Washington Rebel

Ideology: A Dull Man's Substitute for Intelligence

Cover Me

A persistent irritant of mine are my so called "liberal" friends who can't handle alternative thought.  If I send them one of my posts I can feel the alarm bells ring back over the ethers.  They jutht don't know what to thay!  As das and I have frequently remarked, "liberal" ideas have to be digested by us.  It's impossible to attend school in the United States, listen to the news in the United States, read book reviews in the United States, without getting the prissy little school girl version -- that is to say, the "liberal" view -- of life.  Once, when meeting for lunch with several influential bloggers, the question was posed: what turned you conservative?  With the exception of das, who was shocked into reality by 9/11, the rest of us had been challenged by books we read when we were younger.  For example, two books that challenged my Seventies worldview were

The Incredible Bread Machine

and

The Mainspring of Human Progress

Both of these books are zippy, tremendously interesting, and very, very mind-bending.  Here is a pertinent review of The Mainspring of Human Progress:

American Maverick: Thomson Jay Hudson

Thomson Jay Hudson (1834-1903)

There was a golden age in British and American thinking and writing that spanned, roughly, the end of our Civil War through World War II, wherein intellectual integrity and genuine human genius shined through the works of inquiring minds.  I have often wondered why and how we got so many great books and great thinkers from that era.  Perhaps it was because education necessarily consisted of the Trivium: (oppressed) students were expected to clear basic hurdles of math and literature and history before they could be graduated, as opposed to the soft-soap idea of not wanting to discriminate against . . . . someone.  In the days before children were educated to the work house (an idea championed by the common dolt of today as a matter of professed self-interest), per John Dewey's reforms, they received a university education, per John Henry Newman.  I am frequently reminded of two things I grew up with:

1) A teacher and mentor from the Forks High School system whose uncle in the Montana Wilderness lived in a sheeper cabin lined, wall to wall, with books on language and history and Indians and Hebrews and Optics and Science and Music and . . . . an "uneducated" man who could hold his own on almost any topic, with grand flourishes thrown in for sport; and

2) the comment my father frequently made that the math we we struggled with in junior high they had to know to advance to the fourth grade.  My father could speak to that, as he was held back one year!

To give you a flavor of where our country has traveled in this regard, here is a quote from marxists.org about John Dewey:

The Abolition of Man

The World Has Gone Absolutely Bonkers and Lunatics are in Charge.

The Abolition of Man is a stunningly brilliant masterpiece, prophetic in its insight. Several of the other reviewers here who gave the book is plainly deserved five stars have done a fine job of reviewing its contents. Let me respond briefly to the fundamentalist (rousaswgnr) in Campsville, CA and the leftist bigot in Vancouver, WA. Both fail to scratch the surface of the book for opposite reasons.

The reviewer in Campsville (rousaswgnr) apparently thinks that any appeal to right and wrong that doesn't simply quote Bible verses is anti-Christian. Obviously, he would be completely incapable of trying to convince nonChristians that there are universal moral laws that are contravened at our peril -- the very thing Lewis was trying to do. At one point this seeming "fundamentalist" wrote that only scripture teaches right and wrong and things about God. That statement is ironically contrary to scripture itself which says "the heavens declare the glory of God" and that God has revealled His ways and parts of His nature in nature itself and in human consciences (Romans 1). The reviewer rousaswgnr contradicts scripture while trying to defend it. That's a pity. For if he really understood scripture or C. S. Lewis he would know that Lewis is saying what scripture says: God has universal moral laws that He has written into nature that all people can see and that have been generally recognized by major civilizations throughout the ages. Lewis also says it with breath-taking beauty.

