Revenge of the Mutterites
Revenge of the Mutterites
Last week I spent five frenetic days at a conference on politics and religion held at Trinity Western University, outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. A faculty member, Grant Havers, who arranged to have me invited, and his gracious fiancée, Theresa, were my kind hosts; and they took me on the last day of my visit on a trip to Victoria, where I was able to gaze at Victorian architectural splendors, on a Pacific Northwest outpost of what had once been the glorious British Empire. I was also given an interview on a Vancouver TV channel, dedicated to “religious subjects,” and as Fate would have it, I was interviewed about a week after “one of the US’s most important conservatives,” as he was described, had appeared on the same program. This dignitary who had preceded me, and had spoken ill of my person, was none other than Taki’s favorite punching bag, the Frum.
But the memories of my trip that may stay with me longest concern the presentations that came from some of my fellow-participants, together with the reactions these talks evoked among the auditors. From having listened to these presentations, and particularly to two of them delivered by a self-described “metro sexual, leftist” from the New School for Social Research, and to the comments of faculty respondents, I extracted the following, mind-boggling opinions: All particularity is bad, and especially the kind that is associated with religion, and most especially with Christianity. But since people need “fictions” to organize themselves collectively, it would be best to produce “narratives that people would talk about but not really believe in.” Holding “absolute beliefs” can be extremely perilous and may even undermine the belief in equality, which is what all of us should be for. The person offering these opinions also insisted that Jesus had given his life during “a hermeneutic encounter” in which he had expressed doubts about his own position. Unfortunately, however, Christianity’s founder had established a religion that led to sexism and, what is more, to many deaths at the hands of religious bigots. When I interrupted the speaker (during an endless monologue delivered at a dinner on the last evening of the conference) and asked whether the Communists had killed as many people as Christian sexists, his answer was quite simply “that’s debatable.” I was happy to learn that the speaker, a successful academic, was bridging the gap between Marxism and the post-Marxist Left, by combining a denial of Communist mass-murder with multicultural incoherence.
One of his admirers among the assembled guests also insisted that we should not forget about “the sexist oppression” that still rages among Protestants because of their reliance on the Bible. Instead of tailoring this text to fit the feminist movement, Protestants (which ones were not indicated) continued to revere ancient passages emphasizing gender distinctions. A guest from Mount St. Mary, who taught religion there, contrasted this stubborn Biblicism to the more enlightened views of Muslims, whose account of the fall did not place special blame on the female sex. This more generous view, apparently found in the Koran, accounted for the fact that Muslims treat women more kindly than do Christians. When I suggested this was not in fact the case, my fellow-academic qualified her statement by explaining that “politically Muslims do treat women differently from men.” Presumably daily life in Saudi Arabia and in Pakistani villages reflected the perfect application of the principles of the National Organization of Women.
By Friday afternoon, after an “interfaith dialogue,’ in which a local Muslim businessman had repeated the mantra “our faith is all about peace,” a statement that seemed to have left the audience tingling with interfaith good will, I was becoming stupefied by diversity. But then while our metro-sexual star was discoursing on the danger of religious beliefs and his despair over not being able to embrace “faith positions” because of their incompatibility with his openness to dialogue, and belief in equality (I’m not sure how this last belief is not a belief), the gathering suddenly turned electric. The speaker decided to open the session to questions, but once having announced that, began to look with growing panic at the right corner of the auditorium. There I was seated with Grant, Theresa, and a Boston Irish faculty member who taught communications. My companions were giggling slightly but as far as I could tell, none of them was making noise. At that point the speaker on the podium turned toward me and asked if I had raised a question. My answer was “not yet. I’m still listening in rapt attention.” He then raised his voice to explain: “I think that some muttering is coming from over there.” It was as if the speaker were preparing for a full-scale attack from those who had had enough of his verbal exhibitionism and ritualized PC cringes.
