Category: Culture

Dabney on Fiction … McAtee Applying Dabney

Speaking of the dangers of an immoderate reading of fiction, R. L. Dabney wrote,

“But there is also an injury to the moral character as well as to the habits of mental industry, which is a necessary result of the fundamental laws of feeling. Exercise is the great instrument ordained by God to strengthen the active principles of the heart. On the other hand, all the passive susceptibilities are worn out and deadened by frequent impressions. Illustrations of these two truths are familiar to every one; but there is one well-known instance which offers us at once an example of the truth of both of them. It is that of the experienced and benevolent physician. The active principle of benevolence is strengthened by his daily occupations until it becomes a spontaneous and habitual thing in him to respond to every call of distress, regardless of personal fatigue, and to find happiness in doing so. But at the same time, his susceptibilities to the painful impressions of distressing scenes are so deadened that he can act with nerve and coolness in the midst of suffering, the sight of which would at first have unmanned him.

Now, all works of fiction are full of scenes of imaginary distress, which are constructed to impress the sensibilities. The fatal objection to the habitual contemplation of these scenes is this, that while they deaden the sensibilities, they afford no occasion or call for the exercise of active sympathies. Thus the feelings of the heart are cultivated into a monstrous, an unnatural, and unamiable disproportion. He who goes forth in the works of active benevolence among the real sufferings of his fellow creatures will have his sensibilities impressed, and at the same time will have opportunity to cultivate the principle of benevolence by its exercise. Thus the qualities of his heart will be nurtured in beautiful harmony, until they become an ornament to his character and a blessing to his race. This is God’s “school of morals.” This is God’s plan for developing and training the emotions and moral impulses. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” And the adaptation of this plan of cultivation to the laws of man’s nature shows that the inventor is the same wise Being who created man. It is by practicing this precept of the gospel that man is truly humanized. But the beholder of these fictitious sorrows has his sympathies impressed, and therefore deadened, while those sympathies must necessarily remain inert and passive, because the whole scene is imaginary. And thus, by equal steps, he becomes at once sentimental and inhuman. While the Christian, whose heart has been trained in the school of duty, goes forth with cheerful and active sympathies in exercises of beneficence towards the real woes of his neighbor, the novel reader sits weeping over the sorrows of imaginary heroes and heroines, too selfish and lazy to lay down the fascinating volume and reach forth his hand to relieve an actual sufferer at his door.”

1.) This is not to throw out all reading of fiction. It is merely to note the effect of a constant diet of fiction upon the Christian mind. And since we are going to be saying something about the pulpit, this isn’t intended to communicate that the Sermon story has no place whatsoever.

2.) We need to keep in mind that whatever Dabney has to say here about the immoderate reading of fiction would apply to the immoderate viewing of films, plays, and television.

3.) I’ve spent a significant portion of time in my adult life reading sermons. I can tell you that over the last two to three hundred years sermons have changed a great deal. If you listen to sermons today as compared to a sermon from almost any of the Puritans you see the centrality of the sentimental in sermons and interestingly enough that happens quite often via the telling of the fiction story from the pulpit as part of (and often central to) the sermon. In the Preacher business this is called “narrative preaching.”

4.) Dabney’s point is that the saturation of the feelings, via the absorption of fiction, without some kind of corresponding action leaves one to rot, much like a sponge that soaks up water that is never squeezed out. If this is true and if it is true that the sermon has largely become a platform for story telling, then one is left to wonder if much of our modern sermonizing is resulting, not in building up the saints, but is working to leave them to rot.

5.) Story telling from the pulpit and fiction in general is like a drug for the person who is hooked. Once hooked the fiction and story telling must get better and better — more and more sentimental and sensational — in order to work within the listener or reader the desired effect. Pity the Preacher who doesn’t do the sappy and sentimental story because a generation raised on story telling and fiction is a generation that will not abide a Preacher who is didactic as opposed to sentimental and sensational.