The leftist from Vancouver, WA is even more vacuous than the fundamentalist. (That's typical.) Like the typical leftist, he imagines that he's brilliant while proving that he doesn't have a clue. He thinks he's clever by quoting Lau Tzu on the meaning of "Tao." But if he'd bothered to have really read Lewis or found out the meaning of the Chinese word "Tao", he would know that Lewis was not referring to Taoism but to the much more pervasive use of the idea of "Tao" in Chinese culture: that offered by Confucianism. The humanist from Vancouver, WA condemns Lewis for not getting it because he assumes that anyone who disagrees with his leftist ideology is empty-headed. His mindless repitition of Marxist ideology -- that moral systems are the mere fronts for political powers -- shows he's the one who hasn't understood Lewis. The Vancouver, WA leftist's statement that Lewis is merely defending "western" morals is absurd to the point of questioning whether he actually read the book -- or whether he's capable of really reading anything that isn't pre-committed to his Marxist politics. Indeed, the Vancouver leftist demonstrates that he's one of those men without chests about whom Lewis is writing while the fundamentalist from Campsville shows why modern conservative Christianity -- so frigthened of innovative communication -- has been so impotent, even though it holds the solution to the cultural problem Lewis diagnoses if only it could get over its reactionary anti-intellectualism and rigidity of mind that the reviewer exemplifies.   Book Review by John B. Carpenter 

Which America Do You Want?

Homies F'Jesus

Which America Do Americans Want?  John Calvin's or Charles Darwin's?

[T]he priesthood of all believers, a protestant doctrine that Calvin expounded on, led to the education of nearly all America's citizens, since all believers are responsible for seeking to know what God has said to them in the Bible. This widespread literacy allowed the democratic system to operate, given the relative isolation of towns back then, and the lack of any mass media other than the printed word. In addition, Calvin exhorted believers to work hard, while declaring secular occupations to be every bit as holy as that of the pulpit. These teachings, along with his view on the limitations of government, together set the philosophical stage for Capitalism. Given all of these factors, one can see just how profound an influence this theologian has had on the social and political formation of the United States of America.

The founder of the other America (which, in view of the first one, might well be considered the anti-America) also had a major anniversary this year, having been born in 1809. Though his discipline was science, the theory of origins that he formulated from his observation of plants and animals has had enormous implications in America's social and political realms as well. I am, of course, referring to Charles Darwin. In his article entitled "Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence," Bradley C. S. Watson lists six core ideas that social Darwinists in the 20th century came to have with respect to politics in general and constitutional government in particular.

Sarah Palin and the Bard:

All the major themes of human existence are represented. Love, hate, greed, charity, redemption, etc. are weaved into a brilliant tapestry of literal and allegorical devices. So comprehensive and timeless are many of the lessons of the Great Bard that his life's work is often called "The Lay Bible." But like the Good Book, many of the truisms contained within Shakespeare's work and his life continue to be overlooked or completely forgotten.

Paul Kengor: Obama Gave a Good Speech to Students in China the Other Day.  Sounded like Reagan.

Richard Brookhiser on the Founders

Richard Brookhiser is a major brain.  One of the things I like about him is he can "go both ways", i.e., he's not a hard-bitten ideologue.  He has a brain.  I've seen him interviewed on History shows about Hippies and the Sixties.  He's cool.

This interview of Brookhiser concerning his 2006 book, What Would the Founders Do?, is right up our alley on the question of republican virtue.  It's worth at least one listen.  There's a lot there!

American Lion

 
So the Man-Boy Writes Like Caesar, Does He?

Funny!

Here's what a Lion looks like, boys:

Readers of Thomas Sowell's columns in IBD don't have to be told why he is considered one of America's greatest thinkers — maybe the greatest.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet has called him "our greatest contemporary philosopher," an opinion that British historian Paul Johnson shares in his book "A History of the American People."

Besides his weekly newspaper column, Sowell has written 43 books — 10 in the last five years — two monographs, 87 articles in periodicals and books, and 33 book reviews.

His latest two books, "The Housing Boom and Bust" and "Applied Economics," came out this year. The latter, subtitled "Thinking Beyond Stage One," is one of six he has written on economics.

Dr. Sowell has granted IBD permission to run one of the chapters of "Applied Economics" — "The Economics of Medical Care" — in its entirety. We are doing so because of its relevance to the debate over health care reform. The chapter will run in nine parts over the next week and a half. The first part starts below and continues in the Issues & Insights section, where the other eight parts will appear.

Sowell was born in North Carolina in 1930 and reared in Harlem. After dropping out of high school, he was drafted into the military and served in the Marines during the Korean War.

During his 20s, when he was a self-described Marxist, he attended and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a B.A. in economics. He also has a master's in economics from Columbia and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

He has taught at Howard University, Cornell, Brandeis, Amherst and UCLA, and is now the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Now, if the NEA guy said the President writes like Thomas Sowell . . . .