I recall that two of the presumed mutterers, Grant and myself, let the poseur have it good, and particularly when he tried to explain that Osama Ben Laden did not have the slightest interest in converting anyone in the West to Islam. Allegedly Osama was simply reacting against Western invaders. (One need not support W’s war of choice in Iraq in order to recognize the silliness of this whitewash of an international terrorist who has never hidden his conversionary agenda or his hatred for Christians and Jews.) Although the speaker claimed to reject all religions equally, Muslims seemed to fare better in his hermeneutic encounters than the utterly “hate-filled” religion of the West. Grant tried to press the point that Muslim institutions in Saudi Arabia would not be inviting him to come to insult them in the way Evangelical Protestants were doing at his university. At least on the question of tolerance, the speaker should have been honest enough to concede the obvious. Western Trinity was an institution whose faculty affirmed their adherence each year to the Nicene Creed. Nonetheless, Grant went on to explain, its faculty and officers had provided a forum and remuneration for those who were happy to trash their religious convictions.
One point that we Mutterites (that is, members of an only recently discovered remnant of a long lost Reformation sect) discussed after the session is whether academics in high place “really believe the garbage we had listened to.” In my view, most of them probably only accept in some very general sense what they publicly espouse. What they say is so plainly self-contradictory and so counterfactual that it is impossible to imagine that otherwise intelligent people could hold such views to be true. It is utter nonsense to assert that Europeans who had abandoned all their age-old traditions and beliefs would now find unity by embracing a contrived “narrative” that they knew to be a “fiction.” Without any doubt the careers and social positions of those who spoke like this depend on their willingness to express such opinions, with a modicum of fervor. This is not to say that ordinary people whom I met in Canada believed anything more substantial. For most of the public opinion I encountered in Canada corresponded closely to what one would hear in our country from a young Obamaite. Canadians are remarkably willing to go along with PC as a civil religion; and what our metro-sexual and feminist participants had to say differed little in its conclusions from what Canadians have been taught to swallow with their baby pabulum.
But intellectuals are a different matter, and the ones who were invited to Western Trinity seemed to have been far too literate and far too well educated in the political and religious classics of the West to have inwardly accepted the drivel they regaled us with. At the end of the day, successful academics in the humanities, that is, the ones who are thriving in elite institutions, may be more cynical than psychotic. Grant, Theresa, and the fellow from Boston suggested what we had heard indicates a contagious mental illness or at least the willingness of intellectuals to pretend to suffer from it. In Canada there are already functioning Human Rights courts that go after those who state views of the kind produced on this website too loudly.
Comments
‘When I interrupted the speaker (during an endless monologue delivered at a dinner on the last evening of the conference) and asked whether the Communists had killed as many people as Christian sexists, his answer was quite simply “that’s debatable.”’
Did he mean to suggest that the Nazis were Christian sexists?
It’s interesting how both Communism and Nazism have been traced to Christianity, and both Communism and Neoconservatism have been traced to Judaism. The left-liberals seem to be attempting to reinvent themselves as having transcended all of this, of having sprung from the head of Zeus, yet in practice their programs and operational system most closely resemble Communism: statist solutions to everything engineered by an “intellectual” elite; state enforced equality of the sexes, races and classes, in conjunction with the demonization of white, male Christians and of the family; politically correct speech-policing; the veneration of promiscuity, which is line with their hostility towards the traditional Christian family.
In some ways, the Christian Right, which has allied itself with vicious Neocon Zionists, deserves to be savaged and stereotyped. But not the entirety of Christianity, which is the foundation upon which the civilization in which these confused-yet-smug left-liberals are now riding high, has been built.
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This is a marvelous presentation of what actually is said and promoted at academic conferences, even those on campuses with ties to professed Christianity. Such schools will all but invariably bend over backwards to accommodate PC, even when its mouthpieces insult them and worse. One thing of immense importance that should be gleaned from this is how fortunate Dr. Gottfried was in finding any university that would tenure him.
I have spent time trying to decide how many of the academic PC-preachers actually believe the nonsense they regurgitate endlessly. Yes, most are, at least by the standards of the era, well educated and well read, and what they spew or at least defend reflexively as self-obvious dogma is rife with so many contradictions that it seems that few of them could believe it. But men who allow themselves to become addicted to horrible ideologies will suspend logic and factual knowledge in order to remain faithful.
