The Age of Spectacle, Part 11
Chapter 3. Underturtle II: Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity, part 3
I am posting a day early since I’ll be away tomorrow and the weekend. I hope that doesn’t discomfit anyone.
It’s now clear that Chapter 3 requires four Raspberry Patch posts to complete without blowing up Substack’s length limits-per-post, so next week will finish the process. Some readers won’t make it to part 4, perhaps, because part 3 contains some arguments bound to cause discomfort for at least a few who have made it thus far. All I can do to defend my un-PC bluntness below is to quote an old James Taylor lyric: “You can’t hide the truth with a happy song.”[1]
…….Bye, Bye Modernity
All three predicates of modernity—the ascendance of individual over communal agency; secularism not just in politics but also in relations between the arts and ecclesiastical authority; and the Whig idea of progress in which material and moral progress go hand in hand—are under sustained attack in the West and in the United States. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that all three have simply been outrun by newly acquired attitudinal habits welling up from unselfaware praxis, from the way we lately live our lives day to day. The Constitution reflects the more self-reliant character of daily life in the 18th century, when most people did not live in cities and routinely pounded their own fence-posts, grew most of their food, and slaughtered their own chickens. As already suggested, there is such a thing as an ecology of liberty. Few Americans today, far more distanced from both nature and rural forms of family self-reliance, do those things anymore. In mostly subtle ways that makes the tacit predicates of American political institutions more remote to them, and it affects attitudes toward all three aspect of modernity.
Americans have taken individualism too far, the Right via the tack of market fundamentalism and the Left via the indulgent conceit of expressive individualism. We seem to take everything to an extreme these days, and so now the backlash against excessive individualism often goes too farm as well. Some cognitive scientists have become overly fond of telling us that, while they don’t really understand where consciousness comes from or even what exactly it is, we each are mere composites of impulses cobbled together by a shrewd, scheming, but ultimately non-existent unitary “narrator.” As for individual agency, some showboat-inclined geneticists are now piling on the mantra of determinism as Freudians (it’s your subconscious id) and Marxists (it’s your relation to the means of production) did before them, having taken over in turn from assorted “double pre-destination” Calvinists and, before that, nearly all the cyclically minded fatalistic ancient civilizations we know of.
Secularism? We have fallen in thrall with new religious idols that are actually mostly re-runs of old religious idols. As already suggested, the woke fraternity expresses one wing of the fourth Great Awakening, only the gods are neo-pantheist and the catechism stresses radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, sometimes called in days past “the communism of the soul.” Most of the arts in the West now bow down to its chant to one extent on another. Gaia rules the roost, often decorated with cherry-pickings from Eastern faith traditions; politicized meteorology is its liturgy; Greta Thunberg is its child prophetess. Charles Péguy was right if perhaps too boldly expansive: “Everything starts in mysticism and ends in politics.”
Here is a fairly typical recent example of the new para-theology, one reminiscent of the spirit of the old countercultural Esalen Institute:
Ever since James Lovelock conceived of his Gaia theory—that the planet is one self-regulating organism, which the Anthropocene Age of human dominance is destabilizing—the world has been looking for a philosophy that fits this dawning realization.
The human-centered materialist progress of Enlightenment rationality opened up the space of personal autonomy and freedom from necessity as never before. But it also ravaged nature as a resource to feed industrialized desire and fragmented human communities through the cult of the individual.
To mend that breach with nature and others, what departure will take us in another direction? Won’t algorithms spun from the same philosophical thread lock us even more so into the same trajectory encoded into artificial intelligence, the step function of our next leap forward?
It is this doubt about where we are headed that has prompted a look back at other philosophical dispositions eclipsed by Western modernity to plumb alternative futures.[2]
Some of this might even be right, but that is not the point. The point is that this thinking is discontinuous with modern Western and American social and political traditions, and so to one extent or another it undermines the institutions built on those traditions--whether to displace them or speed their adaptation is a debatable topic dependent largely on definitions yet to be worked through.
America never was a particularly secular society; we only told ourselves it was based on a narrow (mis)reading of church-state separation. And despite appearances and much pretense, it still isn’t: Switching out one religion for another doesn’t make for full-bore secularism. Thus, while Christological religio-cultural traditions remain strong in the United States especially outside of highly pluralized urban areas, they also remain strong in secular manqué. As one observer nicely put it, “It’s the water in the Christian goldfish bowl” in which the woke swim but, being fish, they are not self-aware of it.