I'd kiss his ass and give him a week to draw a crowd.

Sowell's a man.  Can't say that about the fingerlings in the White House.

See what Dr. Sowell had to say about Eric Hoffer, the Longshoreman Philosopher.

Reading Mitch Horowitz

 

Annuit Coeptis: American First Person Series

Picked up my copy of Mitch Horowitz' Occult America yesterday.  It's a fantastic little reference source -- brisk, easy to read, and chock-full of Rebelesque "links."  I get the feeling Mitch was holding back a little -- not really laying out what he believes completely.  That feeling of restriction only makes the subject matter more intriguing.  You put the book down and you're ready for more, baby!

Of course the very first thing that disturbs most people is the word occult which, in their minds, can only mean "truck with the devil."  Indeed, for many who dabble in such things as "magick" and so on, it may have that very meaning, just as the word "conservative" denotes a mean-spirited war-monger by practitioners of kindly, open-minded "liberalism."  In other words, cultural permeations and persistent misuse of the King's English often renders a word meaningless.  Mitch comes to our rescue with a first-rate definition (I'll tweak it for him below):

Tethered

  

Viraling Out of Control

Apparently Jules has a wife.  Who wrote a book.  You should buy.

Tethered.  Not Your Ordinary Reb:

City of Secrets: One Woman's True-Life Journey to the Heart of the Grail Legend

  

Museu d’Història dels Jueus a Catalunya -
Centre Bonastruc Ça Porta

The Kabbalist Center of Gerona.  From the very beginning two opposing tendencies appear among the kabbalists, the first seeking to limit the Kabbalah to closed circles as a definitely esoteric system, the second wishing to spread its influence among the people at large.  Throughout the history of the Kabbalah right down to recent times these two tendencies have been in conflict.  Parallel with this, from the time of the appearance of the Kabbalah in Gerona, two attitudes developed concerning the relationships of the bearers of the rabbinic culture to the Kabbalah.  The kabbalists were accepted as proponents of a conservative ideology, and as public defenders of tradition and custom, but at the same time they were suspected, by a substantial number of rabbis and sages, of . . . . being innovators whose activities must be curtailed wherever possible . . . . In these disputes, the Kabbalah of the Gerona scholars seemed to be a symbolic interpretation of the world of Judaism and its way of life, based on a theosophy which taught the inner secrets of the revealed Godhead and on a rejection of rationalist interpretations of the Torah and the Commandments.

.  .  .  .

This combination of the theory of the Sacred Names and the speculations using the methods of gematria with the theory of the Sefirot of the Gerona kabbalists contains . . . . . a powerful renewal of ecstatic tendencies, which took on the new form of "prophetic Kabbalah."  Gershom Scholem.

I first became aware of Patrice Chaplin while listening to the Coast-to-Coast show, Mysterious Portals (Is she dating Dr. Who?, an impatient listener asked).  Before that time I knew nothing of the importance of Gerona to the development of Kabbalah -- just as I knew nothing of Patrice Chaplin.  I am grateful many times over that I caught that delightful installment, which I have downloaded to my computer and am listening to as I write this!  I ordered Patrice's book, City of Secrets, (published by Quest Books) and devoured it as soon as it arrived.  In fact, I took time off from work today to read it a second time for the puporse of this review, and believe me, I didn't need to be forced.  The book is vital, energizing, and intelligent -- an excellent, invigorating ride.  I can't say enough about it!

Principle vs. Personality

Neil Postman in the Late 1990s, Part I

Here are the opening paragraphs from his Foreward to Amusing Ourselves to Death:

We were keeping our eye on 1984.  Whe the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves.  The roots of liberal democracy had held.  Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

The Specter of Kimball Haunts America

 

George Washington: Another Dumb Ass Conservative!

A specter is haunting America — the specter of freedom. Even as President Obama proceeds with his efforts to impoverish the country, the productive classes of society are waking from their dogmatic slumbers and banding together.  Roger Kimball, The Real Culture War, 21st Century Style.

Let's hope Kimball is on to something.

Similarly, Dr. Mark Hendrickson predicts that Obama may be overloading his ass with his mouth -- as they say -- in Two Achilles Heels.

And Dr. Sowell gives us insight into his intellectual ripening in Mind Changing Books