#is rapture ideology also a Catholic thing??

[anarchypumpkincowboy]

“Why is there a nun’s habit here without the nun inside?” “Rapture!” CACKLING

Love the implication that him as the priest didn’t get raptured

“Sister Lupe? Oh I’m going to hell” this poor religious Irish mob dude

[canichangemyblogname]

going absolutely fucking feral. fuck?

I’ve been getting a lot of TERF posts rec’ed to me through the #feminism tag lately. And they’re most often only tagged something like #feminism or #woman, so filters aren’t catching them. And it’s all just… anti-woman and anti-feminist take after take. Like. How have they hijacked the narrative and monopolized the meaning of feminism to be something so reactionary and reductive? They genuinely believe takes like, “women should be forced to abort children” are feminist. BFFR. They just hate other women having bodily autonomy.

I saw one just now where someone was like, “I was daydreaming about men just disappearing”— like being raptured— “and then realized that all women don’t know how to do male jobs and got angry” (and they did say ALL). They then went on to talk about how no women knows how to operate machinery because women have been prevented from EVOLVING to do the same things men do because men forced women to EVOLVE to serve them. Evolved. They were like, “all men could just… build a wood bridge but we women are kept from that knowledge. We have no teachers.”

Further fucking proof that these misogynistic asshats do not build community with black, brown, indigenous, poor, rural, or working class women. They live in a theoretical fantasy world daydreaming about men disappearing and “female separatism” rather than offering real fucking solutions. They live in a world where every last woman has the same lived experience as them. They assume all women are oppressed in the same way. They ignore intersectionality to purposefully minimize ableist, racist, classist, heterosexist, and cissexist structures so that everything is organizable into a simple and universal M > F dynamic. This way, in their chronically white movement, they, the white woman, is always oppressed and never responsible for the marginalization of others.

Oh. And the OP had the label “fascist” in her username. They’re self aware now, but at what cost?

Trans Exclusionary Radical Fascism, everyone:

The patriarchy is inevitable. Change is impossible. We are never escaping this hell hole.

Some other “gems” I saw, TW for racism, misogyny, ableism, and abuse:

The amount of Arabophobia, Islamophobia, racism, misogyny, and ableism I see in the #feminism tag every day is truly sickening. Like 1/4 of the posts anymore seem to be from white radfems sexualizing Arab, Asian, and Black women (while denigrating and singling out typically Arab, Asian, and Black personal-care and beauty practices) while another good 1/4 of the posts seem to be anti-queer. And then some 50% are porn bots with #sissy kinks. The tag has been trashed by bigots and bots, and I’m surprised that Staff hasn’t marked it mature content yet for the sheer level of porn bots using the tag. Oh, wait. I do know why. It’s because Staff employs JKR stans who would rather label #transfemme as mature content than combat the porn bots.

[thedreadvampy]

I find Americans talking about religion fascinating because they think the weird pentecostal/evangelical eschatology cults are Normal Christianity and not like. a really specific thing.

and that is by no means to say Christianity elsewhere is less fucked up but it's different.

like Americans will say stuff like "like most Christians, this cult believes we're in the end times and have to reclaim Zion to bring about Revelations, but what's weird about their beliefs is..." and it's like???? WHAT DO YOU MEAN LIKE MOST CHRISTIANS?????

like Scotland's still a pretty Christian country. some of the biggest sociopolitical divides are Christian sectarianism. we got Presbyterians we got Catholics we got Episcopalians we got Quakers (hi) we got Baptists and Methodists and Jehovah's Witnesses and so on. half of the population are Christian. but I don't think I have ever met more than a handful of people whose Christian belief is focused on Revelations and the end times. that's weird stuff my guys.

my outside appraisal of American Christianity is that it looks really very samey. there doesn't seem to be a lot of significant theological difference, or tbh aesthetic difference, between a good number of the major churches. worship practise, structure, and the focus on sin, evangelism and apocalypse seem to be way more common threads there than in Europe. and I feel like people grow up in that and think that means all Christianity is the same as that. which like. it isn't.

A lot of folks I know who've been to American Quaker communities, for example, have been really surprised at how much some Meetings in the US are cramming into the same episcpentamethodbaptitradcathevangelist church model - fire and brimstone preachers, our god is a great big god songs, focus on end times prophecy - and it just doesn't. line up with the degree of diversity in practise and focus for different Christian sects in most other parts of the world. where like. those types of churches also exist (the evangelical born-again rapture and damnation churches) but they're one approach among many.

and again that's not cause like. Christianity is only bad in the US and not bad anywhere else. Christianity does a lot of social good and a looooooot of social harm everywhere. but it's wild what Americans, Christian or otherwise, seem to take as the baseline beliefs of global Christianity. like I went to a Church of England school and I don't believe I was ever taught about Revelations, let alone the rapture or young earth ideology or biblical literalist creationism, except, eventually, as a thing some other people believe and it's weird. when the young earth creationists came into my secondary school to prostyletize it was a bloodbath cause every 14 year old in that room was like "what r u talking about m8 that's cult shit".

what I'm saying is: there's not a huge amount of universal Christian beliefs across all sectors except like "God is there. There's some Bible which contains some amount of spiritual value for some amount of literal interpretation. Jesus? Pretty great and important guy. Probably the son of God or actually God or some secret third thing." and everything else there's some dissent on. but of the things that are broadly though not fully universal - maybe like heaven, hell, sin, redemption through faith or deed, the resurrection, a physical/spiritual divide, prayer, some key holidays etc - I don't think that 'weirdly intense eschatology involving reclaiming Zion, global warfare, the Antichrist, decades of torturous end times, physical rapture etc' is in that mix. that's your country's weird thing that it's since exported through cultural colonialism, just like Christianity itself was largely exported through European cultural colonialism.

[mask131]

Well the short answer would be: Protestantism by definition is a much more fragmented and "branched out" part of Christianity than Catholicism or Orthodoxism, precisely because the very basis of Protestantism was to "protest", "reject" the strict, clear, rigid structure that had been imposed by Catholicism. As such, Protestantism actually covers all the religious currents that tried to change/reject/reform/oppose Catholic Christianty while staying Christian... but nobody agreed on one specific way to do this. They were united by a same rejection, not by a same building-effort - and as such the various Protestant faiths and churches are all very diverse.

And THAT must be added to the Europe vs American divide. Because when it comes to Christianity, from an European point of view, Americans are SO FRIGGIN' WEIRD. Precisely because of how the religions reinvented themselves there. European Protestantism was at least still in line with the varous historical currents and evolutions of Christianity, since the whole point of Protestantism was originally to return to an "older", "purer", "simpler" form of Christianity. But the USA? The people who went there not only tended to be most of the time religious fanatics that nobody in Europe agreed with and who pushed things way further than actual European Protestantism ever did ; but you also have to take into account the whole "building of a nation", "free land" idea that was ingrained in the settlers and colonizers' minds.

