Out, damned spot! out, I say!

Gordon Brown heard on mic calling a voter a 'bigot' | The Sun |News|Election 2010

BLUNDERING Gordon Brown has been caught on microphone calling a voter a "bigot".

The Prime Minister was heard describing an exchange he had just had with lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy, 65 — on the campaign trail in Rochdale, Lancs, today — as a "disaster".

He made the comments as he got into his car after speaking to Mrs Duffy — not realising that he still had the Sky News mic pinned to his shirt.

He told an aide: "That was a disaster - they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? It's just ridiculous."

Asked what she had said, he replied: "Everything, she was just a bigoted woman."

The PM was approached by the grandmother in the street after visiting a community payback scheme in Rochdale.

She tackled him on a series of issues including the national debt, taxes, student financing and immigration.

Mrs Duffy, a widow, said she was "very disappointed" with Mr Brown's remarks.

After hearing what the Prime Minister had said about her, she said it was "very upsetting".

She added: "He's an educated person, why has he come out with words like that?

Well Mrs. Duffy, this reminds me of something one of the more learned people Canada has ever produced, Northrop Frye, once wrote: education doesn't make bad people good; it makes them more dangerous.

In the world view of the most dangerous people in the West, a woman politely raising concerns about immigration becomes a disaster and a bigot. Pretty much sums up the Gnostic's war against the common people and the nation which can never live up to his world-transforming fantasies. However, it seems that Gordon Brown is now learning what all Gnostics are fated to experience: humiliation at the hands of the unaccomodating reality of ordinary people

Mrs. Duffy has declared she won't vote in this election. Her longtime Labourite faith has been dashed. Too much reality all around. And as Duffy notes the would-be elect are not even trying to transform the most unbending object:

he's not doing anything about the national debt and it's going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess - and he's calling me a bigot.

(Mrs. Duffy on hearing what Gordon Brown thinks of her - from video here)
More Video and commentary.

RELATED (Roger L. Simon):

I have said something like this before, but at the risk of being a bore, and because of the times in which we live, I will repeat myself:

The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism is that contemporary American-style liberalism is in rigor mortis. Liberals have nothing else to say or do. Accusations of racism are their last resort.

The European debt crisis — first Greece, then Portugal and now Spain (and Belgium, Ireland and Italy, evidently) — has shown the welfare state to be an unsustainable economic system. The US, UK and Japan, according to the same Financial Times report, are also on similar paths of impoverishment through entitlements.

Many of us have known this for a long time, just from simple math. Entitlements are in essence a Ponzi scheme. Now we have to face that and do something serious about it or our economy (the world economy) will fall apart.

Liberals, leftists or progressives — whatever they choose to call themselves — have a great deal of trouble accepting this. To do so they would have to question a host of positions they have not examined for years, if ever, not to mention have to engage in discussions that could threaten their livelihood and jeopardize their personal and family associations...

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.

Should we call ourselves "conservatives", or those who seek the "authenticity of openness to transcendence", a.k.a. "openness to existence"?

Dag, who has recently taken to reading Eric Voegelin, likes to remind me that Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, does not mention Voegelin, though the influence is clearly there, because Goldberg's editor told him that if he went on about Voegelin, no one would read the book. Too difficult, the cautious man implied. I think Dag means to counsel me, but maybe also laugh with me, should I ever hope of attracting more readers to the blog.

Anyway, this is a commercial instinct we can't afford to follow. As Thomas Bertonneau notes in his latest Brussels Journal essay on Voegelin, there is a vocabulary developed by Voegelin - in his discussion of modern Gnosticism - that is particularly suited to discussing the political pathologies of our times. This is another rich piece from Professor Bertonneau, but one thing I will point out here is its discussion of Voegelin's caution to his friends not to call him a "conservative", a title he feared for its assertion of some false equivalence with the low religious world view of the "liberals":

The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse.
[...]
When we examine the present scene in the United States, we discover just this conceit in the rhetoric of the sitting Democrat-dominated federal government. Vehement commitment to “progress” (“change we can believe in,” as Obama’s electoral slogan put it) differs hardly at all, perhaps only in a few small degrees, from vehement commitment to “permanent revolution,” quite as Leon Trotsky understood when he revived [Charles] Comte’s coinage in his new Bolshevik context. Voegelin writes: “The radical revolutionary must make the revolution into a permanent condition… for as soon as a plateau of stabilization is permitted, the revolution is over.”

