The snake in the garden

When did things start to go wrong?

That's a common interest for a certain type of mind.

I remember my old Russian Orthodox hero, Alexander Schmemann, tracing the eventual separation of Latin and Greek churches back to the condemnation of Berengarius of Tours in the 10th century. He was required to sign a profession of faith which held the Eucharist to be Christ's Body and Blood non solum mystice sed etiam vere. Non only a symbol, but a reality as well.

For Fr. S, for whom reality and symbol were inseparable, this Western way of dividing things up was at the heart of dividing up the Church.

My first boyfriend, Jeff D, was a passionate thinker, although I came to believe that his thinking was mostly a rationalization of his passions. He had decided at one point that the snake-in-the-garden du jour for the modern world's problems, "the smoking gun" as he put it, was romantic love. I don't even remember why.

Politicos on the Right have variety of points at which The Fall took place: The Sixties, The New Deal, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and for the serious Right, Abraham Lincoln. The French Revolution, The Enlightenment, The Reformation. For the Left it was the lost opportunity at the sexistracist Founding, or, popularly, either Jamestown, the Pilgrims, or back to Christopher Columbus.

And of course for feminists, it is the arrival of the Patriarchy into the paradise of the Mother.

Adam in conflict with Lilith

Compared to which fantasy, the Genesis story of Adam and Eve sounds like documented anthropology.

Pretty well any date or event in history (or pre-history if you're a Gnostic) can be somebody's Snake in the Garden.

I have my own suspects, of course, but even as I point them out, I am aware that the case is circumstantial. Not untrue, but circumstantial.

Long ago, at the beginnings of Western Civilization, in the 500's BC, Parmenides' prose poem On Nature laid out the contrasting ways of Truth vs Opinion. The world of Truth is unchanging and certain. In the world of Opinion, change and uncertainty define it.

Trouble is, it's the changing and uncertain phenomena which touch us most directly and about which we have to make decisions and act. Likelihood of error of much higher in this realm of passion and contingency and flaw, but so is the requirement for trying, and the concrete disasters or achievements involved.

They don't call it the human dilemma for nothin'.

Diagnosis

One of my FB friends, a fellow therapist of the very liberal persuasion, whose nickname for me is Cheney-Lite, thinks I have become "cranky and obsessed."

B, who is very tolerant of me and only very occasionally tickles the political stuff, sometimes says I have Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Details on McNaughton's The Forgotten Man 

Nolo contendere.

PS. Both on this blog and on FB, I let off a lot of steam so that I can be pleasant and civilized and amusing in person. Whether I am successful in that, I leave to those who encounter me in person.

It would be PC illusion

to think that no one notices when a Jewish mayor of Chicago tells a Christian business they are not welcome.

Sunday Sunday

Today in San Francisco we have the Marathon



and the Dore Alley Fair.

A line from an old post of mine needed some expansion.

 Feminism can only occur in societies where the men allow it.


Men in such societies must have achieved a double and very contradictory status. They must have been strong enough to create a stable society, and this always includes a massive outpouring of male energy, (brains, sweat and blood),  including a foundation of force of arms. And yet they must be weak enough to fall for feminism's thinly disguised  hatred of masculinity, marketed as a plea for simple justice

Feminism can only occur in societies where
men's strength, courage and skill have made it possible
and where men's misguided honor allows it to happen to them.

***
Saw a YouTube video of a large man beating a smaller teenage boy who had picked a fight with the man's son. The female newscaster condemned the "violent, macho" behavior. In our world, women assume the right, in public and private, to be the arbiters of what is acceptable male behavior. And no men challenge them on this. Let men try to assume a similar role in regard to women --a role they once had and lost-- and the screaming would begin. Who are you to define us!?


When movements for social change are driven by progressivism, they are zero sum games. Win-lose. Inevitably, if the dominant group concedes anything of substance, it will eventually take the place of the subaltern group. A little over fifty years ago, homos in England could be arrested just for being homos. Now people are arrested there simply for offending them. All in a single lifetime.


Voltaire's line: If you want to know who your rulers are, find out who you cannot criticize.

What will the West be like a lifetime from now?

**
I wasted an hour yesterday doing YouTube comments. Mea maxima culpa. When I replied bluntly but factually to a young Black man's obscenity-laced tirade about Whites, another White man criticized me for using the phrase "you people." (Which I did not, in fact. I wrote the shorthand "ur people".) He completely ignored the savagery of the young savage and wanted only to prove his ethical worth by trying to restrain his very restrained fellow Leukophore. White Lent: The meek members of the resurrection in their alabaster chambers, wearing mind-forged manacles. (Apologies to Dickenson and Blake).

***

The "you people" game. If a member of a Formerly Dominant Group uses that kind of speech, implying that "you" are not "us" and therefore somehow "other" and excluded, it is big racist and oppressive sin. But if a member of a Newly Dominant Victim Group wants to read you the riot act and distinguish their group from "you" Whites or males or straights, etc. that is perfectly fine.

***

Had another dream last night related to Covington's Northwest Republic novels. I think the link is that even though I would have no place in that country besides a coffin, he is angry at a lot of the same things that I get angry about.