For the people of the colonies that would become the USA, America was the "free land" and "new land" for a fresh start new start, outside of any convention or heritage from the old Europe - and this was especially obvious in the religion domain. Protestantism was already an effort to rebuild a religion/build a new religion ; but American Protestantism moved it even further since they saw the opportunity to literaly recreate religion in a place where they wouldn't be "checked" and where the old authorities could not go contest them.

In fact, the very history of the differing religious currents and trends among the 13 colonies is a quite fascinating one, and explains a LOT about how Americans view Christianity vs how Europeans view it. You literaly had small religious wars in the proto-United States as almost each colony had its own dominating religious ideology, which often entered in conflicts with each other (for example, I am pulling out vague memories of the history lessons I received on the early USA literature here so it is very vague - but some colonies had a very misogynistic take religion, while others banked everything on female religious leader or an openness of clericalism to both genders)

And still today the American Christianity has so much weird differences to European Christianity (like how there's the whole "Rapture" myth that is so big in the American mindset, while barely existing in Europe).

I’m not knowledgeable enough about the differences between American Protestantism and Nordic Protestantism to say anything deep or groundbreaking about it but hearing the way Americans talk about Protestantism makes it sound like an entirely different religion.

To be clear I’m not religious. The only thing that passed for a religious upbringing was my Religions class in high school. Like most Danes I don’t have any strong feelings about Christianity. It’s just there, Christmas is nice and we get days off from work around Easter.

But just the sentence “Protestant work ethic” as a way to explain why Americans are so overworked sounds kinda humorous to a simple Dane like me. Protestantism is the state religion in Denmark (Evangelical Lutheran to be precise) and we have the highest number of Protestants per capita in the world and yet Americans who move over here often comment on how lazy we are. We leave work early, we have an ungodly number of paid days off (most of them religious), all parents get paid maternity leave and we will break our bosses’ arms if they try to make us work paid overtime too many days in a row. I’m not saying that to brag, it’s just to illustrate what the “Protestant work ethic” looks like in the most Protestant country in the world.

This is super interesting and I need to dig deeper into why Protestantism turned out so differently in our countries.

[veale2006-blog]

The Beast, The False Jesus, And The Rapture, Part 3 - Perversion       February 17, 2021 On the sixth day in Genesis chapter one, Yehovah restored life on Earth, forming the animals and mankind, in about 64 Million BC. This was Restoration Week Two, the third advent of mankind, and the first to be made in God’s image. The world of Creationism does not realize that mankind and other life forms have come and gone five times since Creation Week, 4.6 billion years ago. The laity of the Roman Catholic Church does not realize that the inner circle of Catholicism worships Lucifer, and is the (human) driving force behind the coming “New World Order”.

I would think that most Roman Catholics would be shocked if they knew what Catholicism really teaches. Much of their outward, and all of their inner doctrine, contradict the Bible.  For example, on page 129, the book Catechism of the Catholic Church, it teaches: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods”.  Notice that they did not capitalize the pronouns which are referring to Jesus.  That book was published by Image Books, 1995. Why would anyone want to remain in the Catholic religion, after reading such heresy?

“Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it." - H.G. Wells, in his book,“The New World Order”, 1940. Who is the person that is most famous for repeating the phrase “New World Order”, over and over again?  In my mind, it’s Pres. George (daddy) Bush. Reverend Jessie Jackson once said “stay out of the Bushes”. Looking back at history, that would be been a good idea. Let’s pick up again with the Jesuits.

Part of the Jesuit oath is the following: “That I will go to any part of the world, whatsoever, without murmuring, and I will be submissive in all things whatsoever communicated to me”. Also, “I do further promise and declare, that I will, when the opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals (free thinkers), as I am directed to do to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth, and that I will spare neither sex, age nor condition, and that I will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants’ heads against the wall, in order to annihilate their execrable race”. Does this sound like followers of the Lord Jesus Christ? This is what the (white) Pope and the Vatican sanction. I take this as proof that the Catholic regime is the “whore”, spoken of in Revelation chapter 17, which will be “drunken with the blood of the saints”.

The Catholic Civilization is a periodical published by the Jesuits in Rome, since 1850. Before WWII, it was written “For today Rome considers the Fascist regime (to be) the nearest to its dogmas and interest. We have not merely the Reverend [Jesuit] Father Coughlin praising Mussolini’s Italy as ‘a Christian democracy’, but Catholic Civilization, house organ of the Jesuits, says quite frankly…’Fascism is the regime that corresponds most closely to the concepts of the Church of Rome.”, Days of Our Years, (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1939), p. 465.  So if the Catholic (Jesuit) Church ever rules the world, they will take away your liberties and freedoms, kill Protestants and non-Catholics, and make you subject to the will of the (black) Pope.  Wake up Catholic laity! Catholicism always was a religion of the occult. That is why Constantine, a worshipper of Mithra, wouldn’t allow Christians and Jews to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

The Jesuits were behind the Spanish Inquisition. They also attempted to blow up the English Parliament and assassinate King James on November 5th, 1605. President Lincoln said that “There would not have been a Civil War, if not for the Jesuits”. John Wilkes Booth, was of the Catholic Knights of Golden Circle, and when the investigation of Lincoln’s assassination revealed Catholicism’s involvement, our ambassador to the Papal States was removed in 1867, in protest.

Jesuit controlled bankers in America financed the Communist takeover in Russia, which at the time was Protestant and Greek Orthodox. Those same bankers financed Hitler in Germany.  During WWII, the Catholic south of Germany was hit with conventional bombs, while the Protestant north was fire bombed, against the rules of war. Why?  Was it Catholic ordered?    

In 1933, there was a failed attempt to overthrow the U.S. government, but was successfully done in Argentina about thirty-five years ago, and the two are curiously connected. The U.S. conspirators, which were influential powerbrokers, were led by Prescott (grandfather) Bush, to overthrow FDR and implement a fascist dictatorship in the USA, based around the ideology of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. A front group, called the American Liberty League, included many families that are still household names today, such as Heinz, Colgate, Birds Eye and General Motors. More of the “rich elite”? The Jesuit controlled news media failed to report it, but it was widely reported in England. Look it up yourself.

Prescott Bush was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, 1952-1963.  He was a member of the Skull and Bones Society, founded in 1832 at Yale University. It came from German Jesuits.  Part of their initiation ritual is to drink blood or wine from a human skull, bow or knell down and pledge allegiance to a person dressed as the “white” Pope, another person dressed as the “black Pope”, and a third person dressed as Lucifer. This is not new. If you look for it, you will find it on video on the Internet.

President George (daddy) Bush, was CIA director (1976 – 77), during the time of the takeover in Argentina. Like his father, Prescott Bush, he also was a member of “Skull & Bones”. The next President, Bill Clinton, was Jesuit educated, and shipped thousands of jobs overseas, destroying the middle class. Did the Clinton administration have a part in the Federal Building bombing at Oklahoma City in 1995?  The “so called” truck bomb failed to produce a bomb crater. Did it serve as a false flag prelude to 9/11?

