Jan
25
Zany Radicalism and the Imposition of Human Will
Larry Arnn, author and president of Hillsdale College, delivered remarks at a reception at the college last November. The speech — or, at least, the adaptation printed in Imprimis — was titled “Today’s Firestorm and the Declaration”.
The titular “firestorm” can be seen as resulting from contrary winds, the first being President Donald Trump and his many successes, while “the other wind blows from the self-described ‘resistance’ to the elected government, and it is picking up.” The excerpt below is taken from the section titled “The Resistance”, as I thought it was very quote-worthy.
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Zany radicalism abounds both on the left and the right, left and right being promiscuous terms that mean even less today than usual. Young people on the left seem enamored of Marx; on the right, many gravitate towards Nietzsche. Nick Fuentes, who has a big audience, professes to like both Hitler and Stalin, who to be fair did cooperate to carve up their neighbors before they waged merciless war on each other. Churchill made sense of that by saying that national socialism and communism differ as the North Pole differs from the South. Many young people do not seem to realize that the North and South Poles are bad places to live. Their confusion stems from reasons that are deep but also limpid, visible to the bottom.
What do we see when we look down to that bottom? We see a generation in which too many have been taught that the only truth is in the human will, which then becomes sovereign. The past is presented to them as a dark time, now happily superseded; therefore they learn no edifying or useful history. The quest for truth dies not only in the humanities, but increasingly in the sciences. To think there is one right answer to a math problem has been derided as a racist concept. And of course we confuse the sexes.
Gloria Steinem attributes the feminist saying, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” to a 22-year-old Australian, Irina Dunn, who said she wrote it first on the wall in a toilet stall. It perhaps did not occur to her that a fish and a bicycle could occupy that stall till kingdom come and never produce Irina Dunn. Such ignorance leaves boys free to become useless wimps or dangerous predators. It leaves too many women to themselves even if they wish to face the fulfilling trial of children. Little wonder we are not reproducing even at a replacement level. Little wonder that so many boys and girls gravitate toward different, if ultimately indistinguishable, wastelands.
When human will becomes sovereign, unencumbered by nature and divorced from God, we are left with movements — people organized to impose their will on their adversaries. This is the terminal product of historicist philosophy and modern social science: the war, not of all against all, but of movement against movement.
At the bottom of the rot is a set of doctrines that have remade the American government and are remaking the society. These doctrines are the abnegation of the Declaration of Independence. Under these doctrines there are no truths that last, no commands from above that must be obeyed. There is only what people do to one another, and by this process they shape the society and each other. What they ought to do does not enter into it.
This is the great “discovery” that plagues our day: the sovereignty of history, of time, and of circumstance. Discovering there is no “ought,” we can break free by reinventing everything according to our desires. This is why Nick Fuentes giggles while he calls for rape, the Gulag, and Auschwitz; why thuggish Antifa mobs have become the vanguard of the mainstream Left; why so many deny the fact of two biological sexes and defend the sexual mutilation of children. As the torturer O’Brien proves to his “student” Winston in George Orwell’s 1984, two plus two equals five — or any number you please.
These doctrines have remade the American government. This can be seen in the change of the size of government, relative to the society, since progressivism took hold; in the change in the number of people working for the government; in the wealth gathered around Washington, D.C.; in the centralizing of authority and resources into the government and within government; in the level of taxation; and in the national debt….
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I think Arnn is definitely onto something…
