Category Archives: Culture war

The Science of Evil

Michael Rectenwald's Review of "Political Ponerology"

“Political Ponerology” is the title of a book on the science of evil, written by Polish author Andrew M. Łobaczewski and first published in 1984 (!). US academic Michael Rectenwald has read it and written a review on mises.org. He starts by saying:

This strange and provocative book argues that totalitarianism is the result of the extension of psychopathology from a group of psychopaths to the entire body politic, including its political and economic systems. 

He goes on to say:

Łobaczewski made the bold claim that he’d uncovered “the general laws of the origin of evil.” If true, the book was on par with Newton’s Principia in the physical sciences, while being of greater practical importance. And he approached this domain from the disciplinary perspective of psychology. Such an “individualist” methodology had been dismissed as mere “psychologism” in my own and many other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Łobaczewski’s insistence to focus on individual psychological disorders to understand the unfolding of “macrosocial evil” seemed mistaken to me initially, but this approach accords well with Joseph Schumpeter’s methodological individualism, which became a hallmark of the Austrian school. My assumption had always been that one needed to study political ideology and economics and that political ideology and economic theory explained nearly everything one needed to know about how and why totalitarian evil comes about.

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The Naughty Boy of Evangelicalism

Offers a good, concise description of the three basic types of Christians

Doug Wilson, on his Website “Blog and Mablog” describes the condition of evangelical Christianity in today’s world, following the pattern first formulated by Gary North:

First, those believers who have a yen for power may be called friends-of-the-regime. They do not make claims of control over your life directly, but they certainly want to be on the good side of those who do. They want to be fully cooperative with them, believing that helping the tyrants forge your chains should be called something like “loving your neighbor.” These are the pastors and elders who want to assume the very best about the latest contradictory fog bank from the CDC, and who assume the very worst about the consciences of their own most faithful parishioners.

Second, those believers who are keeping their head down until the rapture are seeking a way of escape. Or, if dispensational theology is not their bag, this kind of person might retreat into pietism or confessionalism. The pietist wants to keep his own personal nose clean until God sees fit to take him out of this dirty world, and so he wants to escape unnoticed in this world until he can escape unnoticed to a better world. And the escapist confessionalist wants to sit in the red sports car of the historic Reformed tradition, fire that baby up, put the clutch all the way in, all the way to the floor, and, together with R. Scott Clark, make vroom vroom noises.

And then, third, we have those with a mind for dominion. These are the believers who seek to labor under the grace of God, seeking to have God load those labors up with what I call Deuteronomic blessings in this life, and in the life to come, all of Christ. This third group is the historic Reformed position. It was held by John Calvin, Pierre Viret, Martin Bucer, John Knox, the Westminster divines, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper, and, quite humbled to be included in such an august listing, and not quite sure how I came to be added to it, me.

He adds some thoughts about how things are going currently:

The now thoroughly discredited leadership of the evangelical movement has been our Neville Chamberlain, and our last two years of chaos have been Hitler’s invasion of Poland. I speak in a dark parable. But the coming leadership of evangelicalism will need to be Churchillian—or we perish.

Is it Time for Intellectuals to Talk about God?

Another progressive leftist finds religion in the face of the pandemic measures

Naomi Wolf is a well-known left-wing, secular, progressive, human-rights (in particular women’s rights) activist. Or rather, was.

She wrote recently, in an article whose title I have copied for this entry:

I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends. [My emphases.]

Wolf, who is of Jewish heritage, concludes:

So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence. [My emphasis.]

This is amazing. After journalist James Delingpole, who was a more or less secular conservative, and Professor Mark Crispin Miller, a (former) leftist secular academic, we have a third more or less well-known public personas who profess that the pandemic, or rather the public reaction to the pandemic, have led, or should one say, driven them to God. Of those three, Naomi Wolf is by far the most famous.

Admittedly, she’s not Christian. She writes in the same article: “As I often say, I’ll take any faith tradition. I’ll talk to God in any language — I don’t think forms really matter. I think intention is everything.”

Still, I see a trend, a pattern. Let’s see who’s next.

After Covid

We won’t get normality back without a fight

Over at Spiked-online, Brendan O’Neill observes and comments on the rather sudden change in tune in the official and mainstream commentariat regarding all things Covid. He writes:

“Suddenly, everyone’s talking about getting back to normal. After 22 months of restrictions, of going in and out of lockdown, of a suspension of civil liberties that was unprecedented in modern peacetime Britain, all the talk is of ‘moving on’. Let’s learn to live with Covid, politicians say.”

He rightly says that “moving on” won’t be easy.

“As sociologist and SAGE adviser Robert Dingwall said back in May 2020, officialdom ‘effectively terrorised’ the public into believing Covid would kill them if they broke the rules. We created a ‘climate of fear’, he said. The consequence of terrorising the public, rather than galvanising us to pull together to combat the spread of Covid and assist the vulnerable, became clear very early on. Snitching abounded. Neighbours told on neighbours. Venturing outside came to be viewed as dangerous anti-social behaviour. Police forces went wild, clearing people out of parks for no good reason and even sending drones to spy on dog-walkers in scenic country spots. The culture of atomisation that predated Covid was intensified by the terror officialdom deployed in response to Covid. Repairing solidarity will be a tough task.”

