Some brief insights into Gnosticism

Below we have two clips from a short essay by Bertonneau on classical Gnosticism. What makes this particularly interesting is that we find obvious parallels between it and today's Left, as Voegelin would point out in a different way. Bertonneau moves from Voegelin to the main source for some clearer background than one finds in Voegelin, a big help to those who come to Voegelin from Archaeology of Religion. Or, to be a bit clearer myself, we see in these clips that Gnosticism has its own history, which Voegelin is happy to work from. The current lot in political power in Washington, "brilliant" as they are, likely have no ideas about any of this, being too smart to care about the ideas and insights of Dead White Men. For the rest of us, this is pretty interesting.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, "Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part I," Brussels Journal. 27 May 2010.

II. When Gnostics say, “Look to God,” they are invoking the knowledge-without-experience, the special knowledge, that the word Gnosis denotes. Such proprietary knowledge they specifically refuse to share with outsiders because possession of it – or the claim to possess it, for that is all that the outsider has – is what differentiates the illuminati from the vulgate. Thus by virtue (so to speak) of their special knowledge, the Gnostics consider themselves elect. They are an extreme in-group phenomenon. Under this conviction, they “proceed to assert that Providence cares for them alone.” When the Hidden God abolishes the corrupt world, only those whose being has been transfigured by secret knowledge will remain, and they, too, shall be as gods. Compared to those in whom the secret knowledge does not reside, and who are therefore not transfigured, the illuminati are already gods. They may thus mock and revile their ontological inferiors.

[....]

IV. Augustine’s plausible representations of the Manichaeans in The Confessions indicate of those sectarians the same hatred of inherited custom and established social hierarchy that Plotinus attributed to his Gnostics, the Valentinians. The devotees of Valentinus regarded the material world as intrinsically and inalterably corrupt. They fervently desired that world’s abolition, after which the pure of heart would be reunited in a kingdom of supernal light known as the Pleroma, or “Fullness.” Augustine would like to see the world improved, but he knows that human behavior is stubborn and that it takes historical ages for a new moral order to take hold. Before he heard differently from God, for example, Abraham would have understood the offering of a child in sacrifice as ordinary religious practice, which it was in the Bronze Age almost everywhere. The Manichaeans, by contrast, exhibit hysteric impatience both with secular recalcitrance and with the crooked timber of humanity. There is one dispensation, theirs, and not holding to it can be charged against an individual even though he had the misfortune to live before the dispensation could be published. The Manichaeans agitated for apocalypse now, the fundamental transformation of a way of life, to coin a phrase.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4440

These excerpts cover a lot of ground in a short space. Well worth the few minutes it will take to look at the full essay linked above.

I'm getting ahead of myself here writing this bit about Czeslaw Milosz's epigram of “An old Jew of Galicia” in his book The Captive Mind, but it seems appropriate in light of the Bertonneau essay here. The beauty of Gnosticism is that the gnostic is not only right, he is perfectly right all the time about everything; and those who don't agree with him fully are totally wrong all the time about all things. Being right in this sense means one has a monopoly on the meaning of life, and one can sneer at those fools who don't share the secret. Everyone else's life is meaningless and wrong and pointless and despicable. What armour. No criticism of oneself can ever penetrate. That is perfection for the man who is terrified of existence and its cosmic loneliness. All of ones terrors can fit into a bag one can fling away, and from then on, one is free to be the fool he is without fear of himself and his knowledge of his foolishness. One can even be proud. Everything is permitted. That's got to be attractive to many. Complete control of life and the universe.

