Dostoevsky’s Demons and Orwell’s Hate
As I’ve written before, when I was in college in the late 60s I happened to take a course called Russian Intellectual History. I had always liked Russian lit, I’d been told the prof was good, and the course seemed an easy way to fulfill a history requirement.
It was all that, and more. I was very fortunate to take it during that particular era, because I could not help but notice – in fact, it was glaringly obvious – that despite the distant time and place and many different details, and despite the fact that we young people thought ourselves to be inventing a new and better world, there were enormous parallels.
That course kept me from idealizing my own generation or their ideas, and served as a warning about intellectual or political hubris. Recent events have only solidified those notions, and added layers of present-day observation about current generations and the danger their ideas present. It’s a variation on a theme.
One of the books we read for that course was Dostoevsky’s Demons, in a translation that at the time was called The Possessed:
The original Russian title is Bésy, which means “demons”. There are three English translations: The Possessed, The Devils, and Demons. Constance Garnett’s 1916 translation popularized the novel and gained it notoriety as The Possessed, but this title has been disputed by later translators. They argue that “The Possessed” points in the wrong direction because Bésy refers to active subjects rather than passive objects — “possessors” rather than “the possessed”. However, ‘Demons’ refers not to individuals who act in various immoral or criminal ways, but rather to the ideas that possess them: non-material but living forces that subordinate the individual (and collective) consciousness, distorting it and impelling it toward catastrophe.
I’m not so sure that “demons” refers to the ideas rather than the individuals as well, but I’m not here to argue that particular point. What made me think of the book again is something that’s probably obvious: the reaction of many on the left to the news that the Trumps have tested positive for COVID. But that’s just one example of a phenomenon we’ve seen a great deal of in recent years, and some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into seething malevolence.
Yesterday we discussed it as part of this lengthy thread. It’s deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.
People don’t like what threatens them, especially if they don’t understand it and if (as happened with this particular woman) they have no factual answer to some of the things that are being said to them. What’s left to them is to explode – which she did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess – although I don’t know, and I’m certainly not about to ask – that either she or plenty of other people I know are rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trump’s diagnosis.
Are they “possessed”? Is this “demonic”? I don’t know. I tend to think in the psychological terms I just explained in the above paragraph, because these people are for the most part not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.
It is somewhat similar to a phenomenon described in another great literary work, Nineteen-Eighty Four, the “Two Minutes Hate“:
In the cinematic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), brainwashing of the participants in the Two Minutes Hate includes auditory and visual cues, such as “a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil” that burst from the telescreen. meant to psychologically excite the crowd into an emotional frenzy of hatred, fear, and loathing for Emmanuel Goldstein, and for Oceania’s enemy of the moment, either Eastasia or Eurasia. The hate session includes the participants throwing things at the telescreen showing the film, as does the Julia character. In the course of the Two Minutes Hate, the film image of Goldstein metamorphoses into the face of a bleating sheep, as enemy soldiers advance towards the viewers of the film, before one enemy soldier charges towards the viewers, whilst firing his sub-machinegun; the face of that soldier then becomes the face of Big Brother. At the end of the two-minute session of hatred, the members of the Party ritualistically chant “B-B . . . B-B . . . B-B . . . B-B.” To maintain the extreme emotions provoked in the Two Minutes Hate sessions, the Party created Hate Week, a week-long festival of hatreds.
[NOTE: This post may have set a new record for “number of categories.”]
“. . .whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons.”
I hope it is for political reasons. But I worry that a part of it is just to make Americans hate their government and each other. I guess that is ultimately for political reasons, but it is more than that, in my estimation. It is to tear apart our civilization and our polity. I hate what the MSM and the Democratic Party are doing to us, and I pray that they will eventually recognize how destructive it is and give it up.
Gary Morson has recently written a superb essay about the situation in pre-Bolshevik Russia entitled “Suicide of the Liberals”; it is posted at FirstThings and deserves to be widely read. He draws upon his wide knowledge of Russian history and Russian literature (he teaches Russian at Northwestern and often writes for The New Criterion) in suggesting how perilous is the attachment of intellectuals and the wider public to toxic ideas; no society, no matter how stable it may appear, can withstand the widespread belief in ideological nonsense and the abdication of reason and logic.