Before continuing with Bertonneau, I'll just point out that another way of saying this may be that what today goes by the name of "liberalism" is not itself a complete or satisfactory religion to the degree it cannot articulate a coherent, transcendent, purpose; rather it is, as Bertonneau say, a vehemently apocalyptic religion that relies on introducing ever-more alien and destructive ideas into Western society as a way of asserting its superiority according to the key doctrine of "tolerance", the supposed guarantor of liberalism's moral superiority. As Bertonneau says, "liberalism" is really an agenda of destruction. But, he argues, this should not give license to those of us opposed to modern "liberalism" to call ourselves conservative, as if there were a neat symmetry between the two:

if those who stand in opposition to the radicals were not adequately described as conservatives, as Voegelin strongly implies is the case, how then would one describe them? Or how, in this connection, is one to describe the current “Red-Blue” division in American politics?

Voegelin’s answer to such questions involves his identification of the radical-revolutionary mentality with Gnosticism, that is, with baroque, reality-denying doctrines, sprung from acute anxiety about existence, that bespeak the cause in the fashion of an unquestionable Koranic pronouncement, deviation from which constitutes a punishable offense. (Think: political correctness.) The opposite of Leftwing doctrinaire-ism, as we might call it, is not, however, some antithetical second doctrinaire-ism, equally baroque and locked in Manichaean agon with the first; it is what, in Voegelin’s discourse of the 1950s and 60s, goes by the name, among variants, of openness to existence. The Montreal lecture, “In Search of the Ground,” later appearing as an essay, offers one of the clearest expressions in Voegelin’s massive authorship of this concept.

An element in existence to which the mature individual maintains his “openness” is the cumulus of historic “differentiations in consciousness,” Voegelin’s term from Order and History. The phrase is not obscure: it refers to the fact that the prevailing knowledge of the world in any given cultural continuum – that of the West, for example – sometimes deepens and becomes richer through an individual insight; a “Leap in Being” can happen, as in Western thought when it jumped from mythic to philosophic ideas of existence.

But, Bertonneau argues, these leaps in being are rare events, historically, and do not justify the "progressive" ideology.

what else, pray tell, is revealed in the assumption, lying at the basis of all radical political action, that a society, which also possesses a nature and is limited in its malleability by that nature, can be changed? This is not to assert that there is no discernible history of social development or that any given society continues to exist only insofar as it refuses to permit any internal alteration whatsoever. People tend, however, to exaggerate the extent of change.

I would argue, for example, that the abolition of slavery in the United States, while it abruptly and positively altered the condition of the ex-slaves, altered the larger society hardly at all, since only a tiny minority had ever owned human chattels; nor later on did the repeal of “Jim Crow” make much of a difference for the larger society even though it altered social conditions somewhat for American blacks in Democrat-dominated regions of the nation where anti-black feeling ran high.

In a slightly different way, Voegelin cites the case of Utah, when it petitioned for admission to the Union. The Union stipulated its condition: Membership in the federal polity or polygamy, one or the other for the Mormons, not both. The larger society would not assimilate change of that sort or the precedent it would set.

The limits of change for any society are much smaller than liberal or radical or Gnostic zeal ever admits. To be reconcilable with the society, such change as occurs must reflect a spontaneous consensus, because coercive change, as I have already argued, is tantamount only to annihilation. In the Eighth Century BC, Hellenic society was happy with the symbolism of the “intra-cosmic gods” and the world they implied; by the Fourth Century AD, Mediterranean humanity, by a long-gestating like-mindedness, found the old “intra-cosmic gods” no longer convincing or meaningful and began to reorient itself, either through Alexandrian Judaism and its offshoots, or through Neo-Platonism, or through Gospel Christianity to the later-emerging transcendent Divinity.

