September 13, 2020

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

A New Age Is Upon Us and It Threatens to Devour Us

 

Friends, 

The noted English professor and philosopher, John N. Gray, is controversial for his views expressed in a number of highly-touted books. If I can summarize one of his main contentions it is this: the experiment in universalist “democratic liberalism,” unleashed by the 18^th century Enlightenment (and partially fulfilled by the American Revolution in conservative fashion, but by the Socialists and Marxists in a more radical fashion), is coming to a gagging and sputtering end. In a certain—if remote—sense, what Gray is saying is what the traditionalist Christian poet and author T. S. Eliot once famously wrote in his epic poem “The Hollow Men” (1925), written in the disastrous aftermath of the devastation, both intellectual and material, after World War I: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

In the following essay, Gray examines the current woke rebellion in the streets, but also in the ivory halls of academe and among our elite government and cultural classes. The Age of Enlightenment Liberalism, he asserts, is ending.

And in reading and thinking about it, his short piece seems to go hand-in-hand with something I published recently both at The Abbeville Institute and LewRockwell.com. My essay titled, “Cancel Culture Comes South,” in a different version, was first issued in the MY CORNER series on September 6, as “Cancel Culture and the Religious Origins of the Revolution in the Streets.” I rewrote it to give it more emphasis on the effects of “cancel culture” in the South, and in that new version it was published…and it is that version that I offer today, immediately after Gray’s essay.

Gray compares the present day woke Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) to chiliastic millenarians—religious hyper-fanatics of the past—who attempted to overturn and in effect destroy the traditions of Western Christianity. Those movements, including the Cathares, Lollards, Puritans and Fifth Monarchy Men, and in particular, the Anabaptists with their supreme leader John of Leiden [AKA, Jan Bockelson], sought to either destroy those traditions, or, at the very least to completely re-invent them. And what followed was inevitably a period of social and political anarchy, and quickly the imposition of an authoritarianism more severe and brutal than anything established historic Christianity ever contemplated. They would bring on the thousand year terrestrial reign of the Deity, even if it took the massacre of every human life where they dwelt to do it.

Although there are striking parallels between those earlier millenarian movements and today’s zealots, there are also some significant differences. While both illustrate a kind of frenzied religious fanaticism, these latter day millenarians are mostly characterized by a dominant anarchism. Their religious zeal is secularized. Save for “defunding the police” and demands for total (but ill-defined) equality and reparations of some kind, much of their rhetoric betrays a lack of precision and deeper thought. And unlike earlier movements, our present SJWs are being funded and to some degree directed by our elites, ensconced many times in Silicon Valley, or Hollywood, and on Wall Street. It follows that those empowered elites wish to use the street warriors and the widely-diffused and praised Black Lives Matter campaign for their own purposes, their own well-being, and their own power. And, thus, they have literally cowed and shamed most of our political class into submission; who now dares criticize Black Lives Matter or the s0-called demands for “equality” (and some form of reparations for “white oppression” and past “injustice”) without bringing down the wrath of the entirety of the media and most political leaders? And this includes Republicans and establishment conservatives who run as fast as they can to the tall grass.

Notice one more significant characteristic: many of the street terrorists are rich white kids, children of wealth and position, educated usually (and badly) at places like Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, UNC, and Duke, and with families who can afford to live in gated communities, and who, in fact, in their insouciant and sneering liberalism, disdain and despise what the Jewish writer Philip Roth once called despectively, “fly-over country.” In other words, anyone outside of those centers of power and wealth who might possibly challenge their hegemony.  For them the SJWs are effective storm troopers…that is, as long as they don’t get out of control, or go into those posh neighborhoods where a Nancy Pelosi or Madonna live.

Or, if it seems that politically the street terrorism appears to get out of hand, maybe favoring President Trump politically. Ah, then those elites must offer their pro forma, generalized condemnations, just to be on record…despite their real encouragement of the revolution.

