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Post by hibernicus on Jul 16, 2015 13:38:58 GMT
I would think that the simpler liturgical approach in Ireland had more to do with our position as a mission country and the relative weakness/absence of a Catholic aristocracy, with their attachment to ceremonial. For that matter, part of the attachment to flamboyant devotions in the C19 and early C20 was meant as a counterweight to or substitute for the royal and aristocratic ceremonial associated with the ancien regime (and post-independence with Britain) while part of the sober and puritanical public image of post-independence regimes, especially de Valera's, was a deliberate reaction against the memory of the old aristocracy (and conversely, the pseudo-aristocratic display of Charlie Haughey in the next generation and some of his cronies was a way of saying "we're as good as they are and needn't fear the comparison; some of WT Cosgrave's ministers showed traces of this as well, but on nothing like the same scale as Charlie Haughey).
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 3, 2015 22:31:13 GMT
This article has some very useful insights to the sociological dimension of why our elites go in for progressivist secularism. Bear in mind sociology is part of the story, but only part www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/4410/why_the_unreality.aspxEXTRACT Such views don’t explain the position secular progressivism holds in public life today: its increasing grip on institutions and professions, its extension to ever more aspects of life, its success in remaking mainstream political and religious movements in its image, its ambition to silence all opposition, its resilience that enables it to come back from all reverses. When non-progressives say some new initiative is silly and won’t last—“gay marriage,” “micro-aggressions,” or whatever—they’re routinely proven wrong, at least on the second point. Such successes argue for an outlook that is rooted in basic and enduring features of modern life and how modern people look at the world. They show that even what seem like absurdities can’t be laughed off, but must be taken very seriously, because there’s more thought and institutional momentum behind them than might appear. What I’m calling progressivism, which is the dominant view of our time, has a theoretical and an institutional side. On the theoretical side it might be summed up as a tendency toward scientism, the view that an idealized version of modern natural science is the unique model for knowledge and reason. That view denies qualitative distinctions and turns goods into preferences, because it wants to accept only what is publicly observable and quantifiable. It also implies a sort of moral egalitarianism: preferences define what is good, and all preferences are equally preferences, so they are equally valid and have an equal claim to satisfaction. To reject a preference is baseless discrimination against the person whose preference it is, and thus a form of hatred and oppression. It’s worth noting that scientism is not scientific, and often aligns itself with obfuscation. Science is a matter of what works in a concrete sense, and lets the chips fall where they may. If observations such as brain scans show basic differences in how men and women think about things, science accepts that. Scientism in contrast is a matter of ideals and standards of legitimacy, so its adherents typically accept other progressive ideals and standards, including radical egalitarianism. When confronted with adverse scientific findings they’re likely to resolve the conflict by denying that the findings imply anything and attacking those who suggest otherwise. On the institutional side, progressivism might be summed up as the attempt to organize social life rationally toward explicitly chosen goals, principally maximum equal preference satisfaction, but also the coherence, effectiveness, and stability of the system. With the latter point in mind, the preferences to be treated equally must be limited to those that fit smoothly into the system, chiefly those relating to career aspirations, consumer goods, and private indulgences. In contrast, goals related to the things traditionally considered most important—God, the good, beautiful, and true, loyalty to family and community—have to be suppressed as disruptive or reduced to the level of private hobbies or consumption choices. Both the theoretical and institutional sides of progressivism are immensely powerful. Scientism has the prestige that comes from the extraordinary success of the natural sciences in extending man’s control over nature, and the practical advantages that come from the enormous growth of formal education and occupational certification. Also, it encourages a cult of the expert and rejection of the intuitive that enables it to rule out other more commonsensical points of view without a hearing. It is assumed that people who don’t fully accept scientism and associated views haven’t been trained properly, so they’re uneducated or stupid. To the extent they make judgments based on ordinary human ways of thinking, which are based mostly on informal pattern recognition, they’re insisting on the reality and importance of tendencies and distinctions that haven’t been demonstrated to exist and matter. That means they’re ignorant bigots who want to enforce their prejudices on others, and what they say isn’t worthy of response. Institutional progressivism, the attempt to make all social life part of a single rationalized system, has the prestige that comes from alliance with science and technological ways of thinking, as well as from the power and pervasiveness of the modern state and modern methods of