Who Can Save Us From Western Civilisation?

by Robert Bruce (February 2016)

were acute prophets of these new men and it is the curse of the so called knowledge society that such maladjusted personalities are never in short supply. One of the perennial charms of Marxism is that it provides a crutch for this inflated self worth, and although in the most prosaically bourgeoisie and classless of civilizations, its mass appeal has always been muted; it has for that very reason always held a special appeal to intellectuals looking too engrave status distinctions against the common mob.

There is no genuine anti-Semitism, and certainly no such thing as a born anti-Semite. The adults to whom the cry for the blood of Jews has become second nature do not know the reason why any more than the young people who are called upon to spill that blood. Those in command who know the reasons, do not hate the Jews and do not love their own followers. But the hatred felt by the led, who can never be satisfied economically or sexually, knows no bounds.

Economically or sexually? It would be difficult to think of a passage which feels so tastelessly inappropriate and it lays out the passionless tone of a work intent on establishing a moral equivalence between the most prosaic liberal democracy and all the grim terrors of the Third Reich. Having missed fascism in Germany, Adorno was the first to discover it in Tinseltown, and being a German professor he could infuse his genteel prejudices with metaphysical pathos.

It would be ridiculous, he intoned in one of those flashes of profundity that dazzled sixties audiences, to reproach chewing gum for being an affront to metaphysics’ good taste, but one could probably show that Wrigley’s profits and their Chicago palace were due to its operation of a social function consisting in the reconciliation of men with their impoverished conditions of existence and dissuading them from criticizing them. It’s a matter of explaining that chewing gum, far from being harmful to metaphysics, is itself metaphysical.

The Authoritarian Personality

Of these taints Marcuse had plenty but they played well to the temper of the times.

Culture Death – Sex All the Time

Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer who took fright at the student movement, Marcuse indulged every passing enthusiasm. Few intellectuals offered a more vivid spectacle of that prostitution of the intellect which an excess of democracy can bring about and his philosophy, such as it was, looks like little more than an infantile totalitarian temptation. Asked what his utopia might look like Marcuse spoke glowingly of ‘a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous sexuality’ that ‘protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality’. He recommends returning to a state of ‘primary narcissism’ in which one will find ‘the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death: silence, sleep, night, paradise – the Nirvana principle not as death but as life.

Amidst all the carnage of this over-sexed drug addled oblivion the inevitable self-parodying priorities of infantile leftism bloomed. As the personal became political, it was inevitable that sex, suitably cheapened and reduced to its Kinsey Report bare minimum of release-restraint, would dominate their Maoist self-criticism sessions, and sometimes the dialectical tensions were explosive. Bernadine Dohrn, a particularly skilled sexual predator attracted the reproach from Mark Rudd that ‘power flowed from her c….t’. Uproar followed and after atoning for the implied sexism the rebuke softened: Bernadine’s c…..t  in fact ‘goes to wherever the power is’. Doubtless to be young at such a dawn was very heaven, but even so one imagines you can have too much of a good thing. Whilst the slogans of the counter-culture screamed liberation, the practice of its most determined cults aimed to obliterate the individual and void the sexual act of personality – a feat pulled off in just the kind of bonobo-like promiscuity Aldous Huxley had depicted in Brave New World. There in the sterile utopia of the future, a regime of sexual indulgence is encouraged, not in order to liberate, but in order to inculcate a grinding social quiescence where the trade-offs between sensation and culture are clearly set out. 

Responding to the Shakespeare besotted savage’s question of why the new society can no longer produce tragedy, Mr Mond lays bare the consequences of this mandatory hedonism:

It is Forbidden to Forbid – The Perversions of Cohn Bendit

Like so many student radical icons, Cohn Bendit exchanged violent street theatre for trendy pedagogy and the biographical reflections of his experiences in an experimental kindergarten in Frankfurt in the seventies, leave little to the imagination

Go figure

In an age where our public virtue is exhausted by a kitsch sentimentality about a childhood we have profaned, Bendit’s nauseating comments are particularly shocking and have come back to haunt his career in a way that was barely conceivable in earlier decades. As late as 1986 the German Green party passed a resolution advocating the legalization of non-violent sexual relations between adults and children. This clear endorsement of pedophilia was only pushing the premises of the counter-culture to its logical conclusion, and it is these that provide the real problem. Perverts are every society’s misfortune but to give them an ideological warrant is a much bigger problem. For all his cringing exculpations Bendit’s contextual explication, to use the favoured Tariq Ramadan formulae, only restates the problem. Elaborating a particularly unpromising and ill advised line of defence in Der Spiegel, Bendit was at pains to point out that he did not have the courage of his convictions he was in a provocative fashion trying to provoke bourgeois conventions:

Good to know but how reassuring exactly is this?

Epilogue

The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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