Collapse: The Blog

Reactionary Entertainment: The Tudors

Lots of breasts, Renaissance Ken dolls, and screaming.

Skip it.

From Status to Contract: The PC Term is "Partner"

Larry Auster observes that yet another word has been ruined by the sinister modern drive to dehumanize every institution by discussing it in the grayest and least personal terms available:

Partner means, or used to mean, two people engaged together in some shared enterprise, or who are friends and are doing things together as a team. But now "partner" has become the quasi official term for two unmarried people--whether homosexual or heterosexual--who live together. And for the truly politically correct, "partner" is even the obligatory term for married persons, since it would "privilege" heterosexual married couples for them to be referred to as "husband" and "wife" while homosexual couples and unmarried heterosexual couples are deprived of those honored titles. Therefore, in the name of equality, husband and wife must be called partner and partner. And with the spread of homosexual "marriage," this change is working itself into the law as well, as I have pointed out many times.

The shift from "spouse" to "partner" is perfectly emblematic of the social-organizational transition from status to contract. Spousehood is a permanent arrangement, unfree after the initial choice of marriage and spouse. Partnership, by contrast, is a fluid arrangement -- fluid by virtue of its meaninglessness -- adopted when useful and casually flouted when it becomes inconvenient, another restrain imposed unjustly on sovereign and absolute wills. Husband" or "wife" is what you are. "Partner" is what you want to be, for as long as you want to be it, and no longer.

Here, as always, the muddling of language is instrumental.

Adminutiae: A Second Note on Comments

I think I have a solution to the case of the disappearing comments. Either because of some in-built algorithim or  because of extrapolation about the nature of comments I have tended to mark "spam," it appears they have been getting directed into the spam folder. I discovered this when I checked it earlier and found about 20 comments of genuine content from regular commenters. I was surprised by this -- questionable comments, I thought, would be held in moderation, not simply dumped unceremoniously into the spam folder.

Comments appear to be marked as spam if they are very long, if they contain two or more links, or if they use any words I have put on the block list (most of which are brand names, thanks to regular visits from spambots -- "Timberland," "North Face," etc.).

I recall never having this problem when comments were moderated, so for the foreseeable future, Collapse: The Blog will return to a moderated comment format (i.e., comments are held in moderation before being published). This will also allow me to relax the blocked-words list to reduce the number of posts that are improperly marked as spam. It will also, I'm sure, stem the tide of douchebaggery that has flooded this blog since I last returned it to an open-comments format.

The Perverse Consistency of Modern Thought

I recently praised the remarkable consistency of reactionary thought. In truth, though, we don't have a monopoly on coherence. There is a perverse consistency to modern thought, too.

Let's begin with my presupposition that modernity is simply the product of a critical mass of people who are utterly insensible to the sacred. The sacred permeates the entire order of being and thus impacts the way it is experienced for religious people; the inability to experience it as sacred thus should entail a pretty comprehensive deformation of life experience.

Reactionary thought binds everything together: ontology, epistemology, theology, ethics, and politics. Can modern thought accomplish this same binding act, taking as its starting point the inability to experience anything as sacred?

Sure.

Let's start with theology. If nothing is sacred it can only be because there is no source of the sacred, i.e., no God. So spiritual autism leads to atheism.

If there is no God then it must be the case that there is nothing transcendent. To transcend, after all, is to point upwards, and we supposedly live in a purely horizontal world. So the appearance of that which is transcendent, such as ideas or universals, must be illusory. In other words, everything must be reducible to the lowest level of being: matter. Thus, the unofficial modern ontology: materialism.

Of course, if matter is all there is, then the study of matter is all that produces knowledge. Thus, modern epistemology: scientism.

And if everything is reducible to matter, then it follows that even ideas like "good" and "evil" are reducible to matter. Indeed, in a materialist ontological paradigm, they are reducible to pleasure and pain (sensate reactions to material stimuli). "Good" and "evil" may be said, at best, to arise out of some kind of arbitrary psychological abstraction of these two concepts. This gives us modern ethics: utilitarianism (the reduction of "good" and "evil" to mere pleasure and pain/harm).

If the order of being is not sacred, then there is no reason to respect the duties it appears to impose on us. So status, which arises from the fixed nature of the order of being, gives way to contract, a state of fluidity. Thus, modern politics: democracy (a state of permanent, sanctioned revolution).