As country custom and as household ritual and as semi-comic superstition, the “intra-cosmic gods” lived on and they survive, attenuated in their potency, even to this day. As the image of divinity, wistfully, they perished, a new image replacing them that offered to its recipients a richer understanding of existence. That image, representing the discovery of a new depth in reality, has stood in place in the West for two thousand years.

It follows that sensible people should behave with extraordinary circumspection where it concerns cavalier, wishful, or resentful programs of “change” because, as Voegelin so poignantly shows in his essays, radical “change” based on passions is definitely not the “progress” that it claims itself to be: It is not the “Leap in Being” but the frightened, dangerous opposite – a lapse into primitive thinking and myth.

Opposition to “change” for the sake of change, and to “change” as goalless indefinite regress, which is what the vaunted “progress” really is, will likely take the name of Conservatism, the very label that Voegelin wanted not to descend on him as the sign of his political identity. Voegelin knew that words, like ideas, have consequences. Under this admonition, a number of cautionary remarks can be made about the word “Conservatism” and what it implies. For one thing, as soon as one posits Conservatism, one has created an inevitable verbal artifact – Conservatism versus Liberalism – that is structurally Manichaean. This should give us pause. Manichaean, dualistic structures are a characteristic Gnostic appurtenance, which philosophers should avoid.

I recall here my earlier argument that the opposition to ideological doctrine cannot be another ideological doctrine, for that would be ideological rivalry without meaning rather than engagement in debate for the sake of truth. It would be other than the dignified quest, as, to use Voegelin’s essay-title, “In Search of the Ground.”

What the organized Right-leaning opposition to the Party of Destruction does is, finally, more important than what it calls itself even though words have meanings and usages signify something. I am encouraged, slightly, by the way in which spontaneous demonstrations of popular ire against overweening big-government schemes – like “bailouts” and socialized medical insurance – have surprised and actually checked the dictatorial bullying of the Obama regime. When an amateur journalist-reporter, FOX News Channel’s Glenn Beck, publicized the curriculum vitae and words of Obama adviser Van Jones, a nutty Marxist-racialist, it led to the first departure-under-outside-pressure of an Obama appointee. It is a sign of the times that actual investigative reporting is now done by someone like Beck, who previously was little other than a radio-comedian whose main shtick consisted in making prank telephone calls to predictably dimwitted people in a recurring feature called “Jeopretardy.”

Far from being offended, currently one of the most offensive words in the political jargon, by the silently mouthed “That is not true” – uttered by Supreme Court Justice Alito when President Obama gratuitously insulted the court during his State of the Union Address – I take heart in it because Obama’s disrespect was rooted in a falsehood and Robert’s quiet but visible contradiction was rooted in truth. There should be a good deal more clear articulation of the fact that the deconstructors of society have doctrines, false doctrines galore, and that we, by contrast, have an interest in truth, to the objectivity of which we remain open.

Cultic doctrines kill freedom; they demand its immolation in the sacrificial flames of their causes. Truth and free will – truth and freedom – by contrast require and nourish one another. We must vigorously remind our friends and neighbors of these facts.

By coincidence, Gil Bailie has just posted a couple of quotations that provide another way of articulating this kind of argument. Under the heading, "More on the real counter culture", Bailie first quotes Philip Rieff:

Here we now see, with startling clarity, how little our established political distinctions between left and right, conservative and radical, revolutionary and reactionary, matter nowadays. Rather, any remaking of political distinctions will have to ask, first, whether there is in fact a discipline of inwardness, a mobilization for fresh renunciations of instinct; or whether there is only the discipline of outwardness, a mobilizing for fresh satisfactions of instinct. Such a distinction will divide contemporary men and movements more accurately; then we shall find fashionable liberals and fascists on the same side, where they really belong.