George (junior) Bush was the next President, and his administration failed to prevent “9/11”, and failed to put safeguards in place, even though it was known weeks beforehand that it would occur.   Why is it that none of the black boxes of the four planes were ever found or produced? Were they removed before each plane took off, or carried away before any formal investigation?  Why is it that no aircraft debris was ever found at the Pentagon site and neither at Shanksville, PA?  Why did World Trade Center Building 7 collapse, over seven hours later, without ever being hit?  Did all three buildings have demolition explosives planted in them before the date of September 11, 2001? Junior Bush, a member of “Skull & Bones”, used 9/11 as an excuse to sign away liberties from Americans, and push Fascism within America.  What does all this add up to?

It is despicable to think that our civil leaders would conspire with perverted worshipers of Lucifer, to kill thousands of innocent Americans, so that their “New World Order” could be established.  But wait. It gets worst. Enter the Freemasons, in Part 4.  

Love, Debbie

[d33-alex]

Philosophy And The Crisis Of The Modern World

To find a way out of the current confusions and rifts in modern Western societies, and for its various countries to regain workable cultural identities, a necessary, but not sufficient condition would be to have an allegiance to a divine conception of reality. This allegiance is not sufficient because cultures need to foster traditions and modes of living peculiar to them. Traditions stem from trial and error and will reflect the character of the people and the physical and man-made environment out of which they arise. These ethnic and cultural differences give rise to the cultural diversity liberals claim so much to love. However, modern liberalism is instead dedicated to stifling and eradicating differences and to thrusting often incompatible cultures together. Their modes of living and approaches to life may or may not be congenial.

Some liberal commentators can be found pointing out the difficulty that, for instance, the Irish and the Italians had initially in getting along in nineteenth century America, but how after much strife, they learned to live together. Two things should be noted here; one is that this conflict occurred between traditionally Catholic and European cultures. Imagine how much more difficult it would have been if they were more distantly related. Another is that putting even these two cultures together caused conflict and that the conflict was resolved by establishing a new culture that incorporated both in a common culture. This is not an argument in favor of multiculturalism. But to question multiculturalism at this point in time is to be regarded as “far right;” and thus as an extremist.

The multicultural ideal person seems to be the rootless cosmopolitan, as happy in New York City as in London, Paris or Berlin, with no firm attachments to anywhere in particular. René Girard points out in The One By Whom Scandal Comes that anyone who does not evince a particular preference and loyalty to his own family, his own culture, has historically been deemed a threat to the continued existence of that family, that culture. If a person is as fond of another culture as his own then there is nothing to stop his abandonment of that culture in a time of crisis or any other; nor does he have a reason to work towards cultural self-preservation. In fact, the uniquely Western and liberal phenomenon of “ethnomasochism” takes the point of view of those with a grievance against the West, sometimes justified, and ignores the virtues that any culture is bound to have. Why preserve a culture if it is evil?

Liberalism is the dominant ideology of the mainstream media, academia and the ruling elite of perhaps all Western cultures. It has its roots at least partly in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment period tended to reject tradition and intuition as meaningful modes of interacting with reality. It emphasized human reason as the means to progress and progress was to be achieved by an overweening rationalism and a suspicion and rejection of both the prerational; tradition, and the suprarational; the religious. Liberal theists do exist, but they are typically despised by their fellow liberals as retrograde and backward. Theism is fundamentally incompatible with the exclusively science-embracing perspective of the ideology of liberalism.

Ideas have consequences. Arguably, a precondition of having a workable, functioning and non-nihilistic culture rooted in a particular time and place, incorporating “a people” with some functioning identity, room must be found for the transcendent. No culture has ever been created without religious roots. Logically, this could be a historical accident. Or, more likely, it is because a conception of a divine aspect of reality is necessary to avoid nihilism. In The Crisis of the Modern World, published in 1927, René Guenon blames the emergence of philosophy among the Greeks for all that has gone wrong in the Western world. To a devotee of philosophy, particularly Platonic philosophy, this is a rather alarming assertion.

 René Guenon notes that philosophy is the love of wisdom. As such it is “a preliminary and preparatory stage, a step as it were in the direction of wisdom.” It is not wisdom itself. “The perversion that ensued consisted in taking this transitional stage for an end in itself and in seeking to substitute ‘philosophy’ for wisdom, a process which implied forgetting or ignoring the true nature of the latter.”

Guenon’s objection is not to philosophy per se, but to a philosophy denuded of esoteric content. At the heart of Plato’s philosophy is the Form of the Good – God, the Source. The Form of the Good is clearly the object of mystical revelation and it gives all reality a divine quality. Thus, reality is being generated by God and it shares in God’s divine nature. Wisdom must be grounded in reality. Rational philosophical reflection must be centered around the real. If the divine is absented from philosophical speculation, then a vacuum is created. This vacuum can only be filled with malignant creations of the human imagination. They will be malignant because false and misleading – “a pretended wisdom that is purely human and therefore entirely of the rational order.” Reality is “true, traditional, supra-rational.”

Another and popular alternative is to take a fragment of the true Good and to represent it as the whole. A single virtue, like compassion, agape, becomes an evil monstrosity by shoving out of view all other excellences. Compassion is acceptance, but true love includes Eros, the push to develop, to gain wisdom, to seek salvation. For that, effort is required. If agape is lacking eros, compassion is lost because truly caring for someone and wishing that person the best means to care about his development. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis reserves the word “ideology” for the practice of taking a fragment of the Tao and enlarging it in this way, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Hence, communism is an ideology but the Christian religion is not. Liberal opponents of this view tend to try to apply the label “ideology” to religion but in doing this, they miss the point. They want to claim that religion is an ideology like any other. The advantage of the fragment enlarging technique for the ideologue is that he appears to have a hold of the truth. However, a partial truth becomes a big lie in this context.

Plato, on the other hand, is no ideologue. He examines the role of different aspects of the Good in different dialogs. His devotion is to The Form of the Good and this Form is supra-rational and not something that can be fully explicated rationally. It is not the product of mind and rationality. In fact, it produces the lower levels of mind, soul and body. Using the Neo-Platonist Plotinus’ nomenclature, of mind/psyche, soul/nous, spirit/the One, then a visual representation might look something like this.

Plato never doubts The Form of the Good, but he sometimes wonders about his ability to write sensibly and well about it. He is aware of the limitations of discourse and never considers it a substitute for mystical experience. Hence, he narrates a story, a “myth,” like the Timaeus, and in contexts like that he sometimes writes “something like this must be true.” Plato also appears to worry in the Meno that virtue may be unteachable and not fully definable. The character of Socrates suggests that it is better to try to do so, than to give up. In being self-aware about the distance between exoteric and the esoteric, Plato’s philosophy has the quality of a parable in the manner of Jesus, Christ’s way of communicating with the uninitiated.

