The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom

Juliana Geran Pilon

Description

After the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union, the categories of “Left” and “Right” continue to be used to describe political ideologies, despite their historic ambiguity and a shared utopian root. The idealistic belief that a perfect world is possible continues to dwell on existential hope for messianic salvation. This belief lay at the heart of the apocalyptic narratives of the Bible and reflects what the Greeks called hubris, a fatal and destructive form of conceit. This conceit reemerged in the Gnostic sects of early Christianity, then again in medieval millenarianism, Jacobinism, Marxism, Fascism, and secular “liberal” collectivism. Modern-day Salafi Islam is the latest manifestation in this nefarious tradition. In The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, noted political philosopher Juliana Geran Pilon explores the roots of this malevolent ideology as the common ancestor of both anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism in the contemporary world, where political and religious freedom is increasingly under assault.
In an age of rampant religious and philosophical skepticism and national and ethnic deracination, religious and quasi-religious ideologies bent on the vilification and destruction of entire communities are confronting and undermining a confused, guilt-ridden, materialistic, and often nihilistic Western society. In this bold and dynamic book, Pilon argues that a strong defense of freedom and pluralism, which forms the basis of constitutional democracy, is essential for the survival of civilization. Culturally sensitive and empirically tested outreach, predicated on an uncompromising defense against disinformation and terror, must be waged by all civilized nations, but especially the United States as its role evolves in a changing world.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Jewish Studies
• Religión
• Global politics
• American studies
• Religious studies
• Ideology
• Intellectual history
• Political philosophy
• Antisemitism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781680539707
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Utopian Conceit
And the War on Freedom
Juliana Geran Pilon
The Utopian Conceit
And the War on Freedom
Juliana Geran Pilon
Academica Press Washington - London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pilon, Juliana Geran, author.
Title: The utopian conceit and the war on freedom / Juliana Geran Pilon.
Description: Washington : Academica Press, 2019. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: In The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, noted political philosopher Juliana Geran Pilon explores the roots of this malevolent ideology as the common ancestor of both anti capitalism and anti-Semitism in the contemporary world, where political and religious freedom is increasingly under assault -- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027427 ISBN 9781680531558 (hardcover) ISBN 9781680531664 (paperback) ISBN 9781680539707 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Utopias--Philosophy. Capitalism. Anti-Semitism. Liberty. Classification: LCC HX806 .P48 2019 DDC 321/.07--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027427
Copyright 2019 Juliana Geran Pilon
It is certainly no coincidence that in all three cases, [the political religions of Nazism, Stalinism, and Islamism], a remarkably similar anti-American and anti-Jewish demonology has been manipulated in the cause of destroying Judeo-Christian values, individual freedom, and liberal democracy . At their very heart we can find the oldest and darkest of ideological obsessions - that of antisemitism .
Robert S. Wistrich (2010)
The fact that German antisemitism and anti-capitalism come from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there [though] it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism .
F. A. Hayek (1944)
The battle for freedom must be won over and over again .
Milton Friedman (1994)
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: Beyond Left and Right
I. GOD-ENVY: THE ERROR IN THE BONE
1: Hubris
2: Egalitarian Christian Utopianism
3: Fraternity by Guillotine
4: Manifesto Destiny
II. MUDDYING THE UTOPIAN WATERS
5: Progressive State Utopia
6: Heroic Totalitarianism and the Holocaust
7: The Protocols of Jihadism
8: Utopia Update
III. BRAVE NEW WORLD ORDER
9: Liberty, Equality and Property
10: Capitalism s Discontents
11: On Earth, Not Heaven
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth . Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911)
Bad ideas generate bad consequences. An enduring probe into bad ideas is Richard M. Weaver s 1948 classic Ideas Have Consequences , that argues for right reason over unthinking, faulty thinking, shibboleths, intellectual fads, and all varieties of secular nostrums perpetually intent on creating an earthly paradise. The horrific human costs of such bad ideas litter the chronicles of human history, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or contemporary post-modernism. The persistence of certain bad ideas speaks to their perennial attractiveness, notwithstanding their demonstrated fallacies and repeated evil consequences. Dr. Juliana Pilon s The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom arrives precisely at another of these increasingly repetitive historical points where half-baked ideas gain purchase once again, not merely in the hypertensive arena of the media and academia, but in political parties throughout the west, the US included.
When moral and behavioral norms thousands of years old and when heretofore normal language, to include pronouns, become the target of language police and censorship it is time, once again, for thoughtful adults to stand up and intone, stop , in no uncertain terms. Juliana Pilon is one of those thoughtful adults. Her book walks the serious reader through the bad ideas and their socio-political results that have continuously infected human history. She brings her focus to bear on the plagues of the mind that underlie the isms of modern history candidly, courageously, and unafraid of touching so-called third-rail issues.
