I ran across a few religion sites of the liberal persuasion recently and was struck once more with the overwhelming fetish about inclusion. Once inclusion becomes the dominant value, it becomes the only value, the only idea. Nothing else is possible, or even needed. But it is empty. It drives out all other values and ideas. The inclusive/egalitarian drive is cancerous and viral.
The Spiritus Christi (ex)Catholic Community --another word they swoon over-- in NY state. They broke with the RC Church in the late 90's over women's liturgical roles, gay unions and open communion. "Welcoming and including everyone", says on its website: Jesus said “no one who comes to my table will ever be rejected.” Lie. Never said that. At least not in Scripture. But I guess they think it's truthy.
Diversity and sensitivity are part of the new trinity, but they flow from inclusion, are mere modulations of it. A major major cultural trance is this need to level everyone. It saves you from thinking very deeply because equal inclusion is the only issue, ever. It is the feminine gone into overdrive, with affiliation becoming the only public virtue. Hierarchy, the male energy, is repressed so that loud affirmations of equality become a route to... power. Neat, no?
Like all forms of egalitarianism, one of its functions is to insulate the believer from moral condemnation and provide a ready mode of definition and difference against all the "unjust and sinful structures" of reality. My first lover was a seminarian whose quick mind was fueled almost entirely by his feeling function, one full of resentment and power drive, by the way. He came to define the Perfect Church as one in which the only people to be excluded were those who wanted to exclude anybody else. Like paranoia, radical inclusion is a closed loop. Once you are in the business of making everyone welcome and equal, who could possibly criticise you? And when you are done, what do you have left to offer? A night in which all cows are black? (And you can bet that some cows will be more equal than others.)
You are the epitome of 21st century virtue.
And as boring as you are dangerous.
The Spiritus Christi (ex)Catholic Community --another word they swoon over-- in NY state. They broke with the RC Church in the late 90's over women's liturgical roles, gay unions and open communion. "Welcoming and including everyone", says on its website: Jesus said “no one who comes to my table will ever be rejected.” Lie. Never said that. At least not in Scripture. But I guess they think it's truthy.
Diversity and sensitivity are part of the new trinity, but they flow from inclusion, are mere modulations of it. A major major cultural trance is this need to level everyone. It saves you from thinking very deeply because equal inclusion is the only issue, ever. It is the feminine gone into overdrive, with affiliation becoming the only public virtue. Hierarchy, the male energy, is repressed so that loud affirmations of equality become a route to... power. Neat, no?
Like all forms of egalitarianism, one of its functions is to insulate the believer from moral condemnation and provide a ready mode of definition and difference against all the "unjust and sinful structures" of reality. My first lover was a seminarian whose quick mind was fueled almost entirely by his feeling function, one full of resentment and power drive, by the way. He came to define the Perfect Church as one in which the only people to be excluded were those who wanted to exclude anybody else. Like paranoia, radical inclusion is a closed loop. Once you are in the business of making everyone welcome and equal, who could possibly criticise you? And when you are done, what do you have left to offer? A night in which all cows are black? (And you can bet that some cows will be more equal than others.)
You are the epitome of 21st century virtue.
And as boring as you are dangerous.
8 comments:
Re: »Once you are in the business of making everyone welcome and equal, who could possibly criticise you?« Evidently Ex Cathedra can criticize inclusionists! »You are ... as boring as you are dangerous.«
Also Nietzsche's Zarathustra can sort-of criticize inclusionism: »Every Self wills the same, every Self estins the same« he quotes of the last man, the final version of man, who adds »any Self that feels otherwise goes voluntarily to the madhouse« and clucks in an aside »Formerly the whole world was mad.«
Nietzsche's Zarathustra only sort-of criticizes the Last Man he proposes for Europe's wish to end self-gtranscendence, because, evidently, Nietzsche consider'd the Sehnsucht for the Last Man to provide the foundation for the Superman whose ego declares of the eternal return 'thus I will'd it.'
Yet there's a difference between his time and ours, inasmuch as desublimational, proto-traditionalist Selfs will a desublimational madness, seeing in George Eliot's 'secularized Christianity' a nightmare of race, class and gender oppression, and denying any continuity or progress from Paul and Augustine up to America of 1945.
The religio-political, familial, educational etc enculturational institutions of post-WW2 West must be undermined as unjust by any utopian means necessary. »A new aion is necessary, but it must not come from "Plato to NATO"!«
For instance, even though feminist historians and journalists point out that women had been increasingly entering politics and the workforce (or had never really been absent from the workforce outside as well as inside the home), emergency action must be taken -- action that breaks continuity with establish'd civilizational directions.
Accordingly we see Simone de Beauvoir proposing Christian female hermits and saints -- unmarry'd (more or less as Simone was only desublimationally marry'd to Jean-Paul) -- as the precursors to the New Independent Woman.
(Perhaps really Marxist-Leninist institutions must be as thoroughly undermined as Western institutions: in any case, the USSR assuredly collapsed in our era, despite the shows of solidarity by Western intellectuals who protected it from critiques by anti-Communists but who didn't do anything to help the USSR remain functional. Marx surely would be appall'd to see European "Marxists" urge coeds to see medieval saints as their role models.)
Cleverly, Betty Friedan exposes girls to the reality that boys respect achievements based in conquest, competition, etc, and lets concern for raising families seem contemptible ("staying home and baking cookies") so that marriage and family can cease to be institutions of generation and sublimation. Womanhood was never anything more than a 'mystique' for advertisers to exploit.
