Even though his Christianity is sometimes heretical, Bruce Charlton is often tremendously brilliant. And I mean “brilliant” in an almost literal way: Shining strong light to reveal an important truth. Witness his recent post, Is Social Justice/ Political Correctness/ New Leftism a religion? Actually *not* (despite superficial similarities).
I have been saying that liberalism is a religion. Not so, points out Charlton. Some quotes:
The Old Left, such as Communism, was very much like a Godless religion; and it did have saints- such as Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao. But the New Left of Social Justice and Political Correctness has only temporary idols, any of whom may be vilified and demonized at any time.
The idols of the Social Justice Warriors are not saints, but merely function as clubs, taken-up to beat the enemy – then usually discarded.
(snip)
And this is the essence of the beast: it is negative, oppositional, lives by subversion, inversion and destruction of the Good; its stance is perpetual opposition.
Stability and the status quo and tradition [are] attacked, but there is no alternative stable state in view; no Social Justice utopia being aimed-at; no end-point at which political correctness will say ‘enough’, ‘this is it’.
Classical liberalism was a de facto religion, with a plausible (although false) cosmic metanarrative, a code of ethics, “saints,” and even, as one wag put it, the New York Times as Holy Writ. But contemporary, politically correct leftism doesn’t deserve to be called a religion. It has no stable form, only a constant, intuitive hatred of the true, the good and the beautiful. It’s a civilizational suicide cult.
To be sure, the politically-correct Left frequently invokes the ideas of classical liberalism, which still command widespread respect. But when it does, it’s just a demon in wolf’s clothing. The current Left is all about destruction.
*
Our job, then, as relatively sane men, is to dodge the falling debris.
The Orthosphere 
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I’ve been saying forever that advanced liberalism isn’t a religion.
Some earlier forms of liberalism retained a few religious elements, but even then they were characterized more by a denial of religious ways of thinking than by any positive religious ideas.
You might be interested in this.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=25634
http://thoreau.eserver.org/amertran.html
I’m here to help.
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Alan,
I agree with your assessment of Bruce’s brilliance and your use of that term. I also happen to agree with him on what you call his heresies.
One of the problems with the Orthosphere is that we have not defined what constitutes our opposition. This is a recurring issue that popped up in the recent thread on neo-reaction. My question is when we say “liberal” do we have in mind the philosophy of a.) Barack Obama b.) John Locke, c.) both Obama and Locke. For my part it is c.) but my sense is that some here would answer “a.).”
Ita, I believe we have defined our opposition, usually in comments, and quite often. Orthosphereans are opposed to modernity, root, trunk, and branch. “Liberalism” and “modernity” are the same thing. We should keep calling liberals, liberals because, when they changed their self-designation to “progressive,” they were indicating that the other word had acquired a sufficient pejorative charge to be useful to their critics. They were changing their spots and trying to elude identification.
Thus Bruce Charlton thinks that liberalism is a not a religion but a suicide cult while I think it is a Gnostic religion and a suicide cult, but we both judge it a suicide cult and we’re against it. To paraphrase Marx: Whatever liberalism is, we’re against it. (See Horsefeathers, 1932.)
It just occurred to me, by the way, that the smarmy Columbia coed Emma Sulkowicz perfectly illustrates how liberalism suicidally consummates itself: She is the ultimate effect, of which all those hefty tomes by the “postmodernists” and “deconstructionists” in the 1980s were the cause. Derrida and his eager American follower-imitators declared that the self was a delusion and thinking a delusion and anything declared necessary by the existing order a delusion. They really believed it. They began, on their conviction, to “deconstruct” higher education. Thirty-five years later, a four-hundred-thousand dollar baccalaureate program in social sciences at Columbia produces a lying, slogan-spouting slattern (see her pornographic tweets concerning her sex-life) whose notoriety consists in carting a mattress with her wherever she goes, including the dais where she receives her diploma. The liberal motto ought to be: Look! Nothing! Wow!
P.S. When a mass movement is a suicide-cult, it is difficult for it not also to be a homicide cult. So if liberalism were a suicide cult, it would also be a homicide cult.
‘Any mass movement suicide-cult is also a homicide-cult.’ Absolutely!
‘Whatever liberalism is, we oppose it.’ Absolutely!
“Our job, as relatively sane men, is to dodge the falling debris.”
