Secular Calvinism

I was surfing the manosphere yesterday, when over at Vox's place I noted this comment by "artie" in response to Vox's  post, "Democracy vs Aristocracy".

It will be interesting to see how long this farce will go on.

I also on the sceptical side. The EUcrats always have the righist hammer to throw down to the people. It has been the most effective political weapon in Europe since the end of WWII.

That's why I think the work of Kuenehlt-Leddihn is so important....and ignored.

Now, I've never heard of Kuenehlt-Leddihn before and I thought I would read up on him.
His Wikipedia entry is here.

What a find!

He appears to one of those freaky bastards* that the educational system of the old Hapsburg empire seemed to produce. The last of the great renaissance men and a man who also liked to thump some of themes pushed by this blog. Anyway, he wrote a rather influential book in the 40's, The Menace of the Herd. It's available, from the Mises Institute, as a pdf here.

I was having a browse through the book, when in the appendix I noticed this:  



All I can say is wow!

It seems that whilst Hitler was a bad Catholic, all those nice Protestants really liked him........ a lot. Much more than his fellow Catholics actually. No seriously, I mean, WTF?

The reason I bring this up is because of a comment thread over at Ferdinand's. Commentator Thursday, for whom I have very much respect, says:

It is time to get off this “liberalism is the result of Calvinism/Christianity/Nominalism/whatever” nonsense.

Now, this is not a dig at Thursday but rather a spectacular demonstration of the opposite. I'm sorry but religion matters. Big time.

Kuenehlt-Leddihn was no fan of Protestantism, but he did recognise that sound Protestantism would have probably prevented the rise of Hitler. It's the watered down version of it that is toxic.

And by the way, Kuenehlt-Leddihn correctly diagnosed Nazism as a leftist phenomenon.

Mea Culpa

I my previous post, commentator mdavid made the following comment;

SP, Charity, for example, does not permit divorce (at least frivolous ones)
 
Ahh, the seeds of relativism are planted deep! Even SP's blog offers no relief...:-) 

Now, I really didn't want to get into a theological discussion about the matter of marriage, but if you take the approach of charity as "a perfecting force" instead of an emotive type of benevolent act,  several contentious theological issues can be approached from a fresh perspective. I'll just stick to marriage for the moment.
 
Firstly, without any reference to the text, if charity is a benevolent perfecting force, it follows that charity will always attempt to restore something that is broken or deficient. The operation of charity on a Christian marriage, in other words a union blessed by charity, will be to keep it together.  If we take the view that God is Charity, i.e Deus Caritas Est, then there is no way in hell that God will approve of divorce, because His very nature is to perfect, not to destroy. It's not only that He does not permit divorce, he can't actually divorce anything because of His nature.

Now, I wasn't hoping to put up a defence of Catholic teaching, ruminations on Houellebecq's  "problem of love" led me to this conclusion, but the fact of the matter is that charity can never permit divorce and the Catholic approach to divorce displays the correct understanding of the nature of God. God can't break any sanctified union. No reliance on scripture is necessary.

I was wrong. There is no way that divorce of any kind is permissible. Mea Culpa.

Still it is important to test my thinking. In my previous post, I mentioned to commentator Spandrell that the way that the intellect can gain an understanding of God's will for things is either through revelation or reason. As I get older I tend to put more trust on revelation than reason, and with regard to the subject of divorce, pretty much all of the New Testament confirms the prohibition of divorce.

Except Matthew 5:32;

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

Like everyone else who read this passage,  I concentrated on the exceptive clause, "excepting for the cause of fornication",  believing that this provided some "wiggle room" for divorce. But on further reflection, thanks to mdavid, now I think that I've read this passage all wrong.

Now the Greek word from which fornication is derived from is pornea.  The term pornea seems to have a wider connotation of sexual immorality including adultery, whilst the specific biblical Greek word for adultery is moichatai. It's interesting that the text uses both words and seems to be an indication of intention in precision of meaning. This is important.

Now,  if we analyse the text by first getting rid of the exception clause we get;

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife....maketh her to commit adultery and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery. 

Here the text would imply a degree of agency on the part of the husband in any adultery by the wife by the use of the term maketh . It's this attribution of agency on the part of the husband with regard to the wife's sins that's interesting. Now, moral culpability is only applicable to creatures with agency and it would therefore imply that Jesus will hold the husband responsible (to an unknown degree) for any future adultery of the wife.

It would also seem to imply that the involuntarily divorced wife may not be full culpable for any future adultery but anyone else that sleeps with her is. Hence if she is kicked out of the house and shacks up with another man she still sins, but maybe not mortally. (This has significant practical implications for innocent divorce victims but I'm speculating here, and could be way out of whack.)