Consider: What is “woke” except the 21st century version of grace? Only some have it, so are superior to the rest, enabling an almost pure form of priestly condescension complete with “cancel culture”—the current locution for what used to be called shunning.[3] What is performative virtue-signaling except a de-churched version of a votive act? Shaming is easy; it is still shaming—nice to know that at least some vocabulary doesn’t change. As John Gray observed, woke amounts to an illiberal form of “secular Christianity shorn of any sense of mystery” or humility, characterized by its substitution of “rights” for moral reasoning.[4]
What, too, is the obsession with claiming and idolizing victimhood except the old martyrology complex modernized, the main difference being that it is now possible to experience group martyrology without having actually to experience death? To be blessed, you “must be meek, poor, persecuted, hungry, hated, excluded, reviled, or weeping” as a colleague once put it to me in a private exchange, preferably a goodly pile-up of most or even all of these descriptors.
What is the insistence on the ubiquity of systematic racism except the transmogrification of the Catholic doctrine that insists on the ubiquity of the body of Christ, or even more basically the Christian doctrine which insists on the moral smothering of free will in its parochial understanding of original sin? Everyone is tainted and guilty; always have been, still are.
And finally in this list, what is the premise of radical sociology, holding as it does that criminals do not exist, but that unfathomable and very large oppressive “systems” make them do what they do, except the Calvinist premise of double predestination returned to a “progressive” judge’s courtroom near you? At least Flip Wilson’s “devil made me do it” line had the merit of humor.
What sound does this para-religious, in some ways more mythic than religious, concoction make coming out of newly woke mouths? It sounds like the jeremidic religious confession of a precocious child. Sholom Asch understood the connection between the theotropic nature of most people, magic, and adolescence: There are times, he wrote, when “boundaries are erased between the reality of the present and the magic dreams where eternal childhood reigns. Man, alone in his need for divinity, becomes a child again.”[5]
Here is one example of that insight from June 2020, courtesy of a family newsletter, the co-authors being a childless married couple in their tender thirties:
We both grew up in predominantly white communities. We never feared the police. We never worried that systemic racism could kill someone in our family. We believed that if we were kind to people of color, we were not racist. We were sure that white supremacy culture existed only among extreme, violent, white nationalists. We had the luxury of ignoring the perspectives of black activists and disregarding activist movements for racial justice.
We’re learning that simply being kind to people of color is not enough.
We’re learning that, no matter how exceptional we are or how good our intentions, we have deeply embedded racist beliefs and behaviors. Every American does.
We’re learning that racism and white supremacy culture are like pollution in the air and poison in our water. It’s impossible to avoid inhaling or consuming them. Racist ideas are reinforced in classrooms, political speeches, movies, advertising, and social media. White supremacy culture shapes our legal and political systems. It seeps into the way we think, the way we act, and the way we live our lives. It’s so omnipresent, we're blind to the fact it’s there.
We’re learning that having racist ideas and living in a white supremacy culture does not make us inherently bad people. We have the ability to learn, to grow, and to change.
We’re learning that our primary school, middle school, high school, university, and graduate education didn't fully explain the history, systems, and structure of racism in our society today.
We’re learning that we have a lot to learn. Unlearning these racist beliefs and rejecting white supremacy culture will be a lifelong journey for us.
We’re learning that this journey is uncomfortable. Sometimes really uncomfortable.
We're learning that our white silence has been another form of violence. Our apathy, complacency, ignorance, and guilt are destructive in their own way.
Sex is no longer the original sin, or usually any sin at all, to confess and atone for; that was so modern, so passé. Hierarchy cum authority is the permanent sin of the postmodern imagination, especially when hierarchy can be characterized or imagined to be still as systemically racist as it once was or otherwise arbitrarily discriminatory. But unlike sexual trespass, which requires being found out for the stigma of sin to apply, hierarchy is a sin insisted upon by its own supposed victims who, whether they see it quite like that or not, have become Christ-like in their own imaginations. Taken to a logical conclusion, this appears to be a particularly masochistic form of idolatry: Make oneself a god, and then heroically, if tragically, suffer the consequences.
