RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dark-side-of-the-enlightenment-1523050206

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under attack and calling on readers to “rise up” and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers “with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave.” And now there’s Steven Pinker’s impressive new book, “Enlightenment Now,” which may be the definitive statement of the neo-Enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond.

Do we all crave enlightenment? I don’t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn’t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm.

Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that “the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead “think things through from the ground up.”

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.”

Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale.

These statesmen and philosophers articulated the principles of modern Anglo-American constitutionalism centuries before the U.S. was created. Yet they were not Enlightenment men. They were religious, English nationalists and political conservatives. They were familiar with the claim that unfettered reason should remake society, but they rejected it in favor of developing a traditional constitution that had proved itself. When Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison initiated a national government for the U.S., they primarily turned to this conservative tradition, adapting it to local conditions.

Country music legend Merle Haggard released “Are the Good Times Really Over” in 1982. Like his earlier songs “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me,” Haggard was looking back to simpler times, before the sixties revolution began the two-bit Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values,” especially the disdain for traditional virtues like patriotism and faith. Progressives and leftists dismissed Haggard as a naïve hillbilly at best, and a white racist pining for his lost privilege at worst.

But the question in Haggard’s chorus still persists in our culture and politics, with prophecies of doom coming from both ends of the political spectrum. So, are “the good times really over”? Or is anxiety over declinism misplaced?

After all, worrying over decline is universal. In constitutional governments, much of it comes from the melodramatic hyperbole of political rhetoric. Ever since ancient Athens, prophesizing doom is a way to frighten voters into choosing one party and set of policies instead of another. After the disappointment of 1968, the left-leaning Democrats particularly turned to hysteria and hyperbole to salve their wounds and jump-start the “fundamental transformation of America.” Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and his son were all cast as portents of the coming doom: the destruction of civil liberties, the dismantling of the democratic order, nuclear annihilation, the creation of a plutocracy––these are just a few of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse predicted by Dems.

The ongoing attacks on Donald Trump are just a more hysterical and hyperbolic version of this age-old staple of electoral politics. From Robert Kagan’s “this is how fascism comes to America,” to Thomas Friedman’s looming “constitutional crisis,” bipartisan disappointment seasoned with class prejudice conjures up these signs of imminent doom that only the elite political class can ward off. Yet for now, the resilience of the Constitutional order has made theses Jeremiads mere sound and fury.

If the spirit of the classical Greek playwright Euripides could be summoned from the grave and observe our feminist age, he would not be surprised. In The Bacchae (premiered circa 405 B.C.), he told the story of Pentheus, the unfortunate ruler of Thebes, who resisted the ritual incursion of Dionysus, the androgynous god of wine, ecstasy, passionate delirium, and the oracular Mysteries.

In the play, Dionysus returns to Thebes, the city of his birth, accompanied by a retinue of bacchants, or drunken revellers. Finding himself mocked, he infects the women of the royal household with an access of divine frenzy, whereupon they flee into the forest to perform paroxysms of fevered worship. Pentheus wishes to preserve the functioning of the state and recognizes that the upsurge of visionary dementia and phobic irrationality exemplified by the maenads or “raving ones” — the RadFem hordes of the day — would lead to the disruption of the political order and the destabilization of civil society.

Pentheus intends to put an end to the insanity but, influenced by Dionysus, falls prey to curiosity and is persuaded to disguise himself in women’s clothing, enter the forest and witness the maenadic revels from a perch in a tall fir tree. He is spotted by the tribe of hysterics, brought to the ground and ripped to shreds, the mordancy of the scene enhanced by the fact that it is his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head and carries the trophy back to Thebes.

Of course, the play is far more complex than this short synopsis would indicate. Euripides treats the perennial conflict between the Olympian gods and the maternal Furies, between man and woman, between social order and individual enthusiasm, between Apollo, the god of reason and light, and Dionysus representing the darker forces of emotion and rapture — or as we would say today, of libido.

This theme was famously addressed by Euripides’ great predecessor Aeschylus in the Oresteian Trilogy, where the female goddesses the Eumenides (or Furies) are pitted against the male Olympians. Both forces, Aeschylus felt, the visceral and the rational, were necessary to the proper conduct of the state and in the life of the individual, but must be contained in a condition of approximate balance to avoid a descent into anarchy. The message of The Bacchae, however, is ambiguous insofar as the conclusion of the play suggests the desired victory of the Dionysian infatuation, yet the disintegration of public order and Apollonian statecraft would have been obvious to Euripides’ audience. We recall that Plato’s Republic, in which music, art, and trance-like phenomena were to be the prohibited by law, appeared circa 380 B.C., only 25 years after the initial performance of The Bacchae. Both sides of the dynamic had their dedicated votaries.