If substitute a more expansive phrasing of the word pornea  into the exception clause we get;

 excepting for the cause of her own sexual immorality( including her own adultery),

We see that within the exceptive clause agency is attributed to the woman solely.

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of her own sexual sins, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

The way I interpret this is Jesus saying, if you divorce your wife, except with case of her freely chosen sexual sins, you will be partially responsible for her future adultery. In other words, this passage is not about justifying divorce but rather an exposition of how Jesus will assign blame in the case of a separation.  If a woman commits adultery or some other freely chosen sexual sin, she will bear the guilt, otherwise the initiator of divorce will bear some of  the responsibility.

And finally to put a nail in the coffin, so to speak;

and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

If the traditional non-Catholic interpretation of this passage was correct, in that divorce was permissible as a consequence of some type of sexual sin, then this last segment of the text would be contradictory. Since, if she was lawfully put away by right of the exception, it would be impossible to commit adultery with her if married to her.

Charity

I thought I would put up this post on Charity as Commentator Spandrell has asked me to elaborate on the matter further. These are my thoughts.

The first thing you have to understand is that Charity cannot be explained within a materialist philosophy.  This was Houellebecq's (an atheist) point, materialism makes love, especially permanent love impossible for the reasons enumerated in the previous posts. Atheism, on the other hand, facilitates hedonism but it kills love. 

Therefore, Charity cannot be described in material terms but needs to be recognised as an immaterial thing. You've got to think of Charity as a property, much like magnetism or radioactivity.  Now, you can't tell if a piece of steel is magnetic by looking it, the way you can work its magnetic is by its effects; it's the same with Charity.

Secondly, in order to understand Charity, any emotional associations must be stripped from it.

I want to start with a silly example. Imagine that you are in possession of a charity ray-gun. In other words by pointing your gun at an object and firing, Charity will exert its effect.

Imagine we found this old Beetle and aimed our charity ray-gun at it.

Before,

After,

The effect of Charity would be to restore the vehicle to its idealised condition.  Take a second example.  Here we have a picture of a girl with acne and let's say we aimed our ray-gun at her. This would be the effect;

The effect of Charity is to restore things to their idealised state by removing their privations. The last example is particularly pertinent. I mean if you look at the life of Jesus, he's always going about curing the sick and the disfigured, in other words, restoring them to their idealised states.  The objective of the charitable act is the perfection of the target. Other examples would be providing a hungry man with food,  any method which decreased ignorance, taking away pain, etc.

Perfection needs to be understood as being perfect in the way that God intended it. When Jesus is curing the sick and disfigured, his charitable act never results in the recipient getting two noses or three ears, no matter how interesting a demonstration of his power this would be; the being is always restored to his proper human form.  The effect of Charity then is to bring the effected target in alignment with God's idea of it.

It also needs to be understood that this force is not something apart from God, but something that is intrinsic to His nature. The charity-gun literally shoots "God-ness" from it.

Now, there is no such thing as a charity ray-gun, but the way that Charity operates in the real world is by being implanted in our human selves and thereby directing our will towards charitable acts.  God, through charity, directs men to perfect the world. A man with charity literally has a bit of "the stuff of God" in his nature. 

Seeing that our human acts are limited by both temporal and physical factors, as well as personality and knowledge,  our expressed charity will therefore always be limited by these factors.  That's why Christian writers have always said that the expression of Charity is contingent upon other virtues such as Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice.

These virtues are important because Charity has to compete with our intelligence and emotions in directing the will. Charity is easy when both reason and emotion are on board but the real test is when they are in opposition. As the Master says:

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. 

When you first look at this passage, the commands runs contrary to our natural inclinations and require a certain opposition of the will in order to abide by them. In fact, in addition to the scorn the Romans poured onto the Christians, they also thought that they were weird.  So unnatural did their actions  appear to them. To the pagans, the Christian behaviour seemed to run against affection and reason, and indeed, upon a superficial reflection of the passage, Christianity seems to direct people towards doing stuff that is disagreeable. But this approach is a trap since it conflates Charity with emotion and it's that conflation that confuses the issue. 

It also needs to be remembered, especially amongst the po-faced masochistic Christian types, that sometimes charity works with our reason and emotions.  To these types, Christianity is all about crosses, suffering, denial, etc. But this is warped view of  Christianity, and it's a view of Christianity based on a negative emotional association with charity.  What people need to understand is that while charity compels us to do our duty sometimes the duty is a pleasure. A man sharing a beer with his friends is being charitable, as is a man giving gifts to friends he likes, as is a man enthusiastically shagging his wife; all these things are the way that God intends them to be.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, Charity is beyond emotion and reason. Charity seeks to impose its will across the human experience

Now, there are several reasons why charity binds. Firstly, charity aims to strengthen and restore broken bonds. Charity, for example, does not permit divorce (at least frivolous ones) because the institution of marriage is privated by the practice of it. Charity directs the will to keep a marriage together even if the "heart isn't it", since once a legitimate bond is set, charity tries to keep it intact. This is why when religion is taken seriously, instead of given lip service, divorce rates plummet. It's also why Christian virgins are better bets at marriage, because the charity that keeps them virginal also keeps them married: they posses and a quality that works against failure.

