Conservatives: Missing The Forest For The Trees

"Probably no one has coined as many memorable phrases about belief than GK Chesterton. His key insight was to observe that 'human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind'. Hope is like a drug which humanity can’t survive without. Therefore hope — and the faith that it will be fulfilled –  is 'as dangerous as fire.' The wisest treat it with caution because it can be twisted into a noose around their necks; but the most careless of humanity imagine themselves above it and fall into it more completely than those who see it from what it is. Chesterton wrote that 'the modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas.'"

Someone just sent me this Richard Fernandez piece, and that quote, above, made me laugh.

I was married to a killer NewAger, someone who was convinced - despite numerous failures - she could "heal", so the idea that "hope — and the faith that it will be fulfilled –  is 'as dangerous as fire'" isn't something I'm completely unfamiliar with.

As a matter of fact, I'd say I'm more familiar with the reality of Fernandez's topic than he is (I'm his "ordinary" guy who's been handed an "aim of some kind" while, apparently, he's a Christian who muses about cults now and then):

In other words, I've actually been living what he's just writing about - and writing about pretty cluelessly:



I think I might be able to see a few things Richard Fernandez, or most people reading this post, might not.

Like Chesterton's observation that "the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas" only leads me to Slavoj Žižek's observation that today "New Age 'Asiatic' thought ... is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism."

Didn't see that one coming, did you? That's right: you could already be under it's spell and not even know it.

Not getting mentioned much on the 6 'O Clock News, is it?

Yea, such little nuggets should start to inform your ideas about the reach of those "ridiculous" cult leaders pretty quick.

And you've got a lot of catching up to do:

"Political expression on the Left in the American sixties was split. Radical activists such as Students for a Democratic Society (1960-68) drew their ideology from Marxism, with its explicit atheism. But demonstrations with a large hippie contingent often mixed politics with occultism-magic and witchcraft along with costumes and symbolism drawn from Native American religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. For example, at the mammoth antiwar protest near Washington, DC, in October 1967, Yippies performed a mock-exorcism to levitate the Pentagon and cast out its demons. Not since early nineteenth-century Romanticism had there been such a strange mix of revolutionary politics with ecstatic nature-worship and sex-charged self-transformation. It is precisely this phantasmagoric religious vision that distinguishes the New Left of the American 1960s from the Old Left of the American 1930s and from France's failed leftist insurgency of 1968, both of which were conventionally Marxist in their indifference or antagonism to religion."

That's the history of your enemy.

Richard Fernandez is on Pajamas Media with Victor Davis Hanson, who's looking at our current politics and crying, "What is the logic behind something so clearly unhinged?"

Maybe , if Fernandez ever reads this, he can show it to VDH and everything will start to make a lot more sense. You know, like this:

"The Material Girl is such a fervent believer, she reportedly paid almost $10,000 to have the radiators in her 10-bedroom London house filled with Kabbalah holy water so the heating system would radiate spirituality, according to London’s News of the World.

Madonna, 51, reportedly believes it gives the house a spiritual quality and will help heal and protect its residents. The Pope doesn’t even go to such lengths at the Vatican.

'It’s cost a fortune. She’d have Kabbalah water coming out of the kitchen taps if she could,' a source told the tabloid.
Word about holy water coursing through the house leaked (so to speak) when plumbers were called to her residence to fix a faulty radiator.

The housekeeper informed them that they couldn’t drain the radiator because of the water.

'The housekeeper was in a flap and told them it was blessed water and they could not drain it,' the source said.

'But they insisted they had to change a broken valve. It took almost an hour before she gave in and allowed them to put the water in steel buckets, pleading with them not to spill a drop.'

Holy Kabbalah water apparently was one of the reasons behind Madonna’s split from Ritchie.

She apparently blew up when he cancelled a near $20,000 order for Kabbalah holy water to fill the swimming pool at their Wiltshire house, the paper reported.

Madonna was also said to have caused an uproar when boy toy Jesus Luz’s parents found out that Madonna was trying to convert their Roman Catholic raised son to the mystical religion."

It's called NewAge, Gentlemen. And it'll haunt your dreams.