Thread by @pgepps

A theory or a movement is not more vital, nor more supernaturally grounded, because it is more atavistic or primal.

This is especially true where there is a self-conscious adoption of such irrationalisms over against existing rational structures.

Yes, sometimes we need to "reject the premise" because we have begun an argument from a false or muddled position.

I'm actually a huge advocate of doing just this, in fact.

BUT appealling to some sort of inchoate force acting across history? Nah.

Ever since the German Romantics were assimilated into the Borg of Hegel, which has spun off a million splinter factions like so many Disney Star Wars sequels, we have had a tendency to propose one Romanticism as the solution for the "dead letter" of another.

From at least the early 18C to the end of the 20th, this tended to take the form of a roughly two-generation cycle between a Germanic and an Anglospheric revision of Romanticism:
Hegelian, Young Hegelian, Liberal, Marxist, Bismarckian, Progressive, Nazi, etc. (gappy, yes)

We have been in one of those periods, like the era of the Young Hegelians (i.e., the ferment of "Hegel is a fuddy-duddy conservative" radical activist intellectuals, think 1848) or the era of Weimar, in which this kind of cycling happens within years rather than generations.

The pattern remains the same.

The temptation is thus to apply anachronistic and atavistic examples, not only to propose large interpretive gestures about history or humanity that might guide judgment, but as though they were *fully instantiated* in every crisis of the moment.

One grasps a very tenuous thread from a very weak science like evolutionary psychology and makes an argument about how the highly mediated reality of a political speech in a continental nation-state is "just like" something from Mesopotamian pre-history.

Maybe? Probably not.

But the issue is not whether, in a "keeping an academic discussion alive using examples" way, there might be some merit to the analogy (perhaps in continuing to evaluate whether "evolutionary psychology" is completely groundless speculation, or just *mostly* hokum and flimflam).

The issue is that for any such set of relations to be healthy and useful, we would still need to do all the genealogy and archaeology of institutions, structures, principles &c. that we needed to do.

Anachronistic "leapfrogging" can be a provocative gesture, but rarely informs.

And still more importantly, the false vitality of atavistic rejections of what seems to be the "dead letter" of the present is deeply troubling in that *rationally motivated* (i.e., adopted explicitly as means to an end) appeals to *irrationalism* are basically superstitious.

By appealling to an unknown (dim prehistorical shaping of humans, collective unconscious, collective spirits, non-specific "charisma") as more to be trusted than the known and understandable, one moves past reason into faith. But is it good faith? On what authority?

With good reason, as revelation has increased the world has become more full of the knowable, the recorded, the arguable. The book of nature, including human nature, is also illuminated by the grace of Redemption, because it comes from the Creator and restores us to good faith.

With good reason, then, Christendom is formed in no small part as a rejection of pagan conceptions, particularly those of the polytheistic regimes which were themselves self-conscious appeals to empowering atavisms over against the proliferation of understanding of the cosmos.

It is no accident that many Christians found it hard to believe that the Socrates of Plato's Apology is pagan, because they too well understood (as Jews had for centuries) the way that receiving the one God made them "atheistic" threats to the atavistic appeal of pagan rulers.

So when you read Wordsworth's poignant "The world is too much with us," do of course lean into the *feeling* that much has become decadent, much is a proxy argument, many people are talking in order to avoid living, that "the best lack all conviction," etc. BUT ...

BUT you do not, indeed, want to be "a pagan suckl'd in a creed outworn."

Because it is outworn. Pan, great Pan, is dead.

And God killed him.

@threadreaderapp unroll please.