economic organization. More and more of life has been integrated into large formal institutions run in accordance with official ways of thinking. Such institutions—corporations, educational institutions, government agencies—now bring us up and educate us, inform and inspire us, and provide the setting, projects, and rewards to which we devote our best efforts. That situation leads intelligent and high-functioning people to identify more and more with such institutions and the ways of thinking that motivate them, and to find the purpose of their lives in their careers. Such tendencies profoundly affect their outlook on life and the world. Consider, for example, the way such a person is likely to view the sexes. All societies have viewed sex distinctions as basic to human life, largely because of their function in family life. Progressivism however insists that no form of family life is better than another. To say the contrary, for example to say that marriage is less real between two men than between a man and a woman, or there’s something wrong with unwed motherhood or living together without marriage, is considered intolerably discriminatory. Progressives thus want to treat family life as an optional personal activity with no specific form or function, so that each can make up his own version and change it at will. It follows that today the sort of intelligent, educated, and ambitious person who is likely to lead opinion has no way to understand what sex differences are about. Experts will tell him that evidence regarding them is mixed, since evidence can always be viewed as insufficient when people want to avoid a conclusion. So he will doubt their reality, and to the extent he accepts them he will see them as a random collection of meaningless traits that developed under very different conditions and have historically been used to support oppressive institutions like the natural family. And it will be perfectly clear to him that the kind of people who take them seriously are the kind of people from whom he wants above all to distinguish himself—the stupid, the uneducated, the provincial, the traditionally religious, the bigoted, the low-status. With that background, it becomes very unlikely that a career-oriented professional, who has been trained to consider counter-intuitive beliefs a mark of superior knowledge, and belief in equality the very essence of morality, will accept the existence and importance of sex differences. If he can’t quite deny them, he will find ways to minimize them, obfuscate them, shrug them off, change the subject, and so on. Similar considerations apply to other progressive views that seem odd to non-progressives. Once it is accepted that counter-intuitive views are better, since they suggest special expertise and oppose traditional assumptions and stereotypes, that all human society must be continually reconstructed in the interests of efficiency, equality, and rationality, and that success in life is success within the institutions that promote such views, the sky’s the limit. There’s almost no limit on how nonsensical people’s opinions may become—as indeed we see around us. END This resonates with a lot of what I see in academia. In the modern Irish context, laughing at the naive Catholic provincials who actually believe (as a mass-media phenomenon as distinct from being confined to Bohemian subcultures or discreet sections of the well-to-do) had already taken off in the Sixties and Seventies. Those old enough to remember HALL'S PICTORIAL WEEKLY in the Seventies will recall the Mothers of Seven and the Ballymagash councillors. In America, the attitude of the coastal elites to the hicks in flyover country is very similar. The discussion of why the IRish media liked to publicise Mine Bean Ui Chribin as exemplifying Catholic "conservatism" (see the Gregory XVII thread) is relevant to this.
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Post by Young Ireland on Dec 3, 2015 22:39:54 GMT
This article has some very useful insights to the sociological dimension of why our elites go in for progressivist secularism. Bear in mind sociology is part of the story, but only part www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/4410/why_the_unreality.aspxEXTRACT Such views don’t explain the position secular progressivism holds in public life today: its increasing grip on institutions and professions, its extension to ever more aspects of life, its success in remaking mainstream political and religious movements in its image, its ambition to silence all opposition, its resilience that enables it to come back from all reverses. When non-progressives say some new initiative is silly and won’t last—“gay marriage,” “micro-aggressions,” or whatever—they’re routinely proven wrong, at least on the second point. Such successes argue for an outlook that is rooted in basic and enduring features of modern life and how modern people look at the world. They show that even what seem like absurdities can’t be laughed off, but must be taken very seriously, because there’s more thought and institutional momentum behind them than might appear. What I’m calling progressivism, which is the dominant view of our time, has a theoretical and an institutional side. On the theoretical side it might be summed up as a tendency toward scientism, the view that an idealized version of modern natural science is the unique model for knowledge and reason. That view denies qualitative distinctions and turns goods into preferences, because it wants to accept only what is publicly observable and quantifiable. It also implies a sort of moral egalitarianism: preferences define what is good, and all preferences are equally preferences, so they are equally valid and have an equal