And if we take the Bible as expressing the will of God, then one will notice a whole bunch of obligatory relations that God wants us to have; respect for parents, lawful authorities and to Him. There is a whole bunch of "binding" going on and it would appear that God wants us to interact with others, especially to those with whom we have the closest biological and community links. It would a appear that there is a meta-imperative to de-atomise.

It's also why the charitable man is a patriot to his country and its institutions, even though they may revolt him in their corruption and evil. His will is directed to repair the malady, not out of any feelings he has for the country or some imagined good, but because his charitable nature compels him to work to restore it to its perfection.

The second reason why charity binds is because charity is expansive. If it finds a privation it attempts to remedy it. The parable of the talents refers to this, charity being the talent. Once given Charity, a man is expected to get of his arse and put it to good use in perfecting the world. It's why a man with charity who fails to express it is a dead man walking: charity's nature is thwarted by his passivity. It's the whole faith without works thing. Christianity is not just an epistemological thing, it's a force.

Being a remedial force, it means that it is the force through which renewal takes place. This is why there will be no western revival until the knee bends before the altar. Because charity is an immaterial power given by God,  beyond the grasp of materialism.  You can't make it, you can't will it any more than a man can will away magnetism or colour or will gravity. It is beyond materialism. In order to posses it you must either ask for it by acknowledging God and thereby disavowing atheism or He will thrust it onto you.

Finally, what charity allows is the possibility of true love. Unlike hedonism, which loves for the pleasure it receives and fades when it there is no longer any pleasure, charity binds regardless and raises the possibility of eternal renewal. 

I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think."

(Michel Houellebecq)

The Elementary Forces V.

This is a post that draw on a few religious quotations. Normally I'd tell my atheist readers the heads up so they can avoid what they think is irrelevant babble.  But I think the problems bought to light by Houellebecq's novels have a direct relation to Christian Mysticism and it may be worthwhile to stick with the rest of the post.

If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And if I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and if I should have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.  

 (I Corinthians 13:1-3: Douay Rheims)

It all hinges upon a word.

Modern translations of the Bible tend to tend to replace the word charity with love. So that the above passage becomes:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

(I Corinthians 13:1-3: NKJV) 

This is unfortunate since charity is not love, at least in the sense that it does not operate in the same way as the love mechanism does. The problem with conflating Charity with Love is that it misattributes some of the features of Love, such as the pleasant feelings, with the notion of Charity. Charity is something wholly different and in order to understand what Charity is we first begin by illustrating what it isn't.

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this?  And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this?  Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect.

(Matthew 5:43-48 Douay Rheims)

Regardless what you think about the teaching, the psychology implied in this passage is profoundly counter intuitive. Jesus'  teaching here recognises the legitimacy of the natural love mechanism but sees it as being nothing special, what's really important to note here is that he wants us to do things in spite of our natural inclinations. There is an implicit command to do good to those who we don't love, in other words, to those with whom we associate no pleasant feelings with.  He is asking us to override our biological drives with our will.  He is asking as to be charitable to those who we don't naturally love.

Now unfortunately amongst the weaker minds of Christianity, this conflation of love and charity, and the counter intuitive imperative, has led to the notion amongst some Christians types that charitable love must be something unpleasant. So wedded is the notion of Charity and feeling that it's all about crosses and sacrifices. The Purtians and some of the hardline Trads exemplify this strand of thought. Any fun must somehow be evil, and therefore the only true Christian love is the love that sucks. Fun is banished in their world as a work of the Devil.

On the other hand, the conflation of charity with love in other individuals leads to a totally unhuman type of behaviour. That is, attempting to feel pleasant feelings for the repulsive. Here, the priority is once again is on the feelings, and what a good christian should do when faced with the repulsive is to try to will the love mechanism in operation. These type of Christians try to be "nice" to everyone whilst constantly suppressing their innate hatred of everyone's guts. The Liberal Christian Churches exemplify this strain of understanding.

In both variants, it's the hedonic understanding which strongly flavours their respective Christian interpretations. Both groups strive mightily yet both lack charity.

In order to understand what Charity is and how it binds, one must first disassociate it from any emotion. Christians like to illustrate charity by the example of the crucifixion but that only confuses things, given all the strength of feelings involved in the event. Charity is probably best illustrated by a curious odditty of the mystics, The Dark Night of the Soul.

