I am accused of making common cause with another person who I oppose at least as much as I do those on the secularist, atheist, modernist play-left. I'd been marginally aware of yet another load of crap from Canada* in the form of Stefan Molyneux, but until I was accused of being influenced by him, I'd never really paid any attention to him.
The idiotic idea that anyone who is a critic of modernism wants to return to something from the past is widespread. I am a critic of modernism because I live in a time and in a place where modernism is the dominant ideology. I will note that one of the things I'm most critical of modernism about is its retaining and expanding a pre-modernist superstition, the late 19th century, Victorian era ideology of scientistic materialism. Some of the most furious statements I've read of such as rail against "post-modernism" do it from the imaginary security of being bound in that kind of scientistic materialism that physics pretty much had destroyed by the late 1920s and mathematics shattered forever in the 1930s. The old men and young ones of CSICOP were and are, to a person, champions of a scientistic ideology that science had already disposed of, I would say the same about its Darwinism, starting about the time that smoke-screen of organized atheism arose in the 70s. Marxism shares that heritage as does every form of fascism I'm aware of, including those relying on bullshit social science.
The basic and controlling belief which I have but which Molyneux rejects, universal equality, is enough to make everything about my critique of modernism entirely different from his. I don't want to go back, I want to get beyond all of that. On every single particular in the shit-pile that is Molyneux's product, I am in complete disagreement with him. We meet at no point, even our rejection of modernism is different.
The stupid and superficial - I call it the "play-left" for a reason - can't deal with more complexity than either-or, black or white, us or them, in this case most importantly, NOW OR THEN. I think that's something that the like of Molyneux shares with them, a rejection of pluralism is characteristic of the superficial, the immature and the stupid. I don't want to return to any past, I believe that change is part of the working out of the universe, the creation to its final end, but that's a religious view from the Jewish tradition that would require a long series of posts to go through. What accepting it means is I think it's immoral to yearn for a past which, inevitably, is imagined even as those who lived it wanted to get past it. Molyneux seems to want to return to a time you can't get back to and no one should want to return to. There's a lot of that around, these days. It's what fascism redux is based in.
* Canada does, actually, produce entirely better than the likes of Jordan Peterson and Molyneux, it's just that it is disappeared in the filter of stupidity that post-literacy and the mass media is.
Update: Not directly related, but haven't I been telling you that E-ton is essentially Harry Hope's bar without a resident Larry? Larry left a long time ago. Maybe he joined AA and sobered up, maybe his liver just finally gave out. It's like the time I outraged them by saying the worst thing about prohibition was that it didn't work.
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