claim to satisfaction. To reject a preference is baseless discrimination against the person whose preference it is, and thus a form of hatred and oppression. It’s worth noting that scientism is not scientific, and often aligns itself with obfuscation. Science is a matter of what works in a concrete sense, and lets the chips fall where they may. If observations such as brain scans show basic differences in how men and women think about things, science accepts that. Scientism in contrast is a matter of ideals and standards of legitimacy, so its adherents typically accept other progressive ideals and standards, including radical egalitarianism. When confronted with adverse scientific findings they’re likely to resolve the conflict by denying that the findings imply anything and attacking those who suggest otherwise. On the institutional side, progressivism might be summed up as the attempt to organize social life rationally toward explicitly chosen goals, principally maximum equal preference satisfaction, but also the coherence, effectiveness, and stability of the system. With the latter point in mind, the preferences to be treated equally must be limited to those that fit smoothly into the system, chiefly those relating to career aspirations, consumer goods, and private indulgences. In contrast, goals related to the things traditionally considered most important—God, the good, beautiful, and true, loyalty to family and community—have to be suppressed as disruptive or reduced to the level of private hobbies or consumption choices. Both the theoretical and institutional sides of progressivism are immensely powerful. Scientism has the prestige that comes from the extraordinary success of the natural sciences in extending man’s control over nature, and the practical advantages that come from the enormous growth of formal education and occupational certification. Also, it encourages a cult of the expert and rejection of the intuitive that enables it to rule out other more commonsensical points of view without a hearing. It is assumed that people who don’t fully accept scientism and associated views haven’t been trained properly, so they’re uneducated or stupid. To the extent they make judgments based on ordinary human ways of thinking, which are based mostly on informal pattern recognition, they’re insisting on the reality and importance of tendencies and distinctions that haven’t been demonstrated to exist and matter. That means they’re ignorant bigots who want to enforce their prejudices on others, and what they say isn’t worthy of response. Institutional progressivism, the attempt to make all social life part of a single rationalized system, has the prestige that comes from alliance with science and technological ways of thinking, as well as from the power and pervasiveness of the modern state and modern methods of economic organization. More and more of life has been integrated into large formal institutions run in accordance with official ways of thinking. Such institutions—corporations, educational institutions, government agencies—now bring us up and educate us, inform and inspire us, and provide the setting, projects, and rewards to which we devote our best efforts. That situation leads intelligent and high-functioning people to identify more and more with such institutions and the ways of thinking that motivate them, and to find the purpose of their lives in their careers. Such tendencies profoundly affect their outlook on life and the world. Consider, for example, the way such a person is likely to view the sexes. All societies have viewed sex distinctions as basic to human life, largely because of their function in family life. Progressivism however insists that no form of family life is better than another. To say the contrary, for example to say that marriage is less real between two men than between a man and a woman, or there’s something wrong with unwed motherhood or living together without marriage, is considered intolerably discriminatory. Progressives thus want to treat family life as an optional personal activity with no specific form or function, so that each can make up his own version and change it at will. It follows that today the sort of intelligent, educated, and ambitious person who is likely to lead opinion has no way to understand what sex differences are about. Experts will tell him that evidence regarding them is mixed, since evidence can always be viewed as insufficient when people want to avoid a conclusion. So he will doubt their reality, and to the extent he accepts them he will see them as a random collection of meaningless traits that developed under very different conditions and have historically been used to support oppressive institutions like the natural family. And it will be perfectly clear to him that the kind of people who take them seriously are the kind of people from whom he wants above all to distinguish himself—the stupid, the uneducated, the provincial, the traditionally religious, the bigoted, the low-status. With that background, it becomes very unlikely that a career-oriented professional, who has been trained to consider counter-intuitive beliefs a mark of superior knowledge, and belief in equality the very essence of morality, will accept the existence and importance of sex differences. If he can’t quite deny them, he will find ways to minimize them, obfuscate them, shrug them off, change the subject, and so on. Similar considerations apply to other progressive views that seem odd to non-progressives. Once it is accepted that counter-intuitive views are better, since they suggest special expertise and oppose traditional assumptions and stereotypes, that all human society must be continually reconstructed in the interests