My guess is that there is significant cynical acceptance and posturing by certain academics who know better and simply wish to retain their jobs in peace, many of whom if they felt it necessary to protecting their careers would join in the stoning of anyone denounced as atavistically intolerant. As if that were not sufficiently awful, I have no doubt that there also is a sizeable element of True Believers.
The worst part is that the PC religion is now so successfully embedded in the minds and hearts of the masses that they demand that all of us genuflect to many, perhaps most, of its articles of faith, and that includes church related colleges. This ideology is a twined hatred of two things, each of which it intends to exterminate: orthodox historic Christianity (as opposed to various anti-Trinitarian and/or Gnostic and/or pro-ordained women, pro-homosexual groups fancying or deceptively marketing themselves Christian: the metrosexual fits here) and traditional European folk cultures and identities.
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Ed,
The ‘Christian Right’ as we now understand it is something that did not “ally itself with vicious Neocon Zionists.” That Anglophonic Evangelical movement, which is best understood culturally and politically by knowing the Sci Fi cartoonish theology of Dispensational Pre-Millennialism, is one that is, I assert, inherent in its source: Anglo-Saxon Puritansim. The English Puritans were the most thorough Judaizing heretics – as well as the most self-righteously savage imperial government centralizers - to capture any lasting political power in the age of Reformation, and the telos of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism is what we see today.
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Paul, Why did you go?
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I apologize for any misspellings that might occur in this post - I’m SO upset! A few moments ago, I had to BITCHSLAP a co-worker for allowing her Protestant Chador to slip far enough for me to see an eyebrow.
What a load of crap!
“...’Metro sexual, leftist’ from the New School for Social Research”
...At least my enemies are sooo five minutes ago.
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Borne said of Goethe:
“Goethe always paid homage only to egoism and coldness; hence, it is only the cold that like him. He has taught educated people how to be educated, broad-minded, and unprejudiced, while remaining egoistic; how to possess every vice without becoming coarse, every foible without becoming ridiculous; how to keep a pure mind uncontaminated by the filth of the heart, how to sin with decorum and to make use of artistic form to beautify anything reprehensible or base. And because he taught us all this, he is revered by educated people.
Organization is not order...it is disorder. Uniformity is not unity...it is fragmentation. The Age of Enlightenment....or the age of endarkment....another bourgeoisie rebellion gone awry. Prometheus or Epimetheus. Herr Spinoza, nature does not reveal God, rather it conceals Him. Herr Descartes, you think because you are Not. The Nazarene did not come to redeem...he came to make us capable of Redemption.
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In response to the above query, I went because Grant and his chairman invited me as a
speaker. My practice is to accept speaking engagements in my area of expertise, if
time permits,from academic organizations and scholarly conferences. The only obvious
exception I would make is for groups controled by neocons. But since this situation
would never arise in which neocons invited me to participate in one of their gatherings,
I don’t have to worry about this particular social problem
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‘The ‘Christian Right’ as we now understand it is something that did not “ally itself with vicious Neocon Zionists”...The English Puritans were the most thorough Judaizing heretics – as well as the most self-righteously savage imperial government centralizers...’
Well then perhaps the Neocon Zionists joined the like-minded Christian Right and together the gave rise to Dispensationalism as a mass movement. Whoever joined whom, they have all worked to the discredit of Christianity (which, perhaps, was their intention—conscious or subconscious—all along).
By the by, kudos to Gottfried for bringing the good word to the left-liberal heathens. We must all do our part where we can. The voice of sanity has been shouted down and played the shrinking violet for far too long, thus allowing savages posing as sophisticates and bona-fides on both the Right and the Left to take the levers of power by default, which they then wield against us all savagely.
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There has always been a very fine line between trade & piracy...as we all know too well(JP Morgan??Bear Stearns...the boys & the goys). Sir Walter Raleigh was the original holder of the “patent” to your lovely Virginia. Elizabeth soon found Rawleigh “unpalatable” & “inconvenient"(mostly due to a change of the “winds” with Spain)… off to the tower for him & a change in the title of the “great es[state] of Virginia”...a little later on our beloved John Marshall dedicated his entire “career” to swindling Lord Fairfax out of these same lands(that’s what made him a Federalist & that’s how he got the yob....Jefferson hated Marshall for whit)...long story short it was Cromwell who invited “the Jews” back to perfidious, bucanneerish Albion...all of you, each & every one, are that history...how freakin’ universal.