He ramps up the current regime's multicultural-feminist softish tyranny into a nightmarish extreme, as a justification for the extremism of his own response. But if you take just the British example above, you wonder, if things could get so crazy in just fifty years, what will the next fifty be like? The Liberal sense of righteousness is so profound that they could easily justify all sorts of horrors. Look at what they justify already.

Demographics for Whites are grim, and for White conservatives*, who are no more than half the Caucasian population, even more so. That is Covington's basic point: the threat of biological disappearance. It happened to the AmerIndians, whose numbers (1% of the US population) are so small as to be insignificant. And where they have some moral capital as victims, Whites have zero, as history's oppressors. Where I am pessimistic, he is apocalyptic...but therefore hopeful, because after the apocalypse, the good guys always win.



*Mr. Covington is no conservative. In face, he considers White conservatives to be even more dangerous to his worldview and hopes than Jews. They appear to be on your side, but in the end care only about money, and in any case have proven impotent against the progressive tide. In his view, and the view of the alternative Right or New Right or whatever, just Liberals Lite who will stab in the back any John Derbyshire who tells an inconvenient truth.

**


>**

Grownups

A local fella. Woof.

PS. Next day. Guess who I just saw on the street, with his BF and some friends? I at least got a momentary glance from him. I was cool. He's tall. Tall as me, if not a bit more. 

Ah, sweet memories

Two of my most unpleasant working years were spent teaching high school in Brooklyn, right after I graduated from Columbia. This video reminded me of one day...

One of the boys in the front row was pulling off stuff whenever my back was turned and laughed when I reprimanded him. Not for the first time. I told him that next time it would not be funny. I turned back to the board and he made a fart noise.

All I remember next is that he and I were in the back of the classroom, up against the back wall and he was on the floor, with his hands covering his head  and I was standing over him.

Honest to God, I have no memory of how we both got there.

High school teaching. Like living in a Kafka novel. I guess that day, like the guy in the video, I'd just had enough.

Like this teacher!

Moral systems

Morality or ethics, not a subject in which I feel expert. Or in many ways, interest. Moralism is a trait I find tremendously irritating. And baffling.

The moral/ethical system I know most about, of course, is Catholic. And it's a fusion of Biblical material with natural law theory. Grace and nature schmoozing it out together. And then applying it to the vagaries and variances of history and contingency.

It has become apparent to me that preserving the system is paramount, if Catholicism is to have any ethics at all. So people who expect to have their exceptions made into principles are barking up the wrong tree.

But I know of no ethical system which can adequately deal with the vagaries and variances of history and contingency. Sometimes life slips out of the categories of mind.

Italian Catholicism, with its Mediterranean hedonism, Romanita, and general disinterest in actual perfection, had a gift for making clear moral statements but then not having a nervous breakdown when life did not comply. There's a fine line between reality-based compassion and agnostic antinomianism. The "Roman solution" for difficult moral problems was one thing on paper (strict) and another in practice (Say Three Hail Mary's and try not to do it again.) As well, public and private sins were treated differently. And moral failings far more tolerable than offenses against authority or doctrine.

AngloSaxons and the Irish, etc. have a different attitude. No exceptions. Which puts an impossible burden on principles and laws.

Anyway, things like contraception, homosexuality, euthanasia are examples of places where life slips out beyond the categories of mind. For a coherent Catholic ethical system, these cannot be condoned without the whole edifice unravelling. But that doesn't mean they are always actually immoral. There are other values that can override the ethical guidelines.

With the Italian style, you adjust and move on. With the moralistic passions of the Northerners, this is hypocrisy, so you agitate to change the guidelines.
Or you force yourself into doing things, or not doing things, to match the guidelines even if the outcome in particular cases is stupid, cruel or soul-killing.

I think my choices are pretty clear. I respect the system --hey, I'm a Five-- but I long ago decided that trying to live within all the guidelines was not possible.

More misogyny

Paraphrasing a novel I read this summer:

“The Arabs have a proverb: ‘There is danger to him who snatcheth the tiger’s cub, but more to him who snatcheth delusion from a woman.’” answered Rob.
“Point taken,” said the older man.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” asked Veronica archly from the back seat.
“No disrespect, but women do have a nasty habit of shooting the messenger,” said Rob.
“Do you really want to say that to a girl sitting behind you with an M-16?” asked Veronica?"
“We need to keep an eye out as we drive through here,” said the older man. “I think they’ve got some...

When men speak critically of women as a group. How do women usually react?
They take it personally, or on behalf of their female tribe and hit back. Engage for a fight, not infrequently with implied threats.

Women who make critical or cutting comments about men as a group. How do men usually react? Silence. Eyerolling. Disengagement.



What does this say about  male/female difference?

Affirmative action for doctors?

If you can mandate racial hires for firemen, why not for doctors?

Oh, that wouldn't make you feel confident? Too risky when your life is at stake?

Here's a report with actual examples from the test that these guys can't pass.

Quote:

Judge Garaufis promptly rules that two of every five new firefighters hired must be black and one Hispanic — as opposed to the old, racist system, which required that five of every five be minimally competent/not retarded (clearly privileging whites).

Any wonder why the otherwise saintly and humanitarian Ex Cathedra has lost every last drop of sympathy for (or guilt about) NAMS?

*Non-Asian Minorities. A new acronym I just learned. I like to share.

****

Hu Nu?

African migrants rioting in China?

Why does a country of 1 billion need migrants...from anywhere...
much less Africa?