of efficiency, equality, and rationality, and that success in life is success within the institutions that promote such views, the sky’s the limit. There’s almost no limit on how nonsensical people’s opinions may become—as indeed we see around us. END This resonates with a lot of what I see in academia. In the modern Irish context, laughing at the naive Catholic provincials who actually believe (as a mass-media phenomenon as distinct from being confined to Bohemian subcultures or discreet sections of the well-to-do) had already taken off in the Sixties and Seventies. Those old enough to remember HALL'S PICTORIAL WEEKLY in the Seventies will recall the Mothers of Seven and the Ballymagash councillors. In America, the attitude of the coastal elites to the hicks in flyover country is very similar. The discussion of why the IRish media liked to publicise Mine Bean Ui Chribin as exemplifying Catholic "conservatism" (see the Gregory XVII thread) is relevant to this. Yes, as someone from a rural background, I definitely get a whiff of disinterest, indeed contempt for rural Ireland amongst the media, the IFA scandal being a good example of this. Picking the Palmarians as a typical example of Catholic "conservatism" seems to be pretty lazy to be honest, they'd actually be more correct picking a Williamson sympathiser. On a seperate note, I think this could also be applied to Northern nationalists more recently, since these tend to be more religious and socially conservative in general than their southern bretheren. The fact that many said nationalists hold rather obnoxious political views doesn't help matters either.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Dec 3, 2015 22:57:29 GMT
The discussion of why the IRish media liked to publicise Mine Bean Ui Chribin as exemplifying Catholic "conservatism" (see the Gregory XVII thread) is relevant to this. I never realised this lady was so well-known. As a native Ballymunner I am quite proud of her!
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Dec 4, 2015 10:19:05 GMT
The discussion of why the Irish media liked to publicise Mine Bean Ui Chribin as exemplifying Catholic "conservatism" (see the Gregory XVII thread) is relevant to this. I never realised this lady was so well-known. As a native Ballymunner I am quite proud of her! I remember the day after the Econe consecrations, in one of the evening papers, the Herald or Press, some journalist (who obviously had more than a nodding acquaintance with the Church, at least he practiced to some degree) wrote a piece where he imagined a traditional Catholic going home that evening and saying: "Mine, we've been excommunicated". Now in 1988, Mine was still a Palmarian and regarded the Pixies as liberal sellouts. But she was well-known enough to be identified as a representative of traditionalism for everybody else.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 9, 2015 21:10:42 GMT
This piece on the "anti-humanist" subculture in American humanities academia is very instructive, both in what it says about its subject and what it unintentionally says about the author: thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-coolEXTRACTS Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism? This essay is not just for those who identify with the canaries in the mine, but for anyone who browses through current journals and is left with an impression of deadness or meanness. I believe that the progressive fervor of the humanities, while it reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction. In the name of critique, anything except critique can be invaded or denatured. This is the game of academic cool that flourished in the era of high theory. Yet what began as theory persists as style. Though it is hardly the case that everyone (progressive or otherwise) approves of this mode, it enjoys prestige, a fact that cannot but affect morale in the field as a whole. The reflections that follow focus largely on English, my home discipline and a trendsetter for the other modern language disciplines. These days nothing in English is “cool” in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole. Some years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick touched on this complex in her well-known essay on paranoid reading, where she identified a strain of “hatred” in criticism. Also salient is a more recent piece in which Bruno Latour has described how scholars slip from “critique” into “critical barbarity,” giving “cruel treatment” to experiences and ideals that non-academics treat as objects of tender concern. Rita Felski’s current work on the state of criticism has reenergized the conversation on the punitive attitudes encouraged by the hermeneutics of suspicion. And Susan Fraiman’s powerful analysis of the “cool male” intellectual style favored in academia is concerned with many of the same patterns I consider here. I hope to show that the kind of thinking these scholars, among others, have criticized has survived the supposed death of theory. More, it encourages an intellectual sadism that the profession would do well to reflect on... Repeatedly, we will find scholars using theory—or simply attitude—to burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation. Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the engulfing collective. Ultimately I suggest that within English as a human system, this gestalt works to create a corps of compliant professionals. Novices subliminally absorb the message that they have no boundaries against the profession itself. The theories they master in graduate school are such as to make their own core selves—or what, within the lexicon of D. W. Winnicott, would be called their “true selves”—look suspect and easy to puncture analytically. What by contrast is untouchable, and supports a new and enhanced professional self, is what Slavoj Žižek, without apparent irony, has called “the inherent correctness of theory itself.” Halberstam’s article hardly represents the best theoretical work of the 1990s. I introduce this piece because it embodies, almost in caricature, a studied coldness that enjoyed a vogue in that decade and has influenced subsequent criticism. Readers who know the novel The Silence of the Lambs or Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation will recall the murderer Buffalo Bill, who fashions a cloak from the skins of his female victims. In a well-known reading of the film, Halberstam suggests that Bill is as much “hero” as villain. For he “challenges the . . . misogynist constructions of the humanness, the naturalness, the interiority of gender.” By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill refutes the idea that maleness and femaleness are carried within us. “Gender,” Halberstam explains, is “always posthuman, always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body bag.” The corpse, once flayed, “is no woman”; “it has been degendered, it is postgender, skinned and fleshed.” Halberstam blends her perspective uncritically with the hero-villain’s posthuman sensibility, which she sees as registering “a historical shift” to an era marked by the destruction of gender binaries and “of the boundary between inside and outside.” In her more responsible, empirical work on gender identities, Halberstam has described some of the ways in which society does “stitch” people into genders that are taken for natural. But here she reads a fictional text allegorically, to suggest that there is no selfhood at all beneath our cultural stitching. For if Bill pulls each victim apart without concern for what the article sceptically calls an “inner life,” it is apparently because there is no such thing as an inner life. Not only gender but also “identity . . . proves only to be skin deep.” Bill “hates identity” and addresses his victims as “it.” He enacts “a carnage of identity.” Yet the article gives us no terms in which to describe this as unhealthy or cruel behavior... The dismissal of personal identity as a form of private property is an inheritance from high theory. A similar rhetoric appeared, for example, in an article in which Fredric Jameson suggested that “bourgeois” individuals experience their “ego” as “secur[e],” feel they have a “unique personal self,” and believe in “some unique life or destiny that [one] might claim as a privilege (or indeed as a form of spiritual or existential private property).” The words “bourgeois,” “privilege,” and “private property” cast the taint of middle-class entitlement on anyone who hopes for a stable sense of self. The general academic distaste for the “ego” is due partly to the influence of Lacanian theory on this community.[5] Yet ego functioning is an essential human capacity, without which no one would be able to keep a promise or take responsibility for his or her behavior. Too often, literary criticism conflates this capacity with the illusion of rock-solid selfhood that modern capitalist societies arguably encourage in their members. Also attributed to an oppressive bourgeois ideology is the human capacity for self-organization and self-regulation. For example, and still within ELH, we find an article describing how the mid-Victorian “discipline of the nervous body” encouraged a form of self-regulation based on “modern modes of regulatory order, efficiency, and rational self-control.” Another piece suggests that “self-reflecting individuality”—the sense of having a distinctive inner life that one can reflect on—is a product of the “individualism” promoted by “industrial capitalism [and] middle class enterprise.” And the very sense of having a self with boundaries—however flexible—appears in ELH largely in its negative version. For example, bounded selfhood is associated with the “imperious self-containment” proposed by humanism, or (different article, same paradigm) “the masculine, self-contained, ‘Western individual.’” Perhaps the most suspect of all the ideas connected with selfhood is that of “self-cultivation,” which another article conflates with the kind of personal “development” that creates “upward mobility” and lands a person “squarely in the professional middle class.” Yet there is a near silence as to whether there exist any positive, beneficial forms of self-organization, individuality, inwardness, or self-boundaries. The stigma of “humanism” has made these ideals look retrograde. Those pieces in ELH that do speak affirmatively about inwardness tend to take a muted, historicist approach. I think, for example, of a lovely article about the Quaker “inner light,” which, alas, views the latter as an effect of “early modern masculinity,” something contemporary academics would hardly identify with. By contrast, those who think little of interiority can reject this concept outright, with decades of theoretical opinion behind them. They can say, for example, without spending time defending their views, that “the truth of inner life” is a construct of “enlightenment thinking about selfhood” and an extension of “humanist” and “Christian” ideology. Very occasionally, an article within the nine-year sample does suggest that differentiated selfhood has something to recommend it. According to an unspoken rule, a scholar can risk entertaining such a humanist idea if he or she is writing about a socially marginal or oppressed group. An example is a thoughtful article on Wilde that proposes, against the theories of Judith Butler, that there exists “some perdurable form of selfhood that performative acts can neither