When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever say he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

For readers still wondering what Gnosticism is

"Gnostic" is a word often used at this blog, and one that readers have sometimes mentioned is unfamiliar to them. So, as part of our quest to make the problem of Gnosticism part of mainstream political discussion, I'll point to another excellent piece by Thomas Bertonneau at the Brussels Journal, part of his ongoing illumination of Gnosticism.
Smearing the Sweden Democrats | The Brussels Journal

Among the symptoms of Gnostic dementia, Voegelin remarked pathological alienation from the world, as it is given to us; he also remarked that this alienation easily tips over into outright destructive hatred. The Gnostic sees reality as tyrannical and intolerable because God or some power has brought reality about, endowing it with the character that it possesses, without consulting the Gnostic. The Gnostic is someone – he might even be atheist, as most self-identifying modern people and most Left-liberals are – who in effect resents the fact that he is not God and who wishes to become or to replace God, or whatever the power is that has led to the present constitution of reality. In nominating himself as the replacement-deity, the Gnostic strives to demonstrate his god-equivalence by remaking or transforming existence. He wishes to be absolutely sovereign and will tolerate no competitor or rival. Destroying longstanding traditions and replacing them by synthetic abstractions belong to this project, as the histories of the ideological dictatorships will reveal.

Moving large populations around also belongs to this project. The Soviets forcibly removed whole populations of Balts, for example, to Western Siberia while settling Russians and Ukrainians in large numbers in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Chinese Communists have done the same thing in Tibet. Before their defeat, the National Socialists wanted to empty whole regions of Russia and Ukraine as Lebensraum for German colonization.

The Sweden Democrats have noticed that the blandly named multiculturalist enterprise of importing large nuclei of inassimilable foreigners to small nation states conforms to this savage dictatorial pattern, which one might think had disappeared with the dictatorships, but which has not. It is the clarity of vision of the Sweden Democrats that outrages their enemies, who desperately want to conceal their own actual motives. Thus Böhm classifies the Sweden Democrats with “orthodox people who believe that everything can be reduced to right and wrong”; Böhm proclaims that such people “cannot be allowed to dominate a society.” But the Sweden Democrats show no sign of wanting “to dominate” Swedish society. In their own words, they want Swedish society to be democratically self-determining and sovereign; their opposition to appellate-proof diktats issued by unelected bureaucrats thus runs in perfect consistency with, and is logically prior to, their objection to destructive immigration-projects inflicted on a small nation of nine million people.

A good part of the contemporary immigration problem in Sweden stems from the presence in the country of hyper-orthodox foreigners of fanatical conviction who take from the welfare state while acting aggressively and even criminally against Swedes and Swedish custom. They resist assimilation and demand concessions from the larger community. This is not “complexity”; it is barbarity, for which no justification exists. Indeed, in those cases where large colonies of Europeans once settled themselves in Africa and Asia and acted to alter local custom, Left-liberals are quick to denounce the evils of colonialism. To see the truth of the situation, as the Sweden Democrats do, is to see something that is actually simple and easy to understand. That is why Presbyters of Correctness, like Böhm, reflexively pervert ordinary language. They attack normative definitions and obscure the genuinely simple under the falsely complex to hide their motives and calumniate their critics – for example, by calling them insane. The Sweden Democrats are morally right to oppose the elites.

On which side of "hate speech" laws does the real barbarism lie?

Thomas Bertonneau's latest at The Brussels Journal discusses Peter Damian Ouspensky's Letters from Russia (1921), a refugee intellectual's account of the Bolshevik Revolution:

Ouspensky anticipates Solzhenitsyn in identifying Bolshevism (Marxism) as a pernicious German invention seized on by Lenin and his followers to justify their orgy of violence against a world they hated because it had the temerity to exist apart from their desires and wishes. “As a general rule,” writes Ouspensky in the fourth letter, “Bolshevism based itself on the worst forces underlying Russian life.”

Ouspensky repeats a refrain in all five letters that Bolshevism, being barbarism with a fancy vocabulary, constitutes a threat not only in Russia, but anywhere, hence also everywhere, because it is a destabilizing condition of ordered life, so arduously achieved, always to carry with it “barbarian forces existing inside [the] society, hostile to culture and civilization.” I could not help connecting a recent remark made by Sean Gabb in a Brussels Journal entry with the foregoing words by Ouspensky.