Now, it appears that most people who chose the religious life do so because they get some form of psychological or hedonic benefit from their religious duties, however, over time, this zeal fades, and sticking to the faith and its concomitant duties becomes very, very hard. The Dark Night of the Soul is the time when the "hedonic juice" which powers the motor runs dry.  The interesting thing with these individuals is that, even though the tank is empty, the person continues to do objective good despite getting nothing for their efforts. No closeness to God, no joy, no intellectual pleasure, no emotion.....zero. Despite themselves, they are sustained by a force that impels them to do good. Their bodies have become vehicles of charity; the stuff of God. This is the operation of pure charity unsullied by the emotions of love.

A quite good example of this phenomenon is Mother Theresa. Her diaries have recently come to light, and in them she reveals that most of her missionary career was spent in this state of dry spirituality. She apparently did not get any "kicks" from helping the poor in Calcutta. Instead, she was God's cubicle drone. She got up in the morning, went to work and did good in the world; running on an empty tank for over 40 years;

Where is my faith? Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness ... If there be God—please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul ... How painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith. Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal, ... What do I labor for? If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.

Yep, that was the mindset of a woman who did so much good and is likely to be canonised a Saint.

Charity is a feeling-less property of the soul that directs the will to do good. In it's day to day operation our feelings sometimes want to work against it, whilst at other times our feelings can quite happily work with it. It's strength is probably most obvious in martyrdom where the will to live is opposition to the will to do good.  But to see it as something in opposition to our pleasures is to mistake it.

But it's not the possession of the property but it's actually nature that makes it the binding agent par excellence. Now, if we take the Aristotelian notion of evil as privation, and good, its opposite, we see that any good act will result in an improvement to whatever the act was directed. Charity, being the stuff of Goodness itself, will direct the will towards acts which both bring good and restore things to their rightful natures. But it's not only that. Its an expansive force that seeks things to fix, it doesn't passively wait;

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

(Matthew 25:31-36)

Charity de-atomises. Unlike hedonism, which eventually alienates, charity connects us to all beings, institutions and things. By being beyond emotion and reason, it keeps bonds intact when they fail.  It is the strong force.

Houellebecq writing is permeated with the sense that the world has lost a capacity for permanent love. The characters in his novels are wounded and atomised as a result of it. The modern world, thoroughly materialistic, still has some Christian cultural capital or at least the memory of it. I think this what the ultimate thrust of his novels is that materialism has killed our capacity to love within a Christian context. And I think it is in the context of this memory that he writes:

Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.

(Atomised [The Elementary Particles])

The Elementary Forces. IV

If we consider the mechanism of love from an engineering point of view, the mechanics of love could best be described as a contingent positive feedback mechanism. Contingent, in the sense that a "good" is required to activate it,  and once activated, the mechanism continues to stay connected to the good because of the pleasure associated with it.

As mentioned before, this mechanism fails if:

1) The "good" fails;  Beauty fades, people betray, character changes and there's always the inevitable physical decay.  This is one of the themes in Houellebecq's books. The materialist interpretation of life makes permanent love impossible since all physical things start rotting from the moment of their inception. Entropy is a bitch.

2) The mechanism fails to elicit the appropriate response. Here, the good, over time, fails to elicit a response and phenomenon of boredom sets in. Houellebecq illustrates this by having his characters engage in all sorts of sexual variations or constantly coupling with new partners.  The endless search for novelty an attempt to escape the habituation mechanism of the mind. Each novel act an attempt at a new psychological "high".

Hoellebecq's engineering solution to the problem of love is technological. Firstly, he advocates cloning and and a genetics which resist decay. With this technological solution, the goods which activate the love mechanism are constantly renewed. Entropy wins in the end but at least the love mechanism gets to run a lot longer.

His second solution to the problem is to re-engineer the love mechanism, through genetic engineering so that individuality disappears, there is no need to connect because there is nothing that wants to connect. Personality is killed and the mechanism is by-passed. Instead a disposition to connection replaces the "goods recognition mechanism". Goodwill rather than joy becomes the way society interacts.  His new man resembles those who belong to "ethical societies": connection but no warmth.

Curiously, another group of people had arrived at the same engineering solution. Buddhism advocated essentially the the same approach:

Normally we think our happiness is contingent upon external circumstances and situations, rather than upon our own inner atti­tude toward things, or toward life in general. The Buddha was saying that dissatisfaction is part of life, even if we are seeking happiness and even if we manage to find temporary happiness. The very fact that it is temporary means that sooner or later the happiness is going to pass. So the Buddha said that unless we understand this and see how pervasive dissatisfaction or duhkha is, it is impossible for us to start looking for real happiness.

