By Peter Burfeind
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Recently I and a staff member in our ministry met with
others to plan a summer program in a black community where I serve as a
domestic missionary. The program was open to all children. We were invited to
do faith-based programming, but when its supervisors saw our curriculum and its
clear presentation of Jesus Christ, they asked us to steer more toward
character-building and moral lessons.
Keep out “titles,” they said. They were concerned we
would perpetuate the perception that Christianity is a white man’s religion
used to keep blacks dependent on the white man. The program’s theme was to be
about self-reliance rather than reliance on a white man’s God.
To be fair, this opinion was not held by everyone
involved in the program, and we now happily contribute our portion, with titles
and all, problem-free. But the accusation lingers because of the paradox it
unmasks in leftist thought.
Progressivism’s
Gnostic Solution to Their ‘Liar’s Paradox’
For instance, the view that religion is a tool of
oppressors used to keep the oppressed in line is taught by…a white man named
Karl Marx. Or again, who wrote a book called “Self-Reliance” but a white man
named Ralph Waldo Emerson? Who influenced him but a white man named Immanuel
Kant? And who was re-reading Emerson when he penned his anthem to the self,
“Thus Spake Zarathustra,” but…a white man named Frederick Nietzsche? Shall we
go on about all the white men whose thoughts have colonized the black minds who
were concerned about our white God?
This goes back to the nagging paradox of the
postmodernist epistemology that founds so much of the progressive cosmic
architecture: How can thought—which is claimed to be socially determined—itself
escape that very determination when it is progressive? A Marx or Weber or
Foucault will make claims about the absolute subjectivity of human thought,
claiming it’s determined by economics, culture, power, or whatever, while
somehow he exempts himself from the forces he claims tyrannize others’
thinking.
The answer: they think they’ve beat the Liar’s Paradox.
The Liar’s Paradox ponders whether you can believe a Cretan who says all
Cretans are liars. How do you beat this unbeatable paradox? You do it by transcending
the rules of logic to which us plebs are subject. Ultimately it’s a Gnostic
position, that a certain select few have been granted a bird’s eye view of the
cosmos and can see everything sub species
aeternatitas. (Meditate
on this image to understand how progressives think vis a vis the rest of us earth-bound masses.)
Thus Weber can transcend his own culture and recognize
the overpowering nature of culture on thought, or Marx can disconnect his
theories from the regular rules of economic determinism, or Foucault can scribe
language free of his own will to power, or sociology departments can claim the
mantle of objective science without any sense of irony.
Yet the Whiteness
and Maleness of Leftist Thought Lingers
But here’s the thing about Marx, Weber, and Foucault.
They were lily-white and—how do we put it these days—humans with penises. So
are the entire stable of modernist and postmodernist thinkers who have crafted
the cosmic architecture that has spawned, to pick a few relevant categories:
feminism, LGBT thought, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.
The irony is that the very thought giving life to the
accusation of Western colonialism—that dead, white Western males have
constructed power structures around the globe that serve only to advance their
power—is itself a colonization of black, woman, and LGBT minds by dead, white
Western males! I challenge anyone to follow the history of ideas back from a
modern leftist movement and not end up in a northern European cesspool of testosterone-permeated
whiteness.
This isn’t an issue for conservatives, who grant truth to
be objective, able to be sought, discussed, and not socially determined. If
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess we should be flattered
when progressives confidently present their thought as objective and universal.
Because, don’t look, progressives, but you’re imitating conservatives in
handling your first principles.
Hey, don’t feel bad. Come join us in our defense of
Western Civilization as a core of university education. If the white, male West
has struck “truth gold,” then by all means we should expect a gold rush from
all parts of the world. Christian missionaries evangelizing the unwashed third
worlders, sociological professors schooling traditionalist international
students on the mysterious ways of their oppression—what really is the
difference when you know you’ve come upon (cue reverb effects) the truth?
Truth-Lovers Are
the Real Ethnic Diversity Team
Well, there is one teensy difference. Christians teach
ultimately Northern African, Middle Eastern, and Greek thought and sociologists
teach stuff from dead, white males. Consider the stable of Western philosophers
who have constructed the cosmic architecture of the progressive mind: Hegel,
Kant, Marx, Comte, Darwin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, etc. If we
were to locate “ground zero” of their epistemological universe, it would be
somewhere in northwestern Germany. Sieg Heil!