Later girls were browbeaten into denying any 'feminine mystique' in sexuality, and to assert that they too have a sexuality with street cred just like guys'. If not actual porn, then at least semi-pornify'd romance novels and vampire romance movies. Lest, compared with guys, they seem 'mousey' before their enculturators.
Will women feel unhappy in a raucous porno-infused sexual culture plus contempt for any woman who doesn't get at least a law degree from an Ivy League university and who courageously doesn't care whether a real family life happens for her or not? This must conduce for conversion of girls to traditionalism. ... If greater progress in the liberation of women really had been the desideratum, continuity would have served far better than the emergency actions which made every guy and coed more or less confused about what feminism intends by c.1973.
All the more so when the Western career institutions have been sunder'd from their origins in Christianity and its aftermath. Staying home and baking cookies has more street cred than working as a lawyer when Western law allow'd to become worthless for Life, with the ostensible exception of J.D.s who use their degrees for neighbourhood activism and helping poor children or prisoners.
For if Christian religion is now only meaningless repression plus a font of racist sexism and homophobia, there can be no real importance in defending religious free exercise.
Jesus is brought in (Yoder, Hauerwas, NCCB et al) against Christianity: Christian civilization has been an offense to Jesus from the beginning. But Jesus has authority only because of Christian civilization. His kerygma wouldn't intimidate the warlords of ancient India and China. Jesus as helper in desublimation is a one-time deal. Once Christian civilization is gone, Jesus won't have any more authority. (In light of the Grand Inquisitor on dynamis, sacrament and authority, and Matthew 4:8-10, I think Jesus would refuse to have authority even to destroy a civilization.)
So also if "expression" not speech is the desideratum to be protected by the first amendment. ... If polymorphous perversity is the final truth of man, then there's no need for civil liberties. But Freud said man can't live in polymorphous perversity. Instinctual gratification isn't possible because of the entire truth of nature and the resulting reality principle.
The pleasure(-pain) principle would be sufficient if polymorphous perversity had been possible for man from the beginning. Desublmation makes of the reality principle a crypto control principle. The second part of "Eros and Civilization" is 'Beyond the Reality Principle' (I guess on grounds that the reality principle has been necessary only because Selfs are competitive: the reality principle control'd by the ego has been possible because of a performance principle among competitive Selfs. But since surely all Selfs can be mature enough to agree not to compete, Rousseau's fatalism about social man can be easily avoided.
Besides, any competition in the untragic but not comic desublimational aion must be competition in letting it all hang out [without yet showing the unity of the two natures], and who would bother to compete in letting it all hang out?
In contrast, Hegel reveal'd even bureaucratic organizations to have their origin in the struggle for recognition and the resulting master-slave dialectic, so that modern civilization can be fulfil'd only in the citizen-soldier
(with the Nietzschean proviso that if this eventually seems impossible reckless because of technology such as the a-bomb, well, the struggle is really war of spirit, not war of powder, and bringing war of spirit up from the subterranean into the cave would obviate fights by technology. Fairly ignorant armies may still clash by night on darkling plains spirit-swept by confusing alarms, but the armies wouldn't have poison gas, howitzers, IEDs, etc, only values!)
Freud too show'd the importance of repression and sublimation in the 'ascetic' institutions of thanatos, including even marriage and family, admittedly.
But for the desublimation theorists, the institutions of Western civilization must be seen to require repression for no real sublimation. "Let's all just live in the instinctual underground, or rather bring the instinctual underground up to the cave and let the institutions fall as they may when proved to have no real purpose for Life. It doesn't matter: if they do. Any non-Western civilization or culture that replaces Western civilization will be an improvement."
In a way the desublimators' recklessness and peevish insistentness accomplish the same as Zarathustra's disciples who are to "Push what is falling!" though from eros for the Superman, not from rancour vs repressiveness and the discontents of civilization.
Has the emergency action of desublimation and activism against Western civilization strengthen'd us anyway? I suppose we ought really to feel exhausted by the efforts of "repressive desublimation" (compulsive porno, viagara, workaholic childless careerism for both sexes etc and so forth). But perhaps the desublimators have nevertheless built up strength for Traditionalists to replace the transitional "barbarians of the spirit'" whom Nietzsche anticipated.
The crises of socialism or social democracy that he anticipated (e.g., Will to Power ¶868) surely have been greatly aggravated by desublimation. Nietzsche supposed that only 'barbarians' outside civilization would be strong enough to do any willing amidst crises as caused by the collapse of family and religion and law. The nihilists or "Europe's Buddhists" [no Tibetan desublimational buddhists, then] aren't strong enough to take responsibility (the specific defect of democracy and its 'elites'). By "take responsibility" I don't mean accept blame (the purpose of democracy's 'elites'), but the seizing of responsibility, of willing.
Are traditionalists really strong enough to seize responsibility? and for deeds stronger than merely imposing burkas and beards, closing breweries and distilleries, replacing the humanities at universities with the Protocols, etc. Ego will-to-power responsibility for Libido and Thanatos, for repression and sublimation, over Selfs. ... I doubt that a chump non-ego will be sufficient.
Is a religion merely of "inner path" or flight from the world sufficient for these tasks? No doubt the flight from the world is complemented by an outer path, but this outer path isn't even thematic, and it must seem to serve only the inner path?
Strictly speaking the inner path is, I think, 'politics' -- in terms of the contents brought by the initiates. The outer path is 'religion' (the meanings etc imposed on the initiates making the upward inner journey).
Critical theory: »You can't undermine a civilization without breaking a few eggs.«
Because, as the Santayana-Lakota elders say, »A people without history is as the wind on the buffalo grass.«
For the inclusivist it's always about him and his inflated, bloated non-egotism.
Why are there so many gays in churches/in the clergy?
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