This Week in Reaction (2015/08/09)

George Robert Acworth Conquest (1917-2015) receiving Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005

Robert Conquest has died, at the quite advanced age of 98. This has failed to produce the reaction within this sphere that I expected. Alas, I have not myself prepared much to say. Except, farewell sage traveler. RIP. His three laws of politics, which are canonical for The Neoreaction:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Bonald talks about Ecumenism and Vatican II for the tribal Catholic. It is excellent:

[T]ribal Christianity is about the legitimacy of the friend-enemy distinction as applied to the Church. Christian intellectuals seem to pride themselves on not thinking in these terms. External faiths and internal heresies are treated according to truth/orthodoxy categories as errors containing more or less impressive admixtures of truth. Protestants, communists, and Kasperites are presumed to be well-meaning but slightly mistaken. […] The sodomite activist is not objectionable primarily because of his private errors, sins, or sacramental irregularities; he is a concern because he is the ENEMY. He is a threat. He means to persecute the Church, corrupt our children, to destroy us utterly. In debating with him, we are not co-participants in a search for truth and virtue; it is warfare by other means. The goal is not to convert an earnest seeker, but to neutralize a threat.

Bonald takes the thoughts right out of my brain, and puts them into sentences…

Tribal Catholics don’t like ecumenism, because it’s usually just an excuse for Catholic-bashing from those who are supposed to be our leaders. From liberal Catholic theologians, we hear about how much more enlightened the mainline Protestants are (although even they pale before the glory of atheists, Jews, and Muslims). From conservative Catholic theologians, we hear about how much more enlightened the Eastern Orthodox are (although they again are not nearly as wonderful as the Jews). I’m sick of it. If the heretics and schismatics are so wonderful, go join them.

Ecumenism is pointless. The traitors of Vatican II gutted the liturgy, gutted the churches, gutted catechesis, did everything they could to downplay the distinctively Catholic, all to no avail. We’re no closer to unity with the Lutherans or anyone else than we were in 1959. After all, Lutherans aren’t stupid. Given that we teach that the Mass is a sacrifice, it doesn’t matter to them whether we say it often or seldom. Their objection is that we believe it at all, since they think it false. The only resolution is for them to change their minds, or for us to change ours. But this would not be any kind of Catholic-Lutheran reunion; it would be mass conversion one way or the other. Eastern Orthodox claim the filioque is heretical. Either they’re wrong or we are. There can be no reunion, ever. Trying to force the issue just breeds resentment.

Amen! For his outstanding analysis this week, Bonald wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Rudolf, from Germany. “White people are not human.”

Nick Land catches the hilariously misnamed “Spengler” being more Judeo-Puritan Than Thou over at PJ Media. If moral signaling were horses… oh wait… I guess it is. He also discovered Rudy from Germany who’s been at work leaking all The Neoreaction’s best laid plans.

Jim brings us Intact fetal cadavers. He’s not pro-life exactly, but he’s predictably anti-choice.

Antidem considers The Need For Thede. An excellent article, he remains at the vanguard of neoreactionary thought. Not that any of it is new—dissidents in every age have come to similar conclusions—but these are not the type of thoughts Anglophone conservatives are accustomed to thinking:

If a thede is robust and resilient; if it is not just willing, but also able, to provide effective mutual defense and mutual aid to its members; if it is based on sound and enduring principles which resonate with high-quality people and attract them into the thede; if it can offer a space that encourages and rewards pro-social behavior; if it can help people to achieve the Good Life in a spiritual sense, a material sense, or both; in short, if it can be a worthy place for worthy people to direct their primary loyalty, then it will become a Master Thede. Once built, a Master Thede will serve (in the words of the Czech anticommunist dissident Vaclav Benda) as a parallel polis – a set of parallel institutions; a parallel culture with parallel art, philosophy, laws, customs, and manners; a parallel de facto government with instruments of defense, aid, education, and internal conflict resolution.

Make that a two-fer from Antidem this week. His next is sponsored: The Feast of St. Cuckold, in which he takes the venerable John C. Wright to task for cuckservative content. A la Democrats are the real racists! Say it ain’t so, Antidem! He calls Wright’s featuring of an interracial marriage in such a time and place that it would at least have been a bad idea a “gratuitous bit of anti-racist countersignaling”. We would I think love to hear Wright’s defense to the charge. But surely there other more radical things a man of his talents would prefer to countersignal?

Alrenous points to a pretty remarkable Game Theorist Fail.