6.) Dabney writes, “it is by practicing this precept of the gospel that man is truly humanized.” Based on this statement Dabney would be chastised by many Reformed people today since according to R2K it is not possible for the Gospel to be practiced by men since the Gospel, according to these definitions, is only what God does. Silly Dabney.

7.) I’m going to contend that this push towards the fiction in our culture but also in the Church is closely tied up with the feminization of the culture and the Church. Fiction fills the role of wooing the reader. Biblically speaking, it is women who have been wooed and men are active in the wooing. Fiction feminizes men because it casts men in the role of the one wooed.

For a two good books that go into this subject with greater depth see,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Feminization-American-Culture-Douglas/dp/0374525587/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358201187&sr=8-1&keywords=ann+douglas

http://www.amazon.com/Church-Impotent-Leon-J-Podles/dp/1890626198/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358201250&sr=1-2&keywords=the+feminization+of+the+church

Thomas Watson & Bertolt Brecht On Babylonian Multiculturalism

A friend posted this quote, this morning. He is a Filipino Doctor practicing medicine somewhere in these united States,

“Methinks I hear England’s passing bell go. Let us shed some tears over dying England. Let us bewail our intestine divisions. England’s divisions have been fatal. They brought in the Saxons, Danes, Normans. ‘If a kingdom divided cannot stand’, how do we stand but by a miracle of free grace? Truth is fallen and peace is fled. England’s fine coat of peace is torn and, like Joseph’s coat, dipped in blood.”

Thomas Watson — Reformed Doctor of the Church
“The Beatitudes- An Exposition of Matthew 5:1-12”, chapter 5, ‘Blessed Are They That Mourn.’

If, even if Watson’s time, among the Doctors of the Church, there existed an awareness of the dangers of heterogeneity, in a culture and social order where the heterogeneity bemoaned was far less fractious then what we are experimenting with today in this country how much more should we be aware of the dangers of balkanization today when the balkanization that is being forced upon us is characterized by a far greater degree of separation between faiths and people groups then they were seeking to slam together in Watson’s own time?

Just keep in mind, that what is going on with the current immigration policy of the West is a drive towards a New World Order where, in the words of Bertolt Brecht,

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

The Solution

I agree with the great Reformed minister Thomas Watson and the 20th century poet Bertolt Brecht regarding the dangers of Babylonian Multiculturalism.

Nicolosi Analyzes Sodomite Origins & Behavior

Joseph Nicolosi, in his book Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, sees homosexuality as essentially a “male deficit,” which results from family problems, specifically an estrangement between father and son at a crucial stage of the son’s psychic development. As a result of this failure to receive the father’s approval, the homosexual seeks that sense of masculinity from sexual contact with men who seem to embody what the homosexual feels he lacks. “After years of secrecy, isolation and alienation,” Nicolosi writes, describing the psychic odyssey of one of his patients but describing Isherwood’s odyssey from Victorian England to decadent Berlin as well, “most young men find the gay world powerfully alluring, with its romantic, sensual, outrageous, and embracing qualities.” This psychological need for the father’s approval becomes, generally, through seduction by an older man, attached to sexual behavior which quickly becomes compulsive and self-destructive. The homosexual, according to Nicolosi, is attracted to “Mysterious men… those who possess enigmatic masculine qualities that both perplex and allure the client. Such men are overvalued and even idealized, for they are the embodiment of qualities that the client wishes he had attained for himself.”

Women, on the other hand, represent neither beauty nor pleasure, as they do to normal men, but a strange sense of heteronomous duty. Women become a challenge to which the homosexual does not feel adequate, and, with that, comes the sense that liking women and going out with them and having sex with them or marry them are duties imposed from without by forces alien to the “real self….”

Since sex for the homosexual is essentially an attempt to appropriate the masculinity that he feels lacking in himself from someone who seems to embody it, sex with girls has no purpose, since girls do not have what he lacks. Once it gets construed in this way, sex becomes an essentially vampiric act. It is either sucking the desired object to obtain its male essence, to being sucked for the same purpose. Isherwood makes this vampiric character clear, but in a slightly veiled manner, when he talks about Bubi, the first object of his homosexual attentions in Berlin: “Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself, forever, to possess him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi — for magical, not gastronomic, reasons.”