Never mind, Gray seems to say, the American faith in a secular universalist redemption and the myth that somehow we are a kind of New Jerusalem, that shining City of a Hill, is dying and we can hope only to pick up the pieces in the new age that is being born.

 

The woke have no vision of the future

Like medieval millenarians, today's SJWs believe all that needs to be done to bring about a new world is to destroy the old one

https://unherd.com/2020/06/the-woke-have-no-vision-of-the-future/

 

BY JOHN GRAY       June 17, 2020

John Gray is a political philosopher and author. His books include Seven Types of Atheism, False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism, and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia.

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As some conservative commentators have observed, there are striking similarities between woke militants and the Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917. But what is unfolding, in the US and to a lesser extent in other countries, is at once more archaic and more futuristic than a twentieth century revolutionary coup. The current convulsion is an outbreak more closely akin to the anarchical millenarians movements that raged across Europe in the late Middle Ages, whose vision of redemption from history was shared by America’s founders, who carried it with them to the New World.

Nevertheless, Bolsheviks and woke militants do have some things in common. In late nineteenth century Russia, under the influence of their progressive parents, a generation of educated young people was convinced of the illegitimacy of the Tsarist regime. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) is a vivid chronicle of the tragic and farcical process by which progressive liberals discredited traditional institutions and unleashed a wave of revolutionary terror. Not only Tsarism but any form of government came to be seen as repressive. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it, “I got entangled in my data…Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”

The woke generation have learned a similar lesson from their elders, this time about the failings of American democracy. Rejecting old-fashioned liberal values as complicit in oppression and essentially fraudulent, they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially marginalising and economically ruining their critics. As in the show trials orchestrated by Lenin’s disciple Stalin and Mao’s “struggle sessions”, woke activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims. Like the communist elites, woke insurgents aim to enforce a single worldview by the pedagogic use of fear. The rejection of liberal freedoms concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob.

Yet the impulses that animate the woke uprising are different from those that energised Lenin or even Mao. For the Bolshevik leader — an authentic disciple of the Jacobin Enlightenment, or so he always insisted — violence was a tool, not an end in itself. In woke movements such as Antifa, on the other hand, violence seems to be mainly therapeutic in its role.

One may abhor the type of society Lenin aimed to construct as much as the methods he adopted to achieve it, as I do myself. Tens of millions were enslaved in forced labour camps, executed or starved to death in pursuit of a repellent fantasy. Even so, Lenin attempted to fashion a future that in his view was an improvement on the past.

Woke activists, in contrast, have no vision of the future. In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power. Yet their difference from Lenin goes deeper. Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.

The key scenes in the woke uprising that followed the killing of George Floyd are rituals of purification in which public officials have washed the feet of insurgents, and acts of iconoclasm in which public monuments have been destroyed or defaced. These are symbolic actions aiming to sever the present from the past, not policies designed to fashion a different future.

The only concrete measure proposed has been to defund and disband the police. As some of the insurrectionaries’ placards have proclaimed, there will be no more police violence when there are no more police. Once repressive institutions have been methodically dismantled, a peaceful anarchy will prevail. As could have been foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, outbreaks of mass looting in Chicago and other cities have not borne out this confidence.

New, ‘transformative’ systems of law enforcement will confront problems not unlike those faced by the police forces that have been dissolved.  ‘Autonomous zones’ of the kind that have been announced in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis will need to resolve disputes and enforce their decisions. Local warlords and prophets — some of them no doubt armed — will become arbiters of public safety. When they overreach themselves and fail to protect even minimal levels of security, vigilantes and organised crime will fill the void. Where this proves costly or unstable, federal government may step in and impose order. In other cases, cities may be abandoned to become zones of anarchy.

The history of the medieval millenarians illustrates this process. They were antinomians, heretical believers who anathematised the Church and considered themselves released by divine grace from any moral restraints. While asserting their superior virtue, their signature practice was self-flagellation. Forgiveness — whether of themselves other others — was notably absent.