Out of these things arise several other pathologies. Democracy gives us technocratic managerialism, the rise and rule of experts. Atheism and materialism combine to give us the aggressive sacrilege of the modern age. Materialism and utilitarianism have conspired to butcher a few tens of millions of unborn children. Scientism and materialism fuel one another. This dark unity explains all the characteristic impulses of the typical modern: the parousiasm of his politics (e.g., the hysteria surrounding President Obama's 2008 campaign), the reductionism of his rhetoric, his general anger ("f***ing fascist homophobe!"), and so on.

In fact, just as surely as the reactionary equivalents of these things are all simply different expressions of the sense that the order of being is sacred, so too is modern thought comprised of modularized expressions of the sense that life itself is meaningless and unjust and that God is dead. The withered and toxic fruits of a spiritually poisoned tree.

On the Contraceptive Mandate

Surely you've heard the news: the Church is up in arms over a new mandate that would force them to purchase insurance coverage for a variety of illicit and objectionable crap.

What's the end game here? Probably nothing. The Church's fecklessness on the issue of contraception has purchased widespread heresy on the part of the laity and a culture of dissent among its lower clergy. There'll be no fighting in the streets, as Bill Donohue promises, and if there is, it will be American Catholics burning their own churches.

On Living a Nonmodern Life in the Modern World

Our sometimes-commenter Peter S. remarks over at Bruce Charlton's Miscellany:

This is the key issue: how to find or create a spiritual ‘modus vivendi’ that allows one to be ‘in the modern world but not of it’? This is the terrible spiritual position of the individual embedded in modernity, for, if a normative civilization quite naturally provides supports for the remembrance of God and the spiritual life, the modern world substitutes, in practical fact, these supports with impediments. In effect, instead of swimming with the spiritual current of a normative civilization, the individual must swim against the current of the modern world if he is to escape spiritual ruination.

As Don Colacho – whose aphorisms are available once again – critically observes, “Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.” [http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2010/10/2046.html]

There is a twofold effort that is required: intellectual, in that one must see through the errors of the modern conception, and build, for oneself at least, an understanding of things that relates back to the Transcendent and to spiritual realities; operative, in that one should try, in whatever partial and intermittent manner, to orient one’s daily life toward prayer and the remembrance of God. Modern life is inherently centrifugal, scattering one’s attention to the periphery; the task before one is to return, again and again, to the Center, to quite literally ‘re-collect’ oneself before God.

As Frithjof Schuon recommends, “In short, one must live ‘in a little garden of the Holy Virgin,’ without unhealthy curiosity and without ever losing sight of the essential content and goal of life. That is ‘holy poverty’ or ‘holy childlikeness’; it is also, so to speak, ‘holy monotony’.... dominated by the proximity of the sacred, and on the margin from the uproar of this lower world.... This seems obvious, but most believers take no account of it.”

Abortion and Modern Reductionism

Speaking with a friend recently about abortion, I heard an old line I hadn't heard in a long time: "The fetus is just a bundle of cells, who cares about it?" (Or something like that).

Well, in the modern reductionist worldview, everyone is "just a bundle of cells." That's why it's called reductionism. And this includes the abortionists whose murders so inflame the average liberal. Why should we care about them any more than a fetus if they're both equally reducible to valueless particles bouncing around deterministically in the void? What's to stop anyone from sucking the brains out of anyone's skull with a vacuum cleaner if we're all just meaningless globs of tissue? (Or is it the case that societies can and do tell people, all the time, what to do with their bodies, and do so legitimately, and can reasonably expect compliance and punish noncompliance, so that "my body, my choice" suddenly rings strikingly hollow?)

Abortion is the one issue in which the rank inhumanity of the modern worldview shines through most clearly, and puts normal people ill-at-ease.

For this reason, it's one of the few areas in which the left's triumph has been constrained almost solely to the political sphere. They simply have not succeeded in affecting total cultural sanction of abortion, and their efforts to do so, as Jehu points out, almost always reveal them for the tin-eared, touchy, ungrateful, infanticidal degenerates that they actually are. And, as such, it's the one issue on which the right ought to push hardest.

How Systems of Thought Run Aground

Rooting through the recent archives at Jim Kalb's Turnabout, I came across this:

Scientific knowledge is knowledge of mechanism that enables prediction and control. If you treat that kind of knowledge as adequate to all reality, which scientism has to do to be workable, then human agency disappears.