Nirvana comes with the elimination of desire, with the bypassing of the love mechanism. Houellebecq recognised the resemblance between his solution and the Buddhist one, In Atomised (The Elementary Particles) he writes:

Hubczejak was certainly the first and, for many years, the only defender of the most radical of Djerzinski's proposals: that mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which was asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, separation and evolution. It is superfluous to note the hostility with which such a project was greeted by the defenders of revealed religion: Judaism, Christianity and Islam were for once agreed, and heaped derision and opprobrium on work which "gravely undermines human dignity in it's unique relationship with the Creator". Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha's teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and that the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.

Buddhism is not the solution to problem of love, rather it is an escape from our personality and humanness. In Nirvana,  man is completely aware........... and alone.

It's interesting the Houellebecq recognised that it would be the Abrahamic religions who would most oppose the technological solution. Because they had already worked out their own. Now, I'm not so read up on Judaism and Islam to comment on them,  but the Christian solution to the problem takes a totally different approach. Instead of trying to to tinker with the love mechanism, they left it alone and added another one. Not being limited by materialism, they introduced a force which did not rely on biology for its operation and was thus free of biologic constraints.

In fact, the new force was not a bonding force at all, but a force which kept binding forces bound. It was a kind of anti-entropic power that did allow good things to corrupt once they were established. In fact, the force directed the love mechanism to bind itself to everything, insofar that it was good. Unlike Buddhism, which was a withdrawal into the self, resulting in eventual nothingness, this force was was it's polar opposite; self realisation in its expansionary action and an affirmation of reality. In the Christian Nirvana, man was aware of his glory and all around him things shone like stars. He was not alone.

But it would be a mistake to think that the Christians worked out this solution. The early Christians, like the rest of men, were way too dumb. It had tried to it reveal itself to the Jews but seemed to have just missed taking root amongst them.  In fact, in the end, the force literally had to sit men down and explain to them what it was. The force was a gift of itself given to men, repairing the privation of the world. For it flowed from the nature of its being:

Deus caritas est.

The Elementary Forces III

INTERVIEWER

Love may no longer exist?

HOUELLEBECQ

That’s the question of the moment.

INTERVIEWER

And what is causing its disappearance?

HOUELLEBECQ

The materialist idea that we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. That’s not very compatible with love.

..............................................

HOUELLEBECQ

It may surprise you, but I am convinced that I am part of the great family of the Romantics.

INTERVIEWER

You’re aware that may be surprising?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes, but society has evolved, a Romantic is not the same thing that it used to be. Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order  Romantic and, on the other hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the  development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, using more realist vocabulary—you would get me.

INTERVIEWER

What is your definition of a Romantic?

HOUELLEBECQ

It’s someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible right away. Belief in love. Also belief in the soul, which is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.

INTERVIEWER

You believe in unlimited, eternal happiness?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes. And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.

(Interview. The Paris Review)

One of the things I like about Houellebecq is that he writes his novels from the point of view of a atheist materialist.  It's one thing to write a critique of modern love from the point of view of a Christian, to which atheists will always attribute a degree of non-objectivity to, but it's another to write it from within the world view of Atheism. Being one of their own kind he is much harder to dismiss.

People accuse Houellebecq of being a depressive realist, yet as he has remarked before, the transient and hence depressing nature of modern love is a logical consequence of the materialist mindset.  To this mindset, love is ultimately a biological mechanism responding to biological forces:

Humans are just animals, and, unsurprisingly, that knowledge gives precedence to  biological impulse; to strength, health and beauty over weakness, infirmity and  repulsiveness; and it makes self-interest paramount. Houellebecq’s men find themselves incapable of considering anything but themselves, but they also apprehend, with some horror, the essential unsustainability of individualism. Living with nothing other than your own desires and urges makes your frustrations, increasingly awful and unavoidable as you age, torturous—and the prospect of death unmanageable. “Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. More than at any time or in any civilization, human beings are obsessed with aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain  (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks inevitably towards the end). This weighing up of pleasure and pain which, sooner or later, everyone is forced to make, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.” It is, to paraphrase Houellebecq on a different topic, an insoluble condition, but not really a complicated one.

(Ben Jeffry's. Hard Feelings. Very good essay btw.)

Depressing or not, it's just a fact of life. It's true that Houllebecq concentrates on sex, but what's also apparent from his novels is that his characters are not only isolated from their lovers, but are isolated  from others, like family, as well.  Houellebecq does not speculate on why this is so but simply registers that the love in the materialist world is ultimately solipsistic.