As Norman Cohn writes in his seminal study The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), “in Germany and southern Europe alike flagellant groups continued to exist for more than two centuries.” Probably originating in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century, the flagellant movement reached a peak in Germany in 1348-9 when it was inflamed by the Black Death. There, as in other parts of Europe, the flagellants turned on sections of the population they accused of conjuring up the pestilence, particularly Jews, many of whose communities were wiped out.

Two hundred years later, the Anabaptist prophet Jan Bockelson seized control of the city of Munster, turning it briefly into a communist theocracy in which forcible baptisms and public executions became daily spectacles. Bockelson’s rule ended when, after a long siege, the city fell to armies acting for the Church. He was tortured to death in the town square.

For Cohn, the study of medieval millenarians was an essential part of understanding modern totalitarianism. It is also useful in understanding the woke movement. Medieval flagellants and woke militants combine a sense of their own moral infallibility with a passion for masochistic self-abasement. Medieval millenarians believed the world would be remade by God when Jesus returned after a millennium of injustice (millenarians are also known as chiliasts, chiliad being a thousand years), while the woke faithful believe divine intervention is no longer necessary: their own virtue will be sufficient. In both cases, nothing needs to be done to bring about a new world apart from destroying the old one.

There are some differences between the two movements. Mediaeval millenarians attracted much of their support from illiterate peasants and poor urban workers. The woke movement, on the other hand, is mostly composed of the offspring of middle class families schooled in institutions of higher learning. Like their medieval predecessors, woke activists believe themselves to be emancipated from established values. But, possibly uniquely in history, their antinomian rebellion emanates from an antinomian establishment.

The rise of the woke movement has not occurred as a result of a takeover of American institutions by a dictatorial government. Key American institutions have overthrown themselves, while Trump’s attempts to assert governmental power have so far been ineffectual. It may be that the scenes of anarchy that are part of the uprising will work in Trump’s favour in November. At least a third of the American population is opposed to woke values, a number that could increase substantially the more the uprising involves public disorder. Equally, Biden may prevail by promising a more peaceful future and find himself compelled to rein in the insurgency in order to preserve some degree of public order. Either way America will remain more or less ungovernable.

The foundational crimes of the American regime — black slavery and the seizure of indigenous groups’ lands that followed the War of Independence—are real enough. But so, in its continuing formative influence, is the mythology from which America was born. A Lockean fusion of Protestant religiosity with an Enlightenment faith in reason was the founding American religion.

Throughout most of American history Lockean liberalism has reflected the realities of power. Locke himself helped draft constitutions for Carolina that legitimated slavery, and argued that indigenous peoples could be suppressed on the ground that they had not cleared the wilderness and made their land productive. On occasion — as in the Rooseveltian settlement that followed the Second World War and made possible the civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties — America’s divisions were partly transcended. For the most part a redemptive myth has gone hand in hand with repression. The record suggests this will continue. Icons will be smashed and antinomian passions ventilated, while social and racial antagonisms remain brutal and intractable.

More than the faux-Marxian musings of postmodern thinkers, it is the singular American faith in national redemption that drives the woke insurgency. The self-imposed inquisitorial regime in universities and newspapers — where editors and journalists, professors and students are encouraged to sniff out and report heresy so it can be exposed and exorcised — smacks of Salem more than Leningrad. Saturated with Christian theology, Locke’s Enlightenment liberalism is reverting to a more primordial version of the founding faith. America is changing, radically and irreversibly, but it is also staying the same.

America’s ungovernability is morphing into a distinctive pattern of governance, with power shifting to institutions that are dismantling their traditional structures. Universities have become seminaries of woke religion, while newspapers are turning into sermonising agitprop sheets. At the same time mass unemployment and accelerating automation are stripping workers of what remained of the bargaining power they exercised before the neoliberal era.

