If you’re interested in plowing deeper into the causes of the current spate of riots, statue toppling, and angry mobs from Trump’s inaugural through the Kavanaugh hearings to the mayhem in our cities, one need look no further than a recent piece in National Review (August 29) by M. D. Aeschliman. In a nutshell, today’s urban street thugs – always half-literate despite privileged college admissions and comfortable upbringings – are unknowingly devotees of the 18th century’s Jean Jacques Rousseau, a man who dumped his children on the doorsteps of orphanages for someone else to be burdened with their upkeep. Rousseau is responsible for much of the secular dogmas and liturgies of today’s left. It’s a direct contradiction to Christianity and nearly all norms that have made human flourishing possible.
Rousseau would make two things broadly popular: hedonism and a coercive state. On the one hand, he dispensed with the truth of human corruptibility in the doctrine of original sin and replaced it with a benign emotionalism that was, in his mind, ruined by centuries of traditions. And off our angry urchins go running to the latest gang assault on a statue, a re-imbibing of the NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, and the erasure of anything older than last hour’s Twitter storm. The shattering of norms – that old stuff again – points the way to a radical individual autonomy and a sanctioning of depravity. For Rousseau, nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of self-defined sensualism.
On the other hand, if we aren’t to be governed by anything older than last night’s leftovers and life is one continuous bacchanalia, Rousseau deposits in tradition’s stead the shadowy, spectral-like “general will”. The people according to Rousseau have a mind, or “general will”, but how do we know what it wants? Good luck … and run to the hills. Flight is the only practical option because there will always be someone to step forward with the power to decipher the national brain. Der fuhrer would make much of the all-conquering national will as embodied in him. Lenin’s will was not safely questioned. Longevity as a real or imagined opponent of Mao was an alien concept. Need I mention others who drank from Rousseau’s well? Tradition- and norm-bashing seem to lead to ugly places.
The historian Thomas Carlyle, the real prophet of today’s woes, writing in the middle of the 19th century did more than anyone to accurately plumb the depths of the French Revolution – the child of Rousseau’s mendacious thoughts – in his book of the same name. As a radical to the Tories and Tory to the radicals, he could fathom the errors of a barnacle-encrusted society while at the same time appreciate the fragility of the social order. The Jacobins destroyed the old social order and created tyranny.
Are BLM, Antifa, and the radicals now firmly ensconced in the leadership of the Democratic Party taking the place of yesteryear’s Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and Castro’s Cuban Communist Party? Or are we to separate the Democratic Party and place it alongside Kerensky’s Socialists? And you ought to know what happened to them. For the Bolsheviks, two’s a crowd and off to the gulag and execution squads for moderates and competitor extremists.
Please read the article … and reread it. You’ll get more out of it the second time around. If you don’t want to work that hard, turn in your citizenship card because a republic requires its citizens to do the heavy lifting, or be horrifically ruled by the few who will. Lenin had a name for them: The Vanguard Elite.
RogerG