That is often easier said than done, but the point is well taken: if we can see it coming, and are very good at judging its speed and trajectory, then, yes, we have to exercise prudence and get the hell out of its way.
A thought that occurred to me just this morning in this connection: if the tea party conservative is the man who stands athwart history yelling “stop,” then his mainstream ‘conservative’ adversaries yell only “not so fast.” The reactionary then is the man who steps nimbly out of the way of history so as to avoid entanglement in its catastrophe, while an orthospherean reactionary says also, “Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered.”
“opposed to modernity, root, trunk, and branch”
But obviously not all modern technology, e.g. penicillin and the internet, and the Orthosphere seems divided on things like democracy vs. the divine right of kings.
Technology is not properly modern. Steam engines and computers work the same whether or not your metaphysic is whacked. It’s with humans that a whacked metaphysic can wreak havoc.
As Kristor points out, ‘Modernism’ in the sense that we use the word is an indicator of ideological and worldview grounding vis-a-vis the World of Tradition (in Modernity’s case, being unequivocally opposed to it). Opposing Modernism does not necessitate a disdain for foods, clothing, technology (for the most part) or other rather arbitrary articles that happen to appear in the Modern age.
Professor Bertonneau, I appreciate the reply, I think it is obvious that I strongly agree with the points you make at the Orthopshere, but here I think you are glossing over some significant fissures. I am not entirely convinced that all who are describe themselves as Orthosphereans actually reject liberalism. I do not think we can say Charlton does. How can we say that when he routinely attacks Catholicism and pushes a 19th century cult birthed in a liberal polity? You yourself have described it as gnostic. So is Charlton a gnostic? It seems to me that dividing lines cannot be clearer. You can say that at least both of you regard oppose liberalism as a suicide cult but that still begs the question of what both of you consider “liberalism” to be.
Ita: See below. (TFB)
I think it is a serious mistake to attempt to divorce technology from modernity. The two are inextricably linked both historically and in the public mind. Indeed, it was the success of science and technology especially in the Nineteenth Century that fueled optimism about the future and caused the past to be increasingly questioned. In the era of Beowulf an old sword was a good sword, reflecting a decline in metallurgy. Today, an old weapon is simply considered obsolete. The whole mindset is different largely because of science and technology.
Look at the cover of The Unintended Reformation. The modern photo clearly reflects current urban technology. If you were transported back to the Middle Ages or Late Antiquity, the lack of technology would create serious culture shock. If you ask the man on the street what characterizes the modern age, science and technology would be a likely answer. If the Reformation and the following Enlightenment is collectively blamed for modernity, then why not credit it with science and technology?
Moreover, technology serious impacts sociology and economics and everything else. The steam engine eliminated the need for galley slaves. The printing press fueled the Reformation. The pill revolutionized sexual habits, and one might say created an infertility cult. The examples are endless.
One obvious reactionary path is to reject modern technology. The Amish preserve their ways partly by rejecting much, though not all, of modern technology. But I don’t think most of the Orthosphere wants to go there.
The question of good and evil remains, and each era technological era produces its saints and malefactors. The question is how we handle our technology. The answer requires a positive vision, a vision that I share with Bruce.
All I’m saying is that a traditional society – a good society – needn’t be technologically backward, or hidebound. Innovation is dangerous, to be sure, but it is not *essentially* wicked. Life as such, after all, is inherently a dangerous adventure.
Technological innovation can be good, or not. Gothic architecture, polyphony, the stirrup, the waterwheel, the computer, steel; these are all good things. Good things may be used to evil ends, and usually are. But every finite good is by nature corruptible; evil *just is* the perversion or injury or defect of what is good. To try to get rid of evil by deleting what is good is itself a perversion and injury of the good.
The trick is to discern the difference between good and evil innovations. That’s where tradition can help, provided that the tradition is itself good.
I think most of us are definitely (c), but it’s hardly surprising that many are more concerned with Obama than Locke. Locke is, after all, a dead philosopher who lives on only in pithy phrases that, compared to most things we learn in school, really aren’t all that bad. Barack Obama and his ilk have metastasized a cancerous growth that is reaching down to such things as small Christian bakeries who refuse to bow the knee to Molech and celebrate such blasphemous sacrileges as gay marriage or refuse to give in to the contraceptive culture. So, I think it is understandable that many of us are far more concerned by the damage that the American Left has wrought in the past 6-7 years than arguing against the philosophy of a dead man who most Americans are almost totally ignorant of anyway.