No one was more surprised at Trump’s electoral victory than the man himself, unless it was supporters of Hillary Clinton, a candidate who never did explain just why she wanted to be president and who continually badgered her team to come up with a theme for the pudding that was her campaign. How was it possible that this vulgar misogynist could beat Hillary Clinton, she the shatterer of glass ceilings; the defender of abortion on demand, financed if necessary by orders of Catholic nuns; and of young persons’ rights to choose their gender and their toilets regardless of gender; of the right of illegal immigrants to become American citizens. She was consort to beneficiaries of globalisation who filled her coffers with speaking fees, and representative of all that “deplorables”, as she called Trump supporters, find so offensive about the social agenda of the bicoastal liberal establishment. The Russians must have done it. Or the really dumb Founding Fathers who established an electoral system that gave voice to less densely populated states rather than rely entirely on the popular vote. No matter the cause, Trump is an illegitimate president.

Which means that the Democratic minority, with the support of an overwhelmingly liberal-establishment media, is not merely obligated to oppose those of his policies they deem not to be in the national interest, but to have him removed from office, preferably in handcuffs. The virulence of the attacks on the President makes the battle between Momentum and the Blairites seem tame by comparison. Trump’s response is to lash out indiscriminately at anyone who disagrees with whatever his whim-of-the-moment seems to be. His weapon of choice is the tweet, which a frustrated media must report, giving these short bursts of often incoherent, often nasty impulses an even wider audience. Trump supporters liken the tweets to FDR’s use of radio — the famous Fireside Chats — to go over the heads of a hostile press directly to the American people, but a better comparison would be to the “nya, nya, you’re one, too” response of a witless schoolboy to some disagreeable remark by a playmate.

So much for Trump the person, and why his natural propensity to lie — not so much to lie, but to invent an alternative “truth” in which he really, really believes — and to substitute invective for reason, is justified by his supporters. To that 35 to 40 per cent of the electorate, largely white, rural, poor or middle class, religious and male, Trump might be a sinful New York property developer claiming to be a billionaire, but, oddly, he is “one of us”, to borrow a descriptive once popular in Britain, eager to poke a finger in the eye of the elites who remain unaware of our existence and problems.

On to policy. It is important to distinguish Trump the Person from Trump the Policymaker. Trump the person believes that the current international trading system is rigged in favour of the rich, of what David Goodhart calls “the anywheres”, who couldn’t care less about Making America Great Again. This is the New York crowd that kept a thrusting Trump at arm’s length, and only now have found reason to invite him into their more tasteful, less gilt-covered apartments for dinner. Trump the campaigner promised to smash that system in favour of one that protects American interests.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21017/fbi-sister-wives-noor-salman-and-hillary-clinton  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: http://lindagoudsmit.com Noor Salman, wife of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, was exonerated on all charges of aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice even though the jury was convinced she knew her husband was plotting the attack. WHY? The jury foreman in the case, “I wish that the FBI had recorded their interviews with Ms. Salman […]

Conor Cruise O’Brien, the late Irish politician, writer, historian and academic who wrote “The Siege”….arguably the best history of Israel, lamented “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” Indeed! It has awakened with gale force. Once, in order to be respectable due to post Holocaust guilt, it posed as “tough love” criticism of Israel.

The hypocrisy was staggering even then. After World War Two, millions of people were forcibly deported and rendered refugees, but only the Arabs made it a heritable status, as Palestinian Arabs were herded into squalid camps for four generations. Who got the blame? Israel.

History and facts were discarded as “the occupation” obsessed those too lazy and ignorant to read history. The so called “West Bank” was part and parcel of the White Paper of 1922 which deeded 80 percent of promised Palestine to the Arabs ….all the land East of the Jordan River…which became Jordan…and all the land west of the river ….20% to the Jews.

But history be damned! Never mind the harsh realities of Communist oppression and the genocides in Africa. Israel dared to defend itself! How dare they? The floodgates opened and antisemitism blossomed in the academies, in the media, and among large segments of the populations in Europe.

Yes, one may argue that it is largely driven by Islamic anti-Semitism, but who gives it a free ride by obfuscation and deliberate concealment of its source?

Those are the bitter reflections of Passover for me as we recount past suffering while “respectable” Jew hatred grows exponentially….rsk

If there is one thing lacking in our society today, it is a jealous fidelity to kindness. Yes, there is an excess of talk about kindness and being kind, and it always comes at the hand of someone who is trying to tell someone else that they have to be kind. The fact of the matter is this: kindness is not being taught in the home, and it is being agendized in our culture for manipulative purposes.

