EPH–4 / VULGAR RADICALS

The placid nihilism of our generation is the deadliest land mine laid by the departing modernists.

– Fr. George Rutler, Beyond Modernity

I. BACKGROUNDER. Modern Western society is in an obvious downslide to all–out nihilism. Not so much a violent nihilism, as in the Nietzschean atop the alpine mountain summit, defiantly standing against that always unnamable oppressor represented by an omnipresent leaden sky. Rather, it is a quiescent type of nihilism, suave and self–complacent in a way, as if a battle has been fought and won, and that now is the time to rest and revel. Without question, this casual denial of values and morality in the twenty–first century is most immediately traceable to the 1960s Counterculture Revolution. It is evidential of the victory of a loud rebellion whose exponents, now beyond middle age and established, wield positions of no minimal influence in modern society. From the media and the entertainment industry to education and politics there is an unvoiced acceptation that says all values are relative, that truth is an anachronism, and that morality to any minimal degree is a barrier to personal liberty.

II. HISTORICAL REVISIONISM. Like all revolutions that wish create a new society founded on relativist precepts, firstly must the ideas of the past be condemned and debunked absolutely. Thus was concocted the mythology of the 1950s. Leftists today claim that the Sixties was a decade of emancipation from the so–called repression of the Fifties. That was an age of fanatical right wing paranoia of Communism and ICBMs, of puritan ethics and emotional emptiness, void of cultural advancement and intellectual freedom. It is rather amusing that television shows such as Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver are taken as actualities of family life and social mannerism during the Fifties. The stern and stoical father, the compliant and prim mother, the golly–gee mentality of the siblings – these are presumed to be normative of the times. Normative in the sense that, these characteristics are not taken as fordable Hollywood expressions of security and civility, but of serious, true–to–life reflections of the times.

III. FALSE LIBERATION. In reality, the 1950s was a time of general happiness and common sense, charged by economic prosperity and an optimism still overflowing from victory in the Second World War. But, alas, the 1960s arrived. Tom Hayden, Malcom X, Gloria Steinem, Timothy Leary and a host of others inducted the new age of liberation. Loudly is it propounded that the “Summer of 69” signified true freedom at last. But what principles and presumptions was this liberation based upon? What has been its legacy? From what was the decade liberated as the 1970s came to pass?

IV. INFILTRATION. Mainly, it was a continuation and intensification of the revolt against the Christian worldview as inaugurated by Marx and Engels, but taking on variegated and disguised forms. The growing prominence of Marxist thought, explicit and subtle, had decisively emplaced itself in academia and, eventually, into the public square. It won respectability with the intelligentsia, and inevitably filtered its way through to policy making, the churches, the media and other levels of social discourse. The structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi–Strauss (1908–2009), for example, attempted to discredit the notion that Western Civilization is superior to the panoply of pagan cultures[1]. Another Frenchman, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) launched deconstructionism, which proclaimed that language was a meaningless game.[2] The Canadian Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) introduced an extremely bizarre form of technological determinism that won worldwide acclaim[3]. Greatly celebrated in the 1960s were the studies of sexual behavior by Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956). Based mainly on the perverted propensities of criminals, he opened the floodgates to a kaleidoscope of sexual conduct without recourse to personal responsibility and total submission to sensation.[4] Rachel Ward's Silent Spring (1962) and, later, Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), heralded the era of apocalyptic environmentalism, whose scare tactics had effectuated more damage than good. Both books were scientifically bogus. The decisive role of the ecology lobby in spurring the OPEC oil crisis and the resulting hyperinflation of the 1970s is a case in point.[5] The late–1950s fiction of the “Beat Generation” – Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs – debased literature to an unprecedented level of anarchic vulgarianism [6], creating the ridiculous "beatnik" as the anti–social rebel, who latterly transmogrified into the even more ridiculous "hippie" of the 1960s. But most perniciously, the works of neo–Marxist "critical theory" issuing from the Frankfurt School, [7] enlivened a latent radicalism and gave birth to the “New Left”, using Trojan Horse tactics that eventually – in the Marxist sense – proletarianized a significant proportion of the middle class baby boomer population. This whole movement, at once misologic and antinomian, came as a shockwave. Considering the trend of postwar optimism, it was in many respects unexpected.