The answer is a resounding C. Standing in opposition to Modernity (which includes both its in-utero form Libertarianism, its popular form Liberalism, its insane form Progressivism, and its bastard stepchildren Marxism etc) we can see it as a kind of degenerative disease like cancer. If Locke represents one of the original offending cells, then Obama is a late manifestation, like bleeding from lower orifices for example.
Modernity is more of a technical (literally) problem than a social one. I bat this one around a lot. Since you can’t scale back big chunks of the very technologies and processes that atomize us, how do we get back to normally ordered societies and roles while still having some degree of rump modernity? Just accepting industrially produced antibiotics puts one in a place where you can’t reject some of the key precepts of liberalism. It’s a really thorny issue.
I leave it to the hands of fate, which some would say makes me a dangerously optimistic mysticist. If Prophetic Catastrophism is the correct theory of Reactionary ascendancy, and I believe it is, then what technology is available to us will be determined by how severely this world plunges into the abyss. I am content with a very low technological standard to be honest, almost Mad Maxian you might say.
I think you are on to something here. I too have noticed the weird disappearance of Utopianism from Leftism. In the past, that was the whole point. But let me try to rephrase it.
The Enlightenment was all about a belief that the Progress of Reason liberates and equalizes and generally makes everything perfect. Conservatives disagreed.
Then we got to the point where Post-Moderns began to realize the same thing. Perhaps their most important work was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment which said basically the same thing as (some) conservatives said: a progress of Reason does not lead to more freedom, but just to ever finer forms of social control.
The result was, that the Post-Modern Left lost the whole basis for its ideology. No longer could they believe that the progress of Reason will bring about a Utopia. There was a gaping ideological hole and nobody managed to fill it. There was literally nothing that could be trusted to move history forward. Progressivism started eating itself. For example, former attitudes where European colonists forced Enlightenment values on natives were decried as racist or culturally imperialist and actually the funniest part is that every kind of conservatism except white and christian was accepted by the Left as cultural difference. With a fury, Progressives began eliminating the whole idea of Progress. New York is not better than a tribal village in Africa, just different and every sensitive person knows that! Now every kind of tradition was respectable, except ours. Of course European history was left out from this, or else it would really look like a form of reactionary conservatism. But anyway, this exercise, while it did not fill the ideological hole, kept them busy. A solution still needed to be found.
I think… the “solution” was that they started to want to have no ideology at all, no political philosophy at all. If Reason is no longer necessarily liberating, it can be cast away. If there is no utopia just endless critique, no need for it. And I think thus gradually Leftism became feelings based. The general, how to put it, “emancipatory” attitude was retained but without any ideology at all. It just more like if you feel bad about something, you as a group are oppressed by/with it and need getting emancipated from it.
A suicide-cult’s ideology is suicide. A suicide-cult’s utopia will be explicitly suicidal. I write “will be,” as if this event lay in the future, but it is happening now. Liberalism has reached the stage, as Eric Voegelin would say, of “immanentizing the eschaton.” The eschaton, in liberalism’s case, is non-existence.
No, I think the shibboleth of a utopia still exerts a powerful influence upon them, though I would agree that the extreme application of the principle of “non-discrimination” (and hence of compulsory, equal esteem for “whatever”) tends to reduce their utopia to a vague notion of people “self-actualizing” without any impediment. They increasingly regard anything that makes them unhappy as a sure indication of a lurking oppression or mean-ism, because it is inconceivable to them that people following their own bliss could ever be the unintentional authors of their own misery. They have a religious faith, that a socially just world will result in everybody self-actualizing, and that self-actualizing will cause every life-choice to induce multiple joygasms, and therefore the failure to joygasm often and loudly, is proof that the public enemy is oppressing them somehow. Being perverse wretches, they desire chiefly dysfunctional and dyscivilizational things; therefore the “public enemy” is consistently identified with the most highly functional and civilizing force on Earth – cishet males – and especially with white, Christian (read especially: Catholic) males, the nonpareils of cishet patriarchy.
But, I think they are still chasing Utopia. It’s just that their vision of Utopia has less substantive content than it once did, and their tendency to make the perfect an enemy of the good now evinces a more clearly inimical spirit.