contain nor efface.” More simply, it is valuable to have “a coherent sense of self.” Because the focus is on Wilde and homoerotic desire, the supposed conservatism of the ideal of self-coherence is offset and the article is viable. On the other hand, unlike scholarship that dispenses with selfhood, this piece (again) engages meticulously with opposing opinion. Our profession’s devaluation of selfhood, passed from one generation to the next, softens members up for the demands the profession makes on their own selves. If it is “bourgeois” to care about your identity and your boundaries, perhaps you might throw your own identity and boundaries on the altar of your career. I am struck, too, by the fact that current scholarship reflects a strong bias toward noncommittal sex. Our journals offer scant encouragement either for communion with oneself or for abiding connection to a partner—both experiences that could offer leverage against the encompassing group. In the pages of ELH, we read for example that “free love” is a “radical” answer to the monogamy that serves “a capitalist and patriarchal sense of property and propriety.” Or we find that in the Restoration, “resistance” to the bleak “disciplinary” regulation of sexuality was found in “egalitarian” public spaces where “Individual women’s bodies … all blend into one another, ultimately signifying only a space to divest one’s bodily fluids and slake sexual desire.” In another piece, we learn that a particular character’s rejection of “jealous, obsessive monogamy … challenges naïve notions of the endurance or singularity of … love.” When the focus shifts to attached couples, high marks go to “depersonalizing [sexual] intimacies” devoid of “meaningfulness and personal relation.” In the meantime, there are many negative or skeptical representations of committed pairs. To select from a myriad illustrations, we read that “abstracted heterosocial coupling” is one of the requirements of “a sentimental polity,” and elsewhere that “Home is, of course, a disciplinary mechanism.” Or we read of “couplehood’s little platoon,” set within “the defensive provincialism of the family group.” Or again, within the “the middle-class home” one finds “the domestic sanctum of bourgeois order.” Correspondingly, the rare articles that view sustained romantic commitment as offering something positive to at least some individuals take a defensive tone, acknowledging all the standard critiques of “bourgeois romantic love.” Alternatively, they assume a safely historicist posture. Milton thinks that “sexual relations touch the soul as well as the body”; but then again, this idea falls within “the humanist understanding of companionate marriage.”.. - See more at: thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool#sthash.UjRmLbqR.dpufEND OF EXTRACT The author anxiously protests that she doesn't want to be seen as a cheerleader for monogamy. Later on, when she complains about an article on one of Henry James's stories which apparently defends paedophilia on the grounds that childish innocence is undesirable and having it - along with that oh-so-bourgeois self - shattered, is a positive development, she explicitly states that she doesn't object in principle to people arguing that it is a good thing for adults to molest children, merely that this article's argumentation is one-sided! Read the whole thing and weep. Rod Dreher discusses the article, and related subjects: www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/among-the-anti-humanists/I occasionally browse some present and past hit songs on YouTube (when I see references to them in think-pieces and want to see what the writer is talking about), and every so often I come across one which seems to reflect this particular ideology - a celebration of the self as infinitely self-constructed, of life as infinite self-assertion and self-invention without any bonds or constraints, in which the idea of ephemeral anonymous relationships, based on pure sensation, between passing strangers who always wear masks and delight in remaining permanently unknown to the other person. If you have a strong stomach check the video for Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" and you will see what I mean. I believe this particular perpetrator is an art school graduate and probably picked up some of this attitude there.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 9, 2015 21:21:24 GMT
This post from Dreher can be seen as related to the last one - it discusses how far present-day corporate capitalism and social liberalism are at one in hostility to "thick" identity and in promoting a sense of identity based on incessant self-reinvention. In the combox, commenters from a variety of viewpoints (warning, some are downright nasty) debate such issues as whether this is inherent in capitalism or reflects particular political decisions, whether this view downplays the nasty side of the old order, and whether economic leftists should be saying to social conservatives "we told you so". www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/george-bailey-is-dead-patrick-deneen/
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Post by Young Ireland on Dec 9, 2015 21:42:25 GMT
Personally, I think that the best medicine for such behaviour is to ignore them, since what they're after is ultimately attention. I bet that every hit Lady Gaga gets on YT, she's getting a cut from the ads on there. Depressingly, she comes from a devout Catholic background, which seems to be more common among these people than one might think. Perhaps rebellion might be a factor there. I also agree with Rod Dreher's point on the links between economic and social liberalism: there's surely a correlation between the ultra-capitalist economic model of the States and the treatment of women almost as a commodity, particularly in entertainment.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 13, 2015 18:07:38 GMT