Human agency is nonetheless with us. We know ourselves as agents, we recognize others as such (if we are not psychopaths), and intelligent activities like science seem to require it.

The solution people adopt is to accept human agency as a reality but a very strange sort of reality about which nothing can be said. To say something about it would be to assert knowledge regarding it and therefore to attempt to subject it to a regime of mechanism, prediction, and control. That’s why it’s horribly wrong (in the current view) to classify people or to attribute significant qualities to them. Any attempt to do so is an attempt to enslave them.

Instead, each of us becomes equally an unknowable being transcending all reality about whom nothing can be said and whose will has a validity to which no limits can be assigned. But then science stops being the supreme standard. PC becomes the supreme standard. Each of us becomes a god, absolute and unknowable. If that conflicts with science, so much the worse for science, and that is where we are today.

The moral: science is a wonderful thing, but it’s a specialized part of more general human practices of knowledge, and when it tries to be the whole you get big problems.

When you subscribe to any kind of metaphysical system based on error (i.e., the self-refutingly unscientific belief that science is the only way to know things), that's what you get: "big problems."

A system of thought can run aground in two respects. First, it can be simply self-contradicting, which is to say that it can't possibly true because it refutes itself. Scientism, I've argued before, is one example of this, but so too is what I've previously identified as deontological libertarianism -- in a nutshell, the belief that consent is morally prior to all other arrangements (whether or not you consent to the binding character of your consent). I'm sure you can think of other systems of thought that truck-bomb themselves right out of the gate (e.g., "all truths are relative"). If you can gather up all the loose ends, you might be able to tie them together into a single act of circular reasoning ("the right to property derives from the fact of self-ownership; the fact of self-ownership is legitimated by the right to own things"), but that doesn't resolve the problem of internal consistency.

The other respect is that it can contradict intuitively-apprehended first principles. As I wrote yesterday morning on Catholic Complementarian (which I recently discovered and now enjoy immensely) with respect to liberal hysteria over pedophilia:

. . . liberalism is at best highly inconsistent re: its attitude toward sex and more often than not treats it like it does everything else, within a paradigm of materialist reductionism: it’s “just sex.” Innately meaningless, valueless, a totally physical recreation with at best conventional (and thus arbitrary) significance attached to it. Yes, sex is regarded as an expression of the self, but so is everything: piercings, tattoos, desecrating the Eucharist, etc. And it regards it as no more innately valuable or meaningful than any of those things.

So to answer your last question, “Why the liberal hysteria over pedophilia?” you have to bear this in mind… that if sex is meaningless, than sexual crimes must also be meaningless. In other words, reflexive hysteria and the Voegelinian prohibition of questioning is their way of confronting the fact that a world filled with pedophiles is exactly what a world run consistently on their principles would look like.

(It's a credit, actually, to the basic decency of people that modernity has taken so long to get to where it is. The shucking of long-held moral convictions, even in the face of inability to articulate rational defenses of them, is difficult. One has to convince oneself. It's a testimony to what Christians have been saying all along -- that man has an intuitive and innate yearning for the good -- that modernity can only function because it's riven with unprincipled exceptions from its own logical conclusions. Yeah, the modern objection to pedophilia is basically irrational within the framework of its own principles; yeah, they can't explain why instinctive revulsion is OK with respect to pedophilia but not OK with respect to homosexuality [bearing in mind that "because they can't consent!" hasn't ever stopped us from making them eat vegetables, brush their teeth, or do their homework, or that people don't respond with horror to violations of legal technicalities]. But moderns are basically decent enough [for now] that they don't let their irrational dogma get in the way of the intuitive apprehension that buggering children is wrong, and not just because they're technically, legally incapable of consenting until they reach an arbitrarily-designated age.)

So unsound systems of thought produce big problems. But the system of thought characteristic of modernity -- basically ontological reductionism, the war against the order of being -- is a big thing, and it relates to the world in big ways. Its fingers extend not merely through the way we think about being but also the way we think about man, the universe, society, knowledge, and ethics. So the problems it produces aren't just big problems -- they're BIG big problems. As Kalb relates in his talk "PC: The Cultural Antichrist":

. . . political correctness is an odd tendency. It's a bit uncanny. It doesn't fit in with how we normally think about things. That's why we don't know what to make of it. People try to laugh it off, but it doesn't laugh off.