Godheads are, however, easily switched out; it is the grammar or syntax of the thinking itself that is sticky. It is as John McWhorter once put it:
Modern “antiracism” is neither a philosophy nor a political program: it is a religious creed, complete with priests, Original Sin, heresy, evangelism, and millenialism (although it hasn’t quite gotten to forgiveness yet). Jason Kilborn is not being disciplined. He is being stoned. His accusers and sanctioners are modern equivalents of the prelates who condemned Galileo to home arrest.[6]
It is a free-floating religious impulse as often as it is a full-fledged coherent creed. Andrew Sullivan put it explicitly, if only in passing, in reference to the subcultural shift at Google: “Google has subtly rigged searches of the web to advance the leftism its woke staffers have adopted as an alterative to religion.”[7] And the impulse to atone for guilt—real or imagined is almost beside the point—is a complex emotion when doused in roiling religious energies. For one thing, it is limitless in proportion to the sense of direct or inherited guilt. It is thus impervious to reason, for any moderation advised by reason makes it impossible to expiate the stain, and the stain must be expiated in full or it is not expiated at all. That’s just its nature, and all religious ritual is attuned to it. If the guilt is inherited from one’s forbears, and if one has reason to criticize one’s forbears for anything at all, again real or imagined, then the wages of atonement are steep indeed. A roomful of psychiatrists could spend months trying to get arms around this sort of thing. Some are busy doing that right now; the female half of the couple described above has since deep-ended herself into therapy.
Marxist critical theory of whatever variety one chooses—Frankfurt School or something less Freudian—once joined to activiste postmodernism in the1980s is postmodern in the sense that it denies the suzerainty of intersubjective reason in public life, reducing all politics to the first-person emotive tense. But in every other significant way it is pre-modern in its attitude toward reason, science, and much else besides.
It is, as already suggested, also pre-religious in a sense, which is to say that it displays mythic consciousness. As we will see in Chapter 4, the epochal development of literacy helped pave the way for myth to become religion. It paved the way, in other words, from a belief system in which the sacred was multiple and diffuse, immanent, putatively concrete, and ineffable to one in which the sacred was concentrated, transcendent, abstract, and articulate. The godhead in myth is indefinite to the point that no single godhead exists; in religion it is defined and, inside the worldview of the religious narrative, it is defined by the godhead itself. [8]
According to that distinction, contemporary Western postmodernism is antithetical to the inherited religious traditions of its own cultural legacy, so we call it revolutionary or revisionist or some other term denoting a revolt against the past. Contemporary forms of radical Islam we usually call conservative, hidebound, reactionary, or some other term denoting slavish adherence to the past, which it assuredly is not: Tawhidi Islam is socially revolutionary, anti-traditional, but also anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and theologically narrow. So by dint of the misleading labels we use we obscure that fact that these two mythopoetical templates are actually quite close when it comes to adherence to the laws of consanguinity and metamorphosis. Much contemporary Western postmodernism may look like a de-churched version of Calvinism insofar as it presents as austere and authoritarian. With the right sartorial accents our woke folk could fit in seamlessly with the denizens of the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa the winter of 1692-93, and we all know what happened then. But it often better resembles the ecstatic pre-Christian pagan world of myth, and in this it has much more in common with the trans-rational, conspiratorially minded MAGA Right than any of the protagonists would admit.
Our New/Old Stories: Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
The new stories we most often hear from both illiberal Right and Left about the relationship of the cosmos to any given social-political order often sound very new, especially those from the Left. But on closer inspection they often bear a syntax that is very old: They have made magical reasoning respectable again.
The invocation of magical reasoning is not meant as mere light metaphor, it (hopefully) being understood from the foregoing discussion that political life itself proceeds largely by dint of metaphors held in common. Rather, the invocation of magic is critical to understanding what spectacle is and how it manifests in our hyper-technified postmodern era.
As already noted in passing, magic works according to two psycho-cognitive laws: the law of consanguinity and the law of metamorphosis.[9] It is now time to elaborate what these laws entail.
The law of consanguinity means that mythical thought is a world suffused with emotion, not reason. It is a world that conflates experience, not analyses that reduce it into elements or pieces. It is a world of maximum feasible sensory unity and subjective immersion. The law of metamorphosis is that anything can change into anything else, and change back or change in some other way. That is the seed of the magic in the mythical mindset. It resembles, if one wants a familiar template, the world of the Greek myths where gods, demigods, and mortals flit about unrestrained by the limiting laws of physics and chemistry as we know them.[10]
Metamorphosis also entails a weak sense of linear time; no solid before and after exists. That is why folk-religious narrative forms with roots prior to theology proper take so many liberties with regard to timelines. In some Islamic stories Miriam the sister of Moses and Aaron becomes the same person as Mary the wife of Jesus despite being separated even in mythic chronology by many centuries. A mythic conception of time also explains why rabbis have felt obligated to explain (away) how it could have been that Abraham did not observe any separation between meat and dairy dishes he served to visiting angels in Genesis even though that rule was formulated more than a millennium into the future.
