And they say religion is on the decline in America!

It looks as though my prediction of last Monday evening, that the white left and most of the African-American community would turn silently away from Trayvon Martin within seven days, is not going to be borne out. Trayvianity still seems to be going strong, and perhaps is even on the upsurge. For example, the Trayvians held a big march in Sanford on Saturday afternoon, and a cartoonist on the student newspaper at the University of Texas in Austin was fired on Friday for publishing a cartoon mocking key tenets of the Trayvian faith. Yes, many mainstream media outlets have published pieces cautiously backing away from the original sacred story and showing the ways in which it was not true. But these gestures of critical doubt and scientific inquiry have not dampened the fervor of the faith-based true believers. Even New York City, the aggressively secularist Sodom where America’s most famous Christian believer, Tim Tebow, oddly chose to play professional football, is experiencing an upsurge in religious belief. Could it be Tebow’s influence?

People of faith: Trayvians, dressed in their religious
habits, hold rally in New York City on March 28.
The speaker appears to be the lesbian City Council
president and mayoral aspirant, Christine Quinn.

Comments

April 1

Jim Kalb writes:

This whole affair is really horrible, isn’t it?

People need to believe in something. That’s not a psychological need, it’s a practical and conceptual need. Without a hierarchy of beliefs terminating in something absolute they can’t place and orient themselves, and if they can’t do that they can’t function.

That gives liberalism a problem, since it denies higher goods and in fact denies that any goal is better than any other goal. The fundamental orientation of liberalism (“freedom” and “equality”) is negative. So what it does is invert the normal moral disposition, an orientation toward the highest good, and turns it into an orientation away from the worst evil, the denial of equal freedom.

People need to embody their ideals in symbols, that’s the way they become comprehensible and effective, and in the normal case that takes the primary form of a conception of God. Liberalism is based on a conception of evil, so the primary moral symbolism is about evil. That’s why in the West today you can’t be penalized for blaspheming God, but in many places you can go to jail for blaspheming the Holocaust, which is now defined as the supreme symbol of discrimination and intolerance.

The religious life calls for a whole complex of symbols, not just the one supreme symbol. So in Christianity you have saints, scriptures, and sacraments, and in liberalism, which emphasizes this-worldly matters and substitutes the news for the drama of salvation, you have demonic figures like George Zimmerman. There’s a constant demand for such figures and the demand won’t be denied. Without them the world would be incomprehensible.

LA replies:

You write:

That gives liberalism a problem, since it denies higher goods and in fact denies that any goal is better than any other goal. The fundamental orientation of liberalism (“freedom” and “equality”) is negative. So what it does is invert the normal moral disposition, an orientation toward the highest good, and turns it into an orientation away from the worst evil, the denial of equal freedom.

Perhaps you’ve said this before and I haven’t seen it, but it strikes me as a new idea, and it is brilliant. Let me try to restate it in my words. Human beings need a highest good, as well as an entire hierarchy of goods below it and leading to it. Liberalism, of course, is not about any substantive good. It is about eliminating inequality and intolerance, about progressing toward ever greater equality and freedom and fulfillment of desires. It is procedural, not substantive. The liberal aims of freedom, non-discrimination, and the maximum possible equal fulfillment of desires have nothing to do with the natural, social, and transcendent goods people actually care about. In fact, liberalism in its pursuit of an ever more non-discriminatory social order must progressively eliminate all substantive goods, because such goods are by their very nature unequal and involve discrimination. But, at the same time, as you say, people require a highest good. Where then, under liberalism, are they to find it?

The answer lies in the very substantive goods that liberalism is constantly striving to eliminate. The substantive goods—God, traditional morality and family, natural and traditional sexual relations, country, ethnicity, human talents and achievements and so on—together constitute the evil force, the vast right wing conspiracy, that stands in the way of perfect non-discrimination. By their very existence, all these things are discriminatory. Morality is discriminatory because some behaviors are more moral and others less. God is discriminatory because some people are closer to God and others farther. Excellence is discriminatory because some people and achievements are more excellent and others less. Nationhood and race are discriminatory because some people belong to a particular nation or race and others don’t. The existence of the sexes is discriminatory, because it means that men and women are different.

How, then, do liberals find the highest good that as human beings they must have as an ideal and object to order their lives? They find it by taking the actual goods, and turning them into the greatest evil, and making the opposition to that evil the greatest good. Most typically and centrally, this liberal religion takes the form of opposing “racism,” i.e., opposing the actual existence of human groups and the differences and inherent exclusions that inevitably result from it; or, rather, opposing the actual existence of the white race, since, by virtue of its successes, it is the most supremacist and discriminatory of all races. The liberal religion also takes the form of opposing sexual inequality (meaning the existence of the distinct sexes), “heterosexism,” religion, belief in the objective moral good, the inequality of wealth which is the natural result of the natural differentiation of talents, and so on. In short, liberalism defines the substantive human and spiritual goods as evil, and, in the campaign to eliminate that evil, it finds the highest good.

