The Long View 2009-04-10
John J. Reilly died before the hostage incident he mentions in this blog post got turned first into a movie starring Tom Hanks and then into a meme, but this now fifteen-year-old blog remains topical. John didn't name his blog idly.
One of the big questions of late has been: have we passed peak wokeness? I do not offer any commentary on that specifically, but it may be useful to adopt John's Long View and see how other seemingly unstoppable political movements eventually lost the Mandate of Heaven.
In this blog post from April of 2009, John J. Reilly looks back at how the once dominant political liberalism of the 1960s was repudiated twenty years later when everyone got sick of crime-ridden cities. Not only is this a thing that can be done, it was done in living memory.
John correctly points out that the internal process of managing crime is analogous to the external process of managing piracy. Right now, both things are causing significant problems in America and abroad respectively, but in principle we already know what to do to fix them. We just have to "unforget" and recover our knowledge of the past.
The Darwin Award in Various Guises
The liberalism of the 1960s was repudiated by the political mainstream in the 1980s because it was indifferent to the maintenance of basic public safety. (Something similar proved true of Movement Conservatism in the 2000's with respect to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but that's another story.) As I look at the attempted hijacking of an American-crewed freighter by pirates this week and their taking the captain hostage, I wonder whether something similar might also soon happen to late 20th-century transnationalism. The suppression of piracy is sort of like the suppression of street crime: both are no-brainers that were worked out in the 19th century. An almost heroic effort of institutional amnesia was necessary to allow order to implode in most of America's major cities in the 1970s. Today, the organs and ideology of transnational governance seem likewise irrelevant to managing a problem that was solved very well by the old Law of Nations.
Transnationalism was always a hot-house flower. Now I think the Somalis have just thrown a brick through the greenhouse glass.
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President Obama is handling the piracy incident just about perfectly. Piracy is not like an ordinary domestic crime for all purposes, but certainly it would be a mistake if the president were visibly preoccupied with the malefactions of just four hostage-takers. The situation is unlike the capture of the American embassy in Teheran during the Carter Administration. President Carter had to be publicly active on that incident, because the hostages were diplomatic personnel. In the current situation, we have civilians assaulting civilians: an issue for the US government, and even for the US military, but not for the Commander-in-Chief.
On the other hand, I greatly regret the fact that President Obama appears poised to attempt "immigration reform" again, and soon. I will not rehearse the immigration question here just now, but the fact is, if he attempts this, his Administration will melt. I would say he should ask George Bush, but I don't think President Bush ever quite undertook what happened to him.
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Speaking of President Obama, perhaps you are disturbed by the rumors that he is a disciple of Saul Alinsky? Well then, you may be reassured to know that there is more documentation for the claim that he is really an admirer of Joachim of Fiore, the father of Western millenarianism and of the three-stage model of history:
Vatican raps Obama medieval mystic Gioacchino da Fiore 'false and heretical' (ANSA) - Vatican City, March 27 - The Vatican on Friday rapped the teachings of a medieval Christian mystic cited three times by Barack Obama as someone who wanted a better world.
''Few of those who expound on Gioacchino da Fiore (Joachim of Fiore, 1130-1202 AD) on the Internet know, or go to the trouble of finding out, what this character really said,'' said Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household.
According to the most ''vogueish'' interpretations, Cantalmessa said, the utopian mystic proposed a new liberal and spiritual Church able to move beyond dogmas and hierarchies.
This was a ''false and heretical'' view, Cantalamessa said, because believers must be guided not only by the spirit but also by the laws of the Church.
''It can be fatal to do without one or the other of these guides''. Gioacchino da Fiore, whose theories were confuted by St Thomas Aquinas, inspired several heretical and esoteric theologists and thinkers including Francis Bacon.
In his campaign speeches, Obama referred to Gioacchino da Fiore as a ''master of contemporary civilisation'' and someone who wanted to create a fairer world. Italy's most famous literary figure, Dante Alighieri, referred to Gioacchino da Fiore as a ''gifted prophet'' in his famous work The Divine Comedy.
A learned correspondent from the Land of Altogether Too Many Lakes sent me the following link to the text above:
http://www.ansa.it/site/notizie/awnplus/english/news/2009-03-27_127338901.html
The link has since stopped working. What more evidence do we need, eh?
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Readers may have noticed that I recently posted a review of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus's last book, American Babylon. The review is far too long, I'm afraid; it was written during one of those periods when I did not have time to write a shorter one. The burden of the book is that eschatological hope allows us the see the secular world as an image of our final destination, one whose institutions can rightly command our loyalty, but whose value rests on the fact those institutions reflect a reality greater than themselves. Actually, I was reminded of nothing so much as Charles Upton's definition of Tradition:
In the sense in which Upton uses the term, however, "Tradition" means almost the opposite of world-hating Gnosticism. Gnostics deny the value of the world; Traditionalists see eternal value in the world. For Tradition, the creation of the world was not a mistake, but an act of divine mercy. Everything in it tells us something about God. These things include the human institutions ordained by God, the most important of which are the world's revealed religions.
Fr. Neuhaus was not much interested in the world's revealed religions (except Judaism) per se, but much the same insight is available within the Christian (small "t") tradition. It is a sunny doctrine that allows for a deep but ordinate patriotism. In Fr. Neuhaus's case, it allowed for the whimsical assertion that New York City (Manhattan in particular, one suspects) is the proleptic image of the New Jerusalem. The title in fact is something of a joke; by no means did the author intend to argue that America is the home of endtime Babylonian wickedness. However, one might note that the latter view is not without adherents. This is another text entitled American Babylon which argues just that. It is particularly pessimistic about the fate of New York City.
Someone, I think, had to cite these two works together, so people will know they are not by the same person.
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In any case, the May issue of Fr. Neuhaus's journal, First Things has appeared, the first issue that did not feature his contributions or was not a memorial to his passing. The lead-time for articles in a monthly of this sort is considerable, so no doubt part of it has been in the works since last year. Still, one notes a sprightly and, perhaps, more topical tone. I might mention the piece by a new associate editor, David P. Goldman (also known as that Spengler at Asia Times), "Demographics & Depression," which echoes the argument that, whatever else might be said about cultural liberalism, it's a Darwin Award winner for every society that adopts it. (The piece does not use the term "Darwin Award," alas.) The time is not long before this argument goes mainstream.
An addendum: It seems that David Goldman, a financier with expertise in Renaissance music, was involved with Lyndon LaRouche 25 years ago. LaRouche has explained at at immense length why he fired him. There are worse things to be than an ex-LaRouchie.
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Finally, readers interested in attending a small college with unique resources should not neglect Miskatonic University. That site is more than a joke; the links to the departments offer quite a lot of information on esoteric themes (not all of it accurate, but all in good fun). I might also point out that the site is maintained by the Yankee Classics film company, which has done some low-budget adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction.
If you want to know how to write a screenplay, just follow the links.
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