Timelines readily disappear because mythic consciousness is less a wide-awake than an intermediate zone of consciousness between the life-world—the lebenswelt in standard phenomenological language—and the world of dreams. It is also a non- or preliterate world in which language exists only in oral form. The implications of these observations will become clearer below.
Meanwhile, we need to illustrate how in our own time revenant magic has acquired a surprising respectability. Postmodernist shamans tell adepts that subjective perception is as real or more so than any objective reality which, they claim, does not exist anyway. This faux philosophy, which takes the sound premise of phenomenology to an absurd extreme, has oozed its way into political thought as an adolescent-level zero-sum premise, to wit: There is no such thing as progress and no such thing as moral reasoning, both supposedly being mere masks for the exercise of power by those who hold it. Politics thus fuses with an oddly subjective form of millenarianism into a world of eternal cyclical conflict between groups whose only resolution, or redemption, is salvation through a mystical, never actually delineated, journey to utopian perfection. Only extremes, deeply felt, exist as ideals, such that the real world as it invariably exists—“Our paradise is the imperfect,” Wallace Stevens wrote—can supply only the disappointments of half measures.
This mindset is partly religious; wokeism is, as noted, certainly a contemporary part of the fourth American Great Awakening. But at least some of the time it retreats further into the world of the mythic consciousness, a world where what we call magic was a taken-for-granted aspect of reality. Let a few summary examples of revenant magic in contemporary American politics further illustrate the point—first on the Right and then on the Left.
On the postmodern Right, among the MAGA extremists who have seized control of the formerly reality-based Republican Party, we have fairly recently heard proposals to “expunge” Donald Trump’s two impeachment trials from the record. No such concept exists in law, constitutional or otherwise, or common sense. It is akin to abolishing last week. This proposal, the brainchild of Marjorie Taylor Greene—once referred to by former Republican Senator Ben Sasse as “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” or CCP for short—is an almost pure example of the magical law of metamorphosis, repeated over and over through the MAGA default stratagem of projecting onto enemies, without the existence of or any need for evidence, the evils they themselves have plotted and sometimes tried to carry out.
This is how a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021 became in their minds a peaceful patriotic protest. It is how a hammer attack on Paul Pelosi became a fake cover for a homosexual encounter. It is how Trump’s admission on tape that he purloined and showed top-secret documents to people with no security clearance turned into just locker-room bravado. It is how an exploding Bentley at the U.S.-Canada Rainbow Bridge border crossing on November 22, 2023 became a terrorist attack complete with immigrants and terroristic Muslims. It is how the Key Bridge disaster in Baltimore harbor on March 26, 2024 became all about illegal immigration and DEI.[11] After Trump’s May 2024 felony conviction in the New York hush-money case, Jill Lawrence noted that MAGAts were now claiming that,
. . . the Biden administration is making ‘a mockery of the rule of law’ and they want revenge: “We are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.” As Trump would say, unbelievable. Projection like we’ve never seen.[12]
Like we’ve never seen? Well maybe not. We saw earlier in May 2024, courtesy again of Rep. Greene, the amazing claim that “Crooked Joe” had authorized the FBI to assassinate Trump--this example of dizzying overspin spectacle appearing first in a mass fundraising appeal. Given the obsession on the MAGAt right with violence and with shooting specific people--General Milley comes to mind, for example--this wild fabrication has to rank as projectile malarkey number one, until something even crazier follows it on the bottomless inverted-GOP road to political hell. Of course, it suggests strongly that either Ms. CCP or DJT himself has contemplated hiring hitmen to assassinate the President. For Trump it would fit perfectly his once affected but long since internalized reality-TV mafia don persona.