Thus, the core of Plato’s philosophy is a religious experience. He worries that in writing about it he may misrepresent it and makes the reader aware of his misgivings and the approximate and provisional nature of all attempts to describe and explicate this religious core. This means all Plato’s writings, like all good philosophy, are theology. Platonic exoteric philosophy forever circles round the supra-rational. The Phaedrus and the Symposium have a quality of glorifying the divine and are also inspirational.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a useful starting point for all attempts to understand Platonic philosophy. Everything Plato writes presupposes such a vision of reality. Plato has a place for rationality, but he at no point tries to deduce morality from merely rational considerations. The love of goodness and justness that is visible in the character of Socrates in The Gorgias is of a piece with Plato’s raptures expressed in describing the experience of the Form of the Good in Book VII of The Republic. The moral faith and beauty of Socrates in this dialog is inspiring, in stark contrast with the evil and self-serving nature of Gorgias, Polus and Callicles; with each interlocutor becoming progressively more brazenly horrible. In dialogs like this one, Socrates becomes a vehicle for the Form of the Good and the divine light shines through him, making him the most admirable of men for Plato.

Real philosophy is the explication of the supra-rational. What is the goal of life, having been projected into a physical universe by an ineffable Source? Socrates the man wanted to forget about the origins of the universe and focus on ethics. However, Plato saw that ethics without an appreciation of the divine origins of life is meaningless and a hopeless task. God is the alpha and the omega; the origin and destination. Rationalism, on the other hand, loses its way.

Stoic and Epicurean philosophy represent the beginning of the rot. Guenon notes that “the appearance of skepticism on the one hand, and of Stoic and Epicurean moralism on the other, are sufficient to show to what point intellectuality had declined.” They share some of the ethical insights of Platonic philosophy but jettison God. The point and purpose of human life is largely lost. They are like a too thin papier mâché shell constructed over a balloon. The balloon bursts and the shell remains temporarily intact before collapsing without the inner core that made it possible.

Once the supra-rational is abandoned and rejected there is nothing to philosophize about. God, as the First Cause, itself a logical necessity, may be able to create ex nihilo but philosophers cannot. Rational thought is not creative; it is analytic. William Blake wrote “Man by his reasoning power can only compare and judge of what he has already perceived.” The rationalist philosopher seeks to establish by theory that which only exists in experience and faith.

Exoteric philosophy abandons esoteric mysteries and insights and tries to conjure the world from the intellect of the philosopher. The rational philosophical mind spins its wheels on nothing; it grinds thin air trying to make bread and substance. It finds its task hopeless and despairs; the despair of skepticism and nihilism. Positivism, nihilism. Post-modernism, nihilism. Diversity, nihilism. Liberalism, nihilism. Humanism, nihilism. Every door closes, shutting itself in the face of the increasingly desperate or perhaps apathetic searcher.

Roger Scruton shares Iris Murdoch’s view that a thorough going and straight-forward belief in God is now impossible. Murdoch thinks it is a pity and so does Scruton. Scruton looks to art and music to provide a kind of God substitute. In his book on beauty, Scruton rejects the notion that the experience of beauty is a view of the face of God; where the divine light shines through.

By contrast, the religious mystic and Platonist, Plotinus asks the fascinating question – why do we like beautiful things? What attracts us, calls us, lures us, and fills us with joy about beautiful objects? The answer is not obvious. Like Plato, Plotinus recognizes that beauties of character, noble conduct, experience of the supra-rational far outshine mere physical beauty.

Plotinus writes that soul recognizes a kinship to the beautiful and this attracts it. Soul is a divine thing and a fragment of Primal Beauty. The Good is desired by every soul and is beautiful. “Each in the solitude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling the pure, unmingled, for which all live, act and know, all things depend, the Source of life, intellection, being.” The Beauty supreme, fashions its lovers to beauty and makes them also worthy of love. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father. Withdraw into your soul and look and if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as the creator of a sculptor does and keep chiseling until “god-like splendor of virtue shines forth.” The more beautiful the soul is, the clearer its vision of First Beauty. Beauty in the realm of ideas constitutes the beauty of the intellectual sphere. The Good lies beyond that and is the Fountain and Principle of Beauty. Plotinus’ writings about beauty are themselves beautiful.

Scruton writes scathingly about theology. He compares it to academic feminists; taking the line that to prescribe conclusions is to forgo research. For instance, feminists set out to explain, catalog and remedy the “oppression of women,” never doubting for a second that this oppression is taking place. In fact, it is impermissible to question this supposed truth.

The appropriate rejoinder to this criticism would seem to be that the problem with feminism is that it is wrong and misguided. But is this what should be said about Plato’s theology? Since Plato’s theology centers around a mystical experience, it is not something that can be considered to be the end product of a chain of reasoning, or the conclusion of an argument. The Form of the Good is not the result of speculative philosophy – it is what makes meaningful speculative philosophy possible.

Similarly, if the existence of the world is thought to be the end product of philosophical speculation, the ontological order has been reversed. The world exists. The world gives rise to humans. Humans then wonder about this world. Humans did not first exist and bring about the existence of the world by conjecture. Our inability to conjecture the world, God, goodness and beauty into existence is not a sign of philosophical corruption or bad faith.

Scruton has assumed a vacuum where there should be a God. This starting assumption is not more legitimate than the theologian’s. The intuition and experience of God’s existence did not come from philosophical argument. If Scruton is incapable of religious experience, he can rely on faith and hope like the rest of us. He clearly exhibits these two things and yet he still rejects theology.

Theology does not mean the end of philosophical thinking. It is the only form of philosophical thinking that does not ultimately end in or imply nihilism. In the end can be found the beginning and in the beginning, the end. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, writes Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Yet philosophies without God are only superficially different. If a philosophy starts with nothing, it will end with nothing. God is the Alpha and the Omega or Nothing is the beginning and the end. Of course, much of what is officially called theology is atheistic and unenlightening.

Tibetan monks spend half the day meditating – purifying the soul to make itself at home in the Beauty and Goodness from whence it came; aligning the soul with reality – and the other half disputing with the other monks as to the meaning of what they have experienced. Having agreed that God exists, it is still necessary to discover how to live and how to integrate religious experience into everyday life. Philosophy does not end when it becomes properly theological.

In The Sacred and the Secular, Scruton takes Feuerbach’s view that God is a projection of human qualities onto a nonexistent divine. Talk of God is strictly metaphorical. It is of a piece with myth which is really about the human condition; not about God at all. Scruton writes approvingly of nineteenth century writers who “had rejected various metaphysical ideas and doctrines, but still inhabited the world that faith had made – the world of secure commitments, of marriage and love, of obsequies and Christenings, of real presences in ordinary lives and exalted visions in art.” However, without the metaphysical underpinnings, nothing can sustain those remnants of faith, as can be observed in the modern world around us. By replacing God’s love with a purely human love, human love loses its aspirational character. Instead of divine love shining through Socrates’ goodness, humans are to be the source of that love. Is our task to get out of the way of the divine transmission of love or to be its creators? The first is to properly orient ourselves in relation to reality. The second is to assume the role of God; not being a vehicle but the Source.

There is a reason that once a notion of the transcendent is lost, human life becomes more or less unbearable. As Scruton notes, often various “causes” are adopted, like PETA, that have an emotionally functional equivalence to religious devotion. Humans abhor meaninglessness and all sorts of pathologies are promoted in the absence of the divine. Rejecting religious experience, many modern philosophers are materialists and embrace scientism. Denying the existence of the invisible features of reality, and focusing on what can be quantified, E. F. Schumacher comments that such a person “lives in a very poor world, so poor that he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human habitation. Equally, if he sees it as nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms, he must needs agree with Bertrand Russell that the only rational attitude is one of unyielding despair.”