F:
I agree that is part of the goal, but I define that is being a political reason.
And the left will never give that up. It is part of their entire worldview of how leftist dominance is to be achieved.
As it happens, I made an attempt at countering the narrative today, in the vein of Neo’s “you never know” idea. I posted on Facebook a link to the NR story below, with a very mild-mannered “if you’re interested” comment. Nobody screamed at me, but they all simply repeated the narrative, refusing the possibility of any other view having any validity.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-proud-boys-debate-moment-a-case-study-in-the-medias-mishandling-of-trump/
As I mentioned in earlier threads, the phenomenon continues. Today I unfriended 3 more people from my past: high school and college friends. As Neo said, they have not been evil people as I have known them, but today they were gleefully celebrating Trump’s infection and wishing for his demise. Truly despicable behavior from people I would never expect it.
OK, yes they are liberals, thus are probably ripe for the brainwashing that is happening. But it still fills me with dread as I watch this happening. My BIL (3 families vacationing together this week on OBX) greeted me this morning at 730am with a big smile on his face “Have you seen the news!??” I said no. “Trump’s infected with the corona virus!” he said laughing and smiling. I responded with, as he prides himself as being a lector at his local catholic church, “So as a practicing Christian, you are really happy about the illness of another person?” At least that stopped him short and he hasn’t mentioned it since. Still very hard to witness.
Perhaps not evil, but wicked as in wicked solution (e.g. selective-child), with diversity (i.e. color judgment) closely following, which are rationalized under their Twilight faith, Pro-Choice quasi-religion (“ethics”), and liberal ideology, further justified for the sake of social justice, social progress, and to normalize political congruence (“=”). Leftists regimes all operate with the same theme, albeit with variable, but invariably progressive, corruption and dysfunction. That said, keep women barefoot, available, and taxable. #HateLovesAbortion
Just prior to the lockdown, we were in New York for my 60th. Our experience at the One World Trade Center was more emotional than I had imagined it would be. You start out on the area of the building bedrock and take the elevator where an amazing overhead pictorial presents the original construction and then you arrive in a room and the curtains open and because of the weather conditions we could see as far as the eye could see. I became tearful as did a Norwegian woman who was there with her husband and children. My first thoughts was about the destruction and how it was the result of HATE, as in, this is what hate does…destroy. And of course as one looks out you see what man is capable of when the composite of imagination, talent, skill, resource, workmanship and all the other components that go into building are manifest. So much is taken for granted by so many in our present time.
physicsguy:
Similar, this morning observed two co-workers (EE and ME) smiling about the news of Trump’s positive COVID19 (aka the China Virus (HodgeTwins)) test. Both Christians of some sort. The masks are coming off in more ways than one.
Compare and contrast their reactions to Trump’s illness versus his reaction when hearing Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died.
Trump was immediately gracious, he didn’t smile or react like he was pleased at her demise. Much of the right blogs I read reacted the same, wishing her family their thoughts and prayers.
Now the left…
Rejoicing that a fellow human has a possibly serious illness shows how little these people consider opponents to be human. Being myself a Christian believer, I think the devil is doing his work very well. If my disagreement with someone devolves into hatred so strong, I myself am very, very sick.
One major problem is that their two minutes’ hate has been going on for about four years now.
Of the various qualities which seem to define liberals, a virtually endless capacity for HATE seems to be one of them.
Republicans can get angry, but few are truly capable of HATE.
There’s a massive difference between the two.
Anger has a cause — take that cause away, the anger fades. It’s also exhausting to maintain.
Hate has a target. It feeds on your soul. Take that target away, often, the flame just redirects itself, because nothing quenches whatever is burning inside the “hater”. It is inexhaustible as long as the hater is alive.
Finding God is one answer, because God is not commensurate with Hate. But liberals generally reject God, or adopt an ersatz version which is not truly Him. So their hopes in that direction are small.