The list of shameless MAGAt projectile lies resembles the kind of things nine-year old boys engaged in a school toilet fart contest are liable to think up after watching the latest dumb-downed television adventure offering. They live at about the same level of sophistication as the playground comebacker “I know you are but what am I?” But it works because the bulk of the intended audience is largely the old “Jackass” audience, and regardless of age it enjoys fart contests. As for the MAGAt mendacity projectile tic, unfortunately, there is as of yet no pharmacological aid to treat projectile dysfunction (PD).
These projectiles are not usually simple lies, unbelieved by the tellers to spin up the credulous and part them from their dollars. These are often better described as surrealistic truths uttered in a parallel quasi-reality—in other words, mendacious political operatives behaving exactly as scriptwriters engrossed in the task of creating fare for a escapist-adventure television show. So if this turnstile of lying ranks as cynicism in action, it’s only in semi-fictive action. All examples have in common the certain guilt and perfidy of the cultic monadic enemy; lately that would be the Marxist-socialist-communist-traitor-whore-criminal “crooked” Joe Biden. The guilt first, crime second pattern is reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts’s “sentence first, verdict afterwards” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It is the twisted inverted logic on which all forms of macabre bigoted reasoning rest, and it sums to aspirational stupidity when applied in comparison to any reasonable assessment of reality.
These examples sum to an astonishing GOP flip from a once-reality based conservative political party to a surrealist cult formed around the weirdly charismatic personality of its shaman-in-chief, Donald J. Trump.[13] The Republican Party has drifted so far into a morally inverse form of its traditional self that when the Republican minority leader in the Senate openly declared on the eve of the second Trump impeachment trial that partisan competition took precedence over his oath of office, most observers had already become inured to shock.
After all, when Donald Trump asserted years before that John McCain was not a hero because he got captured, many expected the end of Trump’s chances to win the Republican nomination. They were wrong, and President Trump then infamously asked “What was in it for them?” about the graves of American soldiers and sailors buried in France. By then only some Republicans expressed any shock, and today almost none do when Trump says things like that. When in February 2024 Trump invited Russia to attack those American NATO allies that were in arrears, in his view, in paying their way in the alliance, he once again demonstrated that the only value he recognizes is value that can be literally counted in coin—as the mental nine-year old he is. Few remaining Republican “normies” bothered to criticize, and most others just mooed if they made any noise at all.
The Republican inversion is more shocking still if one stands back and sees it in perspective. As several others have pointed out, the GOP used to be, for the entire second half of the Cold War and beyond, a more zealous defender and promoter of global democracy than the Democratic Party, yet now it supports the authoritarian Russia over a self-defending young democratic Ukraine. It oozes “American First” isolationism from every pore. You know that something strange has happened when Democrats stand first to defend the intelligence community and the FBI while Republicans demonize both as part of the traitorous “deep state.” This is magical surrealism, the kind of thing common to pre-adolescent fantasy play, to a fare-thee-well. It reads like a bad, vocabulary stunted, television script. It is mobilizing because it is entertaining by dint of its astonishment quotient, which tells us pretty much all we need to know about the core MAGAt audience/constituency.
Revenant magic plays an even greater role on the woke Left postmodernist side. Let us describe for now only one example, but not a trivial one: the recent emergence of the bizarre ideological tic of anti-binary sexuality, which seems to have popped into prominence almost overnight as these things go.
According to this fanciful scripting, male and female are only social gender constructions that do not exist in any would-be firm reality because biology, at least as scientists understand the term, supposedly has no bearing on gender.[14] So with some hormones and some wishful thinking a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, and then revert back again if so desired. This pretense of reality is now being pushed on children as young as six and seven years old in many U.S. public school districts. Anatomical and, even more determinative, chromosomal reality can simply be ignored because, supposedly, it isn’t as real as subjective experience (if it is real at all).
How this can be asserted true for humans as mammals but not for any other mammals, or any other primates, is cause for wide-mouthed wonder. It can be thus because it is magical thinking par excellance. Indeed, we have entered a time in the postmodern Age of Spectacle in which the laws of consanguinity and metamorphosis define the zenith of spectacle on the cultural Left. It is mainly for that reason postmodernism begins to look a whole lot like pre-modernism.
