The Philosophies of Death and Their Apostles

I really don’t like writing about what’s bad in the world – too many people do that every day and it seldom does much to induce positive actions. People who spend their time on complaints are easily drawn into the tar pit that is politics, where they learn to blame one polar opposite or another for all evils. As a result, they spend their energies attacking the opposite team, lauding their own, and doing almost nothing that is truly productive.

But, in this case, I am making an exception. What I am calling philosophies of death are being taught to young people in almost every educational institution and they need to be pointed out. And when I say “philosophies of death,” I am not being overly dramatic; not only do these philosophies kill, but they dull the souls of many, many millions.

I also want to mention a few of their apostles – the men and women who made it their careers to spread them. This is a story that has been almost lost to modern discourse. As soon as it is brought up, a vast phalanx of academics and political types jump to defend their positions and their self-esteem, which they have foolishly based on politics. Nonetheless, the chief villains should be named and the truth should be pointed-out.

I will begin by briefly explaining why these philosophies are not only wrong, but ridiculous. Then I’ll spend a bit of time on their origins and their apostles.

RELATIVISM

Relativism is the everyday version of this set of philosophies. It consists of slogans that are repeated everywhere from the jobsite to television shows. The core message of these slogans is that reality is unknowable. The proponents of these ideas say things like:

• “Everything is relative.”
• “Perception is reality.”
• “We can’t really know right and wrong.”

Sometimes, they will even try to couch their slogans in science, bringing up Einstein or Heisenberg. Not wanting to make this a very long article, I will put off the examination of these follies for another time.

All of these slogans ultimately argue that reality is changeable or unknowable. This is simply ridiculous. We may not understand all of reality, but we know an enormous amount now and are adding to our knowledge daily. If reality wasn’t reliable, we couldn’t button our shirts, much less build and fly airplanes. Case closed!

This particular strain of sloganeering has its roots in the late middle ages, when Galileo and others proved that the earth actually moved around the sun, and not vice-versa. Prior to that time, it seemed logical and obvious to people that the sun moved. After all, they saw it coming up in the east every morning, and going down in the west. Obviously it moved. They also said things like, “if the earth were moving, would we not fly off of the earth? Take a stone, and place a grain of sand on it, then toss it into the air; does not the sand fly off?”

As the realization that Galileo was right spread slowly though Europe, the message people came away with was that you could not trust your senses. The truth of the matter is that our senses work just fine, but there are sometimes issues of perspective that must be combined with them to reach an accurate conclusion. Coming to the right conclusion involved very careful use of men’s senses after all! What Galileo and Copernicus did prove was that our senses must be used with reason.

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism is the academic version of relativism. Essentially, it is an effort to destroy all judgment. Here are some excerpts from Wikipedia on the leading voices of postmodernism and their ideas:

Jacques Derrida re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of western metaphysics.

Michel Foucault examined discursive power… and also known for saying “language is oppression” (Meaning that language was developed to allow only those who spoke the language not to be oppressed. All other people that don’t speak the language would then be oppressed.)

Jean-François Lyotard opposed universality, meta-narratives, and generality.

Richard Rorty argues philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; advocates dissolving traditional philosophical problems; anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism.

Jean Baudrillard – reality disappears underneath the interchangeability of signs.

All these ideas undermine the ability of anyone to make judgments, and specifically undermine Western thought and the Western tradition in general.

It is telling that a major stream of postmodern philosophy is called Deconstruction, which generally attempts to strip words of all possibilities of meaning. (Look it up on Wikipedia, if you dare.)

Ultimately, postmodernism ends with some type of Nihilism, which is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. That, of course, would mean that human life is devoid of any meaning, purpose, or value. Obviously, this is a depressing philosophy, and an excellent way to destroy human creativity and capacity. It has, in fact, destroyed the lives of many.

WHERE THIS CAME FROM

Silly ideas like these have always existed, but they have seldom found many adherents. In the past century, however, they have spread wildly. Since this spreading of ideas involved millions of people, no single explanation can be precise. I will, however, give you an explanation that is more or less accurate:

Step #1: Confusion resulting from the Industrial Revolution

Industrial production, as it spread across the West in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, required workers to be organized into huge factory operations and in specialized work. This was immensely productive, but it took a terrible toll on people’s understanding of the world.

When working for a factory, the young man or woman never saw much of the entire operation, only their little part. Unless they were quite well-informed, they saw only a “system,” which they didn’t understand. This made the worker ignorant.

A shoe-maker in the old days purchased leather and other supplies from traders, had a basic understanding of supply and demand, and worked with customers and suppliers to deliver the best shoe he could for their money. The factory worker understood none of this, unless he or she went out of their way to find understanding. A mere employee does not know how the world works, how humanity arrived at its present state, or what the principles of civilization might be.