Schumacher points out that the idea of a Levels of Being is a recurrent conception in human cultures. He identifies them as mineral, plant, animal, human – correlated with the physical, life, consciousness and self-awareness. A low Level of Being means focusing on the body and biological needs while living at a higher level involves fulfilling human potential and a richer life.

The game of modern philosophy, involving the useless spinning wheels of the rationalistic philosopher, continues by violating one of Goedel’s assertions, namely that axiomatic systems can be consistent and incomplete, or inconsistent and complete, but never consistent and complete. This last would enable philosophers to self-generate the aboutness missing from their philosophy; unfortunately for them, it is a proven impossibility. Analytic philosophers, post-moderns and all the others continue to “think” or at least write by opting for “inconsistent and complete.” This possibility is rejected by Goedel because the reason that an inconsistent axiomatic system can be complete is because contradictions, if taken to be true, can be used to prove anything. This “anything” includes false things. Truly rational human beings do not want to be able to prove that false things are true.

Perhaps this fact is yet another reason why many analytic philosophers can abide the contradictions of determinism, because they need contradictions in order for the utter vacuousness of their theories to remain hidden. They want skepticism about almost everything except the existence of physical reality, although their philosophy makes no such thing possible, and then make desultory attempts to generate things like morality from it even though justice is an abstract concept, the reality of which cannot be derived from the physical level. In trying to derive morality from biology, for instance, it is possible to show that morality is useful, but not that it is true.

The things that we really care about and that make life worth living are invisible: love, friendship, nonphysical beauty, meaning, purpose, morality, fun, joy and value. Relying on a scientific approach means focusing on externals, surfaces, the superficial. If the human race were to encounter aliens, there would be some minor interest in the aliens’ height, weight, appearance, etc.. But the real interest would be their thoughts and dreams. Conversation with them, reading their literature, listening to their music and discovering their spiritual ideas would be of most importance. It would be supremely disappointing if an investigator returned from his encounter with aliens having forgotten to include any of these factors in his inquiries. The inquirer could be assessed as incompetent and perhaps even mentally challenged. The same holds of course for all similar inquiries into the human condition.

Roger Scruton argues that “science can have all the answers only if it has all the questions: and that assumption is false.” Schumacher identifies some of the missing questions and notes the effect of ignoring them. These include inquiring about the meaning and purpose of human life and the nature of good and evil. A culture that stops asking these questions is unsustainable – “man cannot live by bread alone.”

The character Sergey Ivanovitch in Anna Karenina notes that classical learning can counter the nihilistic tendencies inherent in an exclusive focus on science; “little pills of classical learning possess the medicinal property of anti-nihilism.” A classical education could have this effect partly because, as Guenon points out, things had not at that point descended to the current extremes. Mystery cults and esoteric philosophy still exerted an influence on exoteric thought.

Schumacher notes that those of us who still see the value of a science of understanding nonetheless are affected by the hypnotic pull of the exclusively scientific view. After all, for most Western people, this view underpinned nearly all of their formal education. The power of social conformism draws people in like a black hole in the center of what was once a living culture. Faith, instead of being a guide to understanding higher levels, is seen as being in opposition to the intellect. Since science excludes anything “higher” than itself, it can give the appearance of confirming that there are no such higher levels. At worst a person “may lose the courage as well as the inclination to consult the ‘wisdom tradition of mankind’ and to profit from it.”

Science has garnered a near-total monopoly on prestige. The science of manipulation offers to solve our problems. It is imagined that a technological fix can be found for the problems that confront us. However, many societal problems are grounded in morality, culture and an impoverished idea of the purpose of human existence. Wealth may accumulate as the quality of life declines.

The science of manipulation has a pragmatic quality. Pursuing a degree in English or philosophy tends to elicit the question “what are you going to do with that?” It would be nice if the answer were to preserve our wisdom traditions and to appreciate and transmit our grand cultural inheritance. However, for most philosophers, “wisdom” is regarded as a defunct and outdated concept and English tends to center around “gender, class and race” and thus to be a feeble arm of a lost and misguided politics – Scruton’s “culture of repudiation” among other things. In this way, English tries to demonstrate its “usefulness,” but it does so by gutting itself of content and an appreciation of high art and replacing it with the pursuit of “equality.” If all the “smart” people abandon the spiritual quest; if they do not develop their abilities towards the science of understanding, evidence of wisdom will increasingly only exist in the past.

There is plenty of evidence that the ability to think coherently and constructively about invisibles is diminishing. The confusion surrounding moral values is astounding. American society has gone from the equality of opportunity to the equality of result. It does no good to point out the incoherence of legislating results. Failure is taken to be synonymous with oppression and with oppression there logically needs to be an oppressor. This leads to the lynch-mob mentality of, for instance, post-colonial studies. Only criticism, but never praise, of the oppressing culture is countenanced. The failure of many former colonies to emulate the success of the colonizers is attributed to their past oppression. The fallacy is to imagine that without, say, French atrocities in the Congo, the Congo would now be a thriving, developed, economically sound, well-educated, peaceful, relatively corruption-free society. Their legal system would rival the best in the world. Their education system would be second-to-none. The fact that many countries that have never been colonized have failed to thrive in this manner is ignored.

It is possible to try to make so-called transcendental arguments. These start with the experience of, for instance, freedom, and try to outline the metaphysical realities that make freedom possible. Transcendental arguments show how the exoteric relies on the esoteric. But to do so, they rely on the full reality of ordinary experience. Positivists and the like, simply deny this reality. The rejection of esoteric realities ends up with the rejection of exoteric realities, until, in the philosophy of John Locke and Galileo, ordinary subjective experience is banished from reality. Only the measurable and quantifiable are held to exist.

 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky bravely and interestingly does not directly answer the philosophical arguments of The Grand Inquisitor made in Ivan’s allegory. Instead, the allegory is immediately followed by a conversion story. Father Zossima’s brother Markel is the recipient of mystical insight; an esoteric revelation. Markel had been under the influence of a militant politicized atheist and made fun of things religious. However, as Markel learns he is dying at the age of seventeen, he comes to have sympathy for his mother and his old nurse. He makes concessions to their religiosity and in doing so begins a process of transformation which has much to do with his newfound empathy which is partly inspired by their overt sorrow.

Markel’s insights flummox his relatives and his doctor who declares the disease Markel is suffering from has literally gone to his head. It seems to be partly that in coming close to death, the beauty and goodness of life becomes apparent. Markel tells his mother not to cry; “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it; if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day.” He declares that the fact he is soon going to die is irrelevant in this regard. One day is enough to know all happiness. We quarrel, compete and keep grudges, when we should go “straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss each other, and glorify life.” Markel even asks forgiveness from the birds because “there was such a glory of God all about me: birds, trees, meadows, sky; only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory.”

