Richard Greenhorn says, and we believe him, that there have been five, count ’em, five revolutions in the West, each piling on to the destructive forces of the previous. These five are (in my words):
Protesting Christian Revolt;
Révolution française;
The collapse of WWI;
The Pride of 1968;
Coronadoom and the Cult of Safety First!
Because of my Florida travels, I cannot do this book justice, but I wanted to have the review out so that you have time to get a copy for Christmas for the thinking people in your family. It makes an excellent gift. Get it here.
Do not give this frivolously. The text is dense and rich, and covers a wide swath of history, with deep discussions across many areas of thought from theology to economics. In no way is this light reading.
Now to it. All the revolutions, with, I think, at least one more to come, are in favor of “liberalism”, better called Modernism, a “force more insidious than communism, socialism, and Nazism.” All movement is away from self-rule to Expert-rule. “Liberals,” as we all know, “are the true enemy of liberty.” Each successive revolution moves us ever closer to the old joke: all that is not forbidden is mandatory.
Greenhorn deemphasizes the traditional story of the Protesting Christian Revolt, which is the role of Luther, whose complaints about indulgences and the like were just. He focuses instead on the wider movement, especially on what we now call economics, particularly using the example of England. The theft of the Church land in England, for instance, had far-reaching consequences.
The land and lucre stolen through the course of the revolt provided the resources for the initial capital investments so necessary for the [new economic] system to prosper. Likewise, the huge populations of people thrown off ecclesial land created that unfortunate mass that would later be known as the proletariat, the large reserve army of labor that could be exploited without moral qualm.
“Proles” today only increase, by design, mainly by importation. Greenhorn throws a twist on the Protesting Christian work ethic. Before the revolt,
the parasite class could not damn so many men to penury under the old Catholic view of mankind, while the Calvinist system provided the greatest justification for the theft ever conceived: The victims were unworthy, the unelect, the damned.
Greenhorn is by from the first author to tie our current predicament to the puritanistic ethos of Protestingism. But he’s one of the few who sees how the great bane of “tolerance” grew from it. Tolerance, “A notion once condemned as anathema by every knowing Christian was now help up as the highest encomium of the Faith.”
If your hackles are rising because you, my dear reader, are in a Protesting sect yourself, know that Greenhorn’s not holding Protesting Christians of today up for special derision, because later he shows how the “spirit” of Vatican II has seized the Church in the same way. Also because “Liberalism has long since relinquished explicitly Protestant theology as a means for promoting itself”. And anyway, we all have to navigate the conditions in which we find ourselves, especially at birth.
Greenhorn is also the first author that I’ve seen to tie the creation of scientism—the very word he uses—to the French Revolt Against Reality. Well, it follows, does it not, that any sect that would raise a temple to Reason must fall into scientism. Which we, even now, and with great agony, suffer from.
The French slayed Natural Law, aided by Hobbes, who “helped unleash that great blight on intellectual discourse”, the so-called state of nature. From which one of the most idiotic ideas of all time came: the blank slate and perfection of man through education. About this, and scientism, I believe regular readers are well familiar, so we pass by quickly and come to the “mass”.
Greenhorn doesn’t mean the mob or rabble, but mass man, the great swell of humanity most susceptible to propaganda and manipulation, both necessary and indispensable attributes of all Our Democracys (there is no typo here). If you have people vote, they must be made the vote the right way. And the only way to ensure that is an endless parade of entertainment passed off as news.
The battle ever after [the French Revolt Against Reality] would be how men were to be utilized towards the remaking of the social order. In the matter of political existence, men were no longer an end in themselves, but a means for arriving at an ideologue’s preferred outcome.
In English, we have a great many cognates (which will turn out to be an amusing pun) for “flood”. All have been put into rightful service for the quantify of blood spilled in the Bolshevik Revolution, and its continuing aftermath. Of which you will already know. But here Greenhorn ties it all in with what happened in the States, and with capitalism.
This is one of the thickest parts of the book, and I cannot here do more than provide a few quotations of some unfamiliar and counter-intuitive arguments about capitalism.
Capitalism is the most effective means by which ideological change is given material form. It is in a sense conservative, as it appeals to man’s sensibility, which always strives for bodily contentment. But as a motive force it is most anarchic, the material means of perpetual revolution.
