Readings (19 June 2014)

The Great Disruptor, by Matthew Boudway of Commonweal, a paper given at a recent conference on Catholicism and Libertarianism, or Catholicism vs. Libertarianism. He distinguishes the two types of libertarianism and then comments on the type that Catholic libertarians favor.

It is not an accident that sophisticated Catholic champions of free-market ideology tend to rely less on the work of Rand or Nozick than on that of Hayek and the Chicago School economists. For Rand and Nozick make claims that are obviously at odds with the Gospel. This may be truer of Rand’s vulgar Nietzscheanism than it is of Nozick’s analytically fastidious case for self-ownership, but it is generally true of both of them. Both were suspicious of any claim about what an individual owed his or her community. The very idea of the common good, as anything other than the aggregate welfare of individuals, was in their judgment nothing more than a mystification. The idea of solidarity implied collectivism; and collectivism, they thought, always entails coercion.

Bill Banning Tattooing and Piercing Dogs and Cats Passes Unanimously from the New York Observer describes the outlawing of a practice I never knew anyone did.

Dugin’s Evil Theology, by Robert Zubrin in National Review Online. If this story about a stereotypical Russian fascist apocalyptic mystic and his influence upon Putin is accurate, it’s worrisome. Quoting a new book on Dugin, he argues that:

For Dugin, logos is replaced by chaos, and the very symbol of chaos magic is the symbol of Eurasia: ‘Logos has expired and we all will be buried under its ruins unless we make an appeal to chaos and its metaphysical principles, and use them as a basis for something new.’ Dugin dressed his discussion of logos in the language of Heidegger, but his terminology cannot be read outside of a 2,000-year-old Western, biblical tradition which associates the Logos with the Christ, and Dugin’s invocation of chaos against logos leads to certain inevitable conclusions regarding his doctrines.

Putin’s Brain, from Foreign Affairs, suggests Zubrin’s article is basically right.

His ideas of conservative revolution are adapted from German interwar thinkers who promoted the destruction of the individualistic liberal order and the commercial culture of industrial and urban civilization in favor of a new order based on conservative values such as the submission of individual needs and desires to the needs of the many, a state-organized economy, and traditional values for society based on a quasi-religious view of the world. For Dugin, the prime example of a conservative revolution was the radical, Nazi-sponsored north Italian Social Republic of Salò (1943–45).

Indeed, Dugin continuously returned to what he saw as the virtues of Nazi practices and voiced appreciation for the SS and Herman Wirth’s occult Ahnenerbe group. In particular, Dugin praised the orthodox conservative-revolutionary projects that the SS and Ahnenerbe developed for postwar Europe, in which they envisioned a new, unified Europe regulated by a feudal system of ethnically separated regions that would serve as vassals to the German suzerain. It is worth noting that, among other projects, the Ahnenerbe was responsible for all the experiments on humans in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.

Charming.

The World Belongs to Those Who Show Up, by Mattias Caro, on Ethika Politika. Quoting the Catholic theologian Regis Martin, who said “It [the future] belongs to those who show up,” Caro writes:

The world largely lacks hope these days. The lack of hope manifests itself in apathy, but not necessarily as an indifference to condition of the world. The apathy comes largely in the form of resignation — perhaps even a fated determinism — that my life is the way it is and regardless of how I live it, the best I can do is cope well with it. Think the Gospel according to Joel Osteen.

That is not in any way showing up. When he says “show up,” my sense in Martin’s words is that he is saying more than, “Hey! I’m here!” It means being an active and determined participant. You hear it all the time in sports talk: You’ve got to decide to “show up” to the game if you want to win it. Make a choice to live life a certain way. In that sense to “show up” requires a great deal of discernment, that is, of thought about my life, my gifts and my place in society. I cannot simply wake up every morning and do what I always do, thinking, “Well that’s just how things are.”