V. PERCEIVED TRANSITIONS. Overall, that sense of liberation from the so–called bourgeois repression of the Fifties to the Sixties, like the transition from the swinging twenties to the economic depression of the 1930s, has Marxist eschatology written all over it. Historians and commentators of the Left stealthily equate the high–flying and opulent 1920s with bourgeois capitalism come to its climactic end, and infer that the Great Depression of 1929 marked the beginning of the proletarian revolution. Similarly, the economic affluence and general conservatism of the Fifties are equated with the bourgeois value system at its most decadent and hypocritical. Such ideas are given justification by making reference to trendy economists like John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), another Canadian. The thesis of his popular book The Affluent Society, first published in 1958, was that the days of shortage are no more as Western economies had developed efficient means of production. It was a time of plenty. Economic problems no longer existed. The next step, he said, was distribution, which was, in the hands of social activists, contorted into confiscation, so long as the goods and property to be confiscated did not belong to them.

VI. ANTINOMIANISM. The most prominent aspect of the 1960s Counterculture Revolution was antinomianism. The rejection of traditional or socially established morality led to the glorification of youth unguided by conventional wisdom and contemptuous of authority. Manifestations of this ranged from the comical to the disturbing: the ridiculous looking hippy with his long hair and gaudy clothes; the sonorous and self–absorbed political protester; reckless narcotic experimentation; the use of violence to promote whatever agenda; nonchalant hedonism; aberrant sexual activity. Whatever one’s position rock music (while not condemning it absolutely), it must be acknowledged that the triad of “sex, drugs and rock & roll” unleashed an irrational barbarity unaffected by limitations set by reason, wholly driven by feelings and biologic urge. The “New Music”, whose influence cannot be underestimated, was and currently is used as a propaganda tool by dilettantes to slander everything from chastity to geopolitical protocol. The net effect of this antinomianism was to tamper with familial relations, soon after to sever that tenuous connection between personal and public life, which is the prerequisite of civility. Unmitigated freedom of want, which is self–directing and thus anti–social, overthrew the principle of the freedom of ought, which allows for interaction with, and responsibility to, the public. Indeed, civility itself was seen as oppressive. Politeness, prudence, reasonable restraint and virtue were deemed elitist snobbery, or “anal retentive” as the catchphrase goes. Nonchalant profanity, obviousness and vulgarity were the new modes of expression and mannerism.

VII. SUBSTITUTING RELIGIOSITIES. Morality is intimately coupled with religion. But because morality was pronounced relative, traditional religion was immediately mocked. Adherence to moral imperatives which traditional religion necessarily demands is incompatible with the license to think and behave as one pleases. Two types of so–called religiosity could accommodate for this: Eastern Spirituality and Politicized Christianity. The rush of impressionable youths to the “wisdom of the East” was a spectacle that can only be described as pathetic. Pathetic because it was not an authentic search for new meaning, but a form of escape from (TH2 would say) the sometimes necessary dreariness associated with harsh realities of life, as in the use of drugs to produce hallucinations. In the main, it was just another way to justify Epicureanism and intellectual laziness. The spirituality that they sought was plainly gnostic, a hodgepodge of oriental obscurantisms expounded by a multitude of charlatans and fly–by–night holy men. The sight of the stoned “flower child” carelessly perambulating through purple meadows under psychedelic skies was pubescent romanticism, which presumed an imminent utopia. “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...”, and all the rest of it. However, if utopia was to be accomplished in the spiritual sense, political involvement was required. Here, then, we come across the phenomenon of affixing ideology to religion. If Marx could inform the politician and economist, he could also supplement the theologian. The chief expression of the marrying of politics to religion was "liberation theology". Promoted by radicalized Jesuits and ex–priests, it appealed to pop–religionists in North America and encouraged violent revolution in South America.[8]

VIII. SELF–CONTAINMENT. It is peculiar, but more so evidential of naiveté, that Sixties radicals traduced the Judaeo–Christian outlook because of its so–called backwardness. It seemed irrelevant to them that Western Civilization had progressed upon such beliefs for millennia. Yes, there were differences in perspective, yet most agreed in moral absolutes as set down by a transcendent God, and that truth could not be subdivided into variegated opinions. They even denounced the philosophical and cultural inheritances of Greece and Rome. Yet the pseudo–spiritual worldviews that the radicals had newly adopted were strictly inward–looking, subjectivist, effectively proclaiming that reality is not reality, but an emanation of the mind. TH2 can think of no other form of repression that contains the world within the self. This is also a contradiction because the axiom of moral self–containment violated their idea of social change through aggressive and sustained public protest, including their indefatigable claim that religion is a “private matter”, an idea entirely of Protestant origin.