Alan Roebuck writes:

I agree with your assessment. Jim’s observation that liberals must, because of the nature of their religion, make opposition to “evil” (i.e., normal human thought and life) their highest good, is very important. I will have to ponder it to see if my initial response is correct, but it looks like a crucial insight.

And it helps me with my latest project, an essay exploring the fact that our authorities tell us that we must tolerate everything, which, if true, means human life, and indeed all of reality, is absurd. (If we must tolerate everything, then nothing has value, in which case everything is futile.) Which goes a long way toward explaining why most people appear to be either fundamentally demoralized or else full of demonic energy. [LA replies: The best lack all conviction, etc.]

Alan Roebuck continues:

Every important principle needs a name. Just as (traditional) religion involves identifying the highest good and worshiping it, here we have identifying the deepest evil, and cursing it. So we could call this the inversion of religion.

John Dempsey writes:

In your reply to Jim Kalb, you’ve now brought full circle to the argument you made here. In it, while speaking of marriage, you wrote:

What began as the demand that an outsider group be given equal access to or equal possession of a good thing, ends as the demand for the destruction of that good thing. The end of liberalism is not the good, or even the equal distribution of the good, but the elimination of all goods in the name of equality, because the good, by its very nature, cannot be possessed equally.

To my knowledge, that’s one of the most profound statements you’ve ever made on the subject. And that’s saying something.

LA replies:

Thank you. It was understood that the end of liberalism is the elimination of all goods. What Mr. Kalb has added here, I think, is that the elimination of all goods is not just the logical end result of liberalism, but its own highest good.:-)

LA continues:

Also, the passage you quote suggests that “equality” may be both an adequate and a simpler way of talking about liberalism, and that “non-discrimination,” my preferred description, is not needed. Equality is a more familiar and understandable idea, and it also seems to contain the idea of non-discrimination within it. To make marriage equally accessible to all, the discrimination that keeps two persons of the same sex from marrying each other must be eliminated. To make our country equally accessible to all, the discrimination that keeps everyone on earth from having U.S. citizenship must be eliminated. And so on.

But non-discrimination remains a crucial concept, because, as I’ve always seen it, the moral horror at discrimination is where the rubber meets the road in the liberal mind. Above all forces, it’s what keeps us moving toward national suicide. It’s why, for example, even the most “conservative” of mainstream Americans cannot conceive of, and recoil in disgust from, the idea of ending our mass non-discriminatory immigration policy. “Equal freedom” may describe this moral phenomenon at a more primary conceptual level, but it does not describe what actually happens in the heads of liberals the way the “discrimination is wrong” idea does. This is the actual belief that makes conservatives support suicidal liberalism, and that must be renounced if the suicidal liberalism is to be ended,

LA continues:

However, as Jim Kalb said to me recently (I’m not sure if he’s written this), the difference between liberalism and traditionalism boils down to this: liberals believe that freedom (or equal freedom) is the highest principle. The truth that traditionalists believe is that the good is the highest principle. As long as people believe that freedom is the highest principle, they will support, or will be unable to oppose effectively, such things as mass diverse immigration, feminism, homosexual marriage, and the unending excoriation of the white West for its “racism.” Jim says that the turn away from this suicidal liberalism will come when people see that the good, not freedom, is the highest principle.

Jim Kalb replies (April 4):

Yes, that’s the view. To say that the good and not freedom is the highest principle is pretty much to say that the good is not the same as satisfaction of preferences (which is what liberals now mean by freedom). So it’s to say that the liberal theory of things, that freedom is the highest political goal, should accept direct comparison with other views about the highest political goal rather than win by default because it claims to have the unique ability to get by without resolving contentious issues as to the nature of the good.

As it is now the liberal standard, satisfaction of individual preferences within an overall rational system designed to maximize and equalize that goal, counts as simply rational so it can’t be questioned. If you don’t like it then you’re a hater (because you don’t like satisfaction of some people’s preferences) or you’re greedy and overbearing (because you don’t want the satisfaction to be equal) or you’re anti-reason (because you don’t like overall rational systems).