“And what about the culture of freedom? Forget, for a moment, the way our legally guaranteed liberties were put on ice during this crisis. That was bad, no question. But a more injurious if sometimes intangible process was taking place alongside this temporary unwinding of our rights. The culture of freedom was undermined. The individual self-confidence and social trust that freedom depends upon, which freedom cannot exist without, was pummelled, day in, day out. We were educated to distrust others, to distrust ourselves.”

His conclusion:

“We hear a lot about ‘Covid denialism’, about those who deny the scientific reality of Covid-19’s impact on human health. Those people are certainly worth challenging. But I would venture that there is a worse problem – cultural denialism; the blinkered belief that lockdown was a simple and straightforward measure to deal with a health crisis rather than something that was also highly influenced by the cultures of fear, distrust and censorship that sadly define this young century. To my mind, this cultural denialism is worse than scientific denialism because it keeps at bay the political reckoning we will need to have if we are ever to restore the human connections and individual self-belief that are necessary to a good society. For nearly two years we’ve been told that protecting health is the highest aim of human society. We now need to make a very different case – that it is freedom that makes life worth living, and that everything should be bent towards making freedom a reality for all people. Let’s fight for that normality.”

The Only Safe Sex

"The combination of Eros and Agape that is the recipe for true love"

On the LewRockwell.com site, Ira Katz posted an essay yesterday that he says he wrote more than 20 years ago and never published before. “It describes another controversy about safety sex, like we are experiencing today with Covid . . . I have edited it somewhat, but there are no hyperlinks and some of the information could be dated.”

Two quotes:

“If one has sex through this true love it is really safe.  The other would never put you at risk by being diseased.  In fact you would know him so well to be sure he was disease free.  You would not feel the slightest risk of abandonment because you were really sharing one life, not passing fluids between two passing lives.  This love is usually anointed by society through the institution of marriage.”

“Of course we cannot expect to find the perfect love very often.  Yet I think it is better to try and achieve some aspect of Eros and Agape than to simply submit to our animal instincts.  Contraceptives, in a profound way, have broken our society by allowing us to act on our instincts without feeling the immediate effects of our actions.  Furthermore, they have added to a culture which rates sex as the highest order of life, greatly demeaning life.  For these reasons I believe contraceptives can never provide safe sex.”

The full article is here.

The unbearable smugness of the Netflix elites

'Don’t Look Up' is a preposterous movie that is wrong about everything.

Brendan O’Neill has written a devastating critique of a film I hadn’t even heard about before I saw his article. However, it’s important to know about it because it appears to exemplify how not only “the media” tries very hard to influence our thinking, and not only the big tech companies try very hard to keep us shielded from information and opinions that could change our thinking away from what the media wants us to think. It exemplifies how very hard, and very crudely, the entertainment industry tries to influence our thinking as well – instead of simply entertaining us.

Here’s O’Neill’s summary of his article:

Don’t Look Up sums up the unbearable smugness of the Netflix elites, of those West and East Coast cultural movers and shakers who see it as their responsibility to ‘raise the awareness’ of the little people. The makers of this movie really have convinced themselves that they are brave soothsayers who risk being collared by the CIA and capitalism itself for their reckless propagation of The Truth, when in reality they themselves are the new corporate elites who exercise an extraordinary amount of influence over public life in the 21st century. These days, it isn’t ‘denialism’ that is the problem – it’s catastrophism, the view of everything, especially climate change, as a calamity that our hubristic species has brought upon itself. That is the elite consensus opinion right now and, not surprisingly, Netflix, the cultural embodiment of the new elites, is riddled with this decadent, indulgent End of Days hysteria.

Two short statements on Christianity

Star Wars and Western Civilisation

In a recent dialog between Jordan Peterson and Angus Fletcher, who is a Professor of Story Science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, the world’s leading academic think-tank for narrative theory.

(Fletcher says he is interested in “how stories work in the brain”. He got his PhD from Yale. Apparently, according to Fletcher, all sorts of institutions are very interested in the research of his project, it is “backed” by leading neuroscientists and psychologists, doctors, nurses, social workers. Fair enough. But he also mentions as backers: big business, the US army, the special operations community, the air force. Why in the world would they be interested in “narrative theory”? I have ideas, but won’t speculate here.)

Anyway, two short statements stood out, both made by Jordan Peterson:

  1. Star Wars is “Christianity for atheistic nerds”. It’s “inescapable”.
  2. Christianity provides the narrative that forms the cultural foundation of western civilisation. (This latter is quoted from memory and may be paraphrased, as I didn’t bother writing it down at the time.)

Against Apocalyptic Environmentalism

A discussion between Jordan Peterson and upbeat environmentalist Michael Shellenberger

Jordan Peterson, the celebrated psychologist and campaigner against restricted speech and other forms of censorship, has been back for quite a few months now after a long bout of mental and physical illness. His new, preferred format is long (1 to 2 hours) discussions with people who, like him, have done their homework and have something to say.

His latest discussion is with Michael Shellenberger, author of the book titled “Apocalypse Never”. I’ve watched the whole 1 hour 50 minutes of the conversation, and here are my notes and impressions of it. (I don’t claim my rendition is exhaustive. However, I think it provides a good idea of what was said.)

First of all: What a blessing it is, and how refreshing, in this age of quick memes, talking points and “cancellations”, to be able to follow two highly intelligent human beings involved in an exchange of ideas, ranging far, wide, and above all, deep, on some highly topical, contentious and relevant issues.

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