The system that seems to be emerging is a high-tech variation on feudalism, with wealth creation concentrated around new industries and most of the population disenfranchised and dispossessed. While this metamorphosis gathers speed, the American media are manufacturing fictional narratives of national redemption.

America is on the way to becoming a semi-failed state. Its soft power has collapsed, probably irrecoverably. Yet it does not follow that it will cease to be a globally powerful actor. In a competition with totalitarian China, an American regime that mixes authoritarian control with zones of anarchy may have a comparative advantage. Classical totalitarianism is as obsolete as classical liberalism, and American mercantilism may be more resilient and innovative than Chinese state capitalism. A ruling elite shaped by figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk may prove more capable of deploying new technologies than a communist emperor who has put China into a deep freeze. One of the most surreal moments during the insurrection occurred when Musk’s SpaceX, almost unnoticed, launched astronauts into space.

As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and the UK, it should be clear that this is no passing storm. Here, as in the US, woke militants have few, if any, definite policies. What they want is simply the end of the old order. The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a defining moment in the decline of the liberal west. Perhaps it is time to consider how to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless world that is being born.

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Cancel Culture Comes South

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/cancel-culture-comes-south/

 

By Boyd Cathey on Sep 10, 2020

These violent times in which we live are in some ways unparalleled. For Southerners we have seen monuments memorializing and honoring our past heroes and history—monuments and symbols which have stood for a century—torn down and smashed by frenzied mobs, unrestrained in too many cases by a compliant or spineless government.

Various writers and commentators have attempted to describe the reasons and motivations behind this uprising in the streets and near madness in the media and among our political class. In many cases, these authors reach back into history for analogies or comparisons. But ongoing history never offers the same event repeated exactly.

Of course, the riots of 1968, ostensibly over the Vietnam War, figure in these historical comparisons. On a literary level, we recall the works of George Orwell on the growth and results of totalitarian Communism and collectivism (Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Animal Farm) or the late Jean Raspail on the very real peril of mass immigration which would overwhelm our civilization (The Camp of the Saints, 1975 and 1995). And there are other examples which come to mind, especially on the infiltration and perversion of academia and of our entertainment industry.

But none of these literary classics or historical analogies can measure or describe fully what we are witnessing today. It is unique.

A film that I own came to mind recently, and in so many ways I think it encapsulates as no other artistic or literary work has the period we are passing through. No, I am not thinking of the destruction of monuments or the riots and the looting: they are, I would suggest, a derivative, a by-product of the mentality that reigns today nearly everywhere, in our politics, in our media, in entertainment, and most particularly in that most critical element of society (and its continuance), education. There are reasons behind those frenzied and unhinged “mostly peaceful” demonstrations, and those reasons are not just the financial largesse of a George Soros or of Hollywood and Silicon Valley mega-millionaire elites.

That movie is a Russian opus, Burnt by the Sun (1994), directed by the Russian anti-Communist (and monarchist) Nikita Mikhalkov. It is set in 1936 more or less at the height of the Stalinist purges, and its main character is Comrade Sergei Kotov, a devout Communist, a hero of the Russian Civil War, an “Old Bolshevik.” But Kotov commits one small sin: as Soviet tanks on maneuver are about to trample the wheat fields that belong to the local village collective, with his senior status in the Party he orders them to halt. A family friend, Mitya, arrives; Mitya is working with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and because of Sergei’s action he denounces him based on a trumped up charge of treason. A black car with NKVD agents arrives and whisks him away. Sergei is forced—indeed, does so willingly in the name of the party and the ideals of Communism—to confess to his “crime” and is executed.

Comrade Kotov’s mental attitude is indeed very much like that of our modern-day revolutionaries. What the party, what the movement commands must be obeyed willingly, even joyfully, even if the target is some symbol previously praised by the party or…oneself.