The effect of state schooling was similarly disastrous, being designed to eliminate questioning and to instill blind obedience to authority.

Step #2: Soviet financing

This is the point where certain people flip out. So be it, it’s true anyway.

The USSR spent a lot of money to undermine its enemies in the West. But, the situation was a bit more complex than just the USSR versus the USA. These were, after all, serious Marxists – they wanted to destroy everything associated with the bourgeois; that is the middle-class, shopkeepers, mechanics, and similar people.

The USSR employed many agents to pursue this. Not only did they provide financing to their friends like the Communist Party USA, but they also financed many anti-American activities, including anti-war protests in the Vietnam era. (Go ahead and freak out, it’s still true.) But this sort of financing was not the important part of their efforts and didn’t have a great deal of importance to the philosophies we are discussing here. These were state-versus-state efforts; their work to destroy bourgeois values was the real battle.

One of the prime Soviet operatives in this was a man named Willi Munzenberg, glamorized in the press as the Red Millionaire. It was his job to seduce the intellectuals of Western Europe and the United States, and he was good at it.

Munzenberg (1888-1940), was a founding Bolshevik (he had many meetings with Lenin in Germany, before the Russian Revolution) and a director of Soviet covert propaganda operations. Operating out of Paris, he ran a network of newspapers, film companies, magazines and political groups. Munzenberg’s propaganda machine included people like Sidney and Beatrice Web, Moura Budberg, Louis Gibarti, Lucien Vogel, Jores Ivens and Otto Katz. Munzenberg and his group orchestrated a worldwide campaign on behalf of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, promoted Soviet movie director Sergey Eisenstein, infiltrated England’s Bloomsbury group forged links with the infamous Cambridge spy ring of Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess.

Double Lives - Stephen Koch

Munzenberg et al also funded painter Georg Grosz and movie director Erwin Piscator, as well as manipulating a host of writers, artist, journalists, Hollywood performers and public figures. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, John Dos Passos, Andre Gide, Dorothy Parker, Andre Malraux, Felix Frankfurter and Bertolt Brecht. In fairness, it must be said that some of these people weren’t aware that they were being played… but played they were.

There is much more detail that could be added here, but if you are interested, find a book by Stephen Koch called Double Lives. In it, you’ll find many details and sources.

It is important to understand why Western intellectuals were so easily drawn into this game. There are essentially two reasons: One, that they wanted to feel enlightened, and that meant being different that the staid, religious, middle class. The other was probably best explained by George Orwell, who lived through it:

The secret wish of this English Russophile intelligentsia was to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.

This quote from Orwell is worth a bit of study on your part.

Step #3: Antonio Gramsci

Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Communist who was among the first to admit that communism would never succeed by economics. He flatly admitted that Marx was wrong and that the capitalist economy was winning. He then created a new technique for the destruction of capitalism: Destroying the culture that supports it.

The followers of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin naturally detested anything of the bourgeois, but they were waiting for Capitalism to fail for economic reasons. Gramsci defined a new path.

For obvious reasons Gramsci’s ideas were not quickly accepted by the existing Socialist groups and states, so, they spread slowly, not gathering real force until after World War Two. Since then, Gramsci’s ideas have spread heavily in academic circles… which are the best things to control if you want to change a culture.

Step #4: Academia

Academia in the West (and it is usually worse in Europe than in North America) has been taken over by Marxists and Gramscians since the 1960s. Gramsci himself advised them to set off on a “Long March through the institutions,” referencing the Long March that ultimately brought Mao to power in China. In other words, he told his followers to take their time and move themselves into positions of power in education, art, music, entertainment, newspapers, and the governments. It seems to me that many have risen to the challenge, but I have no real documentation of that – you may wish to consider it and decide for yourself.

One huge advantage that postmodernists have had in the institutions is that they can claim that they are “not political.” That is a significant advantage when it comes to being hired or being granted tenure.

Feminists, for example, are overtly political, and seem to be hired less commonly by universities. The postmodernists, on the other hand, say that they don’t even believe words can be trusted to mean things, so they are not considered political.

A HISTORY THAT NEEDS TO BE WRITTEN

The history of the Socialist war against the productive bourgeois culture of the West needs to be written. A few writers such as the aforementioned Stephen Koch, and well as John Fonte and Steven Yates have done a bit of work on it of late, but much more needs to be done. The Soviet archives are open and a variety of additional sources have become available.

The reason such a history has not be pursued is simply because so many of the guilty remain in positions of power. An academic attempting such a work would face enormous opposition, as would a New York editor who championed it.

Some serious historian needs to tackle this subject. Who would finance such an operation, I do not know.

© Copyright 2009 by Paul A. Rosenberg