#36: The Left's War on Love and Hate

OK, whose fault is it really? Where and with whom did the rot begin? Edmund Wilson traced it to the French Revolution, but socialist historians themselves identify Diderot and the materialists writing some forty years earlier as the culprits. I think Popper probably came closest by blaming it on Plato and his ilk.

Popper located the problem in Plato’s quite obvious dictatorial utopianism as well as his historicism, and that’s likely right (though I don’t recall the historicism being all that evident), but I think that there’s another source within Plato as well. It’s Plato who begins the tradition of contempt, if not outright hatred, for the emotions and the body that continues unabated in and through Platonic Christianity well into the 17^th and 18^th Cs. It would be nice to think that it ends there, but it doesn’t; strangely, it gets picked up by the philosophers. Just to let you know where this is heading: when science turns its hand to social matters, it inevitably does so as an engineer, and thus we wind up social engineering. This is, of course, just a more neutral term for socialism.

I could go directly to Kant to make this point, but actually the hostility to the passions was already carried over into the 18^th C earlier by Christianity’s most relentless and powerful foe, namely the burgeoning new science. Science, you say skeptically? Science? Hostile to the passions, you say? How so?

When science rejected religion then, as it did in the books of the Baron d’Holbach and the earlier anonymous tracts of the Clandestine literature, it did not do so with the idea of leaving a value vacuum. In place of revealed values and principles, the new science thought to introduce new rules of life on the basis of pure reason (which was, of course, identified with science). But this was just the old Platonic song that it was only from the well of Reason that we could possible draw the rules of life. We certainly find this thinking in Diderot, but even more so in the far more radical Julien de la Mettrie’s the Man Machine.

The dominance of reason is finally fully expressed in the monumental efforts of Immanuel Kant in the latter part of the 18^th C. While Kant’s works are entitled “Kritiken,” meaning studies intended to show the boundaries and limitations of reason, it remains that in Kant’s thinking, all moral rules must themselves still be expressions of pure reason uncontaminated by experience or emotion. In particular, they must always have the form of purely general propositions completely clean of any reference to the particular. Ethics, in fact, must be a kind of science; and science never refers to anyone or anything particular. Thus, a human’s “passions” not only have nothing to do with “ethics,” but are actually a potential threat to moral behavior. To be good, one must be purely rational. Mr. Spock would have had a good shot at being really good in Kant’s world.

Thus we find, at the beginning of the 19^th C, that the passions were identified with sin and, further, with individuality (particularly in Hegel), while reason was identified with the good and the right, and with generality. What this meant, was that there was absolutely no difference between any two people from the moral point of view in any given moral dilemma. As far as being a moral agent was concerned, Mr. A was absolutely indistinguishable from Mr. B. Indeed, in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, where everyone is perfectly rational (and, hence, moral), if we accept the principle of the indistinguishability of identicals, there would only be a single person. For Kant, two perfectly rational moral agents will make identical decisions under identical circumstances.

The implication of this is clear: to the extent that one’s individual circumstances or one’s emotions or one’s needs or wants incline one away from the perfectly rational choice, to that extent they incline one away from the good. Thus, individuality becomes the source of sin. In fact, when philosophers of this stripe refer to the enemy of the good that all humans carry within themselves, they call this enemy “the inclinations.” Evil, evil, evil inclinations.

The point I am making, perhaps beating to death, is that all of this follows from the original Platonic promotion of Reason as the faculty entitled to dominate the rest of the human frame. In his famous three part division of the soul, the passions were not regarded with great respect. In the subsequent Christian adoption of Platonic doctrines, the passions were singled out for special loathing, though Reason itself had an uneven road, being in direct competition with faith. In the seventeenth C., reason finally got a firm grip on history as the key tool of the new bully on the block, science. And when science did so well in predicting the locations of heavenly bodies, among other achievements, it was enthusiastically assumed that it could finally resolve ALL human social, political, and moral problems as well. Reason, a.k.a. Science, was to be the Master Key to the universe.

This notion was applied quite radically during the French Revolution when a special conclusion was explicitly drawn, namely that the inclinations had been historically embedded within the religion, the political structure, and the traditions of France. What had to be overturned in order for a rational ordering to be put in place was, in a phrase, the whole of existing French Culture. This culture to be overthrown was captured in the phrase, the Ancien Regime.

We can see what happens when this notion is appropriated naively and in the context of another culture when we read Nikolay Chernishevsky’s What is To Be Done? (1863), a Russian “anarchist” call to action in the form of a novel. Note that Marx and Engels’s Manifesto came out in 1848 (the first Russian translation was apparently by Bakunin in the early 60s, but Chernishevsky might have been able to read either German, the original language, or French, which was available). The characters of this novel act out the life lived “rationally” and the result is both stilted and grotesque. Nonetheless, the novel had an enormous public impact and captured the imaginations of Russia’s suffering masses, those, at least, who could read.

