0 comment Saturday, October 11, 2014 | admin
Here, DanielJ of the blog Tomorrow in Vinland writes about Philip Rieff and the Triumph of the Therapeutic.
I will not even attempt to discuss Rieff and his ideas. I know little but that he was Jewish, and that he was married to Susan Sontag, she of the infamous ''the White race is the cancer of the human race'' comment.
Now that does not necessarily delegitimize his ideas or writings, but nonetheless I haven't been inclined to read his works. There is a thread at the Kinism Forum on Rieff, here, for those interested.
The excerpts I have read show his writing to be too abstruse and arcane and too intellectual for my liking; I am not one of those who can deal in abstractions and ideas about ideas on a sustained basis. So I will leave Rieff and his ideas to those who have a head for such rarefied stuff. I am, however, interested in the idea of the role of the therapeutic culture in a post-Christian West. That may be a topic for another entry. And even more, I am concerned with the ongoing anti-Christianism that many self-identified neo-pagans promote on the racial right.
Taking that last into account, this first reply to DanielJ's post was expected, and all too typical:
If today�s Christianity is a defence mechanism against non-White invasion of Euroman�s lands then I�m a baked hedgehog with mushroom sauce. Christianity, that ancient Hebrew heresy foisted upon White people by Jews and their proselytising, brainwashed catspaws, is the natural parent of multi-culturalism�s sponsor, Marxism. Of course, the supernatural element of Christianity�s arrant nonsense had to be excised in order for those foolishly egalitarian Whites who, at least, valued observed reality above blind, racially alien, Middle Eastern deity worship to accept the worthless religion�s new Communist guise.''
He pretty much hits all the usual notes sounded by the anti-Christian zealots on the racial right.
But wait, one pro-Christian comment appears:
1. Christianity has been for a long time the religion of the West. As an empirical proposition, as Europe has dispensed with the old faith, it has been transmogrified into a bunch of non-reproducing, non-white-ass-kissing pansies and socialists. Correlation or causation?
2. Must Christianity lead to multiculturalism? I genuinely do not know (and neither do you - this is one of the most profound yet largely unexplored areas of intellectual concern). All patriots should avoid this easy inference, however, as it is not clear that multiculturalism is a latent outgrowth of "taking Christianity seriously". At least as likely is the hypothesis that Christianity�s replacement, sentimental secular humanism, the aptly called Religion of Humanity, is what has directly lead to our modern hysterical denials of racial differences, and acceptance of race-replacement.''
Yes. If 'taking Christianity seriously' is the issue, then just about any generation before the 20th century took it much more seriously than today's lukewarm liberal Christians and CINOs (Christians In Name Only). So if Christianity was the toxic ingredient that killed off the spirit, and is killing the body, of the West, it would have done so long ago. None of the critics ever address this little anomaly.
3. Another empirical proposition. Most conservatives generally, and most racial conservatives in particular (I don�t mean celebrity racialists, or extreme rightists - just the plain people who vote against immigration, affirmative action, etc) describe themselves as "conservative Christians", at least here in America. There is, in other words, a much stronger correlation between Christian conservatism and racial conservatism, than between atheism and racial conservatism. Why this should be, or WHETHER this should be, intellectually, I don�t know. But this fact ought to influence political thinking about explorations of the intersection of Christianity and race-liberalism, especially when calls for a new paganism or similar nonsense start issuing forth.''
This is a point I haven't made sufficiently: there is at least as much of a case, if not more, as the commenter says, for a correlation between conservative Christianity and racial conservatism. I keep asking, with no response, why, if Christianity is guilty of destroying the West, it took millennia to do so. That's like saying that a meal eaten a decade ago could kill someone today. Presumably if Christianity was so destructive to the West, the West would not have survived and prospered and expanded for centuries.