A couple of interesting posts from Edward Feser (from earlier this year) about the widespread rhetorical pretence that sex has no special moral significance, and why this is laughably false: edwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2015/01/whats-deal-with-sex-part-i.htmledwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2015/02/whats-deal-with-sex-part-ii.htmlEXTRACT In a previous post I identified three aspects of sex which manifestly give it a special moral significance: It is the means by which new human beings are made; it is the means by which we are physiologically and psychologically completed qua men and women; and it is that area of human life in which the animal side of our nature most relentlessly fights against the rational side of our nature. When natural law theorists and moral theologians talk about the procreative and unitive functions of sex, what they have in mind are the first two of these aspects. The basic idea of traditional natural law theory where sex is concerned is that since the good for us is determined by the natural ends of our faculties, it cannot be good for us to use our sexual faculties in a way that positively frustrates its procreative and unitive ends. The third morally significant aspect of sex, which is that the unique intensity of sexual pleasure can lead us to act irrationally, is perhaps less often discussed these days. So let’s talk about that... So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess. And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism -- treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body -- or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal. The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex. The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position -- specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure. END OF EXTRACT Or, as the 1930s fantasy writer Lord Dunsany (an atheist and cultural Anglican, BTW) put it, he disapproved of sexy advertising because he thought the instinct whereby human life is reproduced too sacred to be exploited for trivial purposes. This last remark is part of the cultural legacy of Christianity, whether its author considered himself Christian; one striking feature of modern literary/artistic treatments of this subject is the view that it should not be seen as sacred at all, but merely as the fulfilment of an instinctual physical urge. It is really striking how views which 100-120 years ago were advanced only on the outermost fringes of radicalism, such as Alexandra Kollontai's "glass of water" theory of free love, appear to have become mainstream and to be taken for granted over large sections of society: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 15, 2016 23:11:26 GMT
www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christophobia/#post-commentsedwardfeser.blogspot.ie/2016/01/liberalism-and-islam.htmlRod Dreher and Edward Feser have interesting posts suggesting why many militant secularists are obsessively hostile to Christianity and relatively lenient towards Islam is because in order to see their own beliefs as universal they must "cleanse" them of the memory of their specifically Christian origins. (Both cite an article by the late political scientist Kenneth Minogue, a secular conservative). Oddly enough, there is a parallel to this which they miss - for most of the period of the Union between Britain and IReland, liberal Protestants and secularists tended to ally with IRish Catholics against conservative church-and-state Anglicans, for similar reasons.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 24, 2016 21:26:54 GMT
The supporters of the Education Equality group, calling for the secularisation of the IRish educational system, have been preening themselves all over the letters page of the IRISH TIMES in recent weeks. One example which struck me recently was a denunciation of multi-denominational schools on the grounds that they still involve "segregation" of children within schools on the basis of religious denomination. True "equality" the writer informs us, requires a completely secular school system from which religion is completely excluded and privatised. The clinching argument, for this person, is that we don't organise denominationally in any aspect of social life (the scout movement's recent merger is mentioned) so why in schools? The logic of this view is that religious beliefs should not have any influence on anyone's behaviour, and have no implications outside the church door - which is pretty much equivalent to saying they should not exist at all and our only loyalty should be to the state. (The Northern IReland conflict, BTW, must take a lot of the blame for this view appearing plausible.) Or, as the Romans put it, everyone must sacrifice to the Genius of the Emperor and dissent cannot be tolerated because it leads to anarchy. Anyone needing to know why so many secularists find Hilary Mantel's idealised view of Thomas Cromwell tremendously appealing need look no further. (BTW, while I'm not saying Thomas More was perfect, when he was at odds with the king, increasingly isolated and was facing execution he was still able to disprove any allegations of corruption brought against him. When Thomas Cromwell fell, his enemies seized his business correspondence, which still survives, and one thing it shows is that Cromwell was on the take in a BIG way.)
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 24, 2016 21:35:04 GMT
That's a good point about the Northern Ireland conflict.