For example, the postmodernist insistence that everything is all in our heads is not a new thesis: Even as philosophical postulate as opposed to unarticulated assumption, it resembles in some ways Platonic metaphysics, notably Plato’s notion of pre-existent atemporal and aspatial ideal forms.[15] The main difference is that Platonic forms are created by some first cause, by a creator, presumably the supreme Greek god Zeus in an immaterial zone above heaven; in postmodernist subjectivism, where material causality is defined away along with objective reality, everyone essentially becomes his or her own god, making for a personalistic form of individuated idolatry. This is, in any event, epistemologically incoherent; it is not possible to deny any and all foundational bases for a moral judgment and then still insist on that judgment’s categorical soundness outside of the head that propounds it.
So what, then, to make of postmodernist moral claims, nowadays usually cast in the philosophically lowest-common-denominator, zero-sum terms of identity politics? Simple answer: Not much, no more than any normal person would credit any other mytho-magically based claim. The problem here is that incoherence is no longer a handicap in the competition of socio-political ideas when set in an orality-dominated spectacle mentality framework.
Postmodernism thus looks a lot like pre-modernism only, as Woody Allen might say, “with an explanation.”And what is asserted by way of explanation as theory begins to look instead a whole lot like lightweight ideology. If you detect a reference in passing here to Critical Race Theory (CRT) you are on point.[16]
Other differences between pre- and postmodernism do exist, of which more later, but the current anti-binary gender mania is ecumenical about them: If something--anything really, whether a film, an artistic concept, an academic theory, a political cult, any given conspiracy theory a cult hatches, and far more besides, not to exclude sexual exhibitionism--exudes the two laws of mythic consciousness then that thing will be given highest perceptual priority qua spectacle, rapt clickbait media attention, and frequently highest honor because of its perceptual priority in our increasingly acute attention economy.
Now, transsexuals and others with ambiguous genitalia are inherently curiosity-generating because they are so rare. In a sense, then, spectacle inheres in them for that reason alone. This, too, is nothing new; transsexuals have been around in small numbers throughout the existence of modern anatomical humans these past roughly 250,000 years.[17] They deserve respect, compassion, legal protection from abuse and discrimination, and medicine if desired insofar as it may prove ameliorative of their circumstances. There is nothing magical about any of that. They may be only a fraction of 1 percent of the population—0.4 percent is the highest credible estimate—but out of a population of 335 million Americans that comes to around 1.34 million people, and of that number probably about 30,000 are pre-pubescent school-age children. Those are not such tiny numbers that they should be ignored; but neither are they such huge numbers that they should dominate public policy decisions over a whole range of issues to the exclusion of other concerns and other values.
The monomaniacal woke impulse to insist on precisely that dominance, from local school board decisions to decisions at the Federal level over nearly all of social policy, is in some ways less than meets the eye. This is not only or mainly about compassion or equality before the law or anti-bigotry mobilization or anything so anodyne, the promotion of which is already thankfully well embedded in existing U.S. Federal civil rights law. The real passion behind wishing to elevate this tiny minority via a utopian ideology to the status of a super-normal group of human beings only occurs because transsexuals fit perfectly with the magical formula of the postmodern premise: consanguinity and especially metamorphosis. Transsexuals have acquired an aura of worship-worthy avatars of postmodern fungibility.[18]
None of this suggests any moral equivalence or equivalence of danger between the magic-addled Left and the magic-addled Right. At present the magic-addled Right is far more dangerous, near-term, to the country’s constitutional order, not least because it has taken over the apparatus of a major political party; the magic-addled Left is perhaps more dangerous to the culture in the longer run, but it has yet to take over the apparatus of the Democratic Party. It is to suggest that at both extremes we are witnessing not just different views but, more important than that, the same state of dreamlike escapism based on an ideological current gone philosophically berserk. Whatever the causes and context, the magical dispensation is spreading rather like “the Nothing” in The Never Ending Story. As was the case in the film, we need to stop it before it’s too late. Where is Bastian Bux when we need him?
[1] From “Rainy Day Man,” James Taylor (Apple, 1968).
[2] Nathan Gardels, “The East Has A Philosophy For The Future: But First It Must Escape the Thrall of Accelerated Western Modernization,” Noema, August 29, 2020.
[3] Tocqueville predicted this; see Joshua Mitchell, Plato’s Fable (Princeton University Press, 2006).
[4] From Gray’s November 8, 2023 Pharos Lecture in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, summarized in Richard Lofthouse, “The Strange Rise of Illiberalism,” Oxford Alumni News, November 14, 2023. Gray’s mention of rights over moral reasoning may have been influenced by Mary Ann Glendon’s 1993 book Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. Gray’s newest book is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). Undoubtedly a sharp and shrewd thinker, Gray’s insistence on deconstructing all forms of idealism spites his own devotion to classical liberalism, which is, as all political constructs are and must be, based on a process of symbolization that is in essence metaphorical. That is idealism as Kant defined it and as Cassirer and many others have interpreted it.