If the monuments to Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson were originally the targets—the “low hanging fruit,” as it were—of the radicals, more easily attacked, they were only a first step in the revolutionary project. Now, ironically, if the movement defines monuments to Frederick Douglass and the Abolitionists as “racist,” then they must go also, they must be brought down. If a textbook says faintly favorable things about John C. Calhoun, then it must be purged or “corrected.” Then on to the next level, to Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, and to every facet of our culture. Thus, the film Gone with the Wind henceforth will be shown with disclaimers about slavery and racism (after being pulled temporarily by WarnerMedia), and perhaps any number of John Wayne movies need to be contextualized as well.

The sweep of this destructive vision is immense. It shapes and determines the mindset of millions, bending them to its will, even for those who are entrusted ostensibly with the very defense of our civilization. Those defenders cower in silence or fear, if not going along with the Revolution.

This vision, as Mikhalkov underlines in Burnt by the Sun, is motivated essentially by a type of religious fanaticism, a kind of Anti-Christianity, with its own emblematic symbols, sacred teachings, parables, saints (and sinners), a confessional (and repentance) system, and accompanying manufactured history.  In that sense, it mirrors in a very dark and evil way the traditional faith which for two millennia has informed and annealed our civilization. It is that civilization—Western and Christian—which is the target, and no manner of half-measures on the part of our supposed conservative opposition can stem or defeat it.

That civilization has had its most persistent defenders in the South.

In previous essays I have called those who now rampage not just in the streets but intellectually and culturally, “Insaniacs,” that is, those possessed—and that indeed is the proper word—of an outlook and vision that is antithetical to the traditions and heritage of our civilization, the opposite of “normal.” They are to quote G. K. Chesterton, “insane,” in the sense that they reject the living reality and foundations of our history. They are indeed outside reality, and, thus, they feverishly attempt to create a new “reality” which is disconnected from the laws of Nature and the past, and owes almost nothing to two-thousand years of Christian tradition. They are driven by an all-consuming madness—it is impossible to reason with them, it is impossible to compromise with them. No act, immoral or vicious as it may be, is beyond their use in their quest to destroy. Everyone, including their own adepts, must bend to the will of the Insanity. For it is a new paradigm, a new religion far more insistent, demanding and dogmatic than any church of the past.

Just like Sergei Kotov, very recently a major left wing political activist (devoted to rooting out racist “imperialism and colonialism”), Jessica Krug, a professor of African-American Studies at The George Washington University (Washington, DC), came clean. For years she had claimed that she was black, but now blubbering, she has admitted her “sin”—Krug confessed that it was all a lie: she is actually white and Jewish. She had been prevaricating for years: “I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech,” Krug wrote tearfully. “I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years, but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.” She continues: “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.”

At first it was her zealous desire for this new form of “salvation” (and possible advancement)—she would become black or a minority, which in the new religion is equivalent to a kind of reserved sainthood, a special and elevated place of predilection for the Elect. But now, recognizing her immense “sin” against the new faith, comes her abject “confession” and public announcement about engaging in multiple lies, her guilt, which like Kotov and any number of those Bolsheviks shot in 1936-1937, she accepts with the same zeal as those victims of Stalin’s purges exhibited as faithful and dutiful party members.

“You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself,” she cries, perhaps seeking some form of expiation. But unlike in traditional Christianity, with its loving and forgiving God, Krug may not get forgiveness from her progressivist allies.

She illustrates in a certain very disturbing manner what we face: it is not just the destruction of monuments to heroic Confederates—it is not just the unchained violence and looting in the streets—it is not just an unhinged anti-Trumpism politically in the media or in academia. In a way Krug is emblematic of the age-old spiritual war between the Children of Faith, the inheritors of our civilization and culture entrusted to them by their ancestors, and those programmed minions, those dark demiurges out of Hell itself who answer not to God but to the Evil One.

This, then, is the conflict we find ourselves in, and just like our Crusader ancestors and the Heroes of 1861 we must answer the Call. Failing that, we shall perish and future generations will curse our names.

Continue reading about Jessica Krug and Cancel Culture here.

About Boyd Cathey

Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations. His book, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press) was published in late 2018.