It’s possible that’s one reason they reject God, too — either the demons that possess them to hate push them to push God away, or the realization that God means they’ll let go of the hate causes them to reject Him automatically… I dunno.
I tend to think the world would be better if more people read Dostoevsky. Of course, there are people who read the words but don’t take it in. Or somehow project on others.
Nice post. I stumbled on Dostoyevsky—or rather one of his novels, Crime and Punishment—at a family owned bookstore in Claymont, Delaware, when in my early twenties—back in 1973, I believe. The store was always submerged under books; stacks and stacks of them; indeed, no one—only God– could possibly have known what books were in this shop at any given time, unless one dove into them and shoveled away nonstop for an entire year.
Anyway, Dostoyevsky became my all time favorite writer, pronto. Even back then (’73) the parallels that neo alluded to—those between the Russia that Dostoyevsky depicted, and the cultural/political/religious trends in the West at the time, were jaw dropping. Nowadays, I’m quite perplexed– and disappointed– that Catholic commentators seem to largely overlook him. Dostoyevsky (it seems to me) brilliantly tied together the psychological, spiritual, political, religious, and (if you will) demonic elements not only of his time and place– but ours as well. And he could write about poor people—the truly poor—infinitely more realistically, compassionately, and vividly than any “progressive” or “radical”, then or now.
Speaking of Catholics, well known Catholic exorcist Father Chad Ripperger touches on the subject of possible demonic influence particularly in respect to certain millennials etc vis-à-vis authority, in the youtube video “Father Chad Ripperger: Demonic Compliance & How Demons Attack Authority Structures” (one might start at about mn 7 and listen two and a half minutes til mn 9:30).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IJqwlWYPXM
I don’t think Fr. Ripperger references Dostoyevsky though (not that he should). Hopefully, someone will eventually pen the essay that, for now, is sitting in the corner rolling its eyes and sighing in exasperation as it waits to be written: “Dostoyevsky, the Demonic, BLM & Antifa”.
(I haven’t yet checked out the FT article that j e refers to; it sounds good).
“They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident. neo
What is the practical difference between ideological fanaticism and self-righteousness whipped into a fever pitch?
And while political gain is the immediate goal, the rationale advanced to achieve that goal is to “make Americans hate their government and each other”.
“no society, no matter how stable it may appear, can withstand the widespread belief in ideological nonsense and the abdication of reason and logic.” je
“the left will never give that up. It is part of their entire worldview of how leftist dominance is to be achieved.” neo
Indeed, which is why we face the binary choice of 1776 or 1984.
om on October 2, 2020 at 5:45 pm said:
physicsguy:
Similar, this morning observed two co-workers (EE and ME) smiling about the news of Trump’s positive COVID19 (aka the China Virus (HodgeTwins)) test. Both Christians of some sort. The masks are coming off in more ways than one.
Time is running out for repentance over that 2015 period in which you took the mask off and went after people for their political voting decisions. Om was not much different back then vs those two christians now.
Yammer:
Still stuck in 2015 it seems, but you still yammer after all these years. Disagreeing about politics isn’t quite the same as being glad about the death or suffering of someone you disagree with, or is it in yammerland?
My assessment of President Trump was far too negative in 2015 and he has proven far better than anticapated. Also, the left has proven to be far worse as have you.
The older I get and the more I see, the more the Bible’s description of man in his natural state as depraved and evil appears to be spot on.
Neo – by any chance was one of the books you had called “Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia” by Marc Raeff published in 1966. My version is a purple cover with the Russian Imperial Eagle on the front. I found it in a used book store.
https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Russian-Intelligentsia-Eighteenth-Century-Nobility/dp/0156701502
Older and Wheezier @ 12:24 am. “For all have fallen short of the glory of God”.
In our youth and enthusiasm we believed that we could create the heaven on Earth. But as life presses upon us we find that saying is all so true. We are witnessing the end point of secularism/paganism. I refuse to call it atheism as most of secular left hold Gaia worship as a central tenant of their intellectual center.