Some intuitive appreciation of such suprarationally inspired notions is possible – arguably in the form of Plato’s anamnesis – an awakening of what the soul already knows, without undergoing Markel’s spiritual transformation. The beauty of photographs, paintings, music and poetry is often undeniable and presents a refutation to the notion that the science of manipulation spans the gamut of existence. Beautiful pictures of people reading, among others, also point to the inner dimension of life that opens, ultimately, onto God. Positivism is like coming to the entrance of an intriguing and beautiful home, but never knocking and entering.

   By Richard Cocks – faculty member of the Philosophy Department at SUNY Oswego. Dr. Cocks is an editor and regular contributor at the Orthosphere and has been published at The Brussels Journal, The Sydney Traditionalist Forum, People of Shambhala, The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and the University Bookman.

[leviathangourmet]

There was a time when Das Kapital was my bible. It sits on one of the bookshelves that line my living room, alongside other artifacts from my youthful foray into Marxism. The front cover is worn, the pages slightly frayed. For years, I returned to those words, chewing slow on arguments unspooled in archaic prose about labour-power and the appropriation of surplus-value. I was certain I’d found the key to understanding the modern world; a truth so pure it would end the oppression of man by man.

I’ve thought often about that sense of certainty in the years since. I turn the memories over in my mind, amazed at my erstwhile fervency. The sense that I, a teenager and later a young man, had found the answer to what ails the world in a text of political economy published in 1867….That hubris, in retrospect, is shocking.

Although I would have protested the idea then, it’s become clear to me that my former sense of conviction was a secularized form of faith. My pretense to holding an atheistic worldview coldly ruled by reason was just that: a pretense. Marx may have been correct that religion is the opiate of the masses, but he failed to envision what his materialist conception of history would become to his followers in a secularized world. On an unconscious level, my ideology was fundamentally theistic, my nominal rejection of the supernatural notwithstanding.

The link between religion and Marxism (or, more recently, identity politics) has been remarked upon by many writers, including here in Quillette. Nevertheless, I continue to be struck by how many intelligent and empathetic young people, often on the tail end of a gradual, multi-generational rejection of God, become congregants of the radical left.

I’ll use Christianity and Marxism to illustrate the point, but it holds for other religions and ideologies as well. Jesus steps onto the world stage to bring forth the word of God, before sacrificing himself for the sins of mankind. Marx rises from obscurity after revealing the unfolding logic of history and—by extension—the end point in the social organization of man. The apostles, the closest followers of Christ, dedicate themselves to interpreting and spreading his word. The post-Marx Marxists do the same, although the most revered figures vary depending on geography and personal preference. For some, it’s butchers such as Stalin and Mao; for me, it was Lenin and Trotsky, the architects of the October Revolution of 1917. Perhaps most on the nose: The Czech-Austrian communist theoretician Karl Kautsky, the most well-known follower of Marx and Engels in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, was affectionately called “the pope of Marxism.”

The Old Testament is replaced by Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, and the New Testament by Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, or Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare, or Lenin’s April Theses. Parsing these texts becomes an obsession for generations of true believers. The rapture, that bloody apocalyptic end of days, is replaced with revolution. And like fundamentalist Christians, many Marxists look forward to it, including the death and terror it would bring. Finally, communism marks the manifestation of heaven on earth. Despite the pretension to atheism, Marxism provides a secularized Christian eschatology, rooted in an unconscious Manichaean millenarianism.

The late British-American essayist Christopher Hitchens was a reformed Marxist. In his 2007 book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he likened his youthful political convictions to religious faith thusly:

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute, and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect, which admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we also had our prophets…Those of us who had a sort of rational alternative for religion had reached a terminus which was comparably dogmatic.

As I can attest, there is a certain comfort that accompanies this mindset, which I suspect is similar to what religious true believers feel. It also gives one a sense of purpose, for I was a missionary on the hunt for converts. There were times I travelled hundreds of kilometres to participate in demonstrations that had little, if any, connection to my life, except for the hope that one day, perhaps even after my death, my efforts would help usher in the prophesized utopia. There were moments my comrades and I would even acknowledge and poke fun at this aspect of our activism: During a campaign that involved canvassing poor neighbourhoods in a major U.S. city, knocking on door after door, we began referring to ourselves as the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the revolution.

One of the most evident problems with faith-based (or ersatz-faith-based) worldviews is that they arm adherents with a sense of certitude that is corrosive to discourse. It leaves them utterly certain that they occupy the moral high ground on every issue, and so the facts must be on their side. And if the facts prove uncooperative, they are either ignored, distorted, or simply erased. This is something the much-maligned French philosopher Michel Foucault understoodquite well, notwithstanding all of the criticism to which he has been subject:

The polemi­cist…pro­ceeds en­cased in priv­i­leges that he pos­sesses in ad­vance and will never agree to ques­tion. On prin­ci­ple, he pos­sesses rights au­tho­riz­ing him to wage war and mak­ing that strug­gle a just un­der­tak­ing; the per­son he con­fronts is not a part­ner in search for the truth, but an ad­ver­sary, an en­emy who is wrong, who is harm­ful, and whose very ex­is­tence con­sti­tutes a threat. For him, then, the game con­sists not of rec­og­niz­ing this per­son as a sub­ject hav­ing the right to speak, but of abol­ish­ing him as in­ter­locu­tor from any pos­si­ble di­a­logue; and his final ob­jec­tive will be not to come as close as pos­si­ble to a difficult truth, but to bring about the tri­umph of the just cause he has been man­i­festly up­hold­ing from the be­gin­ning.

There’s an episode from my own past that illustrates this general principle nicely. I’m young and arguing with my stepfather about politics. In Canada, where we live, our nation’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is a shameful stain on our history. The Indigenous population remains marginalized, their communities being often poor and isolated. We were discussing what needed to be done to remedy this. My stepfather argued that there is only so much the government can do to improve the lot of any group, and that states should create the conditions in which people can lift themselves up, before getting out of the way entirely. It’s a perfectly reasonable position, one I’m sympathetic to now. But at the time, I was having none of it. Not only was he on the wrong side of the issue, he was on the wrong side of history. Frustrated and angry after a lengthy, emotional exchange, I called him a racist, practically spitting the word at him. In fact, my stepfather is nothing of the sort. I’ve never heard him utter an unkind word, let alone one that betrayed an attitude of bigotry. This wasn’t a case of him denying historical wrongs. He simply disagreed what steps could best be taken to address a problem we both recognized as real. Thinking back on the encounter still makes me feel ashamed.

For many of us, such one-off encounters have become a regular—sometimes even daily—form of “debate,” especially on social media, whose dynamics encourage rhetorical stakes-raising. The idea that two people acting in good faith can look at the same set of facts and reach different conclusions has gone from unspoken assumption to exotic claim. People aren’t just wrong on this or that issue: They’re morally flawed. They don’t have bad politics: They’re bad people. On Twitter, you actually find college professors and politicians using Nazi analogies to attack people who disagree with them on mundane points of policy.