Henry Wallace, Member of a Tribe (if not The Tribe)

De Jouvenel is all the rage in the Neoreactionary Salon these days. NIO provides a terrain map for the discussion. Also part the first of Three Speeches by Henry Wallace, who was FDR’s VP during his 3rd term, and seemed to be in charge of a lot of holiness signaling for the administration. A lot.

Neovictorian brings us Magicians of the Outer Right, Part Zwei—Power Plays. This one appears to be slightly less cryptic than his Part Ein. Herein:

The current Magicians of the Outer Right (you know who you are) are not trying to “change minds.” They are working to physically manifest Truth in reality. Reality includes truth and error, the Good, the True and the Beautiful but also the Bad, the False and the Ugly. Only by ceaseless effort is the beautiful maintained in the World and entropy locally decreased for a time.

I think it’s quite a fair charge that Progressivism and especially “Social Justice” are actively bringing error into reality because ethics is about intentions, and “People are hurting.” If making people feel temporarily better causes uncalculable, horrific consequences somewhere in the indefinite future, well, “That’s not what I meant.”

Well. It’s official, and not a moment too soon in the interest of code-place justice. Robert Mariani has the story: GitHub implements policies to please social justice warriors. And pleased is the one thing SJWs will never be able to be. At least for very long. We call this “Git+”.

A lot more on that topic from Atavisionary’s Jumping the Shark: How Cultural Marxism is Set to Ruin GitHub. He wonders:

How did they allow these nuts to gain control of their community? Moreover, why did discussion about social justice, sexism, and racism become so important to a community which works with open-source programming projects? These things aren’t even tangentially related. Most of the people interacting do so only via the internet using screen names. You could be a purple teletubbykin Xer and no one would have a clue about it. I mean, there isn’t a better situation for race and gender blindness possible. Blacks and women could contribute all they want and would only be judged by the quality of their code.

Silly Atavisionary. Don’t you know that race (or gender or disability or body dysphoria or batshit looney) blindness isn’t enough? Don’t you know the “content of character” be rayciss? Atavisionary goes on to spin a bunch of stereotypes together into a highly probable story of what must have been happening behind the scene. And stereotypes obey a sort of Central Limit Theorem, where the more of them you add up, the more likely you are to arrive at the truth. His theory:

What happened was that female programmers who in real life are used to being held to lower standards compared to their male counterparts must have joined GitHub. These women as a group aren’t as good as men and are not criticized for this when people address their work in person. Maybe its because male coworkers want to fuck them or maybe its because her employer fears lawsuits and just needs a vagina on the programmer payroll regardless of how much she sucks. Whatever the reason, these women met with a harsh climate when they contributed junk code using an anonymized account. They were being held to the same standards as men for the first time in their lives and they didn’t like it. So, they immediately violated the internet rule of “there are no girls on the internet.” They stated they were female, despite that having no bearing on whether the code was good or not, to try to get their female advantage back. A number of programmers rightly condemned this and told them to hit the road with that nonsense. Some might have used especially harsh language, but the message was clear. Code well or leave.

And you won’t believe what happened next! Atavasionary notes: “If someone has a better theory, please share.” No no. Hard to imagine it going down any other way. Good-bye Github. Those who can will just go and make another one. Those who can’t will pat themselves on the back for their takeover of increasingly irrelevant virtual real-estate. For his legendary sleuthing and explaining skills showcased in this article, Atavisionary wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Congratulations, sir!

Richard A. Brookes takes note of Marriage and Family Illustrated—more specificially how not to do it:

The pair were married for nearly a decade before having children, and it seems that as a couple they never really adapted to being parents. The kind of office career that she followed does not usually get easier over time; it gets more demanding, more pressured. You can be 24, and “going to work” is just one thing you do among many, but when you are 38 your job is the biggest part of your life, and anything else is a little extra that you might have time and energy for. Since she was going out to work but he was working from home, the nanny was closer to him in every way than the wife.

The husband felt closer to the nanny who looked after his house and his children, than to the “project co-ordinator” he was theoretically married to.

…

Basically, Ben and Anna, the husband and the nanny, had the normal relationship of a traditional family, except that at night he was, for no obvious reason, sleeping with Abigail, some other woman who happened to be sharing his house.

I can imagine being rich enough to hire a maid for cleaning, a cook for cooking, a driver for carting people around, a gardener to improve my increasingly decrepid yard. But I cannot imagine being rich enough to hire someone other than my wife to raise my kids. At least while she’s alive.