Yes that timeless point of reference which is the bible has been proven true over and over to us. But be of good cheer. For we have won at an individual level. We have the reward of heaven while secularists only have the here and now and the despair that it brings. (This is where I find the writings of Nietzsche to be of use to gain perspective of their world view). They will be the ones that will pass away with wails of dismay and gnashing of teeth. All we can do is build a better life for our families and pass on our love for Jesus to them. We can look back on our lives with a sense of contentment and satisfaction as I sense that you and I are on the backside of life. Peace and joy be upon you.
And until God calls us home what we can do is be the “happy” warrior working to make life better for all around us and for the country. That is why I and my wife are working this election for Trump and his team. America is the last best hope for this fallen world and I will not let it pass without a fight from me.
I don’t think I’m better than the people reacting to Trump’s having covid-19, but I do think I am less out of balance. When you notice yourself enjoying schadenfreude at someone else’s bad news, you are seeing just what nasty creatures we are as OlderandWheezier pointed out. If we only see evil in the other guy, then we can be pretty well sure we are projecting. Projection is a defence mechanism. We all need defences. We all do it. But if we have not lost our balance, we moderate the tendency. See what is ours and what is theirs. Ask ourselves if we would rejoice in Biden getting the bug. Interesting that the poem behind the title of Hemingway’s great novel of the Spanish civil war which expressed the ethos of the left in the time of FDR and Orwell, would come full circle and could be used today as a rebuke to their ideological grandchildren.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Whether or not you take the idea of a righreous and holy God and a supernatural realm seriously, with a little thought it becomes obvious that the anti-logocentrism project in its many strands tracing back through the post modernists to Nietzsche and Marx, is essentially at war with “Being”, defined as coherent, integrated, and intelligible existence.
It is somewhat remarkable how the deconstructive war on the Logos, resonates on so many levels: some, indisputably literal, some, disputably figurative.
But the war is a war on the deepest roots of our civilizational ordering, on the concept of ordering itself, on definition, on coherence, intelligibility, and the meaning of the word.
The Logos leads to nomos and nomos (through order) to intelligibility; and our entire civilization has been based on and survived through reliance on this pattern.
From Fiat lux, to Plato, to, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God … and the darkness comprehended it not”, it has been that which kept chaos and the entropic furies at bay: whether it be through the mere power of an idea operating in the purely mundane, or whether through the influence of some extra mundane reality that transcends and shoots through the experienced reality.
But the war on the Logos, explicitly directed at the very root of our project of intellectual and moral coherence, could only end in the destruction of definition and truth as viable interpersonal or social adjudicators.
And when that happens, although there might be much to do with regard to those who were formerly definable as “fellow” and “like kind”, [but who, because they placed themselves outside the ordering realm of coherence] there is, unfortunately, nothing left to say to them.
You cannot, after all, argue with an unreasoning urge, which celebrates its unreason, and makes a god of itself. You can only demonstrate to it, that it is not in fact, a god, and that you are not a mirror existing only to reflect its glory.
“Are they “possessed”? Is this “demonic”? I don’t know. I tend to think in the psychological terms I just explained in the above paragraph, because these people are for the most part not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.”
For sure – and only because they are? were? your friends – they are not evil or demonic.
But rest assured, if you or others of your mindset are dragged off to the gulags, do not expect them to utter one word in your defense.
They will just stand by as you are dragged off in the middle of the night, and tossed into the unmarked car of the CHEKA (or if you prefer, the STASI or GESTAPO).
I have never read any Russian literature, but I have read the biography of “Lenin,”, by Dmitri Volkogonov . The author was a former USSR military officer who hoped to show that Lenin was the “good guy,” and that Lenin’s good ideas / plans were totally corrupted by his successor, Stalin (who exterminated more people than Hitler).
Long story short, Lenin was a murderous, blood thirsty thug who had no problem ordering the deaths of tens of thousands to impose his pseudo-religious ideology upon the Russian people.
When an individual subsumes his person, his mind, his psyche to an ideology, he becomes what the ideology demands. So if you question that individuals ideology, you are really questioning and threatening that individual’s raison d’etre.