4. I am sufficiently confident in my comparative theological knowledge to make this claim: the only philosophically and scientifically tenable alternatives to atheism are either some form of rational Christianity, or a deism as yet not fully articulated; that is, all existing non-Christian forms of supernaturalism, including various Christian sects, fail intellectually and scientifically. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is very strong, however. The more it is studied the more (intellectually) impressive it becomes. Paganism, however, whatever its former tribe-unifying merits, cannot be resurrected by the modern mind.''
The last sentence seems convincing to me. The fact is we know very little about the pre-Christian religions of Europe; there was no extensive body of writings, no holy books, nothing other than bits and pieces written by Roman historians or others in various places. Much of what is called 'paganism' today is a cobbled-together 'tradition', mostly the work of Gerald Gardner, who lived in the 20th century, far-removed from the traditions he was supposedly resurrecting. In Victorian times, Sir James Frazer and his work The Golden Bough also contributed a great deal to this reinvented paganism. In other words, the authenticity of it is very much in question, but then I suspect that matters not at all to its proponents, because it appears that to them, neo-paganism is merely a means to an end, a supplanter of Christianity which they deem as more useful to their cause of creating a new Europe in which the hated faith of our fathers will not exist. A Christendom without Christ, as some have put it.
5. Even if all religion is, finally, empirically false, white nationalists may want to encourage a new efflorescence of traditional Christianity, if only for its healthy, life-affirming aspects. The old faith encouraged large families (biological reproduction). We need this now. For centuries, moreover, the old faith was not seen to be incompatible with anti-miscegenation laws, with ethnic expulsions, with ranks and hierarchies, and with anti-immigration statutes. Instead of jettisoning the faith because it has been racially corrupted, the easier as well as more politically prudent and fruitful course would be to recover and reapply the earlier, non-multiculturalist understanding of Christian obligation."
[Emphasis mine.]
6. The Faith presided over great periods of Western (biological) expansion. It may have helped cause that expansion, directly and certainly indirectly. The Faith is therefore not necessarily inimical to the West; secular liberalism undeniably is. Oh, and the Faith may even be true ... racialists should adjust their thinking accordingly. ''
That last little point is not made often enough. What if Christianity is true? That should be the central question. Is it true? Is there a God, one God, as the Bible states, and is Christ his son and our savior? If so, then it behooves those who revere truth to seek out the true God, rather than inventing or 'rediscovering' a set of 'gods' who will serve as mascots or talismans for their new Christless Eurotopia.
I'm often tempted to ask those who profess to be pagans: do you really believe in your gods or are they just intellectual symbols for you? Props in your scenario for a new Europe? If they do exist, and if they are specifically tribal gods of the White race or the Northern European race, are they not there to help their people now? Or are they dormant until Christianity is overthrown?
Truth be told, I've known people who professed to be pagans or Wiccans or sort of freelance witches, or Druids. Before I was a Christian, I was something of a seeker, spiritually, and I learned about all religions, Eastern and Western. I never got the sense that the pagan gods were real and vital in the minds of those who called themselves pagans. How is worshipping them supposed to spiritually and racially revivify the West? Come to that, why did the pagan West fall to Christianity, if the gods were so potent, and if paganism was authentic while Christianity was alien and artificial for Europeans?
And I don't buy the allegation that Christianity was 'forced' at swordpoint on Europeans. Those who say that must be confusing Christianity with Islam. Christianity was not forced on Europe. The story of Constantine forcing his supposed 'faith' on Rome (his profession being in doubt, according to some observers) does not apply to Europe generally.
I have no grudge against the pagans or neo-pagans on the right, as long as they are not calling for the stamping out of Christianity, nor engaging in wholesale slanders against our Christian ancestors. I think that all of us who care about the future of our people have to come to some kind of modus vivendi, and tolerate one another. We can't afford the divisions, and I don't see these divisions as originating with the Christian side; the hostility consistently shows up in the constant blaming and vilifying of Christians and the faith of old Europe. I simply don't see how one can love Europe and hate the faith which informed it during its height of achievement and strength.