My job as a journalist requires me to spend a fair amount of time on Twitter, which I find draining and toxic. My feed is a curated list of North American politicos and reporters, which gives me a front row seat on the outrage mobs. I’ve concluded that many of the most active and influential culture warriors—the ones in the front pews praying the loudest, and the most ecstatically—are mentally unwell.

The Covington Catholic student controversy at the Lincoln Memorial offered an extreme example—perhaps even a wake-up call. People are no longer seen as individuals, but rather stand-ins for group identity. Nick Sandmann, the 16-year-old boy at the centre of things, was depicted as the very distillation of white supremacist, patriarchal evil. Making a single individual, let alone a child, the proxy for centuries of oppression isn’t social justice. It’s insanity. One was reminded of a Christian mob in ancient times that had found a heretic to sacrifice—or a similar mob in modern Pakistan that had seized some poor sod accused of mocking the Prophet Mohammed or desecrating a Koran.

One of the best descriptions of the ideologically possessed mind comes to us from Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). In The God that Failed, a 1949 collection of essays written by ex-communists detailing their conversion to, and disillusionment from, Marxism, Koestler wrote:

Something had clicked in my brain, which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows…The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.

What is needed in the face of such ideological certainty is a phase shift to a more modest intellectual approach. When I look back on my time as a Marxist, I’m struck by how little doubt I experienced. The world is an unbelievably complex place composed of infinite shades of grey. And anyone who thinks they have it all figured out should be mistrusted on principle.

These days, when I see that copy of Das Kapital on my shelf, my mind turns not to its author, but to Socrates. For during my years as a Marxist, I lost touch with the philosopher’s greatest insight: “I neither know nor think I know.” Socrates was the smartest man in Athens because he recognized his ignorance. It is perhaps the oldest lesson that philosophy has to teach us, yet so many of us have forgotten it.

This is not a call for epistemological nihilism. I am not advocating a bottomless appeal to subjectivity that destroys the very idea of truth. Meaning and knowledge, not just aesthetic preference, are possible; and it is incumbent upon us to strive for them. But we must also remember that people of good faith can be divided by politics and religion. Your favorite pundit or political theorist is just that—a pundit or political theorist, not a Moses, Mohammed or Jesus. And there is no one ideology that will lead us to an imagined promised land.

[pornosophical]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory, well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier.   The voices dissolved into the warm pre-dawn darkness as I watched vomit drip between the ferns and fallen leaves. Muttering consolations, my friend held my elbow. Only moments before we had been making impassioned if sloshy love in my single bed, while my 21st birthday party raged outside. Now I was hurling what seemed like a infinite fount of bile into the bushes behind my little room.   As my friend led me to bed, I thought: You really are 21 now. You got horribly drunk, dragged a guy to bed, and then got sick. Just like a made-for-TV movie. These thoughts were accompanied by an odd, abstracted rapture I have come to take for granted. For want of a better term, I'll call it the rapture of irony.   Halfway to my bed, I must have laughed out loud, because my friend asked, "What are you thinking about?"   "The narrative," was all I could manage. I wanted him to know that even in this humiliated, impaired state, I was fully cognizant of the mind boggling paradox of the situation. I may have been a walking cliché but at least I was self-conscious.

Carol Lloyd, I Was Michel Foucault’s Love Slave

As I drifted off into a tangle of dehydrated nightmares, I comforted myself with the thought that Theory had suffused my life so thoroughly that I couldn't get laid, get drunk and get sick without paying homage to Roland Barthes' notion of the "artifice of realism" or Baudrillard's "simulacra." Though now I live a practical life, with more actions and fewer theories, I still struggle with the convoluted mind-set of my higher education. Even after years of trying to acclimate myself to a more concrete world, this odd theology lives in me so much so that it is only recently that I have recognized it for what it is: a religious doctrine.