And IMHO, that’s why liberals in particular (because they conceive of themselves as the most tolerant, open minded and informed) respond to any challenges to their belief system with unmitigated hatred and rage.
Humility is the foundational virtue for a reason. The self-righteousness is the problem.
People of moral character understand their own ignorance, their own fallibility and the fallibility of experts and “consensus”.
The left has become the poster children for hubris.
“The left has become the poster children for hubris.”
I used to say something similar, but now I think the correct diagnosis is narcissism. Remember when Obama would give a speech it was full of I I I, me me me, my my my. It was always about Obama.
Several people close to me are Trump haters. I never engage them because you can’t reason with rage. Is the rage demonic? I don’t know. But it is impenetrable. They have a strong emotional investment in being right and being righteous. One’s own perceived righteousness is an intoxicating thing.
This post might, on the surface, seem out of place here – Peggy McIntosh is responsible for inventing the concept of “white privilege” – but read through to the author’s comments on the evil of fomenting tribalism for political gain.
https://quillette.com/2018/08/29/unpacking-peggy-mcintoshs-knapsack/
Looks pretty demonic to me.
Scott Peck’s 1983 book on evil, “The People of the Lie,” is also relevant.
I don’t agree with all of his later psycho-babble, after (admittedly deserved) celebrity affected his research and writing, but he is dead-on-target in that one.
Om, like most of humanity, you are stuck in the past, a sort of Star Trek time loophole scenario or even Groundhog’s Day.
You have two choices to make. You can either progress spiritually and open the heart chakra, to advance with the Earth and more advanced souls. Or you can repeat the grade by joining the child traffickers, violent criminals, and Cabal leaders in another version of Earth’s timeline.
This is not the Rapture, but perhaps it is conceptually similar, although inverted.
P.S. The name is Ymarsakar, Ymar, or Y. Not Yammer. This mistake you make is repeated in nearly all of your incarnation timelines. You truly are in your version of hell or a Groundhog loop, so to speak.
In our youth and enthusiasm we believed that we could create the heaven on Earth. But as life presses upon us we find that saying is all so true. We are witnessing the end point of secularism/paganism. I refuse to call it atheism as most of secular left hold Gaia worship as a central tenant of their intellectual center.
They don’t really worship Gaia, any more than they worship parenthood at Planned Profit or womanhood at feminism.
AA’s 12-Step approach follows a set of guidelines designed as “steps” toward recovery, and members can revisit these steps at any time. The 12 Steps are:9
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
America, and even the world itself, is going through an AA 12 step program. First they must repent and admit they need to change and to truly view their faults. Humanity is no longer “allowed” to delude and deceive themselves into thinking their problems are external or the fault of “someone else”.
I AM the light, the truth, and the way.
DNW on October 3, 2020 at 7:56 am said:
Whether or not you take the idea of a righreous and holy God and a supernatural realm seriously, with a little thought it becomes obvious that the anti-logocentrism project in its many strands tracing back through the post modernists to Nietzsche and Marx, is essentially at war with “Being”, defined as coherent, integrated, and intelligible existence.
The majority of the damage done to the faithful and Gospel, was via the Church of Rome when the authorities and inquisition hunted down, tortured, and burned alive the Saints of the Most High. Humanity is confused, because there are good and bad things in their bible and scriptures. Humanity is confused, because the church that they think is of Christ or Peter, was responsible for much of the damage done in their name.
They will just stand by as you are dragged off in the middle of the night, and tossed into the unmarked car of the CHEKA (or if you prefer, the STASI or GESTAPO).
Technically, anti fascist, but go on.
I would note that DNW’s last reaction to the Roman Church hunting down the saints of the most high, was an almost equivalent response as Leftist rage/denial.
Even though DNW has changed from his Catholic upbringing, the roots of the identity and conditioning still remain, to the point where there is no rational reason for them to attack or defend the point, given the facts of history.
Often times, individuals can’t see their own flaws, so they look for things in their brother’s eye so to speak. That musical chair thing. But Yeshua did indeed criticize other people, if only to criticze their criticisms.
they were gleefully celebrating Trump’s infection and wishing for his demise. Truly despicable behavior from people I would never expect it.