And then he quotes Hans Urs von Balthasar:

The road to authenticity demands the renunciation of immediacy -- that is, it demands ascesis. No great life can reach maturity without ‘great sacrifice’.

And finally, if you are not yet clear on what is being attacked in this post, and you want a concrete example, take a look at Barry Rubin's latest on the "education" his son is receiving:

The teacher told the fourth grade class in the midst of the greatest snow storm in Washington DC history: "Just because it's snowing doesn't mean that there isn't global warming. All scientists agree that there's global warming."

My son raised his hand and said: "That's impossible. Not all scientists agree."

"Ok," said the teacher, "I meant to say that the majority of scientists agree."

Is there man-made global warming? I have no idea whatsoever, lacking the expertise to make such a judgment. But I do know this isn't the way to teach kids about the scientific method. Rather, it is the way to train them always to yield to peer pressure, that dreaded syndrome supposed to lead young people to drugs, alcohol, and smoking. Or, as summed up comically by the character Yossarian in Catch-22, "Just because everyone thinks that way how could I think anything different?"

Indeed, the teacher didn't have to say anything at all, since no child had claimed the heavy snowfall was proof that there was no global warming. They had already spent around three full sessions pounding home the idea that there wasn't any question that global warming is a huge problem on which trillions of dollars must be spent. Presumably, the class was convinced already.

Rather, the attitude evined is that they must be made to believe in this and even the possibility of any doubt existing had to be squelched. And to ensure this the teacher told a lie, which was only retracted because there was one student there who had the knowledge and courage to question it.

This kind of "everyone agrees" argument is the stuff of indoctrination, not learning. The teacher could have spoken about how data is collected, experiments are made, hypotheses are questioned, and out of that debate--if it goes on long enough and all the facts line up--comes a consensus truth which is itself subject to further testing and constant examination.

But that isn't how most schools teach today. Rather they say--in an approach sounding like the worst "progressive" stereotype of a traditional "America is always right" old school system--This is the truth. Everyone says so. Shut up and believe it.

Indeed, there is nothing "liberal" about modern liberalism; so perhaps we should question those who would take up the mantle of conservatism.

Kudos to Jonathan Manthorpe

Discussing his column last week that discussed the Anthropogenic Global Warming "denier", Ian Plimer, Jonathan Manthorpe shows he's not bullied by the high priests of the first global religion:

There was too a healthy crop of letters from scientists who, while quarreling with some of Plimer's arguments, basically agree with him that the Earth warms and cools in natural cycles, and that human activities have little or no impact on these changes.

But the disturbing letters were from the scientist believers in man-man global warming.

I have met a lot of unpleasant people in the course of my life, but I have never seen such a torrent of nasty, arrogant and downright stupid abuse as has been aimed at me this week by people who aggressively sign themselves "PhD" as though it were a mark of divine right that is beyond challenge or question.

If a man can be judged by the character of his enemies, the letters I have received from scientists this week has significantly raised Plimer in my estimation.

For a Canada in which we may once again freely measure, represent, debate and enact a shared reality

It's "Canada Day", and while I have not made much time recently for blogging, this will soon change. But to that end, maybe it's time for a little stock taking. Where are we, as a nation, going, given the political culture of this country? A recent Mark Steyn piece provides a useful glimpse, if only for a moment on a beautiful day not to be completely wasted by our culture's political insanities: Blazing Cat Fur: Hey Jennifer Lynch- Coming to a newstand near you....

Canada, it seems, has become a country where the policing of those who might say things mildly critical of the reigning religion are told to shut up, or else lose their jobs, reputation, etc. It's a country where parliamentarians cannot respond rationally - they cannot even begin to recognize - arguments that "human rights" commissions are actually destroyers not defenders of real human rights.I could and will in future expand on the Gnostic religion that is so afraid of hearing criticism, or even alternative conceptualizations, of its world view - lest the Gnostic's trips into an unreality where his Utopian desires must not, or so his faith tells him, be obscured by the lesser men who have come before him, be indeed exposed to some of the resistant facts of a fallen world that is not and cannot be as our Messianic or Maternal visions would remake it.But for the moment, for those who want to take up the question seriously, I will take my time for reflection and point you towards Tom Bertonneau's latest in the Brussels Journal, for he so ably takes up the task of elucidating the Gnostic mentality, its hysterical reactions to criticism, to those whose common sense presents stumbling blocks to the great visionaries. He takes us further in understanding the Gnostic's need for a puritanical speech code.