Again, Isherwood refers to magic, this time to a magic form of cannibalism that will allow him to keep “to Bubi all to himself forever, to possess him utterly, “in other words, to appropriate forever from Bubi what Isherwood himself lacks Cannibalism, as the case of Jeffery Dahmer showed, is nothing more than an extreme form of homosexuality. Both actions involved a “magical” ingestion of the desired characteristics of the other. In this regard, cannibalism is but one term in a series of psychic linkages that radiate out from the vampire, the prime representative of the Weimar Republic culture. With the breakdown of the family, the son does no get the needed affirmation of his own masculinity from the father. As a result, sex becomes an attempt to alleviate this male deficit. It becomes an exercise in feedon on another person, which gets fantasized sometimes as cannibalism but, more often than not, as a sucking off the liquid essence from the desire object in the actual act of felatio or in th symbolic act of vampirism. (Magnus Hirschfield, by the way, in his magnum opus listing all the sexual variants, lists vampirism as one and cites the specific case of a man who could not reach orgasm without first ingesting the blood of his spouse. The Marquis de Sade lists a similar instance in “Justine.”

In either case, the point of the act is to assuage the hunger-like feeling that is the physical manifestation of the deficit nature of homosexuality, but also of lust. As one of Nicolosi’s clients explains about his sexual involvement with a male he admired: “that power and control — I’ve always wanted to draw off of that, to be so together.”

Like a vampire, the homosexual “draws off” that power of sucking, by draining the desired object of its life-force and absorbing it into himself in some ritualistic “magical” banquet. Of course, this magic never works; in fact, it only exacerbates the loneliness and inadequacy which drove the homosexual to this form of sexual activity in the first place, and so, what arises in place of the “magic” is a compulsive, addiction like, vicious circle, in which the homosexual tries to compensate for a sense of masculine inadequacy by engaging in homosexual activity, which, once it’s over, only makes the sense of inadequacy seem even worse.

“Immediately after every homosexual experience,” one of Nicolosi’s clients explains, “it feels like something is missing. The closeness I wanted with another man just didn’t happen. I’m left with the feeling that sex is just not what I wanted.”

And once again, the vampire provides the best explanation of the cyclic nature of this pseudo-sexual activity. There is the depletion of death, the craving, the hunger for what the vampire lacks, which is temporarily alleviated by the sucking of fresh blood, but the transformation is eternally temporary, forcing the vampire, or, in this case, the homosexual, to engage in a never ending search for new partners / victims so that he can draw off from them a momentary escape from his feeling of isolation and inadequacy. “Considering the habit forming nature of sexual behavior,” Nicolosi writes, “the more homosexuality active the client is, the more difficult the course of treatment.”

Dr. E. Michael Jones
Libido Dominandi — pg. 246-248

You Can Run Out Of Money For People, Or, You Can Run Out Of People For Money

“Speaking to USA Today about deficits, Horney explained why Social Security should not be counted as part of the U.S. budget deficit. It shouldn’t because Congress can alter its liabilities by reducing benefits or raising taxes. Or, as Horney more bluntly put it, ‘Retirement programs are not legal obligations.’”

Ever since I was a boy I’ve heard people say that, “you’ll never get out of Social Security what you put into it,” and, “Social Security will go bankrupt before you’re old enough to collect it.” Now, every so often the FEDS will assure us that, “Social Security will be there for us when we retire,” thus trying to alleviate concern among people that eventually the FEDS will act on the fact that it really is the case that “Retirement programs are not legal obligations.” However, there is another way for the FEDS to live up to their Social Security obligations. The FEDS can either reduce the money going out to the people, or they can reduce the people receiving the money.