“But contemporary, politically correct leftism doesn’t deserve to be called a religion. It has no stable form”
The no-stable-form thing is what makes it so scary. Years from now, we’ll hear all about new -isms, phobias, and ‘privileges’ that not even the weirdest freaks on tumblr have managed to think up yet. But once these new -isms finally do emerge, the leftists will have no problem rewriting history around their newfound obsession. “We have always been at war with Eurasia.”
I remember during the Eich flap, I saw a disquieting cartoon. It showed Obama in the year 2020. He was handcuffed, and being led to jail for opposing gay marriage during his first term. But he had a big smile on his face, and he crowed “this was unimaginable only a decade ago!”
Inspired! I had begrudgingly accepted the narrative that Leftism was indeed a religion, even a heretical form of Christianity, but as you point out even if it started as such a thing, it has now devolved into something more akin to a suicide cult. It’s like a jigsaw slotted into place. Props to Mr. Charlton.
My only question is how long before the zero hour comes and we have to start sifting through the bodies at Jonestown?
I encourage each of you to go to scifiwright.com and search for Restless Heart of Darkness, an outstanding historical overview of this phenomenon.
Charlton defines “leftism” in the trite conventional right-wing sense and fails to account for the various other schools found within liberal thought. Consider libertarianism, especially the Objectivist cult surrounding Ayn Rand. There is also the Austrian school, with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute located in Alabama. These groups often do display a creepy cultist reverence for their founders and intellectuals, be it Rand, Mises or Rothbard. The “acting individual” is their god. They are also explicit that where their libertarianism conflicts with their religious commitments, libertarianism wins. While these groups are not dominate on the contemporary political scene, they wield a disproportionate amount of influence, as well as functioning as a wedge group on the right against religious conservatives.
Charlton’s post is too vague to have any real meaning.
You are entirely correct, and I hope the men here will lend a closer ear to your points. Spot on, here and elsewhere on the thread.
@Alan
Thanks for drawing attention to this post (and for your kind comments).
The impact that the argument had on you, and some commenters, is worthy of comment and elaboration.
As you can see, my post was itself a comment on something at John C Wright’s blog -and it has been very unusual for me to comment topically at my blog (for the good reason of trying to create a kind of haven (or perhaps asylum!) from the mass media. But for a day or two I played-around with writing posts linked to other blogs…
My argument that modern leftism is not a religion (or not much like one, and in essence not like one) is one I have articulated repeatedly over the past five years, not just on my blog, but in comments to neoreactionary blogs (a long discussion at the late Foseti comes to mind) and in two books – Thought Prison of 2011 – http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/, and Addicted to Distraction of 2014 – http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/.
Indeed, I was getiing sick of the sound of my own voice on this topic – and presumed there was no point in saying the same thing yet again, but just in a different form of words.
However, it seems I was wrong. Something about the earlier stuff hadn’t communicated properly with everyone, or the earlier stuff was simply not known – and *this time* the point reached several people who I much wanted to it reach.
The lesson I draw as a writer is this: in cases where something is important (and as Robert the Bruce learned in the fable of the spider in the cave) ‘If at first you don’t succeed’ try, try, try again’. Past failures do not prevent success this time.
Also, it is often useful to hear the same thing explained in several ways – to approach the same place from several directions by alternative routes. That way you can be much more confident that communication has indeed occured.
In future I will be less reluctant to link to other blogs when they provide a stimulus, and less worried about ‘repeating myself’.
Ita Scripta Est writes: “Professor Bertonneau, I appreciate the reply, I think it is obvious that I strongly agree with the points you make at The Orthosphere, but here I think you are glossing over some significant fissures. I am not entirely convinced that all who are describe themselves as Orthosphereans actually reject liberalism. I do not think we can say Charlton does. How can we say that when he routinely attacks Catholicism and pushes a 19th century cult birthed in a liberal polity? You yourself have described it as gnostic. So is Charlton a gnostic? It seems to me that dividing lines cannot be clearer. You can say that at least both of you regard oppose liberalism as a suicide cult but that still begs the question of what both of you consider ‘liberalism’ to be.”