I am a child of Theory. I avoided this truth because I didn't want to confront the deep, strange river of pretentiousness that courses in my veins. But lately I've begun to think my predicament is less reflective of a private eccentricity than of a weird historical moment. The moment when the most arcane, elitist mental gymnastics Theory in all its hybrid forms was reborn as sexy, politically radical action. The moment when well-meaning liberal intellectuals who a decade before had dedicated themselves to activism, volunteerism and building social programs turned inward, tending to their private experiential gardens with obsessive diligence. Theory offered intellectuals the same escape from the public world that self-help and therapy offered the masses. But unlike self-help and therapy, which never claimed to be anything but psycho-spiritual Darwinism, Theory draped itself in revolutionary verbiage and pretended to be a political movement. For those of us who got liberal educations in the wake of this shift, being radical meant little more than voting when it was convenient, reading the newspaper and thinking about doing charity work. The only thing that separated us from the ignorant masses was our intellectual opinions, which we shrouded in baroque revolutionary rhetoric. The "tyranny of grammar," the "subversion of sexual mores in extinct Native American tribes," and the "colonialism of the novel" these were our mantles of honor.   Though I always believed that my upbringing was free of ideological trappings, I now see that the seed was planted long before I reached college. My eldest brother was a political activist in his teens, but with the onslaught of the '80s he threw away his ideals and pursued the good life: drinking from the corporate tit as an organizational consultant. After two years in Africa as Peace Corps volunteers, my parents shed their activist habits, moving to a resort town with the intention of getting rich building houses for retired millionaires. Aside from the little holes punched in their secret ballots and token checks made out to various nonprofit organizations, politically my family acted no differently than our blue-blood, conservative neighbors. They pursued the free market with a vengeance, bought as many nice things as possible and hobnobbed at the tennis club. But they still talked like the lefties they once had been. And how they talked.   At dinner we served up steaming topical cauldrons of death, child rearing, art and gender, then skewered them whole. We asked unanswerable questions and then imperiously proceeded to invent the answers. We had no interest in facts. Facts were just things you made up to win arguments. Once I brought home a boyfriend whose old-fashioned education and conservative family had taught him none of the liberal preference for ideas over facts. When the dinner conversation turned toward his hobby of California history and he began to speak in facts, my family paused to stare at him like he was sporting antennae. My mother hemmed; my father hawed; my brothers began to babble invented statistics. Through my family I learned to love ideas "for their own sake," which made me a kind of idiot savant (with emphasis on the idiot) and a prime victim for the God of Theory.   In 1978 my high school history teacher, a Harvard-educated, Jewish-turned-Catholic New Yorker, promised to give "extra credit" to anyone who read and did a book report on Paul de Man's "Blindness and Insight." (Though later exposed as a Nazi sympathizer, at that moment de Man still carried the mantle of "subversive" in the hippest sense.) Dutifully, I read every page understanding it the way a little boy understands the gurgles of his toad. I had no idea what it meant but the densely knotted language of ideas made my head implode and my body sing. For the rest of my high school years I would only have to read a paragraph or two of deconstruction's steamy prose to have a literary orgasm.   In his recent disavowal of literary criticism in Lingua Franca, Frank Lentricchia confesses that his "silent encounters with literature are ravishingly pleasurable, like erotic transport." My experiences with Theory were equally exalted delivering me into a paroxysm of overdetermined signs. In the blurry vertigo of those pages so full of incomprehensible printed matter I felt myself in the presence of a God: the God of complex questions, the God of language's mysteries, the God of meaning severed from the painful and demanding particularity of experience. In abstractions, I found absolution from a world in which I was utterly unprepared for any real responsibility or sacrifice. By surrendering myself to Theory, "reality" became a blank screen upon which I projected my political fantasies. My feelings of responsibility to a world that I had once recognized as both unjust and astoundingly concrete, slowly and painlessly seeped out of me until all that remained was the "consciousness" of the "complexity" of any "serious issue." I didn't need to fix anything, utterance was all, and all I needed were the words long and tentacled enough to entrap meaning for a slippery, textual moment.   Like any religion, Theory provided perks to the pious. In my freshman year, I took an upper-division class on the 17th century English novel. The books were long and difficult but I secured my standing in the class when I responded to the teacher's mention of deconstructive theory. "Yes, each idea undermines itself," I parroted, channeling the memory of my sophomore extra credit report. "Paul de Man says..." With that bit of arcane spittle, I hit pay dirt. The teacher gave me such a hyperbolic recommendation, I was able to transfer to a better school. Once there, I evaded undergraduate classes with their demanding finals and multiple writing assignments and insinuated myself into graduate theory seminars of all departments: anthropology, literature, political science, theater, history. With a host of other would-be intellectuals, I honed the fine art of thinking about thinking about ... What we were thinking about was always pretty irrelevant. I developed minor expertise in the representation of the hermaphrodite in psychiatric literature, the uncanny relationship between classical ballet and the absolutist state of Louis XIV and the woman as landscape in Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy." Now I was just warming up, I told myself. Someday I would find an important issue worthy of all my well-exercised mental muscles and then watch out hegemony!   While I was being treated to the many joys of a great liberal education, I was also learning some rather insidious lessons. I discovered I didn't have to read the entire assigned book. After all, the "ideas" were what was important. Better to read the criticism about the book. Better yet, read the criticism of the criticism and my teachers would not only be impressed but a little intimidated. By extension, I learned not only a way of reading but a way of living. The more removed I was from a primary act, the more valuable it was. Why scoop soup at the homeless shelter when you could say something interesting about how naive it was to think that feeding people really helped them when really what was needed was structural change.   My friends now fall into two categories: ex-Theory nerds (like me) making a living off their late-learned pragmatism, and those who still live and breathe by Theory's fragrant vapors political theorists, literary critics, historians, eternal graduate students. I love talking to them and often I covet the little thrones their ideas get to perch on. Yet when I come away from a conversation that has swooped from the racist implications of early French embalming techniques to the "revolutionary interventions" in the margins of "Tristram Shandy" and ended with the appalling hypocrisy of the right wing, I often feel a strange discomfort. Because these are some of the smartest, kindest and most energetic people I know, I cannot resist the question: Is this the best way for them to spend their lives? If they acknowledged that they were largely engaged in the amoral endeavor of pure intellectual play, that would be one thing, but each of these people considers their work deeply, emphatically political.   Is this theory-heavy, fact-free education teaching people to preach one way and live another? Are we learning that political opinion, however finely crafted, is a legitimate substitute for action? Sometimes it seems that the increased political emphasis on language the controversies over "chairpersons," "people of color" and "youth-at-risk" did more than create a friendly linguistic landscape, it gave liberals something to do, to argue about, to write about, while the right wing took over the country, precinct by precinct. After all, in a world where each lousy word can stir up a raging debate, why worry about the hard, dull work of food distribution or waste management?   I know how high and mighty this sounds, and the side of me that appreciates subtlety and disdains brow-beating is wincing. Political moralism has fallen from fashion, leaving us to cobble together myopic philosophies from warmed-over New Age thinkers like Deepak Chopra or archaic scriptures like the Bible. If it's any consolation, I include myself in the most offending group of educated progressives who squandered their political power over white wine and words like "instantiation." Moreover, I'm not saying we're all a bunch of awful, selfish people. We learned to read, we learned to think critically and at least pay lip service to certain values of justice, egalitarianism and questioning authority. But I do wonder if we're handicapped, publicly impaired somehow.   Like most of my siblings of Theory, from time to time I have tried to get off my duff and do something concrete: protest, precinct walk, do volunteer work whatever but I always get impatient. I wasn't meant to chant annoying rhymes. I am trained to relish complexity, to never simplify a thought. I am trained to appreciate "difference" (between skin tones and truths), but I don't know how to organize a political meeting, create a strategy or make a long-term commitment to a social organization. As Wallace Shawn wrote in "The Fever," "The incredible history of my feelings and my thoughts could fill up a dozen leather-bound books. But the story of my life my behavior, my actions that's a slim volume and I've never read it."   Lentricchia argues that by politicizing the experience of reading, we ended up degrading its beauty and pleasure. In the same fell swoop, we also robbed concrete political action of its meaning. The progressive pragmatists studied political theory; the progressive idealists studied literary theory; and the eccentric radicals became conceptual artists and sold their work to millionaires. In any case, everyone bought the idea that they were engaged in political work. Having a radical opinion was tantamount to revolution.   Back in college, I remember going to a party at the home of one of my professors, who was a famous Marxist. The split-level house was decorated with rare antiques from all over the world, exclusive labels filled the wine cellar, the banquet table overflowed with delicacies. Like an anointed inner circle of acolytes, we students sat around as our professors argued that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was justified from the perspective of the underpaid Palestinian servants who worked in Kuwaiti homes. The following month, while I was house-sitting at the professor's house, his black gardener came to the door wanting to be paid. I discovered that my professor was paying the man minimum wage for less than a half day of self-employed work. That night as I plundered the refrigerator for the best cheeses that money could buy, I chided myself for not having doubled the man's wages. But that might have embarrassed him, no? It definitely would have embarrassed me. It would have been acting on a belief, and action makes me uncomfortable.   Recently I went to a conference on "Women's Art and Activism." I found precious little of either. Instead I found a lot of Theory garbed in its many costumes. There was a lesbian conceptual artist talking about her work, triangular boxes that "undermined the patriarchy of shapes"; a "revolutionary" poet lecturing on her experience of biculturalism; and an "anarchist" performance artist discussing "strategies for subversion." And what fabulous haircuts! The keynote speaker was Orlon, a French performance artist whose work consists of having her entire face rebuilt by plastic surgery. After a very French explanation as to why she needed a third face lift, she answered questions from the packed house. "I think you're just incredible," said one woman. "You say your aim is to reconquer your body as signifier. How do you feel about letting a doctor touch your signifier? And how do you see your revolutionary techniques emancipating women from the prisons of their bodies as sign?"   Had I stumbled into a satanic ritual, I couldn't have felt a more chilling sensation of alienation. Once I would have smiled at these liturgies and savored their impenetrable truths. Now I only wanted to run away and do what? Dig a ditch? Perform open heart surgery? Administrate a charity? Even after all these years, I was still expecting Theory to visit me like the Virgin Mary and give me more than a sign.