Some men may be quite happy with this state of affairs, but it would appear that most people find the emotional isolation of his protagonists with a sense of repulsion, in fact, slight horror. There is something profoundly wrong.  I think Houellebecq, from his comments above, is of this opinion as well. His genius is in being able to speak, in stark terms,  about the death of  a type of love which is still present in memory; a love which is never ending, permanent and fixed. This is the pervasive theme through his books; that there is no everlasting love.

Houellebecq balefully recognises that our biology cannot provide this love. His solution to the problem is technological, that is,  through manipulation of human genetics he changes human nature. His solution to the problem was to kill the need, but in doing so he recognises that the new man is not really man at all.  In other words the problem is unsolvable. Man, as he is, is doomed in a materialist universe to permanent gloom because of his nature and his need to be loved. The stench of impermanence hangs everywhere.

The question then is, how to achieve this love? Our connection to others must be through some kind of mechanism that is not dependent upon transient pleasure, because that which lives by emotion intensity dies with its fading. The solution, therefore,  is in by-passing the "love mechanism", that is,  by not making our love contingent upon the emotions but making it an act of the will.  The only type of love which is permanent is an emotionless type of love.  Our connection to the other must be through some non-emotional choice, we must want to remain connected to each other even though there is no emotional drive to do so. But here's the rub, rationality is not the answer, since rationality always aims at some self-optimal solution, and is therefore by it's nature solipsistic. Loving someone because it is the smart thing to do is going to last as only as it is smart to do so, their is an element of self interest involved.  So the question of permanence remains.

Natural biology cannot provide the solution.

The Elementary Forces II

In our previous post, I tried to paint a picture of the cognitive mechanisms at play in the mechanism of natural or instinctive love. Now, in response to Country Lawyers comments, I wish to delve into some other real world problems that the practical operation of this mechanism entails.

As mentioned previously, prior to the feeling of love there has to be some recognition of a good in the object under consideration. The problem is that instinctive love does not necessarily focus on the object in totality rather it can focus on particular good. It's said that a pretty face covers many faults and its this fact of love that opens up the abyss to hell.

The classic example of this evil-in-possession-of-a-good is the femme fatale. (Exemplified by the character played by Barbara Stanwick in the movie Double Indemnity).  Here the woman obviously has the goods of beauty and charm but they are alloyed to a person of extreme malevolence. Her power (which is a consequence of the loving mechanism) lies in the capacity to exploit her goods for evil advantage. Benedict, in Deus Caritas Est, thought that Eros alone degenerated into mere sex, but it also appears to be able to degenerate into simple murder.  Now,  I've used the example of a femme fatale (Eros), but people have been covering up the crimes of their children (Storge), making up alibis for their friends (Phillia) and committing all sorts of bestial actions for their country(Patriotism) since time immemorial. Love is no guarantee of moral goodness.

What's confused a lot of Western thinking about love is that the mechanism doesn't care about the moral goodness of the totality in question, only particular specifics. Every now and then love gets it right and generates powerful emotions directed towards the objectively good but it's just as likely to get it wrong.

I think that the ancients were quite right in calling love, particularly Eros, a divine madness because person under love's spell frequently behaves like an idiot. There is even scientific proof of the fact. The feelings generated by love (which are so pleasant) literally overwhelm the intellect. The lover is literally on "a high",  their fix is the beloved.

We conclude that human attachment employs a push– pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by [Ed]deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate.

( Neural Correlates of Maternal and Romantic Love.pdf  Bartels and Zeki)

Now a lack of rationality is not a good thing and Love is literally blind to the faults of the object. The alpha qualities of the bad boy/femme fatale literally switch off any critical centers in the brain. Individual self interest is thrown out of the window.  Their lovers literally can't see any fault in them.

Which brings us next to the subject of evil. Overt evil is pretty easy to recognise. Shootings, rapes, chainsaw massacres, etc immediately instill repulsion, but  a diabolical genius with an understanding of human nature who wants to wreck havoc and misery would aim to hide his evil under a veil of goods. 

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The point that I'm trying to get across is that love is no moral compass and what feels good may be objectively evil. What we see, though, from our little analysis, is that any primacy of "feelings" over rationality is going justify a lot of bad behaviour. Evil can hide under the cloak of love. This brings us squarely into conflict with the Romantic Movement.

Modern Christian thinkers have blamed the Enlightenment for a lot of the worlds ills, but what surprises me is how little criticism the Romantic movement gets. This movement, which emphasised the validity of emotions pretty much above all else, is probably far more corrosive to western social stability than any flawed philosophic ideology.  In the West at least, Socialism is more a feel good trend amongst its supporters than a logically coherent system. Conservatives have debated the left for hours with a litany of facts and logical arguments, but it is all in vain, as their emotional investment in their ideology, their love, so to speak, renders them immune to any arguments. It's just like trying to argue the faults of a thug lover to a teenager. 