The reader surely already grasps that profit for its own sake only leads to grief. The form of economics we have now produces a commodification of everything, the growth of planned obsolescence, and the cancer of sophisters, economists, and calculators. Property is no longer private, but must fall to he who can demonstrate—which is to say, calculate—the “optimal” use for it. We now have a “fascination and total reliance on profit and market value in place of concern for real production.”
The sins of the Non-sexual Revolution of 1968 are much closer to us. This is where the Enlightenment’s goal of egalitarianism began its corrosive work of leveling in earnest.
Equality as a principle is nothing and can be nothing but an annihilating and depersonalizing force. It is nothing but and can be nothing but a mechanism for dissolving all forms of genuine diversity in social organizations, which alone provides the means of cultivating individuality.
There can be no individuality when Experts have calculated the “optimal” way to live. “If you’ll turn to page 132 of our PowerPoint and examine equation 332…” The Civil Rights act is, by now, well known as an earthquake wrapped in a flaming tornado which has passed over a munitions dump (now how’s that for a mixed metaphor). Equality is the the grey gooification of everything.
Every individual minority was offered the opportunity [in the Act] for unearned benefit, meritless importance, costless recompense, and frail human dignity cannot long last against the beck and call of obsequious power and capacious reward.
Harvard’s Claudine Gay, anybody?
We have space only to note Greenhorn’s trenchant analysis of how all this affects criminal law. We are ruled as a police state, with the right of self defense being stripped away. We therefore become not pawns, but something lower. Maybe those little plastic dots used as markers in kids’ games, manipulated by rulers.
Finally comes our latest, but I think not our last, Revolution. The rise of the Cult of Public Health, the growth of the Cult of Safety First!, all married to our Expertocracy, which gave us the coronadoom panic. Not just gave us, for Experts created the bug in the first place, but sustained the panic, relished it, and reveled in it.
Long time readers will recall there were only a scant, at best, handful of us from the very beginning screaming, into to void as it turned out, about what awaited us were we to surrender to the latest idiot panic. “Protest,” Greenhorn reminds us, “was so rare as to be practically nonexistent.” Maybe next time you listen to your old Uncle Sergeant Briggs.
We surrendered. And boy, o boy, did we pay the price. Are still paying it. And we’ll go on paying it, for there is now this creation of a thing called “General Socialized Health.” General Health, is a “notional concept. It possess no necessary unity to the physical and mental health of the public, but exists to serve some ulterior ends.”
Health, and its departures, is now defined and decided by Experts. Blubbery 300-pound five foot four females are “healthy”, whereas men who lift weights are not, because they can turn out to be “white supremacists.” A child can be cut up in an attempt, in vain, and remaking its sex. That’s healthy. Having babies makes “climate change”.
The Fifth, and perhaps penultimate, Revolution
seeks to move every remnant of the social world online, and to homogenize the existence of social order under sundry pieces of software…The draconian lockdowns [you frightened simpering idiots] could not have been endured had physical reality itself not already proven itself supplemental to the activities of commerce and government…
The Coronavirus could not have been a pandemic if the smartphone had not allowed it to be.
We made the same point in The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.
Now that we have surrendered, almost everywhere, to the coronadoom, we will surrender to the next Current Thing. Even faster. You have to remember, dear reader, that the panic was welcomed by many. And beloved by rulers and Experts.
Solution?
There is no hope of future progress without recultivation of the individual. There is no Caesar who might rise to redeem our wretched system, for the masses as they exist cannot foster great men, and any man worthy of the title could have no great ambition to rule over such creatures.
How are we getting out of all of this? We ain’t, brother. We ain’t. Prepare yourself.
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Perhaps the Crusades bore at least some aspects of Revolution Zero, in particular the triumph of Good Intentions™ over decent outcomes.
But Briggs; Calvin was a much better businessman and politician than Jesus.
Jesus didn't last a week in Jerusalem.
He wouldn't have lasted a night in Geneva.
Get with prosperity Gospel WMB.
Cuz why do anything if there's no money it it?
Besides which Evangelicals are guaranteed salvation !
Catholics ain't got no such thing, nor Jews, nor Muslims, nor any number of sects that still have sin.
You wanna have guilt and poverty ?
Well we got that now !
We whites and ain't Gay !
Whatta we need God for ?
WE DON'T.