In a discussion of “hate speech” laws and their selective enforcement, Gabb notes that, “the soviet socialists and the national socialists kept control by the arbitrary arrest and torture or murder of suspected opponents,” but that these methods are currently “not… acceptable in England or in the English world.” Nevertheless, writes Gabb, censorious speech-legislation involving intimidating criminalization of certain words or verbal attitudes “has nothing really to do with politeness,” but is, rather, “about power.” So it is as well in the United States and Canada. Wherever governments and elites seek to control expression, whether or not as Gabb observes it has to do ostensibly with “diversity and inclusiveness,” the real agenda is to achieve “the unlimited power to plunder and enslave us, while scaring us into the appearance of gratitude for our dispossession.”

I would say that “hate crime” and “hate speech” laws represent a trial balloon of totalitarian methods. Such methods are barbarous. They betray the basic decency of the Western achievement. They take root in “the worst forces,” as Ouspensky says, “underlying our life.” Now “ought” is a counterfactual word. But it strikes me that if history taught only one lesson to the civilized it would be that as soon as any visibly power-hungry group succeeds in an agenda of intimidation, no matter how minor, sensible people dedicated to their own freedom ought to respond with all necessary resistance until the aggressors have themselves been intimidated into a retreat. Better indeed to quash such attempts before their first success, but that is a more difficult proposition. Ouspensky’s book explains what happens when timidity rather than vigor is the keynote of response to internal barbarism. So does a great library of other books, all of which came later, however, than Ouspensky’s.

(Brussels Journal)

On Plato, on Francis, on Ecology, On Donner und Blitzen.

Below, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes on some themes that preoccupy some of us at Covenant Zone.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3780

Thomas Bertonneau now writing at The Brussels Journal

I am greatly pleased to see that The Brussels Journal has acquired the services of one of my favorite essayists, Thomas F. Bertonneau.

A few quick notes on Bertonneau's latest contributions:

In his previous outing for TBJ, Bertonneau reviewed Sylvain Gouguenheim’s recent book, Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne, a work which seeks further to dispel the PC myth that the Renaissance in Europe was highly indebted to Islamic scholarship. Bertonneau writes:

Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners – Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold – to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. The sultan and dervish look with amused tolerance on the gaucheries of the European rubes. The rubes swing their elbows and knock over the pottery. It was the Eighteenth-Century philosophes and illuminati who coined the pejorative term Dark Ages to refer to the centuries immediately following the collapse of the Roman imperial administration in the West under pressure of the Gothic assertions of the Fifth Century. Liberal discourse often casually extends the same term to apply it to all of medieval European civilization up to the Renaissance. Specialist historians have, however, long since demonstrated that no such absolute discontinuity as the term Dark Ages insinuates ever existed, which means that the Enlightenment version of history is at least partly wrong. And yet the usual story retains its currency, as an item in a kind of liberal folklore.

Part of that story is the motif of the Islamic middleman role in the transmission of classical knowledge to Christendom. According to this motif, the West in the Eleventh Century possessed no first-hand knowledge of the Greek and precious little of the Roman classics. Fortunately (so the story goes) the Muslims had translated Plato and Aristotle into Arabic, knew all about them, and bestowed the gift of their lore on the benighted monks of Italy and France. The benefactors under this notion behave suavely and generously, while the beneficiaries are – to paraphrase a line from a David Lean film – ignorant, barbarous, and cruel.

In the spasm of western Islamophilia that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001, the myth of medieval Muslim learnedness and medieval European illiteracy gained strong new power for the Left whose acolytes have disseminated it with vigor from their ensconcement in the colleges and universities. Facts might have dispelled the myth had anyone cared to notice them.

Read more...

The jolly idea of Muslim competence in classical learning, as Gouguenheim argues, rests on a misunderstanding: what Islam knew of Greco-Roman wisdom, which it possessed at no time extensively, it knew largely thanks to Syriac scholars. “The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.

Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres – whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac – therefore comported itself as a rational theology; already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece – and so too Rome – represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

More aggressively, “Muslim rejection – or indifference – to Greek knowledge manifested itself again through the destruction of the cultural centers that were the monasteries, the Muslims not acting in this way any differently from the Vikings.” One could remark here, however, that the Vikings at least had the decency after two centuries to cease their predatory behavior and settle down as members of Christendom.

Multiculturalists and Islamophiles have pointed to the Abbasid establishment in Spain (Andalusia) called the Bayt al Hikma or “House of Wisdom” as proof of Muslim enthusiasm for classical learning. Gouguenheim demonstrates that this is another “seductive” misunderstanding, to which the fanciful eagerly yield. The “House of Wisdom” never functioned other than as a Koranic school, and even in that capacity it enjoyed only a truncated existence.
[...]
Christianity was ready, moreover, to receive, not only the philosophy, but also certain basic political principles, of the ancient Greeks, particularly of the Athenians, such as “liberty, reason, and democracy.” Christian Europe in the medieval centuries was, indeed, in a position to admire from the ancient heritage – and to adopt critically – whatever might enhance its Gospel-based conviction of the free will of the individual. Thus the Attic achievement in particular lies at the elective root of a paradoxically self-identifying European culture. Islam knows only that it is Islam whereas Europe, when at its best, has always understood that it is itself and yet something else at the same time. A European sense of intellectual insufficiency and need gave unexpected strength to the progress and consolidation of the medieval mind. Europe would prove itself “permeable” in a way that Islam could not – convinced as it was of its own perfection ab origine. Thus, concludes Gouguenheim, “the Hellenization of medieval Europe was the fruit of Europeans,” who discovered, on their own, their filiations with the ancient societies.

Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most significant publications of the last few years. It is, I believe, destined to become a classic – not only in its original French, but also in the other European languages, once it has been translated. It dispels a myth, an invidious one that has long been central to the perverse palaver of western self-hatred. For those who, like me, command their French a bit unsurely, Gouguenheim’s prose is a miracle of balanced sentences and clear meaning. I would say that Gouguenheim’s study has a potentially large audience outside the academy and could become something of a popular success in the Anglophone nations.

All among us who fear we have entered a new "dark ages" and that only a renewal of the eighteenth-century spirit can save us, would do well to spend some time with this essay and the works to which it refers. Those familiar with Bertonneau's other writings might assume the writer is himself fearful of a looming darkness, but he certainly seeks the roots of our proper modernity in the full length of our Western history and not in some singular moment of englightenment. It is remembering the many events of our civilization's renewal that will kindle our passions and help us renew iconic models and a sense of our purpose in dark times.

Similarly, in his latest TBJ piece, Bertonneau reflects on the basis of our faith in respect to a great problem of modernity: people's desire to overcome their loneliness by playing the boy who cried wolf, to take the short cut to appearing morally righteous by playing with and denying a proper apprehension of reality:

No period is so richly guilty of abusing the primary ostensive function of language – of shouting Wolf! – as modernity. I recall [Eric] Gans saying once in a throwaway remark during a lecture that modernity specializes in creating specious differences while simultaneously denying the positive reality of actual differences. We can observe such specious differentiation most especially in current social and political rhetoric.

Take the vocabulary of equality, one of the obsessions of the self-denominating democratic societies. Modernity uses – or rather abuses – the term equality in two incompatible and self-canceling ways and in a verbal sleight of exasperating slipperiness. First, modernity posits equality as a moral absolute and as an eschatological project of the saints. Never mind that otherwise modernity hotly denies the existence of moral absolutes or that elsewhere it despises sanctity. Next, modernity claims that any and every instance of inequality signifies a moral offense and an intolerable injustice. The advocates of equality (their dubious name for which is “social justice”) invariably take the opportunity of their allegations to indict putative authors of inequality, whom they promise to chastise for causing the wickedness. Notice that the scheme of leveling all differences requires the difference that the plaintiff always be morally superior to the defendant. It was on this basis of this morally superior attitude, to which he was keenly sensitive, that Eric Voegelin declared modernity to be essentially “Gnostic.”