But, as Bertonneau concludes, a refusal of a political religion to come to terms with contrary realities cannot last forever. The world, as it actually is, wins out in the end. So this period in our national history may be coming to some kind of collapse into a future we cannot know and which we must prepare ourselves to meet, should we wish to live in a nation bound by covenants and not just one or another's dark and destructive will to power:

One can predict, generally, that the radical spasm through which Europe and North America are now passing will eventually remit. De-creation can only be called creation for so long before the fraud becomes undeniable and the masses become disenchanted with their formerly charismatic leaders.

The trouble for all of us is that, in the meantime, in “the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum,” as Voegelin writes, the agitating elites can wreak enormous harm.
[...]
Quite apart from election results, the extremism and intolerance of those currently in power polarizes the society increasingly, day by day, with no terminus of the process in sight; nor will their polarizing activities cease, should they lose their majority. Gnostic propaganda is nowadays organized as a colossal communications-network. Certainly American society is therefore in the rhetorical phase of a civil war, or perhaps in the policy phase, now that liberals have the votes to justify their schemes and do as they please. Even if the USA did not advance to some kind of actual civil war, the damage to civic institutions and to trust among people will have been, as it already is, profound and lasting.

One might agree with Voegelin, who was writing sixty years ago, that, “the end of the Gnostic dream is perhaps closer at hand than one ordinarily would assume.” But this need not mean that the aftermath will resemble the status quo ante, or be in any way familiar to those who, during the period of nightmare, held fast to the truth of the soul.

...a thought with which to marshal our resolve on this Dominion Day.

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.

The Nekked Truth: Bare Essentials of Christianity in the Netherlands.

The Christian nudist site – Gan Eden – and the nudist park Flevo-Natuur in Zeewolde are planning a nudist church service for 28 September. This is a result of the great success of an earlier such service at the end of June in which 80 nude people participated. Only the pastor, who came from the Roman Catholic diocese of Utrecht, was clothed.
www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/1461433/__Naakt_in_de_kerkbanken__.h

I was going to include pictures but since they're all in Dutch I figured it's not worth the efforts since no one could understand them. Being a naked hippie in church? Well, that makes universal sense.

Old Man Obama

While Gnosticism can, at times, have its creative side, when it comes to truly understanding the shared human source of our creativity, there's nothing new under the Gnostic Sun, not the least the desire of anxious youth to avoid facing certain humbling existential and human questions, preferring to think of themselves instead in the figure of a Sun King, as John Lennon once creatively imagined.

The power of Barack Obama's rhetoric, its ability to appear profound while saying little but "unite", "change", clearly appeals to the would-be uniters, the sun kings of latter days, as is now becoming all too apparent. One could snicker that Obama is simply telling the most guiltily race-conscious people in America that he is going to somehow free them from their guilt by constantly reminding them of the need for "change" and "unity". It's like the priest who keeps promising the forlorn that the Kingdom of God will appear on earth any day now.

But there is a larger point to be made: what Obama represents is a form of rhetoric that has for ages appealed to the young (and young-at-heart), including many happily race-conscious generations. In politics, there is always a divide, somewhere, and always a place for magicians who promise to overcome this hard reality. It's not that there aren't moments in political life when we can indeed overcome divisions; but these moments are always only temporary, as every new consensus gives way to new forms of difference: a consensus is something exchanged by people who have to be different to be engaged in human exchange, people who can never just all become the same thing and then freeze history in place. We are beings free to love and to resent any consensus; we can have no consensus, no shared new sign or idea, that is not already in the process of being exchanged, changed, eroded, reformed, etc. To be human is to exchange differences about what is only ultimately, i.e. originally, the same.