Daniel S. writes:

The entire project of modernity can best be described as the flight from transcendence, especially as it is represented in traditional Christianity. But in order to flee one must have somewhere to run. Modern man finds, however, that he has no where to run to once the Absolute is forsaken, for the relative and the contrived offer no permanence, no answers. So modern man jumps from one cause to the next in search of meaning and purpose, things which he claims do not truly exist, but yet is forever in search of. St. Augustine said in his Confessions, our hearts are restless until they find true rest in God. Yet this modern man will not abide, and is at the same time too timid and childish to embrace nothingness and void, hence he would rather wallow in his constructed, hellish cult of self-worship (of which liberalism is but one expression).

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

The photograph at the beginning of this entry illustrates the Imitatio Trayvoni, a neo-pagan, unself-aware, self-obliterating mimetic reaction by which the crowd forms itself and becomes a threat to anyone who is unassimilable to it. The instinct of the crowd is to immolate, or, in Americanese, to lynch, a victim: Who, in this case, is the unfortunate George Zimmerman. Now René Girard, one of the most original and penetrating minds of our time, says provocative things about the typical victim. The typical victim is an ambiguous figure, simultaneously inside and outside of the community. The “community” in this case is the self-denominating, pretty-sounding “Rainbow Coalition,” which largely excludes whites and is centered on blacks. Zimmerman is a Mestizo, who, in any other circumstance, would be labeled Hispanic, and who would belong therefore to the “Coalition.” But because Zimmerman defended himself against someone belonging to a group even more sacred than Hispanics, he suddenly becomes “white.”

It is intellectually challenging for modern people, even for traditionalists, to get their heads around the idea that lynchings constitute a religious phenomenon, but they do. Lynchings are spontaneous sacrifices to restore order in a disintegrating community. They do so by creating intense, violent unanimity at the expense of the fall guy. (In Girard’s phrase: “Unanimity minus one.”) Incidentally, the essential quality of the liberal community is that it is always in a disintegrative crisis—hence always in need of victims. Girard is not the only observer to have noticed the religiosity, in the primitive, sacrificial sense, of crowd behavior. Gustave LeBon’s study of The Crowd (1897) reaches the same conclusion. Lynching is a basic form of “community organizing,” going back, as Girard says, to the threshold of humanization, which moment it replicates.

Poignantly, Zimmerman also has a surname that sounds Jewish. Jews are the default victims of Western lynch mobs and have been since the First Crusade. Anti-Semitism is alarmingly on the rise in the West, and the “Coalition” heartily participates in its resurrection. Thus in every way L’Affair Zimmerman resembles the sacrificial crisis groping towards its usual conclusion, exactly as Girard describes it in Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, and all the rest of his trenchant oeuvre. “Community organizing,” which cynically requires disorganization and assiduously fosters it, is a relapse into a pre-Jewish, pre-Christian worldview, a magical and totemic worldview. Where we see signs of it, we know that there Biblical conscience has been abolished and the Dionysiac mob has reasserted itself. The trick is that “community organizing” often parodies Christianity, whose forms it assumes even while it bitterly denounces the Gospel’s condemnation of sacrifice.

Alan M. writes:

The discussion about liberals denying the existence of the good with Jim Kalb’s comment is quite insightful.

A while ago, we had a discussion that ended in this:

• An objective moral good depends on an objective teleology.

• Darwinism rejects objective teleology.

• Therefore, Darwinism precludes an objective moral good

For this discussion, we could use a similar construct:

• Traditional morality holds the good, the true, and the beautiful as our natural ends, with equality and non-discrimination being accepted as enablers of the good within their proper place. Evil is the absence of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

• Progressive morality holds equality and non-discrimination as our natural ends, with the good, the true, and the beautiful being antithetical by their very definition. Evil is the absence of equality and non-discrimination.

• For progressives, the good, the true, and the beautiful are by definition evil, and there is never a time when the good, the true, and the beautiful are accepted as enablers of the ultimate ends of man.

It’s likely not adding anything to the discussion but it helped my encapsulate the argument for myself.

Jim Kalb replies to LA:

You wrote:

How, then, do liberals find the highest good that as human beings they must have as an ideal and object to order their lives? They find it by taking the actual goods, and turning them into the greatest evil, and making the opposition to that evil the greatest good. Most typically and centrally, this liberal religion takes the form of opposing “racism,” i.e., opposing the actual existence of human groups and the differences and inherent exclusions that inevitably result from it.

That’s the eventual effect, but it’s important to note how indirect it all is. Liberalism takes a feature of most important substantive goods, the impossibility of transferring and equalizing them, and turns that into the supreme evil. The result is that those goods have to be eradicated because unequal goods are bad.

That’s not because of their goodness, though, but their inequality. That’s why decent people can be liberals. They’re not against the good as such, they’re just moral skeptics who think it’s impossible to determine objectively how good things actually are, so they become obsessed with a secondary point and don’t take into account the effect on more important matters.