I will not even attempt to discuss Rieff and his ideas. I know little but that he was Jewish, and that he was married to Susan Sontag, she of the infamous ''the White race is the cancer of the human race'' comment.
Now that does not necessarily delegitimize his ideas or writings, but nonetheless I haven't been inclined to read his works. There is a thread at the Kinism Forum on Rieff, here, for those interested.
The excerpts I have read show his writing to be too abstruse and arcane and too intellectual for my liking; I am not one of those who can deal in abstractions and ideas about ideas on a sustained basis. So I will leave Rieff and his ideas to those who have a head for such rarefied stuff. I am, however, interested in the idea of the role of the therapeutic culture in a post-Christian West. That may be a topic for another entry. And even more, I am concerned with the ongoing anti-Christianism that many self-identified neo-pagans promote on the racial right.
Taking that last into account, this first reply to DanielJ's post was expected, and all too typical:
If today�s Christianity is a defence mechanism against non-White invasion of Euroman�s lands then I�m a baked hedgehog with mushroom sauce. Christianity, that ancient Hebrew heresy foisted upon White people by Jews and their proselytising, brainwashed catspaws, is the natural parent of multi-culturalism�s sponsor, Marxism. Of course, the supernatural element of Christianity�s arrant nonsense had to be excised in order for those foolishly egalitarian Whites who, at least, valued observed reality above blind, racially alien, Middle Eastern deity worship to accept the worthless religion�s new Communist guise.''
He pretty much hits all the usual notes sounded by the anti-Christian zealots on the racial right.
But wait, one pro-Christian comment appears:
1. Christianity has been for a long time the religion of the West. As an empirical proposition, as Europe has dispensed with the old faith, it has been transmogrified into a bunch of non-reproducing, non-white-ass-kissing pansies and socialists. Correlation or causation?
2. Must Christianity lead to multiculturalism? I genuinely do not know (and neither do you - this is one of the most profound yet largely unexplored areas of intellectual concern). All patriots should avoid this easy inference, however, as it is not clear that multiculturalism is a latent outgrowth of "taking Christianity seriously". At least as likely is the hypothesis that Christianity�s replacement, sentimental secular humanism, the aptly called Religion of Humanity, is what has directly lead to our modern hysterical denials of racial differences, and acceptance of race-replacement.''
Yes. If 'taking Christianity seriously' is the issue, then just about any generation before the 20th century took it much more seriously than today's lukewarm liberal Christians and CINOs (Christians In Name Only). So if Christianity was the toxic ingredient that killed off the spirit, and is killing the body, of the West, it would have done so long ago. None of the critics ever address this little anomaly.
3. Another empirical proposition. Most conservatives generally, and most racial conservatives in particular (I don�t mean celebrity racialists, or extreme rightists - just the plain people who vote against immigration, affirmative action, etc) describe themselves as "conservative Christians", at least here in America. There is, in other words, a much stronger correlation between Christian conservatism and racial conservatism, than between atheism and racial conservatism. Why this should be, or WHETHER this should be, intellectually, I don�t know. But this fact ought to influence political thinking about explorations of the intersection of Christianity and race-liberalism, especially when calls for a new paganism or similar nonsense start issuing forth.''
This is a point I haven't made sufficiently: there is at least as much of a case, if not more, as the commenter says, for a correlation between conservative Christianity and racial conservatism. I keep asking, with no response, why, if Christianity is guilty of destroying the West, it took millennia to do so. That's like saying that a meal eaten a decade ago could kill someone today. Presumably if Christianity was so destructive to the West, the West would not have survived and prospered and expanded for centuries.
4. I am sufficiently confident in my comparative theological knowledge to make this claim: the only philosophically and scientifically tenable alternatives to atheism are either some form of rational Christianity, or a deism as yet not fully articulated; that is, all existing non-Christian forms of supernaturalism, including various Christian sects, fail intellectually and scientifically. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is very strong, however. The more it is studied the more (intellectually) impressive it becomes. Paganism, however, whatever its former tribe-unifying merits, cannot be resurrected by the modern mind.''