Always strong, Intellectual Detox has another must read: Democracy versus Autocracy: A False Dichotomy, which he characterizes as “pure cant” and a “stunningly poor model for understanding the nature of government.” He absolutely shreds the modern shibboleths six ways from Sunday. This article is custom made for the open-minded progressive. If you care at all about people or good government or (hopefully) both, you won’t stay mired a second longer in the progressive groupthink surrounding progressivism. For his efforts this week, Intellectual Detox wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Truth be told, the only thing that kept him from winning the Big Prize™ this week was the impropriety of winning every time he writes something.

Mark Citadel talks some shop for the Coming Reaction in When Will We Know? But first, how it all won’t go down:

Populism is correctly rejected. Damn the people. They have damned themselves and most will never listen, not to sane men and certainly not to the will of God, either responding with the blankness of indifference or the scorn of the committed Progressive cultist. This does not mean however that we condemn our politics to the thin air. For there to be Reaction, it follows that there must be Reactionaries.

Winning over extant institutions, many already in advanced stages of sclerosis and decay is not our endgame. Being the ones left standing, with a coherent positive vision for our peoples, is:

Let us be generous and say that the West today find itself with a little less than 1% of adult males committed to Reaction in some form. This could grow as high as perhaps 8 or even 10%, but unlikely more than that. Still, this is potentially over twenty million men. A minority army, but armies are always tested for success upon a uniting motive. We’re not there to overthrow the system, but to be around when it overthrows itself, when the enemy knocks his head so hard, he’s left bleeding all over the pavement for his own stupidity! As his culture dies, our subculture will thrive because we are the sole political force cognizant of the inescapable shell of truth off of which every act of free will rebounds in some direction when fired.

Citadel goes on to list three “signs” to watch for as the death of the regnant progressive zeitgeist advances. As is typical from him, an excellent article—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Wasenlightened has an interesting statistic with a lulzworthy (and completely predictable) footnote:

[O]f the top 100-ranked Google meme creators, only 6 are female. (Well, “female.” At least one of the 6 is female only because of current social convention: because of current political insanity.)

LEL. Meming seems to be about like chess in certain regards. The reason he thinks:

Women [without Y-chromosomes (Ed.)] are underrepresented in top meme-ers because meme-making is a show-off, risky activity that much better fits the male psychology than the female one.

Oh! silly Wasenlight, don’t you know the shortest, easiest answers are always wrong? The real reason is… evil spells cast by evil white cis-het men. He notes that they used to call them “wreckers” in the good ol’ Soviet days.

Free Northerner puts an appropriately calibrated smackdown on Moe’s (and Aristokles’??) “Catalog of Unforced Errors”—supposedly pertaining to neoreaction, of which the critic knows little. And Northerner much more. Also: Explaining Neoreaction to a 5-Year-Old.

Sarah Perry showed up the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast: Superorganisms. She talks about egregores, memeplexes, and sacredness violations in the strangest places. Very much worth your 41 minutes.

Nydwracu catches the frontiers of scienceness-based progressivism in the act of turning: NPR: Musical dysmorphic disorder.

You heard it here first, folks. Wanting to get better at something is a sign of disordered thinking, low self-esteem, and insecurity about masculinity. And if an angel ever gives you a choice between being Haydn and being an immortal oyster, pick the oyster.

Also from our resident Wizard Apprentice First Class: The people’s choice.

This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry kicks off the week over at Social Matter with The Structure And Genius Of ISIS. “There is something new to this,” Landry says, “that the media fears because it signals a change in the post-Yalta order.” If USG didn’t exactly create ISIS, then Pentagon certainly tilled the soil for it, at least:

What ISIS really is in personnel is the deep security state men of the old Sunni Ba’athist regime in Iraq. These are men who were competent in Hussein’s regime and were respected members in the Sunni tribal network in the Anbar province stronghold. These were men formerly in charge of Iraq who saw their nation go “democratic” and the Shia majority promptly took over their old roles. The Shias also consolidated their hold on the security forces, and after the Americans left, went from security to simply harassing the Sunnis. These were men excluded from decision-making. They were men with valuable war-making skills and organizational acumen.

So skills and experience… but how to gain legitimacy in the minds of Arab peoples?

Loose, decentralized networks are incredibly susceptible to single entryists, especially if the entryist is from another organization with a tight, hierarchical structure. This is what ISIS did. ISIS used al-Baghdadi to make friends with the religious thinkers and leaders of Al-Qaeda on behalf of their organization that they controlled from a military perspective. Al-Qaeda also had the problem of the death of their symbolic figurehead leader, Osama bin laden, and confusion at the top. ISIS had a set structure and defined mission. Now they had an opportunity. Al-Baghdadi gave ISIS religious legitimacy to the outside Muslim within Al-Qaeda. Within the jihad community, suddenly ISIS had legitimacy, cache, and a call to arms. Men flowed to ISIS rather than Al-Qaeda.