Most of my friends’ response, all of us graduate students, when Reagan was shot, was some variant of “I was here all day.” Liberals never change. This is a defect in character that is tightly bound to liberalism.
“The self-righteousness is the problem.”
Well, OK; but while the problem is manifold and multi-faceted, the crux of it is the Left’s spectacular success at having fomented the TOTAL and ABSOLUTE demonization and delegitimization of Trump, and the resulting demonization and delegitimization of ALL of the president’s positions, of EVERYTHING he says and of EVERYONE who supports him.
Certainly the Left’s self-righteousness enables them to feel superior (to whatever it is they feel superior to). But it is one thing to be self-righteous and another to utterly demonize your opponent and essentially deny his or her right to express opinions (and ultimately to exist).
It is the utter demonization here that is remarkable.
Or, more precisely, the utter demonization that has been rationalized as the epitome of ethics and morality: of so-called “Moral Truth”.
Since if you don’t hop on the demonization train, then you yourself must—because of “Moral Truth”—be demonized.
If you don’t hate, then according to those on the cutting edge of ethics and responsibility, of morality and patriotism, you therefore DESERVE to be hated, censored, canceled, threatened, ostracized.
Tribalism at its very worst has been promoted as THE way to promote “progress”, achieve “justice” and improve—even perfect—society.
Except that such emotional and spiritual annihilation, bad enough as it is, tends to go further, preparing the ground—humans bein experts at rationalization—-for physical annihilation. This has been said before, countless times, by many others (and by me as well), but it is the “success” of this ABSOLUTIST policy of demonization that has driven the US to its current state.
How the Left can climb down from this ABSOLUTIST, BRUTAL, MALEVALENT and MURDEROUS attitude remains to be seen, assuming that this can be done at all, since its leaders across the board have been—yes, spouting self-righteousness—setting the fires and social media is fanning the flames amongst the self-righteous faithful.
To climb down requires the will to do so; but what we are witnessing is nothing less than SCORCHED EARTH as “ethical”, “moral”, “humane”, “decent” and “patriotic”—IOW “progressive”—political policy to drive the DEPLORABLEs back into the political wilderness.
Correction:
Instead of “…of EVERYONE who supports him.”
it would be more correct to say,
“…of EVERYONE who supports him or who defends him (on occasion) even if they don’t support him generally”.
Spartacus…”I refuse to call it atheism as most of secular left hold Gaia worship as a central tenant of their intellectual center.”
Indeed, most of today’s Progs are NOT atheist or agnostic scientific materialists such as you would have found on the Left in the 1920s-1950s. They have a range of mystical beliefs, ranging from astrology down to homeopathic medicine to magical crystals and, yes, Gaia-worship.
One interesting form of Prog belief is what Claire Berlinski called ‘crop worship, which I would broaden to call ‘food-worship.’ Claire explained this with reference to the French activist Jose Bove. In her chapter Black-Market Religion, she says:
“European men and women still confront the same existential questions, the same suffering as everyone who has ever been born. They are suspicious now of the Church and of grand political ideologies, but they nonetheless yearn for the transcendent. And so they worship other things–crops, for example, which certain Europeans, like certain tribal animists, have come to regard with superstitious awe.”
Berlinski sees the current Jose Bove as merely one in a long line of historical figures who hawked similar ideologies. They range from a man of unknown name born in Bourges circa AD 560, to Talchem of Antwerp in 1112, through Hans the Piper of Niklashausen in the late 1400s, and on to the “dreamy, gentle, and lunatic Cathars” of Languedoc and finally to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Berlinski sees all these people as being basically Christian heretics, with multiple factors in common. They tend appeal to those whose status or economic position is threatened, and to link the economic anxieties of their followers with spiritual ones. Quite a few of them have been hermits at some stage in their lives. Most of them have been strongly anti-Semitic. And many of the “Boves” have been concerned deeply with purity…Bove coined the neologism malbouffe, which according to Google Translate means “junk food,” but Berlinski says that translation “does not capture the full horror of bad bouffe, with its intimation of contamination, pollution, poison.” She observes that “the passionate terror of malbouffe–well founded or not–is also no accident; it recalls the fanatic religious and ritualistic search for purity of the Middle Ages, ethnic purity included. The fear of poisoning was widespread among the millenarians…”
The syndrome Claire describes here is well-represented among the shoppers at your local Whole Foods or equivalent.