What agenda stems from the penchant of the levelers? If the inequality or difference in question consisted, for example, in the empirical fact that certain children at the end of twelve years in school spell well while certain others spell badly or cannot spell at all – were that so, the modern subject in his outrage would urgently equivocate between spelling well and spelling badly and he would urgently seek to nominate as generative of the difference any cause that shifts attention from direct linear explanations thereof (some students had better teachers than others or some students simply paid closer attention to their lessons than others) to extrinsic, “third party” explanations that permit the laying of blame against supposed malefactors. (Never, of course, the teachers or the school or the curriculum.) One might encounter the exculpatory claim that makes of spelling an arbitrary standard imposed by a ruling elite to stabilize the existing unjust establishment.

Read the whole thing...

Local readers will immediately recognize the figure of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation in these remarks, that body of professional Gnostics who are so keen to outlaw the duly-elected government's desire to have standardized testing of students, lest the results of these tests be publicized by that most egregious of bad boys, the pro-free market think-tank Fraser Institute, to actually show the concerned public which schools are incapable of teaching certain children a basic competency in maths or letters.

But indeed the ranks of those who would invoke the presence of an absent wolf are legion, "educatedd" by just such wishful teachers, weakening us for the work of properly apprehending harder realities to come.

The Brussels Journal, at least, is getting better and better.

What are you praying for?

I've been puttering about for a day or two wondering what to write to announce our weekly meeting, every Thursday, 7-9pm in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, in front of Blenz Coffee. Please join us if you can and would like to discuss the renewal of the Canadian covenant.

I've been trying to decide if I want to make anything of the seemingly small matter of our local university's recent gesture of "welcoming diversity," particularly to the extent it is focussed on members of a certain authoritarian politics/religion. Muslim Footbaths at University of BC growls one headline from a notoriously "Islamophobic" blog, going on to quote from our local tabloid:

“It’s no different from upgrading washrooms to accommodate transgender students or students with disabilities,” said UBC spokeswoman Janet Mee.

The plans stemmed from a consultation last December in which UBC asked students how to improve washroom facilities. “We approached [the Muslim students association] to ask them what their ablution needs were,” Mee said. “We included that in a project that we were working on around accessible, gender-inclusive family friendly washrooms.”

Alsalaman said his association and the university have a very good relationship that includes the creation of the prayer room and the installation of a lock to the room after a dark brown patch was discovered on the floor of the room late last year.

“The footbath installation will not be difficult and not cost very much,” Alsalaman said. “We are asking that it only be in the two washrooms near the prayer room. It’s not that big of a deal and is very important to us. We feel more welcome.”

It's a little thing but it raises the question if, on principle, state-funded Canadian universities have any business paying for religious facilities (religious denominations do fund their own institutions on various Canadian campuses, including UBC). I remember a controversy at McGill recently when the university, whose charter affirms it to be a secular institution, refused to create a permanent prayer room for Muslims, not that it refused to allow them to pray in makeshift settings. I can understand how UBC might have felt that all the foot washing going on in regular washroom sinks was creating a mess and it's better to create a special place for this sort of thing. After all, UBC like many universities with their post-national liberal elites in charge, is now in the business of trying to attract money from all over the world and there is a lot of money in the Arab oil states flowing into Western universities (money which many argue is accepted with the implicit understanding that criticism of the Islamic totalitarian religion/politics will be muted in these universities). Anyone who has checked out the building boom at UBC - which includes many multi-million dollar condos that seemed to me on a recent visit to have several owners from mainland China (how many people working in the Canadian economy can afford such homes?), and thus presumably with connections to the highly oppressive Communist Party oligarchy without which it is rather hard to get rich in China - might come to the fast and easy conclusion that UBC is not too particular about the people and values it welcomes to campus in the guise of "welcoming diversity".