Landry goes onto cover likely scenarios as the anarchy of nation states plays itself out, and the realities, unspeakable by Western media, that may nevertheless lead to a modicum of stability in the area in a hopefully not too distant future.

On Monday, David Grant has a go at Analyzing Ancapistan. Come, all ye ancaps, let us reason together:

Neoreaction and anarcho-capitalism share a deep disquiet about contemporary affairs, a feeling that there is something very wrong with the Western world as it is presently constituted. The main difference is that anarcho-capitalism claims to have found a solution to our problem: abolishing the state and establishing respect for private property. Once this is accomplished, those of us who seek “exit” will be free to leave and build our own institutions, and the destructive elements of our current society will stand revealed and be dismantled.

Neoreaction does not have a solution because we think the situation is much more complex. The state is not the only social evil, nor is it always and invariably the worst social evil. Indeed, the fact that people have created states so frequently indicates that the state arises from some inherent feature of human nature, the irrational desire to enforce one’s will on the world and to dominate others. If the state can put limits on this lust for domination, allowing a basically peaceful society to exist and flourish, we shouldn’t worry too much about whether people actually consent to it or whether every single property right accords with anarcho-capitalist norms. We won’t make the perfect the enemy of the good when it comes to the state.

Grant continues to be controversial this week. Alrenous timely and strenuously protests of Grant’s in characterization of Ancap theory in Non-Ancap Fails to Pretend to be Ancap. I’m just the messenger folks.

This Week in Henry Dampier

Busy making that first $Billion.

This Week in 28 Sherman

In a follow-up to his excellent ISIS article at Social Matter, SoBL goes on to discuss ISIS, Singapore, Israel and Governance. And birthrates. The answer, as utterly uncontroversial and unsurprising as it is politically unthinkable: Different peoples need different governments. If only that weren’t so rayciss:

Part of it is being a member of an identity group that may possibly find a leadership that connects with it, can represent its interests and share in its desires. Should not we all live under leadership that does not hate our existence? Is that too much to ask for? Stop strip mining me and my peers for tax revenue and let us live to our traditions, not those newly dreamed up at Harvard.

SoBL has a report on That Curious NY Times Sea Slaves Story. Which curiously had been not a story for a very long time.

This week in Meet the new Boss, Just the Same as the Old Boss: Fresh, New Female Faces Of Comedy, in which SoBL concludes:

Hollywood, just be sure to not send Silverman to the glue factory; she is a woman not a horse. Weird coincidence, but not a single woman shown will be found in a church on Sunday, but you may catch them at the synagogue a day or so earlier.

This week in WW1 pics: the Mass Application of Flamethrowers.

And finishing off the week in lulzworthy fashion: A Song For Trump . I’m sort of imagining it to the tune of Green Acres.

This Week in World Crass

Crassus finds The New York Times uses swastika illustrate Obama’s climate change posturing. Well not exactly. But as with the sex fiend taking the ink-blot test, NYT is the one drawing all the dirty pictures.

In some heartening news, NYT is not in favor of unlimited immigration everywhere, but only in the US. At least they’re consistent.

This was funny: 67-year old Hillary’s leadership style resembles that of the ambiguously dead Deng Xiaoping.

Ramadan apparently makes you stupid, or at least your kids stupid. They don’t make allowance for pregnant women? That is unbelievably stupid. Sunni Islam is low church Christianity for beige people.

This was good: Job posting: seeking vapid hypocrite, liar & charlatan to fill Jon Stewart’s vacancy. Jonathan Stuart (((((Leibowitz))))).

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X begins the week pondering Women, Math, and the Y Chromosome. Here she offers up a few laugh-out-loud moments such as:

Math is nerdy and low-status, so women avoid it like the plague except to complain that there aren’t enough women in it.

To be honest, I was unaware that the Y-chromosome, or more properly the lack to two X-chromosomes, was itself an explanation for the extra variation seen males on most traits. So I learned something new this week. Thanks, Evolutionist XX!

Here she asks Who needs Nobel Prize Winners, anyway? Rhetorical question, BTW:

Do you know what happens to your science department when you stop focusing on science and turn it into a pity-festival for women? You end up with a bunch of women who can’t hack it in science. Accept men and women on their merits, and you end up with quality scientists. Accept people based on their qualities other than merit, and you end up with hacks.