I mean, take a look at the gay marriage argument. The argument against it is a reasonably rational one, but the usual retort to it is "why can't two people in love have their relationship recognised" and it's this latter argument that resonates with the proletariat. After all, doesn't love justify anything? Euthanasia, he loved her. Divorce, they're out of love. The left, our hearts were in the right place. Noble feelings justify everything. Hard-arsed rationality is given the shove. Indeed, a lot of the motive force behind  PC is drawn from this same cultural font which emphasises the legitimacy of the agreeable lie over the disagreeable truth.  Western society has been hit by a two pronged attack; bad reason and labile emotion.

 (Fred McMurray heading into the gas chamber. Deleted ending from Double Indemnity)

The Elementary Forces. I

“I’d say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God’s existence in Dostoevsky.”


(Michel Houellebecq.)

One of the best essays to emerge out of the Manosphere in recent years is Ferdinand Bardameu's, The Age of Onanism. Like Houellebecq, Ferdinand touches on theme which I think is integral to decline of the West; the social atomisation of individuals. 

Most men and women today are so defective and self-absorbed that the existence of other peoples’ humanity doesn’t register on any fundamental level. It’s like trying to explain the concept of sound to someone born deaf, or trying to teach empathy to a clinical psychopath. Nobody makes love anymore — they’re just masturbating into or with other people.

The social atomisation that is occurring should not be seen as a relationship problem that only effects individuals but also a problem between individuals and institutions. People are not only becoming more alienated from each other, but are also becoming more alienated  from their neighbours, communities, governments and culture. Everything seems to be slowly drifting apart and no one seems to give a shit about anything except themselves. Any commitment to anything is presaged by the ubiquitous, "What's in it for me?"

What I've been trying to understand is why?

Why is it that the center cannot hold? What power did the center have that it has now lost?

To understand the problem, and its possible solution, it is necessary to study the glue that naturally binds all human beings together, and that glue is Love.

Now the problem with the English language use of the word, Love, is that it can encompass different forms of affections and pleasures which are dissimilar. For example, the love of between parent and child is different to the love of newly weds. The word can also can also be used to describes states of being and can be used as a verb. For the rest of this post, to avoid confusion, when I use the word love, I mean to use it in its everyday usage. I explicitly do not want to use it in it's religious sense. The reason why will become apparent later.

Traditional Western understanding of the subject of Love, starts from the Greek Classical tradition, with the pagan thinkers dividing love into its various types; Storge, Phillia, Eros and Agape. But I think this approach hinders rather than helps an understanding of the subject.  What I propose is to look at Love from a point of view of the cognitive process. (Note: Agape here is used in the pagan meaning)

In order to love there has to be something one loves; in other words, love must have an object. That object may be anything;  a child, a car, one's country, a woman and so on. The point is that love is focused on a thing but not just any old thing. The thing being considered must possess some form of good which elicit some from of love response.  The intellect, in contemplation of the object, recognises some good, and in the process of recognition generates some form of pleasant sensation. It's this recognition/pleasant sensation-generation process that we call love. The opposite occurs for hate and disgust. It's my opinion that the variations in the type of feelings we get in response to percieved goods are probably related to biological subconscious cerebral processing. There is probably some higher order "good perception mechanism" which then gets modified by higher level cortical processing to produce the different sensations for the different types of love. In the presence of a our own children we may feel the sensation of Storge, amongst a sexy woman, Eros, and upon contemplation of our friends, Phillia.

This pleasure generated by this mechanism is not only appreciated passively but serves as motivating force both to further our pleasure and to benefit the object of love. Parents look after their children because get pleasure from them, lovers give each other gifts because of the pleasure it gives the giver to see the recipient happy, men fight for their country because they do not want to see its good despoiled by the enemy.

Now, I believe that the Evo-Bio crowd overplay their hand, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this cognitive perception/pleasure mechanism serves  a vital function in providing the bonding force in between individuals and groups in society; between parents and children, friends, lovers,  communities and so on It would appear that our innate biology is wired in such a way to get pleasure from connecting with others. Evolution, or God's design, has made man a social being.

If we explore this perception/pleasure mechanism in further depth we see that our relationship with love's object is driven by a hedonic motivation in ourselves. The stronger the pleasure generated by love's object the more the lover will want to form some connection with the beloved.  Paradoxically then, the psychological center of this love is not love's object but in the sensation of the pleasures generated by the object in the lover; the object being a means of self-pleasure. Although this may be distasteful to many, the psychological process at play in masturbation are similar to that in love.The bonding phenomenon is a consequence of pleasure seeking in ourselves. It's both a narcissistic and onanistic type of phenomenon. Ferdinand was on the ball.