Consider the Ayn-Rand movement: One of the complaints made against the Objectivists is that they have never been able to enlist allies. Either you’re with them on every point or you’re against them, as they see it. Given the Objectivists’ anti-religiosity, cult-like quasi-religious group behavior, and totally materialist view of existence, I’d say that they qualify as liberals. Certainly the non-Objectivist liberals whom I know (and working in academia I know them aplenty) resemble the Objectivists in being unwilling to enlist allies. Either you’re with them on every point or you’re against them – and more importantly, they’re against you, implacably. Thus Geert Wilders is in every way a specimen Twenty-First Century liberal, except where his attitude towards Islam is concerned. Want to see a liberal foam at the mouth? Mention your admiration for Geert Wilders. But what are Geert Wilders’ views on same-sex marriage, abortion, or (once Muslims leave the Netherlands) social welfare? And yet Wilders remains a pariah to the Left.
In whatever my Traditionalism consists, and God knows it is still in formation, I hope that it includes the ability, within sane limits, to enlist allies. I was disappointed, naturally, when Mr. Charlton made made breezy comments on my essay about Gnosticism, and I said so rather forcefully, but that doesn’t mean that I am at odds with him on dozens of other issues. And there are dozens of other issues where Charlton and Bertonneau find themselves in a state of homonoia. (By the way, I am in favor of homonoiac marriage!) In a mood of confession, I might own up to having expressed some fairly scathing notions about Calvinism now and then. Perhaps indeed it is inconsistent to invest as much as I do in St. Augustine and not reserve admiration for Monsieur Chauvin. It is extremely decent of Alan Roebuck, a better Christian by far than I am, and a good Calvinist to boot, not to have called me publicly on one or two intemperate remarks that I have made or on that inconsistency. I suppose that Alan can find an ally in me just as I can find an ally in him (more than an ally) or in Mr. Charlton despite some specific disagreements or a little bit of elbow-bumping.
I would hope that The Orthosphere would not become a checklist organization like Objectivism, Scientology, or Liberalism. Everyone has an ego. Everyone’s ego is prone to being bruised. So what? Adults get past these things. The “ally-impossible” attitude is the sign of a cult.
I stand by my remark: There is sufficient homonoia at The Orthosphere.
I have never called for complete rigid uniformity. Even among Catholic traditionalists there is a diversity of different “schools” to draw from, as mentioned in Bonald’s most recent post. There are intgrealists, radicals, conservatives ect. All I am asking is that we not repeat past mistakes.
I would hope that The Orthosphere would not become checklist organization like Objectivism, Scientology, or Liberalism.
If Charlton is to be considered a leading light of the Orthosphere movement than we are already there.
Ita, you misunderstand me. I was not criticizing your view or accusing you of doctrinal rigidity. I was certainly not describing Mr. C as “a leading light of The Orthosphere.” (Have we any “leading lights”? It’s a pretty evenly shared enterprise.) Charlton shares enough of our views to be allied with us – that was my meaning.
My motive in writing was that I judged your comment highly worthy of a serious and extended response. Perhaps I should have said so.
By the way, I am the only Orthosphere contributor, as far as I know, to have banned someone from his threads forever for being too far beyond our horizon to count as an ally. Inclusion for its own sake is far, far down on my list of principles.
This is an excellent thread. I think the subject of the relationship between technology and modernity is a topic worthy of re-visiting. It seems to me that Leo is on to something- technology, that is, the absolute commitment to an endless and unrestrained pursuit of scientific and technological advance is one of the foundations of modernity. Even the though the gods of progress and utopianism have been largely rejected, the cult of technology lives on. How can technology and its relatives, industrialism and even capitalism, be reconciled to Tradition? We of the Right are all in agreement on the threat posed by scientistic socialism, but what of capitalism? After all, isn’t capitalism fundamentally linked to technological innovation and finance? And if so, is it possible to reject modernity without rejecting all of it?
Cassiodorus, I agree with what I take to be your rhetorical point. I’ve always disliked the word “capitalism” when used as a substitute for the market. I favor the market, an ancient institution, which is as much threatened by “capitalism” as it is by “socialism.” As opposed either to capitalism or socialism, the market is rooted in the pattern of gift-giving, with its many “riffs” on the fundamental ethical principle of reciprocity. I recommend Marcel Mauss’s beautiful little study, The Gift.
Agreed, Tom. You’ve put into a few succinct words a notion I have many times tried to express with many more, and to far lesser effect.