Absolutely and obviously true. But every people gets the purity violators it deserves.

A pictorial feast for the eyes with this one: Women in Science–the Bad Old Days.

Evolutionist X asks: Does childlessness drive people crazy? Needless to say, Darwin would not approve of the practice. She’s not ready to close the book on the question, but notes:

Men who do not have children/live with them do not have this drop in testosterone. They have the testosterone of evolutionary failure, of increasing aggression until, well, they reproduce or die. (Or just get old.)

…

Women with no children seem, at least anecdotally, highly aggressive. Their willingness to overthrow society is well-known.

Yeah. And finally a bit of solid ratiocination HBD and The Continuum Concept.

This Week… Elsewhere

Well, this was embarrassing… for the Mrs. Jellybies of the World: In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions. I wonder if there’s an iron law in there somewhere… something like… “The best cure for telescopic philanthropy is giving one of the best-spoken targets of such philanthropy five unfettered minutes at the microphone.”

Porter is simply fantastic here in Gradually Then Suddenly. There is much to be learned in the story of the rise and fall of the Abbot Downing Coach company. Not least is to be absolutely certain of the type of business one’s business is in. He’s also liveblogging the “debate” (so you don’t have to… Ugh!).

Esoteric Trad has a solid meditation here: Micro-Exit. The longest exit begins with steps you can and do actually take.

CWNY’s weekly epistle: The Nightmare vs. the Dream.

Over at West Coast Reactionaries, Adam Wallace discusses the tenuous nature of The Issue of Free Speech. An impressive article. And then Alfred Miller comes on with a very thoughtful piece: Back to Basics. I especially liked the theme: “Getting Past Basic Bitch Edgelordism”. LOL. Because… you mean there’s more to being reactionary than that? Yes. Yes there is.

For Matt Briggs to repeat himself ad nauseum is a service to us and no burden (apparently) for him: Probability & Statistics Cannot Prove Cause, in which:

Of course, no scientist would ever run the tests “proving” UFOs cause global warming. Because scientists are, and should be, interested in cause and not wee p-values or big Bayes factors. Indeed, any professional (sober) statistician the scientist consulted would also refuse to do a test. Why? Because he would also know UFOs can’t be a cause.

And here is Briggs’ latest for The Stream: What’s True and What’s False in Obama’s Latest Global Warming Claims. Also this bit of solid reasoning: Legalized Suicide Leads To Government Deciding Who Lives, Who Dies.

Kristor writes of The Duty of the Adult to the Child with regard to the propagation of homosexuality, and just about everything else.

When my children were little, I would often end my corrections of their manners or diction or grammar with the ukase, “Fall of the West, my dear, Fall of the West.” Not that I was bloody minded about it – indeed I made rather a joke of it: how could a little child’s table manners affect the course of empires? Nevertheless I explained to them that it is in the very little things that civilization is maintained, or not. I told them the story of Richard III’s horseshoe nail. I emphasized that everything depended upon how well they learnt their lessons, and on how consistently they observed the proprieties, and on how well and beautifully they did things – even things that no one would ever see – because of little hidden humble things are our lives made, and by them great deeds enabled and stitched together, great battles of great kingdoms. I explained that it is in the end such little things that the great battles are ultimately for, and about. We fight and die so that a little girl and her stuffed animals may have their tea party in peace and quiet, and so that a troop of boys may ramble through the woods unmolested.

Also from Kristor: Disutilitarianism: the Incorrigible Conflict Among Incompatible Utility Functions. It is a very serious social theory piece:

The problem of society as such, then, is to find ways of increasing the likely degree of compatibility among utility functions, so as to salve resentment, reduce intramural violence and improve coordination.

A cult clusters utility functions tightly together in the solution space, so that there is a much better chance that the group will approximate to unanimity, or at least to agreement on a set of compatible options, thus minimizing conflict. In effect, a cult promulgates notions of what sorts of things are important, or not, and how therefore it is proper to behave.

No culture with the cult—derived from first principles. For this outstanding contribution week, Kristor wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Do RTWT.

Milo Yiannopoulos asks Does Feminism Make Women Ugly? Tho’ the causal direction remains unclear, it is a serious question, which will not be considered as such because… “Wow! Just wow!”

Sonic makes an impassioned (and logic and data-driven and adult) plea: Paul Krugman, stop trying to make ‘derp’ happen. Also, we know how all analogies fail, but here he shows how some fail far worse than others.