[5] Sholem Asch, East River (G.F. Putnam, 1946), p. 345.
[6] For more, and to find out who Jason Kilborn is, see John McWhorter, “Black Fragility?” Substack, https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/black-fragility.
[7] It may not be an “alternative to religion” but rather an alternative religion, a slightly different statement. In any event, see Sullivan, “Google’s Brave New World-AF World, The Weekly Dish, March 1, 2024.
[8] For a succinct analysis of the difference between myth and religion, see the classic by Earnest Cassirer, An Essay on Man (Yale University Press, 1944).
[9] I here follow Ernst Cassirer’s famous second volume of his masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, published originally in German about a century ago.
[10] Anyone familiar with Bulfinch’s Mythology or Edith Hamilton’s classic presentation of the Greek myths understands the description in the text from experience. We know most of the Greek myths thanks to Ovid, whose fifteen-volume Latin masterpiece captured the tradition in epic poetry during the First Century BCE. Not coincidentally, Ovid titled his masterwork Metamorphoses.
[11] For details of what MAGA entrepreneurs (a.k.a. liars) did with the exploding Bentley, see Charlie Sykes, “Anatomy of a Fake Attack,” Morning Shots (The Bulwark), November 27, 2023. For the Key Bridge-Dali incident, see Donie O’Sullivan, “How the Baltimore bridge collapse spawned a torrent of instant conspiracy theories,” CNN News, March 28, 2024.
[12] Jill Lawrence, “The MAGA Education of Larry Hogan,” The Bulwark, June 5, 2024.
[13] I might have been first to moot this interpretation in print, in “The Trump Cult?” The American Interest, May 11, 2017.
[14] Too many such arguments exist in academia even to list them. One recent example is Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Macmillian, 2024).
[15] We return to this matter in Chapter 10.
[16] We will return to this matter below, but for now I need to make clear based on past experience that I do not need Marxoid ideologues propounding risible zero-sum nonsense about human social nature to lecture me about the continued stickiness of slavery and segregation in American society. I grew up in segregation and my entire adult life has been suffused with the unfinished business still at hand in bringing American reality in line with American ideals. I say this up front because the CRT ideological playbook ordains that anyone who criticizes CRT—which typically shape-shifts its essence as required in the moment—must be stigmatized as a racist. This is a classical scoundrel tactic, designed to avoid taking criticism seriously by name-calling the critic. Criticism is also deflected by claiming that the critic is caricaturing CRT, despite the fact that careful and qualified expressions of CRT comprise only a tiny fraction of what is bandied about, and which, as Cornel West has pointed out, has become so much the default framework of discussion in many American private and public secondary schools and universities as to subsume any need to directly teach it. Scoundrel tactics don’t work on anyone who calls them out for what they are and then stands his or her ground based on logic and not name-calling. Clarifying example: Anyone who thinks that “Uncovering the Impact: Examining the Real-Life Applications of Critical Race Theory,” authored by “staff” at thinkrubix.com, is a serious analysis is a CRT true believer, and anyone who doesn’t privileges messy objectivity over simpleminded ideology. One final thought on this I cannot resist: “Real-Life Applications” as oppose to what other kind? A true sign of the times: not a Freudian but a Foucaultean slip.
[17] Much more recently than 250,000 years ago, the Mishnah—set to writing probably in the 2nd-3rd century CE—calls such people hermaphrodites, borrowing the term from Greek. See the Babylonian Talmud, Seder Zera’im, Tractate Bikkurim, ch. 4. For an English translation, see the Soncino Talmud, Zera’im, pp. 404-06.
[18] Not surprisingly, a new term for gender/sexual fluidity is abrosexual--abro from the Greek meaning graceful or delicate. How sweet. Whether any of these usually troubled folks ever asked for this dubious honor is a question few postmodern sexual theologues have stopped to ponder in their haze of “luxury thinking,” as Rob Henderson has termed it. See Helen Millar, “What to know about abrosexuality,” MedicalNewsToday.com, June 26, 2023. Neither genitalia nor chromosomes are mentioned in this article.