Joseph Knippenberg, writing about Dennis Hale's thoughts on the need for us to recognize the inevitability of division in politics sums up the question succinctly:

Hale makes the entirely commonsensical and grown-up point that choosing means dividing. Unity requires the overcoming or suppression of politics. Obama promises to build the kingdom on earth, which amounts to the overcoming of politics. But people who promise that usually end up trying to suppress politics.

If Obama were serious about unity, he'd be Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini. I credit him with not being altogether serious. He's merely, as Jonah G. would say, a liberal fascist.

I admit to rather liking that moniker, but at the end of the day, one has to face the reality that calling liberal fascists by their proper name is not a way to win them over to reality, as the outrage over Goldberg's book suggests.

As I say, it's not that unity is never possible; it's not that we can't all agree to change; it's just that if we are all to agree on change it has to be over a real promise that is truly open-ended, open to a further exchange of differences, open to new, if yet undeveloped, divisions. And if Obama presumes to represent such a promise, he needs to make clear how he can set up a new political dynamic, a new form of exchange, by bringing new ideas and realities into play in a way that widely raises excitement that a new game, a new challenge, is about to be unboxed and no one yet can know who will learn to master this game, since all players have reason to hope. That's a consensus: the start of an exciting game.

Since my colleagues here at Covenant Zone are frequently discussing how one can appeal to young people, this post began with the idea that I would put up some thoughtful comments from Knippenberg's colleague at NoLeftTurns, Julie Ponzi:

John McCain will not get the same kind of youth support that Barack Obama gets. Indeed, he ought not want to inspire that kind of reflexive, unthinking and insipid prostration.

But all young people are not twits. There is plenty to be tilled from the fertile garden of thinking and emerging-in-intelligence youth. John McCain can start by reminding us that he, too, was once young. He can talk about character in a way that inspires rather than chastises. His story is an inspiring one. He has not used it to as much good effect as he might--partly, I think, out of a sense of modesty and partly out of a (sensible) desire not to bring up the whole Vietnam debate and, thereby, hearken back to the debates of the 1960s (yet again). There is some danger in this, I admit. But the debate that Obama wants to engage is, for all his youth and inexperience, a very old one. This can be demonstrated. The truth is that Obama is nothing new under the sun. And he can be made to look very foolish for thinking that he is. Young people are always insecure about the possibility that they look foolish. Don't offend them by telling them that they are foolish--but point things out that lead them to this conclusion on their own.

There are things a septuagenarian can do to inspire young people. Two of them are NOT pandering to or ignoring them. Appeal to their minds and give them credit for having minds and then, perhaps, you may win their hearts. Such a strategy would do more than win McCain and the Republicans young voters. It would go a long way toward winning him all kinds of voters in general. For, in this need to have respect for our minds and in the desire not to appear as fools, we're all very young at heart.

Gnostics: You are a Religion too!

We talk a lot about Gnostics at this blog, but it's a concept not everyone is yet familiar with. So I thought I'd post this picture of an apparent Gnostic I just came across in reading the news:


The story is titled Supreme Court nixes suit over faith-based plan and we learn that:

Co-founder Annie Laurie Gaylor has helped transform the Freedom From Religion Foundation into the nation's largest group of atheists and agnostics, with a fast-rising membership and increasing legal clout.... [But]

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that ordinary taxpayers [i.e. organized atheists and agnostics] cannot challenge a White House initiative that helps religious charities get a share of federal money.

The 5-4 decision blocks a lawsuit by a group of atheists and agnostics against eight Bush administration officials including the head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The taxpayers' group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc., objected to government conferences in which administration officials encourage religious charities to apply for federal grants.
[...]
With the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, President Bush says he wants to level the playing field. Religious charities and secular charities should compete for government money on an equal footing.

Now I have no problem with constitutional arrangements that separate church and state, but taking the church out of the governing institutions does not mean taking the church out of civil society. But, I hear some people saying, having churches play a role in civil society and having the government fund this role are two very different matters. Why should taxpayers pay to support churches?