The last sentence seems convincing to me. The fact is we know very little about the pre-Christian religions of Europe; there was no extensive body of writings, no holy books, nothing other than bits and pieces written by Roman historians or others in various places. Much of what is called 'paganism' today is a cobbled-together 'tradition', mostly the work of Gerald Gardner, who lived in the 20th century, far-removed from the traditions he was supposedly resurrecting. In Victorian times, Sir James Frazer and his work The Golden Bough also contributed a great deal to this reinvented paganism. In other words, the authenticity of it is very much in question, but then I suspect that matters not at all to its proponents, because it appears that to them, neo-paganism is merely a means to an end, a supplanter of Christianity which they deem as more useful to their cause of creating a new Europe in which the hated faith of our fathers will not exist. A Christendom without Christ, as some have put it.
5. Even if all religion is, finally, empirically false, white nationalists may want to encourage a new efflorescence of traditional Christianity, if only for its healthy, life-affirming aspects. The old faith encouraged large families (biological reproduction). We need this now. For centuries, moreover, the old faith was not seen to be incompatible with anti-miscegenation laws, with ethnic expulsions, with ranks and hierarchies, and with anti-immigration statutes. Instead of jettisoning the faith because it has been racially corrupted, the easier as well as more politically prudent and fruitful course would be to recover and reapply the earlier, non-multiculturalist understanding of Christian obligation."
[Emphasis mine.]
6. The Faith presided over great periods of Western (biological) expansion. It may have helped cause that expansion, directly and certainly indirectly. The Faith is therefore not necessarily inimical to the West; secular liberalism undeniably is. Oh, and the Faith may even be true ... racialists should adjust their thinking accordingly. ''
That last little point is not made often enough. What if Christianity is true? That should be the central question. Is it true? Is there a God, one God, as the Bible states, and is Christ his son and our savior? If so, then it behooves those who revere truth to seek out the true God, rather than inventing or 'rediscovering' a set of 'gods' who will serve as mascots or talismans for their new Christless Eurotopia.
I'm often tempted to ask those who profess to be pagans: do you really believe in your gods or are they just intellectual symbols for you? Props in your scenario for a new Europe? If they do exist, and if they are specifically tribal gods of the White race or the Northern European race, are they not there to help their people now? Or are they dormant until Christianity is overthrown?
Truth be told, I've known people who professed to be pagans or Wiccans or sort of freelance witches, or Druids. Before I was a Christian, I was something of a seeker, spiritually, and I learned about all religions, Eastern and Western. I never got the sense that the pagan gods were real and vital in the minds of those who called themselves pagans. How is worshipping them supposed to spiritually and racially revivify the West? Come to that, why did the pagan West fall to Christianity, if the gods were so potent, and if paganism was authentic while Christianity was alien and artificial for Europeans?
And I don't buy the allegation that Christianity was 'forced' at swordpoint on Europeans. Those who say that must be confusing Christianity with Islam. Christianity was not forced on Europe. The story of Constantine forcing his supposed 'faith' on Rome (his profession being in doubt, according to some observers) does not apply to Europe generally.
I have no grudge against the pagans or neo-pagans on the right, as long as they are not calling for the stamping out of Christianity, nor engaging in wholesale slanders against our Christian ancestors. I think that all of us who care about the future of our people have to come to some kind of modus vivendi, and tolerate one another. We can't afford the divisions, and I don't see these divisions as originating with the Christian side; the hostility consistently shows up in the constant blaming and vilifying of Christians and the faith of old Europe. I simply don't see how one can love Europe and hate the faith which informed it during its height of achievement and strength.
Labels: Christendom, Christianity, Europe, Liberal Christianity, Western Civilization