Another reason I hate the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein. They poisoned Irish patriotism and they poisoned Catholic identity. I once gave a preference to every candidate on the ballot paper just so I could give my last preference to Sinn Fein.
It reminds me of what Tolkien said about Hitler: "I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler ... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."
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Post by pugio on Jan 25, 2016 14:47:06 GMT
I do like that quote from Tolkein - lovely - but I am rather sceptical when it comes to blaming the Provos for the waning interest in Catholic identity and Irish patriotism. I wouldn't dismiss them as a contributing factor in Ireland's case, but that is all. It's not as if the inter-ethnic bloodshed in Ulster was anything new. Moreover, only those with a extremely superficial understanding of the conflict, foreigners mainly, would imagine the Provos were fighting on behalf of Catholicism.
The decline of national and religious feeling is a Europe-wide phenomenon. I think Ireland is merely following a broader pattern of social atomisation and concomitant cultural change, the result of which is to make questions of transcendent value, ancestral obligation and collective identity increasingly meaningless.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 25, 2016 22:53:40 GMT
The Provos were not fighting on behalf of Catholicism in a doctrinal sense, obviously; the argument is that they were doing so in a Durkheimian sense, with religious observance as marking membership of the tribe. (One function of religious dietary/fasting laws, for example, is that they make it difficult to socialise with nonbelievers and thus enhance group loyalty. Obviously this is more true of kashrut and halal than Friday fish or total abstinence from alcohol as a matter of obligation - Free Presbyterians are obliged to be teetotallers as a condition of membership, for example - but the general principle applies.) The argument is that separate schooling and bans on mixed marriages discourage socialisation and thus breed ignorance, fear and suspicion. There is, I should say, something in this; but the hidden implication is that the subcultures possess nothing of value in themselves and should be encouraged to disappear (except for a few external markers which don't deeply influence the personality, with Twelfth parades turning into the equivalent of morris dancing).
In fairness, I would also say that the blame was not entirely with the PRovos and their supporters - the treatment of Ian Paisley as a figure of fun and sentimentalisation of him as a peacemaker in his old age ignores the extent to which he and others like him appealed to sheer savagery and laid the fuse for the Troubles. Brendan Hughes' recollections in VOICES FROM THE GRAVE are a major text in terms of understanding the mindset. Some of it is quite horrifying (he was in "internal security" - in other words, a torturer as well as a murderer, and I really find the former more repulsive than the latter, that's one of the first things that turned me off George W Bush) but you do really get a sense of how in the early days of the Troubles he and those like him saw themselves as fighting to defend the people of their communities from the loyalists and the Brits, and how they were driven by a combination of loyalty to the neighbourhood and the street (since I got to know Belfast I've always been uneasy about THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL's admiration for the sort of society where you are really willing to die and kill for your own street against people who live a few streets away) with a wider sense of being part of a community of the oppressed. Hughes' generation mainly saw that in terms of working-class socialism, whereas his father's generation saw themselves as Catholics born to suffer; Hughes was an atheist but he revered his pious father who made vast sacrifices for his children. I met Hughes once and he was a very quiet man who would hardly say a word; what the book shows is that behind that lay a man eaten up by despair who believed all the loyalties which gave his life meaning, all the suffering he inflicted as well as enduring, had been exploited to bring a few to power and wealth - that it had all been for nothing. That really haunts me. I have devoted a good deal of my life to trying to understand and do justice to the IRish (especially the Ulster) Protestant people and their tradition. I don't regret that in the slightest, but I do often feel that in the endeavour, and in my horror at the crimes of the Republican paramilitaries, I was less than just to the grievances of Northern Catholics/nationalists. Someone should write a decent life of Fr Denis Faul - it would be a good way of coming to terms with all that.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 25, 2016 23:03:10 GMT
Hibernicus, I agree, but I can't help feeling more bitter at the Provisional IRA and other nationalist terror groups than at the loyalists, because they were the ones presuming to speak in MY name.
I admit that I can't be fair to Sinn Fein and the IRA. It would be futile to try. I can't even think about them without getting angry.
I will concede that at the outbreak of the Troubles, the need for an armed defence force for the nationalist community did seem clear, since the civic authorities were not doing their duty. If it had remained a DEFENCE force, it may have been legitimate.
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