern world; the very religious foundations of the faith are at risk every day that Israel persists.  The struggle to eradicate Israel and the Jews can only accommodate Peace if it temporary and in the service of the final solution.  This is not something I am simply making up out of whole cloth, it is what our enemies say on a daily basis, if we only choose to listen. 

Of course, for the West to accept this truth would be a deeply unsettling recognition.  Yet once we come to understand the reality, the solution becomes clearer, albeit one that makes our elites most uncomfortable.  A long term minimization of violence with occasional reminders by the West/Israel to the violent ones that we know where they live (ie, the current status quo) is the only way to keep the forces of destruction under control.  Allowing the Muslim world's most extreme variants to gain power and strength is a path to disaster.

* The question of whether or not Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite is a non-starter.  Andrew Sullivan has been increasingly using language which is indistinguishable from classical anti-Semitic tropes as filtered through the post-modern lens; after a while whether or not he entertains any particular antipathy to Jews is immaterial.  Others may disagree but ultimately it hardly matters.  The mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes is ongoing.

Update: In an excellent article today Barry Rubin points out that the complementary (mirror image?) of the ubiquitous blindness to the reality of radical Islamic religious ideology occurs in the views that  "Moderates" have of Israel:

Why Isn't There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn't interested in peace, doesn't offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible--if not fully accurate--describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s' peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel's agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government's peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered "nothing" and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel's alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state. This reminds me of how Mahmoud Abbas, today leader of the Palestinian Authority, responded to some reasonably accurate descriptions in the Palestinian media of what Israel offered in 2000 at Camp David. It is better, he said at the time, not to talk about these things at all, presumably lest some Palestinians might think that it was a reasonable deal.

Anyone who actually lives in Israel knows that--whether they like it or not--Israel is ready to make big conessions and take reasonable risks to achieve peace. They know, whether or not they agree, that the overwhelming majority is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state as long as it is willing to end the conflict and live side by side in peace.

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Read the whole thing.  The complementary blind spots of our elites toward Israel and the Palestinians (and in a larger sense, toward ourselves and the Islamic radicals)  has important Psychological dimensions; elaboration to follow.

What Will They Think of Next?

The entire edifice of Anthropogenic Global warming is unraveling with amazing speed.  Watts Up With That? has been posing multiple posts daily which document fraudulent behavior by the IPCC and its minions.  Simon at Classical Values offers a nice summary of the metastasizing scandals thus far, and ends with a question:

A Disaster Of Biblical Proportions

The UN's IPCC has just taken a few more torpedoes below the water line.

Well it turns out that the WWF [World Wildlife Fund] is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC's rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they've violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri's watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.

Here's an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF and cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC AR4 report:

I'm not going to reprise the long list. You can find it at the links provided.

...

... they knew it was bad and did nothing. You know, that is not the only fraud uncovered. We may now be in possession of tens of them. So far. In fact it is looking like the whole IPCC enterprise is a fraud. And that doesn't even get to the bottom of the CO₂ emissions trading fraud.

[Among the scandals are those mounting around Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the now embattled head of the IPCC.  Almost all of their dire predictions are coming undone and his financial improprieties and conflicts of interest are receiving attention in the foreign press, though you wouldn't know this from the American MSM, as far as I can determine.]

Simon's conclusion and question:

The good news is that the whole fraud is unraveling. It will be interesting to see what the Watermelons try next.

It looks increasingly likely that the entire AGW scam represents a serendipitous cooptation of some immature science by the international left.  (Hence the derivation of Simon's visual pun.)  After the fall of the USSR, communism and socialism were held in disrepute.  Among other problems for the left was that in every instance it failed to raise the living standards of those who were its nominal beneficiaries.  However, those who support collectivism and leverage envy and hated of those who are successful for their own aggrandizement, were not about to give up on their dreams of dismantling capitalism simply because they had lost the Cold War.  AGW was a perfect fit.  It threatened disaster at some indeterminate future, a disaster that could only be avoided by crippling the world's most developed economies; all directed by those who were uniquely equipped to "save the planet."  It was based on a belief structure that leveraged faith in the new religion of Gaiaism and thus had an already prepared population of worshippers who would fully adopt the dogma and be immune to countervailing data.  As a bonus, it offered the kinds of virtuous self regard that has been a traditional motivator for those who suffered significant guilt over their good fortune to be born and live in materially successful societies.  The international left were quite clear, if not terribly overt, about their desire to use AGW as a weapon to diminish the power of the wealthy nations and transfer large amounts of wealth to the poor (with the wealth first passing through the fingers of the international elites.)  The game is up now on AGW and those who desire above all to create the promised Utopia on earth that only they can envision and produce, must now look to other means by which to introduce such "necessities" as world governance, greater wealth transfers, and enhanced power to the elites.