If one’s priorities are such that your main concern is whether you can afford to spend $2000.00, as opposed to $4000.00 on your next vacation, then, I should imagine, holding true to Traditional values is wayyy down on your priority list.
In his original post, Professor Charlton argued (I believe) that leftism doesn’t have saints since all such figures can and are rejected as it’s convenient. I don’t know if that’s true in the U.K. In America, that’s not true. MLK is a leftist saint and he has not and (I think) will not have his canonization rescinded.
Jim Kalb has argued, persuasively as I remember, that contemporary liberalism is a religion. A basic understanding of man and his relationship to the world.
The problem is that most will attest to being former liberals, but none will attest to being in a suicide cult at that point.
A liberal is simply one whose desire for radical liberation must lead to the annihilation of the self ALL THE WAY to a Hell where his worldly desire will be granted wholeheartedly by a just God. So the enemy is he who will lead your sons and daughters to an eternity of insatiable desire with literally “nothing” in their way. And soon they will discover that total “freedom” cannot bring any fulfillment. Radical autonomy cannot satiate the soul. The enemy is a self-annihilator and he can spread his disease like a technologically-enhanced infection. And if you study Neo’s Reaction and that of the “anti-Semitic” “hard-right,” both hold on to an underlying and fundamentally equal narrative defining Christianity, itself, as the “suicide cult.” It is written that Western Christianity has been deracinated to the point of total pathology. I don’t read too many Christians taking up the challenge in re-interpreting those parts of Scipture that could reasonably lead one to believe the Christianity was actually a “suicide cult,” i.e., it demands the self-annihilation of its most loyal adherents.
One can’t argue about religions and pretend as though the true religion was somehow equally religious to each an every false religion. But Liberalism is neither true or false, religion or cult. It is desire taken to its primitive conclusion. Liberalism’s “purpose” for life is pleasuring one’s self to death. We have a term for this desire which is actually indicative of a particular “nature.” Homo-sexuality. Where homo = same = EXACT SAME = self. Homo-sexuality is the sexual attraction to the self (sexual narcissist). Consequently, “it” is self-annihilating. So the reality is that the intellectual “right” and “left” OBSCURE this simple explanation of “our” societal pathology in favor of elaborate creation myths for Liberalism. Unfortunately, with an anti-metaphysics that mandates ALL THINGS originate in the physical, Liberalism can simply have no spiritual or intellectual origin. It is “we” who are concocting such anti-reality. Liberalism IS the homo-sexual “nature.” Liberalism IS the self-annihilating “nature.” Clearly, ANY sane, healthy-minded individual would reject such an anti-nature. Christians who “love” self-annihilators deserve rebuke and “hate the sin, love the sinner” doesn’t hold water now that we’ve crossed the event horizon.
“Liberalism’s “purpose” for life is pleasuring oneself to death.””
That is actually a very good way of putting it, as far as I’ve been able to tell what in the hell liberalism is all about to the minds of those misguided heathen souls who embrace it.
One can see this in all manner of ways per the individual liberal and the way (s)he conducts himself on a day-to-day basis. A sort of humorous example I heard the other day on a local radio spot concerned the use of tanning beds and their propensity to cause cancer in their users. I literally do not know what to say to people now wringing their hands over this “new revelation” about the dangers incident to tanning. Insofar as tanning is done in pursuit of vanity (I can’t think of any other reason it is done, but I’m open to suggestions :-)), it is, by definition, sinful. Anything sinful has negative consequences attached to it, physical and otherwise – the wages of sin is death, and all that. But as one self-proclaimed “ultra-Conservative” once said to me in a conversation about a different matter, same principle, “yes, I agree it’s immoral, but it’s not a sin.” So there ya go. It ain’t just kids who say the dandest things, Art.
At the end of the day, liberalism is license for rebellion against God and the natural order of being, thus for pleasuring oneself to death, as you so aptly put it. But this also makes it a suicide cult, as well as a homicide cult, as has been pointed out above.
I think what Charlton is noticing is that we are in the stage of what Eugene Rose described as the “nihilism of destruction” (compared with nihilisms of vitalism, liberalism, materialism).
Our job, then, as relatively sane men, is to dodge the falling debris.
We are not on the ground, watching the plane zoom crazily across the sky, and hoping to avoid being underneath it when it hits.
We are IN the plane. The crazies are at the controls and won’t let go. It’s either seize the controls or sit passively waiting for the impact.
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