Religion has become less influential over the past century because many people have found their needs for comfort were better met by secular alternatives to religion. For example, instead of explaining natural phenomena such as earthquakes as the will of God, many people have found scientific explanations more persuasive. Even religious people today are far less religious than the religious of yesteryear in that they understand less and less of the world around them in religious terms (they will often accept scientific explanations over divine explanations).
More efficient peoples and arguments will inevitably displace the less efficient and hence become colonialist.
* Left Eclecticism encompasses a “wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought.” But these are unified by “[a]n understanding, ultimately borrowed from the Marxist ethos, that analytic and theoretical discourse is to be judged primarily by the radicalism of its stance. The schools of thought thus favored make sharply divergent claims, yet all of them set themselves against allegedly repressive Western institutions and practices. In dealing with a given painting, novel, or piece of architecture, especially one dating from the capitalist era, they do not aim primarily to show the work’s character or governing idea. The goal is rather to subdue the work through aggressive demystification—for example, by positing its socioeconomic determinants and ideological implications, scanning it for any encouraging signs of subversion, and then judging the result against an ideal of total freedom.” Like Left Eclecticism, the Right Eclecticism of conservative claims of cultural oppression is characterized by sharp internal disagreements as to both substance and rhetoric. But also like Left Eclecticism, it is marked by a certain unity of purpose. And this is to “subdue” liberalism through “aggressive demystification.” Right Eclecticism seeks, not to refute liberalism as a set of ideas, but to expose liberalism’s basic self-understanding as fraudulent, to reveal that the various existential, epistemic, and ideological motivations that Jost and other liberals would impute to conservatives are the hidden rot lying at the core of liberal virtue. It is liberals, not conservatives, who need order, closure, and structure. It is liberals, not conservatives, who pursue group dominance and endorse inequality. If conservatives are to discredit conservaphobia, they must first discredit those from whom it issues, the liberal elites, and this is what the critical theory of the Right ultimately endeavors to do.
* Whether at home or abroad, the forcible imposition of liberalism will be perceived as “a form of aggression or paternalistic colonialism.”111This is the challenge D’Souza raises for those who ordinarily make it a principle to approach non-Western cultures in a spirit of intellectual charity, on the premise that our reflexive aversion to their ostensible illiberalism may be tainted with ethnocentric prejudice. For the upshot of D’Souza’s argument is that liberals must treat American traditionalists with the same deference that they would extend to denizens of the developing world. However one weighs the morality of “imposing liberalism,” there can be no rational basis for letting themere geographic proximity of American traditionalists enter the equation.
* conservatives believe that the legacy of the 60s lies in bohemia’s colonization of mainstream American life.
* There is no “centrist” morality because a centrist is merely a biconceptual in whom the two systems have established themselves in roughly equal proportion, or in whom the two systems operate only on a general level without having securely colonized the synaptic connections associated with particular spheres. This is why centrists can find themselves going “back and forth” on issues.
* How could society demand any more affective-instinctual self-control from its members than the nature of man’s relation to the universe can warrant, or even make intelligible? Being “opened out” to forces that transcended and engulfed him, the individual was scarcely the center of the universe, or even the center of his own universe, and so he could hardly be expected to exercise a level of self-control and self-restraint that presupposes just this. Carnival was a ritual acknowledgment of these limitations. It acknowledged a world of agents perennially subject to evil spirits able to colonize their subjectivities, a world in which an ordered mental life could not be assured by mere will power because that very will power depended on maintaining a proper relationship to a broader cosmic order that was always in flux for temporal beings. Only God himself, the pinnacle of the Great Chain of Being, was absolute and unchanging, and humans could not but fall short of that high standard. The pre-modern condition was therefore marked by its own kind of relativism and pluralism. Medievals recognized that most people were never going to achieve sainthood and that it was therefore foolish to insist on a single inflexible moral code to govern everyone at all times.
* While liberals are the foremost carriers of the buffered identity in its most advanced iteration, conservatives have internalized that identity to a significant degree. And this is why they must feel perennially besieged by “liberalism,” haunted by the sense that it has usurped something which is theirs. They are struggling against the liberalism that lies within as well as the liberalism that lies without, and it is this that animates their sense of liberalism’s unrelenting imperiousness.
* Enjoying the plausible deniability provided by a façade of democratic idealism, the liberal elites have quietly colonized a host of powerful social institutions—the judiciary, academia, public schools, large foundations, the media, entertainment, and others—through which they now pursue unofficially what earlier clerisies had to pursue officially. They do not marginalize or excommunicate in the name of some codified orthodoxy like Catholic teaching or Talmudic law. But conservatives believe that the cumulative social prestige arrogated by this “rising class” is the functional equivalent of such an orthodoxy, endowing the liberal elites with a special power to cut off debate and silence dissent. Seeking above all to maintain this power, this new secular priesthood will badger, scold, and bully all who defy it.
* Conservative claimants of cultural oppression see themselves, not only as the losers in a “war of ideas” that was always rigged against them, but furthermore as a quasi-ethnic group being encroached upon by a foreign colonial power that is endlessly contemptuous of their native folkways and bent on replacing these with its own arbitrary cultural preferences.
* What conservative and their Right Eclecticism ultimately seek to “subdue” in liberalism is its presumptions to the transcendence of all hero-systems—the one big lie from which the smaller ones emanate.