By contrast, the conservative worldview arguably has as
its ground zero somewhere in the Near East. Its architects range from Moses to
Aristotle, from Jesus to Augustine. Augustine was an African, as was
Athanasius—the “black dwarf”—who was instrumental in laying down the Christian
doctrine of the Incarnation, so extremely influential in establishing Medieval
theology. I suppose certain Anglo-American thinkers—Locke, Smith, Burke,
Jefferson—would tug that ground zero northwest a bit, which would happily put
us in Cyprus.
But the leftism arising from modern thought is squarely a
white, male, Euro-centric thing. Wasn’t one of the big complaints of the
Enlightenment how stuck the Medieval tradition was to the ancients? Modern
leftist thought can truly boast being a Western white male phenomenon, breaking
free from ancient constraints.
Meanwhile, the same cannot be said of Christian and
Medieval thought, which was dependent on Greek philosophy and Near
Eastern/Northern African theology. The extent to which conservatives do reflect
anti- or even pre-modernism—an ongoing and valid observation of the progressive
Left—is the extent to which they have retained the earlier tradition against
the Western colonization of the mind. You might call them insurgents.
Or again, perhaps progressives could decry the prior
colonization of the white mind by Near Easterners, Greeks, and Africans.
Perhaps the rise of modernity and its rebellious child (postmodernism) is a
triumphant ascendency of white males against a more ancient colonialism on the
part of Greeks, Near Easterners, and Northern Africans. Again, Sieg Heil!
What a coup, too. White males come up with the thought
that all thought is determined by things like whiteness and maleness, deploring
along the way how white males have a history of imposing thought structures
that enhance their power, and they convince the world that nothing less than
History is on the side of their white male thought, and no, that sort of
thought coercion is not imposition of a thought structure! Satan couldn’t come
up with better legerdemain.
What can it be but projection when leftists accuse a
tradition rooted in African, Near Eastern, and Greek thought of being exactly
what leftists in fact are?
The Dark Side of
the Gnostic Solution
I’m having a bit of fun in the house of mirrors that is
progressive epistemology. But there’s an underlying horror show suggested by my
reference to the Gnostic solution to the paradox. By the standards of logic,
you can’t wriggle out of the Liar’s Paradox. But if you’re the one Cretan who
can escape your Cretan-ness, you can.
Yet this shouldn’t be possible. According to the various
social theories—all claiming to be scientific—it is an ironclad law that to be
human is to have all your thought and thinking inescapably determined by whatever
structures you’re born in. A Cretan can’t stop being a Cretan any more than an
apple can stop being pulled to the earth by gravity. At least that’s the
pretense of the sociologist (who fantasizes he’s doing science, but that’s
another story.) The only escape exists in something transcending the physical
nature of the subject, something outside its earthy, physical nature. Thus, if
you wished to escape your human-ness, you’d have to be supra- or trans-human.
This was the exact position of the Gnostics. A Gnostic
believes our flesh imprisons us in various fleshly designations—our place in
space and time; our sex; our family and culture; our race and country, the
language we grow up with. An elite few, however, are able to escape the tyranny
of flesh and its various institutions and systems. They are able to see things
purely, free of the various constructs established by life in a physical world.
This sets up, in effect, a radically binary world. Where
the non-Gnostic (traditionalist) understanding of human thought invites a host
of thinkers to discuss and strive for objective truth—yielding a form of
federalism that when working best begets humility, tolerance, and curiosity as
each deals with other seekers of the truth (i.e., what a university education
used to be)—the Gnostic says all these posers are blinded by social forces they
don’t perceive or understand. They’re all just on power quests, one blind
thinker imprisoned by social forces leading another, all living the delusion
they are pursuing the truth.
But he, the Gnostic, is not blind. Coupled with
evolutionary thinking, the Gnostic is one who has “progressed” to the next age,
who is on the right side of History, who is on the verge of trans-humanism, and
who is charged with shepherding us benighted folk into the bright future. The
program can’t be federal—a bunch of blind idiots leading other blind idiots in
random circles. It must be universal, the enlightened leading the benighted out
of systemic darkness into systemic light.
This is, needless to say, terrifying, because it dabbles
in the idea that those not properly advanced in their thinking are of a lesser species,
stifling the progress of the earth. And we’ve seen where that idea has led
before. Sieg Heil!
In any event, leftists need to answer why the white males
who have outlined their thinking are so special, having been granted Gnostic
enlightenment and anointed by History to school the world. Short of doing so,
they are nothing more than posers and oppressors themselves, according to the
very premises they’ve set up.
I can’t wait to see the answer.
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