It seems too stupid to be real but it trumps everything all the same. If a thieving employee shoots and murders his co-workers the big question is whether any of them were racists. When an affirmative action army officer does the same, because he wants to do jihad, what top brass worry about is whether it will make diversity look bad.

Something that trumps normal considerations so completely must have transcendent importance. It's clear that PC relates to something big.

(Here he's referring, respectively, to the atrocious headlining of a news story relating to a black employee's murder of eight white coworkers in a shooting spree, and Army Chief of Staff General George Casey's cautioning that the murderous rampage of an affirmative action hire at Fort Hood, Texas, shouldn't lead the Army to deprioritize ethnic diversity).

Ordinarily, egregious errors are self-correcting, if nothing else because their proponents follow them through quickly to obscene and heinous conclusions. What, then, has kept the modern train of errors running? Personal dishonesty and intentionally affected ignorance internally, intentional suppression (libeling, intimidation, and murder) of people who presume to point out the errors as errors externally. I think this latter point has historically been more important in fueling the compounding errors of modernity, precisely because it fuels the former; the ends seem to justify the means beforehand, but absolutely have to once the fires have started and the graveyards begin to fill.

Reflections on the Anime Subculture

Back when I was in college, when I was still basically a liberal (although even then I hated other liberals), I joined my university's Shakespearean acting troupe as a tech guy. There were a few different reasons for this. It got me out of the dorm. It curried favor with the English department (where I ultimately landed for my minor studies). It was worth three very easy 400-level credits a semester. Shakespeare's just cool. I got to learn cool tech stuff -- sound boards, lighting, etc. And so on. But I realized very quickly that I was not like most of the other people "doing the Rudes." For me, it was instrumental: something I enjoyed and which was of material benefit to me. For them, it was like an end in itself. I also noticed that they were generally deviant in other ways. They were screechy, neurotic bisexuals with lip piercings and black clothes. They had sex with each other constantly and went off after practice to have video game parties. One of them would sometimes wear a strange headband with little conical horns attached to them. They wrote anime fanfiction (because apparently animes with romantic subplots always have desperately unsatisfactory endings) and dressed up like anime characters to go to anime conventions. They were anime kids.

I confess to having watched very little anime in the past, most of which I was forced to watch by an anime-loving friend. I've been mixed about what I've seen. Elfenlied was intriguing, Beautiful Dreamer charming and whimsical, Spirited Away weird and incoherent, and Naruto just annoying, with its screechy theatrics and agonizingly long-winded dialogue (my efforts to get into the Pokemon fad when I was in elementary and middle school failed, and for the same reason). I don't get the appeal, perhaps because of my instinctive dislike for the idea of being a grown man sitting around watching cartoons all day. I think what turned me off most was just the casual and unquestioned weirdness of it all. It's not even divergent enough to be surreal, because it takes itself too seriously. People in these shows and movies casually accept the presence of large minorities of vampires, aliens, weird horned half-men half-animal hybrids, people with ESP and other strange powers, and the like. Watching them is like a bad LSD trip.

So I suppose it's a good fit for people who are themselves casually weird, the kind who grow greasy, patchy beards and wear oversized coats with way too many pockets and chains and collars and all that crap. The awkward, out-group dweebs who populate the corner of every college bistro playing Magic: The Gathering. You know the type. (I wonder, does the weirdness of the person derive from their early exposure to the weirdness of anime? Or are they drawn to anime because they're weird people?)

In college, I dated a relatively pretty girl with several friends in this group and every time I stood in their presence, I felt like the brutish jock in a chick flick who steals away the nerdy main character's love interest. Me! At best, I had the build of a second-rate swimmer in college. But their group was so vacuously negative of masculinity that I slid almost by default into the role of alpha horse. I hated being hated by these mewling, oleaginous things.

I feel like I could write a book on this subculture, but I'll content myself for the sake of economy with just a few observations. Their in-group dynamics, such as they are, are disordered almost to the point of psychosis. It seems they can barely even relate to one another in any kind of meaningful fashion; I once saw two anime kids sitting next to each other on a couch, playing the same video game at the same time, but on different consoles attached to different TVs! "Lest you interact with another person?" I thought to myself.