This does not mean that when we love we are callous of the beloved. The pleasures generated by love may motivate us to act in such a way that a positive feedback mechanism is generated, but there is no implicit need to do so. A man may love the good of a beautiful woman's body but not care much about rest of her just as a woman may love a man's wealth and not necessarily love the man. The thing about love is that it enjoys the goods of another without any obligation to provide anything in return. Love is a solipsitic pleasure and the only reason we bond is because our pleasure is contingent upon another.

The more you mediate on the cognitive psychology of love the more unsettling it becomes. Being a mechanism that is dependent on the appreciation of anothers goods, it clear that if the other lacks any goods then no love or bonding will happen. It also becomes pretty obvious that "love" will only last as long as pleasure is being generated by the love mechanism.  Should the mechanism fail, so will the force of attraction.

 Now, as far as I can see, there are four mechanisms which cause "love" failure. These are:

1) Degradation of percieved goods. i.e Aging, obesity, sickness, change in personality, etc.
2) Habituation of pleasure. i.e. is that the same good over time fails to generated a pleasurable response and boredom sets in.
3) Substitution: A better good comes along. Trading up.
4) Narcissism. The inability to perceive value.

Love then,  relying solely on the pleasure generating mechanism is a transient thing.  As Houellebecq, writing about fading female beauty, brutally puts it:

[Ed: Women]live a lot longer and suffer a lot more (than men). They try to trade on their looks, even when they know their bodies are sad and ugly. They get hurt but they do it anyway, because they cannot give up the need to be loved. That’s one delusion they’ll keep to the bitter end. Once she’s past a certain age, a woman might get to rub up against some cocks, but she has no chance of being loved

People accuse Houellebecq of painting things far too black, but as far as I can see it, he is chillingly accurate in his understanding of love in the modern world.  Houellebecq's genius is portraying man in the temporal universe, where the goods he has to offer are both unequally distributed and being entropically destroyed by the passage if time.  In such a world, no love is permanent as all goods are transitory, any feelings between people, a pleasant exchange of goods which is ultimately meaningless in the vast gulf of time. There is no permanence of love as the love lasts only as long as the loved as something to give to the lover. Beautiful women get fat and their breasts sag, studs become impotent, bubbly toddlers turn into horrible teenagers, plain people live alone and masturbate. Ugly in our old age, we die lonely deaths. Marriage ceases to be till death do us part, but as long as a there is a hedonic benefit in doing so. The glue which binds is fickle, and bereft of any appreciable goods we both live and die alone.

Perceptive individuals will already sense how well the love failure mechanism maps onto Western social decay.

Such is the nature of natural love. The Evo-Bio crowd in many ways are perhaps the clearest thinkers about love. For them its  more like a mutually beneficial exchange. Marriage, for example, is an exchange of the good of sex for the good of security. Each party mutually benefits and is pleased by the result. The problem is that the goods, like the love, is transient. Commentator Jason grasped the significance of this type of love.

For really – if you eschew such concepts as transcendence, selfless love that puts the other often above self, and so on – and I think it is reasonable to say that nihilists again, in general, tend to do so, then it is just natural that you’ll have a Hobbesian sexual world if it consists of a lot of individuals who are themselves nihilists. It just follows, since without such things as love and sacrifice, other people are usually simply seen it terms of “What do they offer to me? And what price do I have to pay to acquire them?” And since individuals are very unequal as far as social and other capital is concerned (Alphas vs. Deltas, young women vs. cougars, rich vs. poor), some individuals will do very well, while others will be left in the cold (especially in today’s world).

In the end it does a become a Hobbesian type of world. The alpha carousel merely its manifestation. The reason why the world lacks love is because what we mean by love is pleasure seeking contingent upon another. Now it's true that love is not the sole motivator of our relationships. Enlightened self-interest may make us stick with a partner when the goods of the other are no longer appreciated, but in the end, self-interest is solipsistic. A race of super intelligent humans would still be ultimately lonely if the way they bound was through the love mechanism. Education or philosophy are not the answer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold because love is not the answer. When put to the test the force is weak.

A Paragraph to Ponder.

 

It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly…. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market”.… In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.… Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.

(Michel Houellebecq)

It could have come straight from Roissy.

I found it in this very good review by Benjamin Kerstein of Houellebecq's book, The Possiblility of an Island.

This visceral equation-sexuality as a system of social hierarchy-is more than a satirical revision of the war between the sexes. It is, rather, the key to Houellebecq’s own absolutism of despair. It is a dagger thrust into the heart of the ’68 generation, striking at their greatest source of pride: The liberation of the individual from social constraints on sexuality. Far from an erotic paradise, Houellebecq’s sexual revolution has created not only a world of the walking wounded, but a world in which the most intimate of human relationships has become an arena of Hobbesian brutality. It has created a life which is no longer worth living.