LA replies:

Yes, I see your point. That’s very insightful. They do not seek to eradicate the good, but the inequality that is an inherent part of the good; and in the process they inevitably demonize and eradicate the good as well.

In my restatement of your position, I went beyond your position when I said that liberals seek to destroy the good itself.

April 2

Brandon F. writes:

Great idea. When I read Trayvianity I read it as Tray-vanity which is another way to understand these people. It is not about the dead thug it is about their own vanity as political leverage, exposure, etc.

Randy N. writes:

You said, “liberals deny the existence of the good.”

There is nothing new under the sun.

John 3:19:

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

Once God is rejected, his WORD is rejected. Rejection comes as rejection of the existence of God and rejection of truth (acceptance of false doctrines). In the end, there is no preservative (salt of the earth) affect and civilization reverts to a natural state of “sin sickness”—as Kathleen mentioned.

Alan Roebuck writes:

Every important principle needs a name. Just as (traditional) religion involves identifying the highest good and worshipping it, here we have identifying the deepest evil, and cursing it. So we could call this the inversion of religion.

Alissa writes:

A recent comment at “Rants and raves” section on Craigslist (horrible place, please don’t go there) made the same point you made. An atheist liberal remarked how religion is stupid and harmful for society. The reply to his post talked about people in America worshipping at the altar of the blacks (one of the tenets of the religion of liberalism).

From what I’ve seen, the “true believers” will not back down. They started this hysteria after all. We could have waited for a calm organization of facts, a suitable investigation and a trial perhaps, but nope they just started screaming like monkeys how the white racists are out to get them.

Ian M. writes:

Alan Roebuck wrote about the liberal religion:

Just as (traditional) religion involves identifying the highest good and worshipping it, here we have identifying the deepest evil, and cursing it. So we could call this the inversion of religion.

There is another angle from which to view this:

Man innately senses that his highest good must be a unity. All major religions reflect this: they have as their object of worship that which is One, i.e. God. The Abrahamic religions insist that God is One and the doctrine of divine simplicity states that He is undifferentiated—not composed of parts. Adherents of eastern religions strive to reach a state where they are undifferentiated from God, where there is no more differentiated ‘self’.

Like traditional religion, liberalism’s highest “good” is also something that is a “unity” and “undifferentiated.” For there is one other “entity” besides God that is simple and undifferentiated: nothingness. As you and others have pointed out, liberalism’s end is directed to nihilism. But nothingness, being the complete absence of being, is the exact inversion of God, the ground of all being. So like traditional religion, liberalism is oriented toward “something” that is “one” and “undifferentiated,” but inverts what traditional religion has always understood this object to be.

Thank you for all your good work!

Howard Sutherland writes:

Does the rise of Trayvianity amongst our oppressors mean that we must embrace Zimmermanity?

I don’t what to say about this farrago that others haven’t said already, except to reiterate that it is profoundly depressing and another—and very strong—indication, both in the knee-jerk idiocy of the liberals and the passive acquiescence of the so-called conservatives, that America lacks the collective gravitas, to say nothing of national unity, to be considered a worthy nation. Indeed, is such a spectacle a nation at all? What characteristics of a true nation does America any longer display?

People like me can no longer get away with blaming our cultural malaise on government, academia and the entertainment-news complex. On some deep collective level, the American people (whatever it actually consists of now) is sick, sick unto death.

I don’t see any “game changer” on the horizon that will pull America back from the abyss, either. A country is dying, dying of a deeply depressing (forgive the repetitiveness) combination of malice, stupidity and fecklessness. And just as what replaces toppled Arab dictators, bad as they were, will be worse than they, so will what replaces degraded America be even worse than America even in its current degraded state. And I now expect that to be true for a long time. Any restoration will be very long in coming. HRS

Robert P. writes:

I read with interest all the excellent comments, but no one has brought up the three-word summation of this phenomenon that was promulgated by Nietzsche about 120 years ago—Umwertung aller Werte (transvaluation of all values).

I see the photograph of the pro-Trayvon rally at the beginning of this entry as a kind of fulfillment of Nietzsche’s concept: Savagery, murder, wilding, thuggery, theft, brutality—none of these is worthy of moral condemnation. For these people, the only thing worthy of moral condemnation is an objective moral code.

Clark Coleman writes:

You wrote:

Jim [Kalb] says that the turn away from this suicidal liberalism will come when people see that the good, not freedom, is the highest principle.

This statement makes me skeptical, to put it mildly, that we can enlist much assistance from the libertarians of today in our battles against liberalism. In fighting against the colossal state, yes. In fighting for the good, no.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 31, 2012 11:59 PM | Send