IX. SOCIALISM RECONSTITUTED. If religion was self–contained and private, political views were not. How could it be otherwise? If the old morality placed limitations on personal conduct, if this morality was presumed to constrain individual freedom, and if morality is connected to a religion considered political, then by implication everything was political. Hence there arose the power struggle of maturated authority versus immature youth. A new socialism emerged. It was not the class socialism of Marx, nor the race socialism of Hitler. It was generational socialism. It possessed affinities to the former two, mitigated as they were, in that it was divisive, it presupposed violence, it had globalist–utopian intentions, and, of course, it despised the middle class. However, most of radicals came from middle class families. Here we have the old case of bourgeois guilt. One of the great mysteries of modern times is why there emerges from the middle class a powerful minority who go about to overthrow this class (themselves effectively), not realizing that a flourishing middle class is necessary for political freedom and economic prosperity.

X. THE BOURGEOIS BRIDGE. As TH2 has discussed in a previous post (EOS–2, para. XVI), history instructs that the middle class act a bridge between the peasant and the aristocrat, between no power and absolute power. Dynamite this bridge and the peasant must submit absolutely to the aristocrat. Earlier this century – subscribe to “the Party”, be a member of the “master race”, or else be consigned to the Gulag or a concentration camp. Today – submit to the Newspeak of Political Correctness or do your time in a “sensitivity training” seminar. The dispersion of power that a thriving middle class fosters disallows such Orwellian nightmares because it provides a socio–economic gateway to opportunity, providing one the liberty to rise or fall based on freely chosen decisions.

XI. HYPOCRISY. Nonetheless, this proletarianization of the bourgeois revealed itself in one principal form: infantile political posturing steeped in anti–Western rhetoric. Jane Fonda in Vietnam, Noam Chomsky on the media, charges of “imperialism”, “colonialism”, and all the rest of it. It is the guilty secret of the leftist intelligentsia that they consistently provoke anti–Western sentiment, glorify all aspects of collectivist societies of the East, yet do this from the comfort and safety of the free, democratic West. If things were so terrible here, why did they not join their comrades and spiritual gurus in the East? Jane, alias Barbarella, has not, so far as TH2 is aware, taken up residence in Hanoi. Her past marriage to the wealthy Ted Turner only substantiates the point. Paul McCartney is now Sir Paul McCartney and lives in an English castle. Whatever happened to his infatuation with that ridiculous Indian swami a few decades ago? Does anyone remember the Beatle’s song “Revolution”? This would only be humorous if it was not hypocritical.

XII. A DIFFERENT KIND OF ATTACK. What makes the Antinomian Revolution so much different from previous ones, say the French and Russian, was that it was not specifically a political or economic rebellion. It was chiefly moral. Politico–economic circumstances, for instance, are the products of human thought and action, not vice versa, otherwise we get determinism. The externalities of society are reflections of the inner condition of man. Virtuous men yield virtuous societies. Men of violence make mayhem. True, the Jacobins and Leninists could accomplish their abominable aims only by assuming moral relativism. Though their targets were mainly political frameworks and the situations were very much public affairs. With the ascent of antinomianism during the Sixties, however, the target is morality itself, at the very core of what makes us human and distinguishes us from the animal kingdom. An objective sense of right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood, and so on. In the past, political and economic frameworks might be tampered with and cause societal disruptions. Yet the hope always existed that some person or era of virtue would arise as the moral heart of man was, so to speak, left untarnished. But an altogether new type of shift from past revolutions occurs during the Sixties – from the spectacle of public rebellion to the unnoticed, internal struggles consociated with private life. Yes, the decade of the Sixties was clamorous and obtruded itself into the public eye. Though the real change happened some time later… gradually. Like all revolutions, their impacts are discovered and properly understood afterwards once the excitement diminishes and the daily routine resumes. But it is always too late, much too late. The process of societal declination had begun.

XIII. "PASSIVE REVOLUTION". Today the revolution is only more politic, it unobtrusively operates within our institutions, run by former hippies and revolutionaries in three–piece suits. It is TH2s personal theory (mentioned previously in EOS–2, para. XXV) that this process of quiet interpenetration is analogous to the notion of a “passive revolution” introduced by the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). He argued that social transformation would come not by revolutionary showdown, not by an immediate and violent overthrow of existing norms and authority. Alternatively, it would arrive via the unhurried emplacement of disruptive and divisive notions into an already established social–political framework. As he said in his Prison Notebooks, it would “be preceded by long ideological and political preparation, organically devised in advance to reawaken popular passions and enable them to be concentrated and brought simultaneously to detonation point.”[9] Anarchic principles would quietly trickle their way into institutions of education, public policy, the judiciary, and so forth. Unbrazenly, radicals should firstly confederate with organizations that work for a wide latitude of causes so as to gain acceptance and trust. Gradually, revolutionary ideas would be introduced until their adversaries, now aware of the manipulation (some would say conspiracy), are unable to counteract a process of subversion that has already torn apart a significant part of the social and moral fabric. The devaluation of values, if you will, has gone mostly unnoticed from the Sixties to the present. And the only way in which these “popular passions” (i.e. emotions and action unrestrained by reason and principles) could be justified would be to usurp the moral with the political.