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Any links to those interwievs?
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The “PC religion” gained supremacy on campuses through biology rather than ideology, which explains why it is “rife with so many contradictions” - and also irreversible. In other words, Dr. Gottfried’s “contagious mental illness” is the normally functioning feminine mind, obsessed with conformity and ultimately beyond reason. Would you rather have Bill or Hillary as your dean?
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A long time ago, I attended Port Angeles High School, where--across the Strait of Juan de Fuca--we could physically see Victoria from our campus.
I don’t think it’s any more surprising that lefties ignore the historical truth of Atheist/communist mass murder than the paleoconservative willful ignorance of the economic and historical thruth of Ricardian comparitive advantage. Smart people are NOT more objective, they are simply better at rationalizing beliefs they already hold.
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As I read this I burst out laughing on three separate occasions. If they had stadium seating for spectators whenever Paul butted heads with multiculturalist bigots I would be a season ticket holder.
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This entire debate seems pointless. There seems to be an organized movement to destroy, or, discredit Christianity. This is not something new, it is been going on since the begining of Christianity. The problem seems to be that this speaker with the very liberal, and, pc ideas has a voice and forum. However, if challenged by someone with
knowledge of history, political science, and anthropology, a person could quickly make a complete mockery of this nutcase. I myself have argued with a few people just like him at the University of Mary Washington, in all cases thier arguements fell apart or they ran out of ideas. Thier beliefs simply do not work in the real world. Life is not fair, complete economic equality is not possible, and normal people do not really care about what some pointy-headed academicians have to say.
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Oh, what I wouldn’t do to see a youtube of this event. Was anybody taping?
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A problem with addressing such views is that paleos are hardly ever invited to challenge
the multicultural Left. The authorized opposition are neocon scribblers, who dominate
that part of the American media that is not entirely controled by Michael Moore-types.
Debates between neocons and multicultural academics are usually skewed toward certain
neocon fixations, such as Israel, support for the war, anti-Semitism, and who really
understands the legacy of Martin Luther King. In such weird discussions the post-Marxist
Left is never seriously confronted with the idiocies and inconsistencies of its views.
In fact it often comes off looking like the defenders of academic freedom, in a
confrontation with neo-Wilsonian totalitarians.
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I mean the “America First” anti-trade protectionism of Pat Buchanan. It’s why we are burning expensive corn moonshine in our SUVs instead of cheap Brazilian rum ethanol or just regular unleaded gasoline. Meanwhile, the Poor mexicans that live almost soley on corn totillas and beans have to pay double for their corn.
It’s why we protect a few hundred sugar producing jobs in Florida and Louisiana at the expense of hundred of thousands of lost jobs at Hershey, Nestle, and Dunkin doughnuts.
Read “Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazlit, specifically chapter XI. Or Stephen Landsburg, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, F.A Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, or David Ricardo.
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Brain surgeons don’t save money by mowing their own lawn or changing their own oil. International trade frees us up to do more productive things. If you really believe in free markets , then you should be consistent and be pro free trade also, including free trade in labor.
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“A problem with addressing such views is that paleos are hardly ever invited to challenge
the multicultural Left. The authorized opposition are neocon scribblers...”
The paleocon-libertarian perspective has basically been shut out of established agitprop venues, from the halls of congress to academia to mass media to cultural dissemination. In part, this is because it shuns the very idea of agitprop itself. This is understandable in that the most intelligent people don’t like to speak in sound bites and slogans. But from a movement perspective, it is a huge mistake. Sound bites and slogans are what the masses understand and relate to, and ever will. Glibness, even sarcasm, can be very effective. But the paleocon-libertarian type is too earnest, and too honest, to engage in such low brow tactics. Some might say its too dainty for street-brawling. This must change, and it can. Anyone who saw the YouTube video of Ron Paul supporters in New Hampshire hounding Sean Hannity through the streets chanting “Fox News Sucks” understands there’s visceral anger and energy out there that can be easily tapped into. I’m not saying p-l’s should sell their souls; I’m saying they should quit lacking the courage of their convictions and be willing to get a little bit dirty. Gottfried’s willingness to make waves in BC is good example of how it can be done with class.