Far from being sexually frustrated, as you might suspect, in my experience they set up these strange sexual covens wherein the women (and certain men; sexual deviancy is not uncommon here) are passed around more than their old pirated copies of Boondock Saints. Strangely, this produces very little drama, like it would in a group of normal people in which one woman slept with multiple men. I have no idea why; maybe an aggressive response is beyond people so totally empty of masculinity, or maybe their stunted souls were never capable of forming meaningful attachments to others in the first place.

I've certainly never had a conversation with an anime kid and thought, afterwards, "Wow, I'm really glad I met that person." Come to think of it, I'm not so sure I've ever had a memorable conversation with one at all. I don't think I've ever seen them read anything that wasn't (a) a comic book or graphic novel, (b) a textbook for class, or (c) some slice of schlocky left-wing cant to make themselves look intelligent, a bookmark always strategically inserted around two-thirds of the way in (because they're so smart!). With few exceptions, dumpiness was the general norm, although I'm not sure if this is just poverty or an intentional snubbing of basic politeness to others. Some things, such as the long, stringy, oily ponytails the men tended to grow, were simply inexcusable; surely they could've borrowed an electric razor from someone, and who would begrudge a grown man the Bruce Willis pate? Pronounced body odor was not the norm but was certainly more evident among them than in the general population.

There are various strata of the subculture that get weirder the deeper you go. At my first school, there was a sub-subculture of people who called themselves furries and who walked around with fake animal tails hanging from their waistband. (All of the furries were anime kids but not all anime kids were furries -- very few were, in fact, and I sort of got the impression that some of the anime kids were "above" the furries and had no social truck with them). I talked with one of them about it, and she evidently believed she had some kind of "animal spirit" dwelling inside her or something and wore her tail as a means of identifying with it. I couldn't help but notice they all identified with foxes, squirrels, and the like. (Of course! Why would your "spirit animal" be a macaque or an alligator or a tapeworm or something? They're gross!)

And, of course, the anime kids were spiritual autists to the last man. The closest thing to religion any of them exhibited was one who was an actual autist and (cafeteria) Catholic; the rest were basically run-of-the-mill atheists possessed of a bitter and irrational hatred of the faith. I gathered from my conversations with several of them that they had all had bad childhoods of some sort which had a vaguely evangelical flavor and which thus soured them forever on the idea of religious. They were pretty much the perfect instantiation of Dr. Charlton's distraction-seeking utilitarian.

Anyway, these anecdotes are just that -- anecdotal -- so I have no idea how well they generalize to other places. That said, I went to school in the mid-Atlantic and my Texas-raised coworker insists my description here matches the anime kids group at each of the three colleges she attended, so I'm inclined to think I'm on to something.

Adminutia: On the Future of C:TB

Collapse: The Blog turns a year old at the end of this month, which I guess makes this well-timed. I've been giving some thought to taking a break from blogging. It's not that I don't enjoy it or that I'm running out of things to talk about -- on the contrary, this is just about my favorite hobby, and at any given time I have a queue of posts waiting to be published approximately a week long, and ideas for more bouncing around in the back of my head. In fact, I enjoy it so much it's displaced most of my other hobbies, especially reading. This is a problem for me. I've also started neglecting my duties in life, to the extent that I may actually lose my house to the rising sediment level, a la ancient Rome. Who wants to run a vacuum when the fate of souls are at stake?!

I've also had other projects on the backburner with which constant blogging has interfered. For one thing, I've been working on a small essay series to publish here. One of them was a lengthy treatment of the perverse consistency of modern thought, arising from modern man's insensibility to the sacred. It was around seven or eight thousand words when last I looked at it, several weeks ago, but every time I log in to work on it, I have to fight the temptation to write a blog post. That's been a losing battle recently.

So perhaps a lengthy vacation is due me. But I don't want to give up on blogging entirely. I was thinking of starting a far-right equivalent of Ferdinand Bardamu's In Bona Fide, a blog post and headlines aggregator. Think of it as your one-stop shop for (what is for us, anyway) fascinating reactionary discussions and relevant news stories. The input would be relatively minimal, it'd keep my fingers deep in the orthosphere, and it'd give me the time to work on other projects so that I could come back to blogging (maybe) with a whole set of shiny new things to display.

All of this is a little premature, of course; I've still got ideas for posts for probably at least two weeks. Just be aware that changes may be coming.