Existenstialism is a dead end [Quotage, Hump day linkage, and Nic Cave].

I said that this morning that gays are like 10 kilo lemurs, not the 800 lb gorilla in our church that is destroying our live, our vigour. We are fighting the wrong battle. Kristor goes quite catholic on this, but his main point is sound. To violate the rules of chastity is to break the fidelity that binds a society together. Without our word being our bond, there is no society. And without the rules and systems that have a divine nature (for all societies, though broken, reflect that which was, even through distortions, as a shattered crystal of spun and stained glass still glistens) society dies. Kristor may not know it, but he is repeating David Goldberg, also known as Spengler.

Unless it be subsumed – taken up, ennobled and transfigured in or by a more expansive cult, as paganism was by Christianity – the death of a cult leads to despair, to literal dys-spirit. When a people learn that reality, and ergo their lives, are not after all enchanted and therefore meaningful as their fathers had praught, they lose their vim. It drains out of them like water. When this happened to American Indians, they would sometimes simply sit down and die. If nothing matters, if the old gods are just dead or illusory, and that’s all there is to it, then why try?

Demographic collapse is the natural and inevitable sequela of the disenchantment of the world. The heterodox are not reproducing. It is the orthodox believers of every faith, for whom all the humdrum business and trouble of life is caught up against all odds in a truly ultimate quest for transcendent glory, who are bearing and raising lots and lots of children.

The most basic case then against feminism, the normalization of homosexuality, adultery, etc. on the one hand, and materialism, naturalism, atheism, etc., on the other, is that they profane the altars where the order of the cosmos is spoken, where we hear the Word of the Logos that binds all things together in Wisdom. Profaning the altar and its rites, they profane the Word therein uttered, and repudiate Wisdom. They first disenchant the world, and then undo the life thereof. Who profanes the altars celebrates a cult of death.

The true poets of this age do not write thin books of poesy, and are not that celebrated in academe. They have learned from Leonard Cohen, who realized that his poems lyrics make, and music is the way to transmit what they hear. And these modern poets, the great ones, reflect despair. They have plumbed the depths of existentialism, and there they find but an execution chamber, and people muttering lies.

You may wonder why I mention existentialism and not liberalism. This is because we moved beyond logical positivism and the classical liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment (and the American Revolution) at the beginning of the modern age: by the time of Hegel and Marx the dissatisfaction with a mechanical, clockwork universe was leading to the development of new collectives around Country (Fascism and American Progressivism) Volk, Rodina and Race (a motley crew including the Wahabites, Ghandi, the NSDAP, the KKK, and Joe Stalin), or class (Marx, Mao and Trostky). During last century these variations of modernity battled: one of the recurrent nightmares for any person of my generation was that there would be thermonuclear war and that only the cockroaches would survive. However, the struggle was, as Marx predicted, political and economic — and the collectivists lost. Badly.

This lead to an implosion. The old verities of the church had been rejected by the modernists as part of their scientific ideology or materialistic fetish. In this place, there was left but a choice, and no meaning. All became free, and all lost meaning.

The liberty to do anything you want, but restricted to the individual scale, provokes an implosion of the personality. The human passes to the infra-human realm, and to sub-individual domains. And here he encounters virtuality, as a dream of sub-individuality, the freedom from anything. This is the evaporation of the human, and brings about the Empire of nothingness as the last word in the total victory of liberalism. Postmodernism prepares the terrain for that post-historic, self-referential recycling of non-sense.

Post Modernism tried to keep the structure of modernism, with its use of technology, science and the market together but at the same time wanted to bring in the subjective, the interpersonal, to inject into this an analysis of power. Those (like me) who have a technical background, and struggle with trying to find out what is going on and what works, consider this to be a complete nonsense, the twittering of fools. The academics who use these techniques and theories are shunted to the schools of nursing and education — and even there the practitioners reject them, so they have infected the arts, where they probably are causing more damage because their scatological utterings destroy all truth, all beauty.

There is nothing sacred to these people, merely shit. There is no ground for truth — that was destroyed by Marxism and the Frankfurt school. There is no ground for authenticity — that was destroyed by queer theory. There is no ground for beauty, for that is oppression.

And without vision, the people perish.

Mr. Dugin’s description of the essential nihilism of liberalism is straightforward enough for our purposes here, but do note his rather interesting description of communism, fascism, and liberalism as distinct manifestations of the spirit of modernity, as if modernity is simply a given and thus people have but three choices. But then, Mr. Dugin does seem like the sort of person who, rather than inspiring a sense of patriotism of the kind Zippy describes as morally compulsory loyalty to crown, blood, soil, and cross, instead makes one feel sort of like hiding under one’s bed. Nevertheless, it is worth considering what exactly one is for if one is not a liberal. Modernity seems to provide no palatable options to liberalism.

Is there a solution? Well, it may be that we need to accept that we are but human, that liberty is a fallen idol, and we need God back in our life. Returning to the issue that Kristor raises and Dugan hints at, the liberals not only despair, but they fail to reproduce.

The best example of this is the interaction of Liberalism and Judaism, and here I am going to quote Spengler extensively.

Sadly, American Jews stand out as a horrible example of demographic failure. In the United States, secular and loosely affiliated American Jews, that is, the vast majority, have the lowest fertility rate of any identifiable segment of the American population.

As I wrote in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too):

”Nowhere is the fertility gap between religious and non-religious more extreme than among American Jews. As a group, American Jews show the lowest fertility of any ethnic group in the country. That is a matter of great anguish for Jewish community leaders. According to sociologist Steven Cohen, “We are now in the midst of a non-Orthodox Jewish population meltdown. … Among Jews in their 50s, for every 100 Orthodox adults, we have 192 Orthodox children. And for the non-Orthodox, for every 100 adults, we have merely 55 such children.”

Half of the non-Orthodox children, moreover, marry non-Jews, and very few children of mixed marriages will remain Jewish. As Reform Rabbi Lance J Sussman wrote in 2010, “With the exception of a number of Orthodox communities and a few other bright spots in or just off the mainstream of Jewish religious life, American Judaism is in precipitous decline … the Reform movement has probably contracted by a full third in the last ten years!”

In Israel, by contrast, the Jewish fertility rate stands at around 3 children per female, by far the highest in the industrial world. Aside from the ultra-Orthodox minority, which has seven or eight children, the non-Orthodox Jewish fertility rate is around 2.6 children per female.

Jewish Fertility by Religious Current
Average Number of Children per Woman
Ultra-Orthodox 6.72
Modern Orthodox 3.39
Conservative 1.74
Reform 1.36
Secular 1.29

Source: Anthony Gordon and Richard Horowitz, National Jewish Population Survey (2000)

Israel’s Jews identify with Jewish nationality more than American Jews, but they also observe the Jewish religion more than their American cousins.

Spengler is an Orthodox Jew. He has seen what liberalism does to the tribe first hand. He has seen how letting women lead, including those who fellowship at the isle of Lesbos, destroys the community. For the marital bed, which Kristor points out is more than a bed but a commitment to worship and sacrifice within the home, is destroyed by this existentialist call to total freedom. Forgetting that this is the first temptation: that we may be like God, knowing good from evil, and independent of God in our despair.