Well, the answer is that because once you have a government that takes it upon itself to levy huge taxes and have a hand in funding all manner of activities in "civil society", so that there are relatively few social or educational programs in the nation that are not in some way touched by government funding, you are left with the choice of either a totalitarian state telling everyone what to think or do, or a state that contracts with all kinds who can meet basic standards and requirements in their own way.

The alternative, of course, would be to have a society in which the state taxes and redistributes much less, and leaves people the responsibility of privately organizing, regulating, and funding civil society and commercial groups to take care of certain social needs, at least to the extent that private initiative can grow to the task (there would always have to be some state regulation). And yet, the historical reasons we don't live in such a world, while an outcome of complex events in the recent past, may be partly reduced to the idea that many of our historical forebears have not wanted to be part of a civil society in which churches played a strong role; rather, they wanted to be "secular", "modern" people who deferred to state-regulated and funded scientific "experts" to design social programs. The history of the twentieth century in North America illustrates just such a widespread development.

Historically, the outcome of wanting "freedom from religion" has been a movement towards a technocratic and somewhat totalitarian state, that is epitomized today by the European bureaucratic elites attempting to outlaw creationist ideas. But this belief in the need for a rule of experts who have the scientific knowledge to solve our social problems without recourse to traditional religious commitments, has not panned out if the goal has been to make a society relatively at peace with itself, happily reproducing itself in a strong commitment to future generations. Social science has not saved us from bad faith, and it has often made things worse.

This is because those who want "freedom from religion", i.e. freedom from something so inherently human, without asking why it is inherently human and respecting it on some level as such, are themselves trapped in an essentially religious gesture, without the benefit of knowing it and thus reflecting on it intelligently: it's analogous to the gesture of the high priest in some temple sacrifice who thinks that by casting out some scapegoat/evil (religion! go!), the community will be saved (as if the evil were not inherent in the human condition, and sure to return once the scapegoat is gone); or that of the magician/alchemist who has special knowledge which turns today's dross into some more enlightened gold.

In short, those who call for "freedom from religion" are Gnostics who believe that they have the special key that opens doors to the real truth, the real creation, that all the rest of us who are religiously sunk in some fallen human condition are too pig ignorant to appreciate. But, the truth is humans cannot really practise "freedom from religion", no more than they can practise freedom from economics or freedom from esthetics, or freedom from anything else fundamental to the anthropological nature of our partly transcendent human Being (look again at the photo above and note how the words "Freedom from Religion", not to mention the woman's body language, transcend the merely physical existence of a woman and a window). And the attempt to do so does not make one more reasonable and less indebted to ritualism or irrationality, but rather more so. It is always a choice of what kind of religion, economics, esthetics you are going to prefer. And you cannot thus escape the responsibility of asking what kind of religion and what kind of relationship between church and state, maximizes human goods like reason, freedom, and equality. To simply cry "freedom from religion" likely reveals you as an anthropologically not serious person with a rebellious adolescent personality. Unfortunately, such people largely rule the bureaucracies of today and can win four out of nine votes on the present American Supreme Court. No doubt they dominate the Canadian court.

By coincidence, Jim Kalb has a neat way of summing all this up on his blog today. He picks up a complaint of Barack Obama, the American presidential candidate:

Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart.

Kalb replies

The change is not so mysterious. In the 60s or thereabouts governing elites decisively rejected their residual connection to traditional Christianity, at bottom in the interests of a purer form of technocratic rule. The school prayer and abortion decisions mark the transition: the public order became purely secular and self-contained, and the value of human life became a matter of will, utility and technique. Once those things had happened any assertion of traditional views in public life became, from the official point of view, ipso facto heretical and schismatic (in current language, “extremist and divisive”). An average American would become an antisocial radical if he just stayed what he had always been and presented his views in public. And that’s why the divisive forces Senator Obama worries about suddenly appeared in our public life.

In other words, if we are called to attend to the culture war and the divisive politics of "religious fundamentalists", it is our duty to ask which divisive fundamentalists: the so-called "secular" Gnostics?