Ace has a great song and some great advice for men looking to be the best men they can be.

A thoughtful, and thought-provoking, post from Cane Caldo: Real Colored Jazz: Pretension, Robosexuals, and Homosexuals—a dire, but not at all unwarranted prediction based on current social vectors.

Al Fin has a fine list of Adjuncts to Dangerous Child Training.

Dante has learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: “Death is Nothing Compared to Vindication”- or Why I’m Okay With the Coontown Purge. He seems to grok Menciian principles on a deeper level than the average mere r/coontown-er:

In other words, if you wish to maintain an ideal society, you must remove the malcontents and dissidents who object to your ideals. This is a universal principle. The idea of “free speech” does not exist and never will exist. If you do not remove these deviants, they will sabotage and undermine your society and its values.

…

I can’t be too mad, because now there is irrefutable proof that the classical liberalism that Reddit was hailed as being the model for simply doesn’t work. As a reactionary, I’ve been vindicated. Reddit administration has embraced my ideology, even if they’re using it to promote the exact opposite of what it was intended for. They’ve embraced the power of the dark side, even if it was to strike down the Sith.

Sith are much harder to strike down than Jedi propaganda lets on.

Good ideas about exit from Chris Gale: Benedict option: Go rural.

Sunshine Thiry tells us Why Christians need to be able to spot manipulation in the opposite sex. Be wise as serpents.

Very interesting article on modernity qua modernity here: The Roots of Modernity in Perversions of Christianity. (HT Land.) Modernity is seen to be conscious of itself, which for starters is quite unusual. Eva Brann‘s explanation of her title alone is worth the price of admission. Here only snippets.

I have to tell you what I mean here by Christianity. I do not refer to the faith itself. Nor do I mean specific dogma, that is to say, dogmatics. What I do mean are certain spiritual and intellectual modes, certain ways of approaching thought and life and the world, which are perhaps more noticeable even to a non-Christian than to someone who lives within Christianity.

…

I mean to show that all of us, simply by reason of living as moderns, have been deeply penetrated by these perversions and that we could hardly carry on without them. They are an unavoidable part of our lives. When I say “unavoidable” I do not mean that there is no possibility and no point in resisting them. In my opinion there are no inevitable movements but only human beings willing, and on occasion unwilling, to go along. These perversions are unavoidable only in the sense that once certain very potent trains of ideas had been set into the world, they were bound to be carried beyond themselves, to be driven to their inherent but unintended conclusion.

Brann places the locus of modernity right around 1600 and surrounding the persons of Galileo, Descartes, and Bacon.

They keep claiming that they are not revealing great mysteries or setting out momentous discoveries. They present themselves as merely having found a careful, universally accessible method, which, once they have set it out, can be used by all mankind. All that is needed is the willingness to throw off old prejudices and preoccupations, all that Bacon calls our “idols;” we are to throw off the nonsense of the ages and to apply sober human reason to clearly-defined problems. In other words, these initiators of modernity are preaching rebellion against the traditional wisdom, but in measured, careful, sometimes even dull words, so dry that students often get rather bored with reading them. That is, they get bored partly with the measured dryness with which this tremendous rebellion is announced, partly because the Baconian-Cartesian revolution is so much in our bones, has been so precisely the overwhelming success its authors expected it to be that we, its heirs, hardly recognize the revolutionary character of its original declarations of independence.

But the overweening pride of these first moderns was not essentially in the fact that they were aware of opening a new age. That was too obvious to them and they were of too superior a character to glory much in it. Their pride was the pride of rebellion, though not, perhaps, against God. Interpretations differ about their relations to faith, and I think they worshipped God in their way, or at least had a high opinion of him as the creator of a rationally accessible world, and they co-opted him as the guarantor of human rationality. Their rebellion is rather against all intermediaries between themselves and God and his nature. They want to be next to him and like him. So they fall to being not creatures but creators.

You won’t believe what happens next! OK. I’ve excerpted far too much. Do RTWT. Also at Imaginative Conservative, this was a pretty good takedown: Newspeak, Tribal Warfare & Coming to Grips with Diversity—episode #2,471 of “I doona thinka that word means what-a-you think it-a means.” As well, from the deep archives: Russell Kirk’s The Moral Conservatism of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1952).

OK. That’s all I’ve had time for this week. I know I’ve missed much. Please complain below in the combox. I’m especially aware of neglecting Isegoria. Get over there an read him daily. Til next week, Keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!