XIV. PUBLIC / PRIVATE. Confusion of the political with the moral therefore must lead to a confusion of public and private life. For example, issues related to the reproductive process, a crucial aspect of private life, including the family, have been fully politicized where beforehand they were considered religious/moral matters. The intrusion of the State in the education of children, as in sex education, is a prime example. But here we find another contradiction on the part of the radical Left. They claim that everything is political, including morality, although they insist that an individual’s public and private life are disconnected from each other, that one does not have influence on the other. How can this be when personal conduct is guided by a politicized morality? And how often have we heard the media contend that the polymorphic sex life of Bill Clinton – that epitome of Sixties radicalism – had no effect on his job as President? For it is not only a contradiction. It is subversive trickery. This is because the principle of the separation of public from personal life permits an individual to act autonomously without regard for the repercussions to civil society. The philosophy bequeathed by the Sixties to the next generation was that the purpose of life is pleasure unlimited by way of self–actualization. Happiness was unrelated to any aspect of the transcendent. It had everything to do with “Me” and the material. This philosophy was advocated by elevating too far individual rights, which are self–directed, over personal responsibility, which is publicly directed. Today, political lobbyists, west coast liberals and professional social activists from the arts to welfare reform regularly speak of “rights”. There are "human rights", "women’s rights", "gay rights", "animal rights", rights of “the workers”, rights of “the people”, rights of “free speech”, and so forth. Rarely does anyone speak of responsibility to “the other”, be it your neighbour or society in general. Notice further that never are family rights mentioned.

XV. REJECTION OF STANDARDS. Now two factors during and after the Sixties have been at work to eschew responsibility and disengage private from public life. The first says that there are no ideals or standards to which comparisons can be made. Postmodernism laughs at Matthew Arnold’s notion of the “best and highest”.[10] All matters of human concern and accomplishment have been levelled out. There are no great saints that can act as models of rectitude. No eminent philosopher can inform us of the real nature of the signs of the times. Great writing such as Burke on France or Tocqueville on America is considered surface analysis commentary such as is found in the weekly news magazine. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is set on par with the John Grisham bestseller. The science of Newton is made comparable to the abstruse ruminations of the Buddhist monk. Disease mitigating pharmaceuticals are made equivalent to the potions of the African witch doctor. Everything is the same, which really means that nothing is important and true. Additionally, the reason why the Left repudiate ideals and omit standards is because it gives them a false sense of superiority. If there no ideals and standards to which comparisons can be made, one can feel comfortable with oneself as there is no need for personal improvement, or mediocrity can be justified and given undue merit. It must be a great amount of envy that sustains such attitudes.

XVI. DETERMINISTICS. The second factor relates to variously expounded determinisms which state that most behaviours and inclinations are outside of individual control. In recent decades, a wide array of cultural, environmental and biological determinisms have entered the forefront with a claimed yet unverified scientific status. They are nevertheless taken as objective facts of the human condition. In the hands of the popularizer, or if implicit to political ideology, they become weapons which weaken the principle of freewill. In Canada, for example, there is the determinism of the environmentalist David Suzuki (socio–genetic), of Marshall McLuhan (technological), of the New Democratic Party (the State). These and others maintain, mostly by euphemistic or ambiguous language – for they must since specificity in view and personal responsibility are correlative, that certain behaviors, once considered immoral or unlawful or controllable, are “natural”. Or that one is “predisposed” to do this or that, that extraneous regulating economic “structures” are involved. The danger here is obvious. If all human action is effectively determined, which means that all responsibility is left elsewhere in some abstract state of suspended animation, some organized force will eventually rise, take control, and do the determining for all. Time tells. History attests. The English historian Paul Johnson observed: “As in all totalitarian systems, a false vernacular [must] be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism”.[11]

XVII. ANTAGONISMS. As indicated above, the generational socialism of the Sixties was divisive. By this is meant that the supposed antagonism of youth versus adult is like the Marxist maxim of the proletariat contra the bourgeois. It is simply the Marxist “class struggle” argument in transposition. Similarly, since the Sixties this notion of division has blossomed into other areas, such as struggles between men and women (feminism) or heterosexual and homosexual (“sexual orientation”) or “whites” and “persons of color”. Basically, life is contrived to be a straightforward battle between oppressors and victims, where the former acts as focal point for the common hatred of the latter. The greatest incarnation of this divisiveness is seen in what has become known as multiculturalism.