What I want to stress, therefore, for those who have not thought about these things is this:

Socialism now and since its inception has conceived of itself as a replacement of nations, cultures, religions with a purely “scientific” and “rational” system of human governance.

What this means is that socialism is not coincidentally internationalist, it is inherently and necessarily internationalist.

What this means, further, is that socialist rhetoric and talking-points notwithstanding, socialism is inherently and necessarily imperialistic. It is imperialist in the sense of fomenting and expecting socialist revolutions in other nations that convert them into additional Soviet Republics governed centrally from Russia. Lenin certainly understood the Russian revolution as only the first of a world wide series of revolutions. When Germany failed to follow suit, he was utterly astonished. Stalin initially thought in terms of generating world wide revolution, but quickly adapted when it became evident that this was not a practical expectation. We see socialist imperialism in the internal tensions present in the EU between its constituent cultural components. The Union was sold on the basis of its economic (read free enterprise) benefits, but the repeated efforts of the central planners to turn the economic union into a political one reveal the underlying intent. What blocks these efforts time and again are the ethnic populations of the component states who stubbornly cling to their cultural identities. I’m quite surprised that the EU heads have not tried to force Esperanto onto its member states.

What follows from this is that socialism’s followers believe that this replacement cannot take place until and unless those cultures and religions are erased, for nationhood is completely dependent on the existence of cultural/religious identifications.

And it follows from this that socialists will work tirelessly to use the freedoms of the open society to erode that society’s cultural identity. They will attack its founding religion, they will attack its traditional holidays, they will attack its patriotic rituals, they will attack its conventional values, they will, in a word, attack its very identity.

American Socialists attack the celebration of Christmas, and, just recently, the news carried a piece about a Mass. school that was banning even Halloween. Examples of this kind can be multiplied endlessly.

But even more important is the socialist/rationalist grinding assault on the emotions that fuelsuch fundamental human interests as national defense and justice.

We are taught as a citizenry to not hate the enemy in a variety of ways. Don’t hate them as a group, that’s stereotyping; don’t hate them as group, the vast majority are loving, kindly people just like you; don’t hate them as a group, that only makes them angry; don’t hate them as a group… blah, blah, blah. We are taught that we are the “civilized” ones in that we have a “professional” armed forces, and what that means, among other things, is our soldiers see their activities as simply a profession. Our boys are taught not to hate.

This is no more than a way of undermining the national will to fight and to defend that nation. But, of course, the socialists do not want a nation to survive as such at all. These teachings are there to undermine the national will under the guise of “taking the high road,” of not “becoming ‘just like them.’”

It’s easy to think that we’re being taught to LOVE, but not to HATE, that good old Christian message, but even this is more complicated than it seems. The socialists among us are perfectly happy with “love” if it means oral activity beneath Clinton’s desk in his White House office or if it means homosexual liaisons in bars and alleys. They are NOT that happy with it if it means, for example: Love of country! For, where there is genuine love of country, there is also hate of those who would destroy it. They are barely tolerant of Love of Spouse. For where there is genuine love of spouse, there is also the willingness to hate anyone who threatens that spouse and a willingness to kill in the spouse’s defense. Not so good, say the socialists. Better to keep the thing on a purely sexual level. Just to keep the commitment thing as muddy as possible, they argue for extending the traditional confirmation of love, marriage, to homosexuals as well. And if that won’t turn out to do the trick, they’ll extend it to long-term committed relationships between, say, groups of mixed sexes. And the external forces that seek to destroy us make it very plain just how powerful the love of a God can be. Better again to keep that to a minimum. The attack on American Christianity has only just begun.

The socialists are happy to keep sexual coupling as their new scientific ersatz for the old romantic love, but they are deeply suspicious of any love that goes deeper. People who love others deeply or who love their country deeply, or who love their God deeply are far more difficult to control from the superior center than people who are contentedly rutting in alleys. Socialists are very wary of the commitments that are attached to any genuine love.

We see the same forces, attitudes, and social-theory rubbish when it comes to the question of crime and … and … and what? Nowadays it can’t be, God forbid … punishment! The law is not there to punish, it is there to either rehabilitate or to warehouse for the protection of the rest. But that’s not what a normal human being has in mind when his child is abducted and murdered. What he wants is for the culprit to be, yes, damn it, punished! But the desire for retribution, he is told, is primitive and modern culture is far superior to that disgusting, that disgusting what? Yes, that disgusting inclination.

Socialist government, like Jehovah in the very old times, has simply decided to remove deep passionate committed emotion from the citizenry, taken it and consigned it to the dump reserved for “the uncivilized.” Justice is mine, sayeth the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In point of fact, what it does is castrate the civilization so as to prepare it for a total and final centralized bureaucratic takeover, leaving behind a gray, cultureless, artless, passionless, depressed citizenry killing time with prescribed therapeutic drugs and sex until it finds blessed release in death.

And that will be Social Justice, come at last.