Topics such as the inherent anti-Semitism lodged in Marx s fixation with the capitalist-bourgeois-Jew; the labeling of anyone opposed to the brown-shirt tactics of contemporary leftist/anarcho-revolutionaries (think antifa ) as fascists, a bit of the supreme irony of projection and the essence of the tu quoque logical fallacy; the apocalyptic fixations of both Marxism and Islamic jihadism that predicate the elimination of those who stand in the way of their scriptural tenets designed to produce their respective earthly utopias - in the case of the Islamic variant an earthly prelude to the sensual pleasures of the heavenly one: all come in for trenchant examination and critique. These are just a few of the numerous bad ideas that the author probes with a welcome clarity of language and reasoned argument.
In the absence of classical learning and classical liberal arts curricula based on the solid foundation of the Judeo-Christian ethic/traditions - now exorcised and replaced by intellectual faddism - many in contemporary generations are ill-equipped to think critically through the barrage of truncated propaganda themes flooding high-tech communications that assault the senses. Indeed, critical thought was one of the first victims of utopian conceit dating back to the earliest of religious and intellectual (i.e., right-ordered thinking) heresies.
It should not surprise the reader that even in the intelligence world (the former profession of this writer), one occasionally encounters efforts in intelligence education to address the principles of critical thinking - a stark acknowledgement of the lack of something so basic to and expected of a craft that calls itself intelligence . Something absolutely core to reason and ordered thought has been lost. As a related aside, it is no accident that in the intellectually disciplined world of home schooling, critical thinking suffuses the curricula, many home-schoolers using the classical-medieval model of the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic). Instead of damning such creative and productive efforts, the educational establishment might consider emulating them.
Closely attending the loss of critical thought in the perennial quest for utopia is the loss of historical instruction and a sense of history. As an example, consider the rediscovery of so-called democratic socialism. Like the unending quest associated with alchemical thinking and hermeticism (utopianism, yet again), the myth of the perfected earthly heaven refuses to die, notwithstanding the mounds of contrary evidence and mountains of corpses, coupled with the still living testaments to the massive operative failures of hair-brained thinking (think Cuba, Venezuela, among many others). But new generations of poorly taught politically-minded utopians argue that the Marxist model just wasn t applied properly. A fitting response might be, Oh, they didn t kill enough people?
However, that retort no doubt would be lost on this latest generation of revolutionaries who are unaware of the massive human cost throughout history of such schemes. Lecturing them, for example, on the horrors of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist Soviet Russia or Communist China, likely is of no avail given the ongoing proof of the implosion of Marxist Venezuela and its attendant horrors seen daily on the evening news. Reality and facts will never compete with utopian theory, especially in its most recent articulation in critical theory and other pseudo-intellectual argot. In short, historical ignorance has profound consequences, since all reference points have been excised and each new untutored generation sees itself as filling in blank slates, as for the first time ever - following, of course, indoctrination by hyper-politicized utopians working on their own blank slates.
We could go back to the intellectual giants of the classics who foresaw where such thinking, or non-thinking, ultimately leads. Socrates paid with his life for addressing some of the very same fallacies of unhinged thought that we face again in this era. But it might be better to save that deeper approach for a later stage in an ongoing effort to recapture reason. Dostoyevsky, himself smitten early with the revolutionary urge to an earthly utopia -- as was Solzhenitsyn -- is worth revisiting. His later reflective conclusion that without God all is permitted is one of the most enduring and prescient single-line critiques of persistent utopian conceit.
More recent figures of similar intellectual and moral depth speak to us in similar voice and whose work prefigures this estimable effort of Juliana Pilon. What comes to mind are Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn s The Menace of the Herd, Liberty or Equality , and Leftism Revisited , which speak from the twentieth century to the same failed thinking that Dr. Pilon necessarily revisits in the twenty-first. So too does the work of the historian-philosopher recently passed from this vale, John Lukacs, whose Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past marks him as another enduring and corrective mentor to help retrieve right reason. It is hardly coincidental that Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Lukacs come from the eastern marches of Western Civilization.
Such figures seem to possess a trait common to deeply thoughtful writers from that part of Europe: a sense of the permanent things outside of and above the self. Juliana Pilon hails originally from Romania. I am not surprised that she produced The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom .
John J. Dziak Washington, DC., May 16, 2019
Introduction: Beyond Left and Right