And here is where the Death Panels in Obama-care come into play in my estimation. The Death Panels (call them what you will, but I believe they are death panels regardless of the euphemism that anyone applies) could work to take the pressure off the of Federal Social Security responsibility by making sure that people don’t live long enough to milk the Social Security pay out.

Already apparatchiks are calling for Death Panels as seen in a recent New York Times Editorial,

“We need Death Panels.

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

You see, one way to get a handle on the fallout from the Ponzi Scheme that is both Social Security and Medicare is for the FEDS to pull a “Logan’s Run.”

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/

Of course we can’t fault the FEDS completely. We’ve brought this time of reckoning upon ourselves by allowing these Socialist redistributionists programs to ever see the light of day. Our Grandparents and Parents sowed the wind by allowing this Socialism to go forward and now we are reaping the whirlwind of their bad decisions.

Leddihn & McAtee On The Conservative Disposition

“Conservatism on the Continent was based on disciplined thought from the start. Chronologically it falls into the period of late Romanticism and opposes ideas and ideologies emanating from the sentimental disorders of early Romanticism. Its opponent is the French Revolution (including the Napoleonic aftermath) with its egalitarianism, nationalism and laicism. But, as it so often happen in the battle of ideas, the good old principle fas est ab hoste doceri (it is right to learn even from an enemy) is applied a great deal to liberally, with the result that early 19th century conservatism has a rigidity and harshness reminding us of the hard school through which these early conservatives had to go: the school of French Revolution and the interminable sanguinary wars caused by the Napoleonic aftermath. Their school, as we said, was tough and therefore an element of severity and repression characterizes early conservatism, a certain belief in force if not in brutality, an unwillingness to enter any sort of dialogue or to conduct gentle and shrewd reeducation of its opponents. One does not discuss with assassins from whom one never expected humaneness, leniency, or tolerance. They must be mastered, fought, jailed, and, if worst comes to worst, locked up or exiled. In view of the horrors of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s trail of blood all over Europe from the gates of Lisbon to the heart of Moscow, this attitude is not surprising.”

Leftism; From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — pg 387

Conservatives practice tough love born of a love for God and people. This tough love that comes across, in Leddihnn’ words, “as rigid and harsh” and “severe and repressive,” is born of both a knowledge of where matters are going if Leftism and its practitioners are not stopped and of a love for God and people.

Epistemologically self conscious conservatives (and such people are always Christians) are aware of the stakes. They have read Shire, Conquest, and Solzhenitsyn. Epistemologically self conscious conservatives understand the anti-Christ ideology that animates Leftism and because conservatives are familiar with history they know where that ideology leads. Epistemologically self conscious conservatives have read the stories about what happened to those who have tried to resist the plans of the left; the Vendee, the Kulaks, and the Boer. They can recite the cruel accounts against Maria Luisa of Savoy, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and Isaak Babel. Countless are the names of those who have had the cruelty of the left visited upon them. Epistemologically self conscious conservatives are familiar with the cruel tools of the left; Necklacing, Gloving (peeling the skin off the hands,), aborting, and Madam La Guillotine. Epistemologically self conscious conservatives can tell you about the Gulag, the Concentration camp, and the Psychological ward — residences provided by the left for the burgeoning legion of dissenters. Epistemologically self conscious conservatives are mindful of the left’s brainwashing, propaganda, and manipulation machine. You can hardly blame epistemologically self conscious conservatives for not being sunny and cheery when it comes to warning people off of the ideology and practice of the Left. How many of millions of graves must conservatives weep over — graves that need not had been filled if conservative counter-revolutionaries had been listened to — until epistemologically self conscious conservatives will be cut some slack regarding the fact that they are not as nice as they might otherwise be?

It is not Conservatives who are the cold-hearted, rigid, and repressive bastards. Any edginess you see in a epistemologically self conscious conservative is a edginess that is born of compassion for people. We have seen the ugly maw of Leftism and we would walk through bedlam and chaos in order to deliver people from the Christ-less ugly and monochromatic world that the left always try to produce in its mad pursuit of Utopia.