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So paleo-libertarians have been shut out because “the most intelligent people” don’t like to speak in sound bites and slogans. And these “dainty” souls are “too earnest, and too honest, to engage in such low brow tactics.”
All true, brother, but you left out “humble.”
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Brain surgeons don’t save money by mowing their own lawn or changing their own oil. International trade frees us up to do more productive things. If you really believe in free markets , then you should be consistent and be pro free trade also, including free trade in labor.
I don’t really believe in free markets. If I decide to go for a religion, I can tell you now it won’t be capitalism.
Capitalism as an order, rather than a tool, is death, because there’ll always be someone there wanting you to sell him the rope to hang you.
The first problem with your free markets in labor that springs to mind is the whole “privatize the profits, publicize the costs” aspect of immigration; one sector gets the upside (wage slave labor), and foists the downside on everyone else (crime, drunk driving, cultural disintegration, welfare, affirmative action, etc.).
The second is that it’s a sucker’s game - nations that don’t protect their sovereignty are doomed to extinction.
Third, I don’t like the idea of slave wage jobs - if a job is low-paying and unpleasant, the solution is NOT to import wage slaves from the third world to artificially lower wages - it’s to increase pay to attract workers, or bugger off and mow your own friggin’ yard, or better, invent a mowing robot.
Homo Economicus can take a long walk off a short pier. Maybe we’ll get lucky and evolution will do the job for us - after all, where’s the profit in raising kids?
Pure capitalism is parents pimping out their children.
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The first problem
I meant to expand on that; my point was, end the privatize/publicize scam and maybe we can discuss the matter further.
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And libertarianism, with it’s kernel of radical individualism, is a sucker’s game; groups outcompete individuals.
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Why is it then, that individuals rarely go insane...and, that groups rarely don’t...?
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While I wholeheartedly support Paul Gottfried’s opposition of the utter nonsense the PC crowd spouts at these meetings, I think he gets carried away, when he repeats the Neocon/Pastor Haggee fairy tale that Bin Laden is hell-bent on establishing a new caliphate around the world. He is certainly no more pushing his religion on non-believers than a Pastor Haggee, the ever present Jehova’s witness on your door, or even our own pope.
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Collectivism is a sucker’s game, because you limit your choices, guaranteeing a suboptimal outcome. Groups do not always outcompete individuals. Would the Mona Lisa have been a better painting if it hat been painted by a comittee?
Culture and religion do not need the coercive power of government to grow and thrive. Christianity made it’s biggest gains before Constantine.
Libertarians believe in freedom for everyone, not just those who agree with us. It is deeply rooted in the JudeoChristian concept of Free Will.
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The myth of a “Judeo-Christian tradition”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4803.htm
I think Free Will is far more Christian than it is Judeo, which is a pretty coercive and authoritarian beleif system.
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Collectivism is a sucker’s game
Agreed. That doesn’t make individualism any less of a loser, obviously.
Groups do not always outcompete individuals. Would the Mona Lisa have been a better painting if it had been painted by a committee?
I wouldn’t be surprised if da Vinci had help. It was common practice for master painters to have assistants. This isn’t exactly a “committee,” but I didn’t say “committees outcompete individuals,” either.
But yes, there are exceptions to any rule; I meant in terms of resource competition, etc. Consider an hyperbolic example: 5 radically “absolute” group members amongst a population of 100 “absolute” individualists. The former will dominate the latter. In fact, the more absolute the “absolutes,” the larger the number one can substitute for 100 (the figures get arbitrarily large).
Consider what I call the ceteris paribus guide; all else being equal, yes, groups outcompete individuals. So the rule stands.
Culture and religion do not need the coercive power of government to grow and thrive.
Agreed.
Libertarians believe in freedom for everyone, not just those who agree with us. It is deeply rooted in the JudeoChristian concept of Free Will.
Even the freedom of individuals to act as group members, and as such dictate the rules of their own communities, nations, states, etc?
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5 radically “absolute”; I ‘d meant to drop the “radically.”
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