There’s been a lot of this kind of thing around recently. It’s mainly been arriving in a link storm from Wagner Clemente Soto, who’s too unambiguously Throne-and-Altar in orientation to identify as NRx or 333, so it’s probably an exercise in internal discipline taking place in another camp. Still, it’s difficult not to ask: Could this be the next fission pile building up?

Here‘s a link to Jörg Guido Hülsman’s (excellent) Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, which seems to have provided the background citations for the recent round of attacks. (This agitation always takes me back to Der Zauberberg.)

ADDED: Or is it “Moses to Mises”?

ADDED: NBS provides a useful ‘Capitalism Week’ round-up.

ADDED: A (loosely) connected argument from Brett Stevens.

Robert Zubrin’s intense (and appalled) discussion of Alexander Dugin’s revolt against the New Atlantis climaxes:

In short, Dugin’s Eurasianism is a satanic cult.

Despite inevitable NRO simplifications, it’s a gripping read throughout.

(Much of interest also in the obstreperous comment thread.)

ADDED: Gregory Hood on Zubrin on Dugin.

The most provocative way to begin this would be to say: The reception of metaphysical inquiries into freedom and fate is often similar to that of HBD. These questions are unwanted. They unsettle too much. The rejoinders they elicit are typically designed to end a distressing agitation, rather than to tap opportunities for exploration. Not that this should be in any way surprising. Such problems tend to tilt the most basic foundations of theological, cultural, and psychological existence into an unfathomable abyss. If we cannot be sure where they will lead — and how could we be? — they wager the world without remainder. Give up everything and perhaps something may come of it.

When construed as a consideration of causality, relating a conception of ‘free will’ to naturalistic models of physical determination, the battle lines seem to divide religious tradition from modern science. Yet the deeper tension is rooted within the Western religious tradition itself, setting the indispensable ideas of eternity and agency in a relation of tacit reciprocal subversion. The intellectual abomination of Calvinism — which cannot be thought without ruin — is identical with this cultural torment erupting into prominence. It is also the dark motor of Western (and thus global) modernity: the core paradox that makes a horror story of history.

If the future is (already) real, which eternity implies, then finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency can only be an illusion. If agency is real, as any appeal to metaphysical liberty and responsibility demands, eternity is abolished by the absolute indeterminacy of future time. Eternity and agency cannot be reconciled outside the cradle of a soothing obscurity. This, at least, is the indication to be drawn from the Western history of theological convulsion and unfolding philosophical crisis. Augustine, Calvin, Spinoza are among the most obvious shock waves of a soul-shattering involvement in eternity, fusing tradition and catastrophe as doom.

“Do you think you were predestined to become a philosopher?” Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft was asked:

Yes, of course. Predestination is in the Bible. A good author gives his characters freedom, so we’re free precisely because we were predestined to be free. There’s no contradiction between predestination and free will.

Outside in still has a few questions to pursue …

Alex passed the link along (in this thread), so I thought I’d foreground it:

It’s not really saying anything that will come as a surprise, but it’s worth endlessly repeating (and the color scheme helps to get it through the gate).

Whatever other arguments are available in favor of traditional religion, they need to be supplemented by the recognition that man is simply too damned stupid for the Death of God.

From here (via):

it always was a little absurd, but it’s seriously absurd now

Following a mysterious blog crash, Jim is back with a concise barn-burner.  The conclusion gives a sense of the provocation:

Suppose a neoreactionary becomes a Roman Catholic. Trouble is that the Pope is to the left of Pol Pot. So he can disown the pope, and keep the New Testament, which is kind of protestant of him, or disown the New Testament and keep the pope, which is kind of commie of him.

He wants to be a throne and altar conservative, but all the thrones are empty, and all the altars desecrated, so he winds up worshiping desecration, which is one step away from the New Age worship of demons and the evil dead.

(If any eddies from the subsequent turbulence end up in the comment thread here, they are most welcome.)

My question: What sense of providence comes out of this?

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… to inflict this on people:

[OK, no need for anybody else to lose their lunch over this — I’m moving it under the fold]

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With all coherent productivity sucked into a knotty accelerationism essay at the moment, some fragments:

Fission update — apparently the geniuses in the NRx peanut gallery are now convinced that Justine Tunney has usurped Michael Anissimov in his universally-acknowledged holy office as God-Emperor of the New Reaction. Anissimov, to his great credit, is bemused. Is this stuff going to burn out in its own radiant insanity, or amplify to some yet unimagined level of crazy? The responsible option would be to abandon the ship of fools now, but it’s way too entertaining for that. Signalling some distance is becoming absolutely imperative, however.

One point that has to be emphasized with renewed fervor is the absolute priority of territorial fragmentation to any line of NRx discussion which begins to imagine itself ‘political’. Universalist models of the good society are entirely inconsistent with NRx at its foundations, and to turn such differences into political argument is to have wandered hopelessly off script. The whole point of neoreactionary social arrangements is to eliminate political argument, replacing it with practical problems of micro-migration. Facilitating homelands for one’s antagonists is even more important than designing them for one’s friends. (Even the old Republic of South Africa knew that — although it botched the execution.) Geographical sorting dispels dialectics.

***

Brett Stevens (of the Amerika blog, @amerika_blog)  has gone super-nova on Twitter in a way that screams impending burn-out, but for the moment he’s a source of superb commentary and linkage. Among very recent gems, these two pieces, raising questions about the restoration of sophisticated teleological ideas within natural science.

Why does life resist disorder? #entropy http://t.co/GGMrjqv4bq

— Brett Stevens (@amerika_blog) May 1, 2014

Also, another two on the Cathedralization of SF literary institutions, unfolding in public.

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Peter A. Taylor relayed this magnificent cladogram of world religions:

(Click on image to enlarge.)

If there’s such a thing as a comprehensive cultural map of the world, it’s woven on to something very like this. No opportunity to comment on it right now — but I’m confident it will spark some responses.

A solid traditionalist argument from Nick B. Steves concludes an exploration of self-deception:

What if the veneer of religiosity was cultivated not so much to impress others as to impress — effectively trick — oneself? The human person has a very nearly infinite capacity for self-delusion. That’s why I consider myself religious … but not spiritual. Whatever in religious practice may seem dull, mundane, and ordinary is more to be trusted than those parts of it which seem highly emotional or consciousness-raising.

ADDED: While we’re on the topic of religious tradition —

On one hand [Dawkins] believes that morality, being natural, is a constant thing, stable throughout history. On the other hand, he believes in moral progress. To square the circle he plunges out of his depth, explaining that different ages have different ideas of morality, and that in recent times there has happily been a major advance in our moral conventions: above all, the principle of equality has triumphed. Such changes ‘certainly have not come from religion’, he snaps. He instead points to better education about our ‘common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex — both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution’. But biological science, especially evolution, can be used to authorise eugenics and racism. The real issue is the triumph of an ideology of equality, of humanism. Instead of asking what this tradition is, and where it comes from, he treats it as axiomatic. This is just the natural human morality, he wants us to think, and in our times we are fortunate to see a particularly full expression of it.