As it happens, reader/commenter Expat sent me a link yesterday that offers a likely candidate for what's next:

Tax and Spend: U.N.'s Rx for New World Medical Order

A member of a World Health Organization (WHO) panel of experts that is pondering new global taxes on e-mails, alcohol, tobacco, airline travel and consumer bank transactions, has charged that she was given only selective information at group meetings, that deliberations were rushed and that group was "manipulated" by the international pharmaceuticals industry.

All of her charges were strongly denied by the head of WHO's Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing (EWG), a 25-member panel of medical experts, academics and health care bureaucrats which is due to present a 98-page report in Geneva on Monday, after 14 months of deliberations on "new and innovative sources of funding" to reshape the global medical industry.

...

The executive summary first revealed the possibility of a multibillion-dollar "indirect consumer tax" as one means of financing an epic shift of drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities to the developing world that is the central aim of WHO's fund-raising strategy.

Fox News has obtained a copy of the full EWG report, Research and Development: Coordination and Financing, in advance of its publication Monday, which lays out in greater detail the working group's proposals for fund-raising. These include not only indirect consumer taxes but also greater donations by wealthy governments as a percentage of gross domestic product, voluntary individual payments tied to such things as individual mobile phone use, health care lotteries, new commitments from charitable and philanthropic organizations, and the possible diversion of current philanthropic giving from developed-world causes into developing world health care.

...

The tempest created by Lopez Montano's accusations is liable to fade quickly as people around the world — especially Americans, who are far and away the world's biggest funders of medical research and development — absorb the variety of the EWG's revenue ideas and the full extent of WHO's ambitions to reshape the international health care industry in favor of research and development for the "neglected" diseases of developing countries.

The full EWG report lays out in some detail a battery of other possible consumer taxes on citizens of rich countries for such things as alcohol and tobacco use, weapons sales, and airline travel, to create a burgeoning medical R&D industry spread across the developing world.

Click here for the full report.

...

After itemizing all those potential sources of new money, however, the report suggests that only a "balance" of options be selected, which it projects would amount — again, conservatively — to about $4.6 billion a year. That would "nearly triple current research and development funding for neglected diseases in developing countries."

How would all the money be channeled? Mainly, it appears, through institutions that in many of cases have close ties with WHO.

The report that will be released Monday suggests that a global blossoming of developing-world research networks, many of which appear to be rapidly sprouting up in tandem with WHO's efforts to create new ways of financing them, could be "coordinated" via an "effective global health governance structure" by WHO itself — an organization whose 34-member executive board is made up largely of non-elected health bureaucrats from around the world.

...

Not by coincidence, new health research networks like ANDI cropped up in 2008 — at about the same time that WHO's legislative World Heath Assembly adopted a global strategy and plan of action that mandated the organization, as the EWG report puts it, to "play a strategic, central role in the relations between public health and innovation and intellectual property."

Among other things, that meant driving the global health-care agenda "to promote a new approach to innovation and access to medicines, which would encourage needs-driven rather than market-driven research." [Empahsis mine-SW] The aim: "to target diseases that disproportionately affect people in developing countries."

Just for clarity, a UN panel is suggesting raising global taxes to fund a new regimen of of "needs-driven" rather than market -driven research, ie centrally planned versus the much messier, and uncontrolled, decentralized research.  Nowhere in the report is there any mention of the fact that the various poor health outcomes so prominently mentioned, the source of the WHO concerns, are primarily caused by poverty, which is primarily caused by poor governance and the lack of market economies in the developing world. 

To no one's surprise, Lopez Montano's accusations were not related to the dishonesty and misunderstanding evinced in the WHO report but to the fact that the report did not go far enough in attacking the intellectual property rights of the large corporations.

Perhaps what is so remarkable is that at a time when smaller and smaller groups of people and individuals have become more and more empowered by our technology (just ask Scott Brown and Martha Coakley) those who desire nothing more than to exert power and control over everyone are left grasping at straws.  The President appears to be "doubling down" on his current course (which is all about increasing the size and power of the federal government) and the UN doesn't appear to have noticed yet that AGW is no longer working as anticipated.

It is worth pondering what comes next for them because people who believe it is their right to control the rest of us (and to live off of our earnings) will never disappear; they are part of the mosaic that makes up human nature.  As we become more empowered (Tea Party, anyone?) and increasingly realize that we are gaining, moment by moment, increased control over our own lives (although with the current economic straits it probably doesn't feel that way for many) the power of the current and traditional elites to tell us what is best for us can only continue to erode.  The struggle for freedom and power between those elites and the rest of us will be determinative for the early years of the 21st century.