XVIII. TRIBALISM. Multiculturalism is not so much a celebration of the cultures that span the globe and of the peoples from these cultures that emigrate to North America. In Canada, ever since the Trudeau government introduced its multicultural policies in the early 1970s, it has been used a platform by the Left to discredit and malign the values and superincumbent achievements of Western civilization. In the hands of radicals, Multiculturalism is used as a tool to divide people from one another since, by its very ideology, it exacerbates differences of race and ethnicity, emphasizing contrarieties between citizens. How else are we to explain the recent turmoils in Canada, like the Quebec separation crisis or the aboriginal dilemma? Both are “culture wars”, to use the now famous phrase. “Diversity” and “distinct society” are doublespeak for division. A counterargument might be that multiculturalism reflects a modern pluralistic society. No doubt this is true. But then, how is pluralism to be defined? On this admission must be made that pluralism is more often than not fashioned to be synonymous with relativism. There are no absolutes, no truth, so it is said. There are only multiple truths, each belonging solely to a particular culture or individual, all of which are situated on an egalitarian plane. Things should remain “personal”, disconnected from public intercourse. In reality, this says that that no view matters, that what we think is irrelevant, which is an insult to intelligence and an effective denial of reason. But our views and opinions do affect others, perhaps as this essay is infuriating some readers right now. The observation is incontrovertible. Truth does not exist in isolation, neither does man. Man does not possess truth. Rather, truth possesses man, which means that truth is extraneous, and, yes, transcendent. Ah!, but this is the great sin of the Christian West, according to our ideologues of multiculturalism. They do, very interestingly, declare their position as if it was absolutely true.

XIX. EFFECTS. “The Sixties” was not a unanimous movement of youth against an unjust world. It was, to be blunt, a small faction of vulgar radicals whose attitudes and actions effectuated tremendous, ultimately disastrous, social change. They did not identify themselves with a country, a religion, a community or some sort of system of values that would foster unity and rapprochement. The identity was with “our generation”, still maintained in their older age, meaning that they live in the past and never grew up into adults. In short, they never “conformed” to the norms of middle class society, as they like to say in a derogatory sense. Today, however, one must conform to the mentality of the radical Left in most manner of discourse and action. What is disturbing is that they do not consider themselves as such, neither do they project themselves so, and they have been quite successful at disseminating their ideas into the mainstream. They consider themselves “tolerant” and “nonjudgmental”, which are insinuations that values and truth do not exist. But it is the lesson of history that any society that rejects a sense of truth and value will eventually collapse upon itself. As the American academic Allan Bloom (1930–1992) wrote: “It might well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself”.[12]


NOTES / REFERENCES

1. For example, given in Lévi–Strauss' academically popular four–volume Mythologiques series, published between 1964 to 1971. In his famous autobiography he is forthright on the influence of Marx on his thought. See Tristes Tropiques, trans J. Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), pp. 61–62. Roughly translated, Tristes Tropiques means "sad tropics". By "Western Civilization" is meant the inheritances from medieval Catholic Christendom, not of the myriad cultural and philosophical catastrophes inaugurated by Luther, as in the so–called "Enlightenment" and other Whig interpretations of history.

2. See Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). First published in 1967. TH2 analyzes deconstructionism in EPH–3.

3. See, for example, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964). The neurotic film writer/director Woody Allen was a big fan of McLuhan.

4. Mainly from his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948. Evidence shows that Kinsey was a bisexual hedonist with a taste for masochism. See J.H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Incorporated, 1997).

5. On this, see the chapter "Ecological Panic" in P. Johnson, Enemies of Society (New York: Atheneum, 1977), pp. 85–101.

6. Particularly On the Road (Jack Kerouac) and Naked Lunch (William Burroughs), respectively published in 1957 and 1959.

7. The term "Frankfurt School" refers to those Marxist fanatics from the Institute for Social Research, established in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt (Germany). After Hitler came to power in 1933, the Institute departed, eventually setting up shop at Columbia University in New York, from where its neo–Marxism commenced infiltration throughout the United States. The main ideational criminals here were Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969).

8. Liberation Theology was effectively founded by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez after the publication of his book A Theology of Liberation (1971).

9. See Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 109–110.

10. Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge at the University Press, 1932), p. 193. Originally published in 1869.

11. Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1983), p. 419.

12. The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Shuster Incorporated 1987), p. 75.

EPH–4 / VULGAR RADICALS