Don't get me wrong, I too have connections with connections to the Chinese Communist Party, and I derive some (small) income (not to mention other social benefits) from them. In business today, most people can't avoid trade with China, just as we support the promotion of Wahabi Islam every time we buy gas to support our own economic activities. But at the end of the day, one has to put business partners and friends aside and remind oneself of his own ethical values and his nation's. And one kind of hopes one's local university will take a lead in reminding him of what Canada has, in the past, stood for: the sacralization of the individual as above the claims of the group, including religious groups.

This has meant we have created public institutions that pay attention to the promotion of individuals in public and economic life, while keeping the claims of specific religions or special interest groups carefully circumscribed. We can't of course entirely separate the individual from his religion but traditionally we have made universities and other institutions places where you go as an individual, and member (or visitor) of the Canadian nation, and not as an active representative of some other kind of sub community. In the past, Muslims have made their way through the system.

And we don't expect that all taxpayers should have to pay for special interests that go beyond providing services in order to foster the growth of individuals, indeed to free them from the bounds of traditional, group-centred, restraints. With some exceptions, e.g. the state support for Catholic schools in Ontario and Quebec, we have generally felt that the promotion of specific religious or political interests should be the duty of individuals who want to make such a commitment. And keep in mind that Islam is both a religion and a traditional, authoritarian, political system.

So what to make of UBC's director of access and diversity, Janet Mee, proclaiming:

"The university is absolutely keen and willing to consider any request that comes forward from the Muslim Students Association."

Is Mee unaware of the kinds of radical political positions that Muslim Students Associations promote at various universities? Does she not see any essential difference in using public monies (the university is in large part publicly funded) to a) support a specific religious-political movement and b) guarantee that all students can be respected as individuals with a basic human right to safely use a washroom for its standard purpose:

Bathroom needs became an issue last year after members of the university's Pride association, representing gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered students, raised safety concerns with Mee's department.

She said transgendered students have reported feeling harassed or embarrassed when forced to use traditionally segregated bathrooms on campus.

From this specific concern, Mee took an opportunity to mix things up and moved on to a much vaguer justification for providing, among other things, religious facilities:

"I hope it says that we want to create an inclusive and welcoming environment for all students"..."It has to do with a greater awareness of the needs of diverse students and probably a greater desire on the part of large institutions to understand their students," she said.

Janet Mee, UBC's house mother of diversity, reminds me of a great article by Thomas Bertonneau

The politically correct university, under the domination of the primordial mother, becomes affective and jealous in its basic structures; it replaces the individual (because he is individuated, hence a priori outside her realm and a threat to it) with the group. "If the person can substitute a group identity for an individual one, social organization becomes possible at the level of the group [and] an ideal of oneself as a member of a group can serve as one’s ego ideal" (121). The individual who rejects identification with a group now becomes the focus of the group-consciousness, of the collective narcissism, and indeed, by constituting such a cynosure, actually permits mediation among groups which might otherwise experience destructive friction. Each group depends on the primordial mother to keep at bay the individual renegade; at the same time, they look to the primordial mother for the sustenance of their collective ego-image. She answers the demand through "the idea of the child who needs love the most, the one who has been least loved in the past, the victim" (121 [emphasis added]). The "marginalized" minority is diversity’s unwanted child in the collective plural. Hence the incessant clamor by this or that demographic segment of the university’s enrollment for favors and privileges—and for punishments to be meted out to those who deviate from the one path:

Decision making in the PC university loses even the intention of being rational. Argument about possible courses of action no longer involves consideration of the actual effects policies will have. The process turns instead to the competitive avowal of one’s goodness and the imputation of badness to one’s opponents. But that is only the beginning of the matter. The separation of decision making from the consideration of results, together with the a priori establishment of some views as morally good while others are morally bad, has other consequences. It leads to a situation in which the intentions of the actor, and, indeed, often only the purported intentions of the actor, are the only matter of importance, removing the means from moral consideration. (124)