See also this interesting piece on environmentalist ritualism as a means of coping with anxiety and perceived disorder:
https://reason.com/2014/08/22/environmentalism-and-the-fear-of-disorde/
The total demonization of the right is not a function of Trump. It started long ago and has been accelerating for quite a while. Two major boosts to the rage of the left were because of the Clintons. By 1994 the Clintons were a laughingstock and Gingrich and the GOP captured the House. This was more than a wake up call. It was a huge slap to the face (or perhaps a 2×4). This was never supposed to happen. And the news media partisanship ratcheted up from mild to corrupt.
The second serious development was the ever mounting evidence of the Clintons’ dishonesty and corruption coupled with their impeachment in their 2d term. In order to justify supporting the Clintons it became increasingly necessary that Republicans had to be even worse. The more evidence of how corrupt the Clintons were, the more racist, sexist and evil the GOP was required to be.
W was demonized relentlessly. They’ve continued to push increasingly harder on the gas ever since. The nastiness preceded Trump and will continue long after him. It comes from the moral defect that plagues the extreme left. Jonathon Haidt’s research is instructive.
David Foster,
True. Not an accident that the same people who believe that recycling or driving an electric car will “save the planet” also desperately want to believe that a porous piece of cloth can magically ward off Covid.
Or the national govt has the wisdom to provide better medical care inexpensively.
Stan…I wouldn’t put the masks in the same category as the rest of this. There really is some evidence, see multiple studies linked at the CDC site, that cloth masks have an effect.. The effect is mostly protecting other people from infection by the mask wearer, not the other way around, although there is some, smaller effect in that direction.
Hi, David. Did those strange mystics leave writings behind, or how do we know about them? I had never heard of some of those.
Philip…are you referring to the links at the bottom of this page?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover-guidance.html
…probably not the sort of things one would run into unless you read the specific journals they appear in, or the updates to the CDC site.
Oh, no, I meant Talchem of Antwerp and so on 😀 Although I’m glad for the mask info, too. I like data.
There’s some kind of pleasure in hating. Especially hating injustice. One of the attractions of the Harry Potter books was how Harry would so often be treated unjustly, but remained a nice guy. But also a huge longing for magic.
Dems hate Trump; also hate Kavanaugh (tho seemingly a bit less); we’ll be seeing their hate for Amy Barrett; they hated Sarah Palin; hated Bush; hated Reagan; hated Nixon.
Also hated the Vietnam War – the US proxy war against Russian commies in SE Asia.
Most Dems today also hate pro-life folk, because the pro-life folk oppose abortion. Science says human life starts at conception – it’s a political choice when the gov’t grants human rights to the human fetus.
Most Dems hate today’s reality that has so many Blacks less rich than so many Whites. Despite that outcome being a complex result of many influences, it’s easy to hate that reality. And call it injustice.
And it feels good to hate injustice.
Philip Sells…”Oh, no, I meant Talchem of Antwerp and so on”
I’d never heard of most of them, either…except for the Cathars, of course…but Claire usually researches her books pretty deeply.
David Foster,
LMAO. No one wears a mask properly. So-called studies of hypothetical people wearing hypothetical masks in a hypothetical manner aren’t very useful. As science. Their utility for politics, however, is a different question.
If you want to understand just how hopelessly corrupt and incompetent science has become, read Charles Monnet’s influential polar bear study that the EPA and federal courts rely upon. He saw some white things in the water one day from a plane. That’s the science. All of it. The rest of the “study” is a collection of his fantasies and musings. But it’s peer-reviewed and published. And used to justify a massive amount of federal regulation. Or check out Mann’s hockey stick with an R2 of .02. Seriously. Missed that p-value threshold of .95 by Max Smart’s “that much”. Just .93 more to go.