The secular, it turns out, is just another form of the sacred, and not necessarily a better one, just as a "foundation" may be just another word for "church".

Here's a new one: Gnosticism and "Incarnophobia"

Regular readers of this blog will know our propensity to label so much of left-liberal-progressive political ideology as one or another kind of "gnosticism": broadly, the belief that there is something wrong with the creation or the world as it has been given to us, that the true creation, or some possible better world, is unnecessarily obscured from our present view, and that through some kind of heroic, intellectual, perhaps magical, operation in the here and now we can avoid further decline and disaster by transforming the world. The gnostic thus implies that we can transform the traditional Judeo-Christian faith in a salvation that is only to come in a transcendent or divine world, into faith in salvation through a commitment to a progressive cause and history in this immanent, worldly, existence.

I like to argue that while the gnostic faith has had its hand in some real worldly progress, historically - it is hard to imagine the rise of modern science without it - the faith has now had its day, as is evident in the present bankruptcy (moral and ethical) of "progressive" politics. I believe that the expansion of human freedom in future will require a return to certain orthodoxies, to disciplines that allow the human soul to have a sound grasp of our uncertain existential reality - avoiding the desire to control or transform our given reality - not that I know exactly what these will be for any given person or group.

I tend to contrast gnosticism with the patient faith of those who can wait endlessly for the return of the Messiah, those who also have faith that our worldly future is open-ended and so unknowable, that mundane history is not progressing in any linear sense, nor that there is any reason to hope it could progress in any consistent or knowable, i.e. controllable, sense, under the management of experts. Rather, I believe that human cultural evolution - i.e. the ways in which the human scene may be represented and organized - is inexhaustible, and that no final apocalypse, or great revelation, is presently unfolding. We will expand freedom by doing away with the gnostic experts who presently rule too much of our public opinion, by building nations in which anyone can have a healthy say and role in ruling themselves together through covenants (which will require its own kinds of expertise). But to do this we must first relearn our faith in ourselves, in the ultimate goodness and open-endedness of our shared humanity.

It is useful to have very general categories, like "gnosticism", that can tie together a wide range of phenomena we can then further differentiate. It is important to recognize that there are certain basic, recurring, patterns to human experience, and that our study of these may serve as starting points for our analysis of the historical particulars of our place and time. Still, to the inevitably somewhat gnostic mind (I doubt any of us can entirely free ourselves from the gnostic faith that has been so central to modern life) that is always looking for that special key to understanding and/or transforming our fallen nature, or our less-than-perfect social/cultural history, it can seem pointless to label every progressive or utopian ideologue who promises worldly salvation as a "gnostic". Let's have a little more precision here, people say.

Well I, for one, am certainly not against an ongoing differentiation of our consciousness in such matters, even as I hold to the usefulness of the broad category. So in this spirit, though knowing this will be contentious for some of our readers (but I hope useful for us to discuss), allow me to present for our ongoing consideration of gnosticism, Mark Gordon, of the blog, Suicide of the West and his Catholic convert's reflection on what he sees as the protestant-cum-gnostic (or perhaps, gnostic-cum-protestant) struggle to control time, or to control people through a "levelling" (making uniform and worldly) of our understanding of time, in such a way that man's worldly pursuits, the valuing of acts before faith, become the foundation of our experience of time and how we symbolize this experience and its promise of salvation:

it has been a tremendous grace for me to learn to live within the metronomic rhythm of the Church’s liturgical year. It took me a few cycles, but eventully the movement from Advent through the Feast of Christ the King became second nature. I don’t know when or why the Christians in my native tradition did away with the liturgical calendar. I can understand their dismissal of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (I guess), but Pentecost? The Transfiguration? Even the Annunciation? The wholesale levelling of time in the Evangelical tradition is a sign of the essentially gnostic and Manichean assumptions that inform so much of Evangelical theology and practice, assumptions which themselves spring from what I would call Incarnophobia: a fear of the Incarnation and its implications.