The politically correct university is not only, as Schwartz notes, a "psychological regression" (159) into infantile narcissism, it is likewise a cultural atavism, a relapse into archaic, indeed sacrificial, forms of communal organization that belong more properly to the Stone or Bronze Age than to the twenty-first century of the Christian Era. I return here to the work of Gans, who argues in Signs of Paradox that the Holocaust represents a cultural turning point in the Western moral imagination, by verifying in a massively empirical way the essential Christian revelation that communal solidarity based on persecution and victimization is evil. "Our ideal moral certainties are re-grounded in the opposition between (Nazi) persecutor and (Jewish) victim" (188). But it is really a good deal more complicated than this, because:

The descent of the absolute into the empirical world is the moment of its undoing. As soon as we posit an absolute difference between victim and persecutor, the underlying symmetry of their relation reasserts itself. When the SS torturer becomes the villain of the war film, he is turned into a sacrificial figure, a scapegoat, [a] structural equivalent of the Jud Süss in Nazi cinema. In the already tiresome clarity of this asymmetry, culture has been abandoned to youth; adults are too world-weary to participate wholeheartedly in the eternal and now transparent structure of victimary resentment.… Group resentment has replaced individual resentment —the point of essential difference between the high and the popular—as the primary object of cultural deferral. (188-189)

Gans remarks how

a long-lost Dionysian frenzy reappears in the ecstatic forms of postwar popular culture, in its music and dance, the audience of which more than that of any other popular form incarnates "the people." These central dramas of the youth-culture are not coincidentally the most subject to black and other minority influences. The rhythms and chord progressions of popular music dissolve individuality in a real or imaginary group movement that is the historical heir to sacrificial ritual. They create, in an imaginary context, the resentful unanimity of the sparagmos. (189).

Schwartz’s "Revolt of the Primitive" and Gans’ atavism of a minoritized "youth culture" are, I believe, aspects of the same epochal cultural transformation. The primordial mother is the ringleader and youth (always in a rainbow coalition of sexually ambiguous misfits) are her press gang. Schwartz interprets the phenomenon more pessimistically than does Gans, who notes, but does not particularly stress, the sacrificial character of the new, resentment-driven forms of collective identification. Yet Gans does admit that "what is new in our era is the promotion of non-integrative local theories…. as though they were the only theories conceivable and it were no longer possible for the human community to think of itself as a whole" (198). He also notes how "feminism and other minority approaches, which maintain their link with universal thought only through the unacknowledged mediation of the Christian centralization of the victim, are fast driving out other forms of cultural interpretation" (198). Gans’ "non-integrative local theories" are nevertheless deeply troubling, not least because their most recent prototype appears to lie exactly in the ferocious biological dualism of Hitlerian anti-Semitic policy, as "non-integrative" as you can get. Paradoxically, of course, the proliferating new Übermenschen find their superiority to all others in their own alleged victimization, which then becomes the pretext to victimize all who would deny the in-group’s special (mother-authorized) victim-status. The lèse, as it were, proves the majesté. Where the lèse does not exist, which means just about everywhere, it is necessary to invent it. There is much burning of the Reichstag. Schwartz catches the same paradox, noticing that the eidos of women in the regime that they now obviously control is a contradictory one, simultaneously a picture of "passive, hopeless victim" and "exemplars of the primordial mother" (158).

Am I blowing a little foot shower out of proportion? Maybe it all depends on whether you think the Muslim Students Association will now happily go its way, keeping their religion/politics - focussed on Jihad and Sharia - a private matter, or, on what you think they are going to demand next. Maybe they will declare some visiting speaker, a "homophobic" Jew, say, a threat to their sense of security.