I can even go so far as to say that those who preach and celebrate kindness are – in many cases – the worst offenders of being unkind. A perfect example comes to us in every church parking lot after every mass every week.

Long ago, I listened to a Jesuit guest speaker at the church I attended with my Mother. He was less than happy with the congregation. He spoke of kindness and how Christians are supposed to treat people and pretty much called us all hypocrites. His example was the church parking lot after mass.

“You offer each other the sign of peace in the pews, smile and pretend to be kind, and then cut each other off in the parking lot because you have to be before your neighbor,” he said, and I paraphrase for the time that has passed since I listened to him. “You forget every last word of the sermon about being kind and Christian because you have to beat your neighbor to the brunch bar!”

Even after his tongue lashing, the exact scene he described played out in the parking lot after mass. Some didn’t hear it, didn’t get it, or just didn’t care. They went to church; they did their time, now back to “me first, I win, you lose.”

Some will argue that there is enough blame to go around for this malady, if, in fact, they believe it to be a problem at all. It seems the further one gets to the “touchy-feely” Left or the sanctimonious Right, the more they tend to overlook even their own acts of unkindness, even as they tell others what they have to do to be kind.

Ayn Rand’s archvillain, Ellsworth Toohey, in The Fountainhead, promoted “diversity,” in Chapter XIV, as one means of acquiring power: “Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.” This is true. If you’re taught, and believe that a thatched hut in Africa is as much of an achievement as the Empire State Building, then the shrine has been razed.

Diversity means mixing apples and oranges and forbidding you to choose between them.

Diversity means equating a Rachmaninoff symphony or a Chopin etude with any instance of “rap” you care to name. God help you if you disagree. Rap is undiluted hatred, in performance of shouting obscenities and misogyny in your face, backed up by throbbing, deafening, mind-nullifying bass. Its purpose is to destroy.

Rap is “a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates ‘rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular’, which is performed or chanted in a variety of ways, usually over a backbeat or musical accompaniment….Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that rap is usually performed in time to an instrumental track. Rap is often associated with, and is a primary ingredient of hip-hop music, but the origins of the phenomenon predate hip-hop culture. The earliest precursor to the modern rap is the West African griot tradition, in which ‘oral historians’, or ‘praise-singers’, or ‘critique individuals’ would disseminate oral traditions and genealogies, or use their formidable rhetorical techniques for gossip or to “praise or critique individuals….”

I beg to differ. It contains no music. And it is usually performed by someone who can’t sing, or doesn’t seem to try. After all, melody is verboten. I stress the term chanted.

Diversity means Western culture is alleged to be on a par with primitive cultures. The Venus de Milo is the same as a voodoo doll. To make a distinction between them is to “confess” your innate “racism, “white privilege,” and even Nazism. Elevate the subjectivist in art, and raze the absolute. A subjectivist person is a coward who is afraid to have values, or is afraid to defend what values he may have if they are attacked.

Diversity means that the artwork of Lawrence Alma-Tadema is on a par with the non-art of the likes of Jackson Pollack, together with that of all his ilk’s smears, blobs, blank canvases, and parallel lines of modern art.

Diversity means that meaningless means that there are no absolutes, only one’s subjectivist feelings. Feelings replace reality. A subjectivist will assert with a straight face that, “The Dark Horse Nebula is just a spilled ink spot, that’s how I see it.” To say that an “artwork” is meaningless is not an acceptable or recognized critique of a canvas of blobs and smears. To a doctrinaire subjectivist it is an expletive. A box of randomly chosen junk is the equal of or superior than the Statue of Liberty. If you are faced with a jumble of colors, or by a canvas on which are glued swatches of fabrics, and insist on identifying it as such, you will have violated the modern cardinal rule of art appreciation to not identify rubbish is trash. You will have hurt the creator’s feelings, and invaded his “safe space.”

Throughout the Arab/Moslem world Christians are imperiled. In Israel, alone among the Middle East nations, they enjoy freedom from persecution and freedom to practice and express their faith.

Holy week which begins on Palm Sunday, brings worshipers to churches and shrines meticulously restored and protected by the government of Israel.

On Good Friday, Christian pilgrims from all over the world, carrying wooden crosses gather in The Mount of Olives and march to the Holy Sepulchre in the middle of the Old City. Easter Sunday celebrates the resurrection of Jesus.

Our combined Judeo/Christian ethics have made the world better, kinder, with more freedom for all. Happy Easter from rsk