This is disjointed. Unlike the author I am capable of intellectual cohesion, and the maintenance of a defensible thesis over long periods of time. But that would require more effort at the moment than I am willing to expend. It is what it is.
First off, I was gratified that those in the bookstore displayed the decency to more or less shove him off as a pervert when he asked for books by Sade. If you have not read him, he “still possesses the power to shock”, as one contemporary review has it. No matter what you think you have seen in movies, or how strong your stomach is, trust me that there are images that have not yet occurred to you.
The author has a strongly Muslim name, Hussain Ibish. I see that in fact he is active in the cause of eradicating Israel. Some might frame that as being “pro-Palestinian”, but this is the same thing, without the bullshit.
Muslims tend towards misogyny. Just today I read in my Facebook feed about one Muslim teaching men how to beat their women properly, and another claiming that women who work outside the home should be sexually abused. In my personal view, their subjugation of women–who after all have good ideas in profusion, daily–is a core element in the failure of Arabs to have achieved anything–hell, I’ll say it–INTERESTING (outside, I will add, of the generally condemned Sufi communities). Obviously Islam encourages this.
I will note that by his lights he cannot condemn me for such blanket statements, and by my lights telling the truth as I see it is always desirable.
With regard to his content, then, I would submit that absent short bits of coherence, the essence of this very long read is “I”m a pervert. I get my rocks off imagining women being tortured. Fuck you. Oh, and blah, blah, blah, you have to accept me because I am verbose and obviously educated. I invoke the tolerance card. And I reiterate Fuck you.”
What I wanted to respond to were a couple bits that harmonize with my own views, and a few examples of the sort of inanity that characterizes the Leftism cult. Here is one bit:
Indeed, we could reasonably posit that his work laid the cornerstone for
the entire anti-humanist project. Surely Sade’s most important
contribution, at its high point, lay in dragging Enlightenment reason to
absurdist logical conclusions, spelling out the method of its
implosion, and anticipating the backlash against it that culminated in
the sixties and seventies. What he bequeathed us was nothing less than a
slow-growing but highly malignant, if not terminal, cancer buried deep
in the corpus of Enlightenment rationalism.
What absurdist logical conclusions? There is nothing inherently contradictory about the use of reason to govern human affairs, or the desire for progress in the material and moral realms. What he is actually doing is STIPULATING that he, Hussein, should not be held to the standard of intellectual coherence; nor can his political beliefs be analyzed for consistency. Put another way, he himself is rejecting Humanism and reason, and failing to justify it. He is simply showing that Sade did it.
No sensible person has ever claimed that people cannot commit daily logical fallacies over the course of a lifetime, and never care or notice. All you have to do is spend five minutes on the Daily Cause.
But I do want to underscore that he is quite right that Sade’s project is anti-humanist, anti-rationalist, and even anti-pleasure. Sade did not seek pleasure: he sought EXPERIENCE, and many of the experiences he chose (mostly in his imagination, to be clear, although not entirely) were awful.
Leftism, likewise, is an irrational project which in its ostensible aim of improving human life sustainably has not only failed every time it has been tried, but failed predictably, and at HUGE cost in human well being.
Who are those who keep proposing it and pursuing it? The Irrationalists, whose philosophy has failed them, and who perforce pursue power.
We need to be clear: Sade was a broken man, a splintered man. His sense of self was shattered early on. Without having studied his life with much care, my best guess is that he was abused as a child, likely a libertine uncle. Rather than try to pull himself together, he instead “rationalized’ his destruction through destruction. The sense of self is obtained in motion. He was unable to proceed in a genuinely creative direction, so he chose destruction as his creation.
At some point Hussein talks about the purported Sadeiam nature of the NRA proposing more guns. He simply stipulates this as symbolically significant. In reality, more guns–empirically, according to scientific, rational data of the sort we expect in a society still governed by Enlightenment principles–equate to less crime. 80% of gun homicides happen in the half of the country that does not allow concealed handgun carry. To help you out, that is a rate that is 4x higher than in those States which make carrying a gun legally possible.
In this, he abuses reason. But he has already SAID that he is fine with abusing reason. Why not listen to him?
Here is an interesting quote:
And Nietzsche obviously originated almost all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,
though she pompously claimed to have been influenced only by Aristotle.
Rand essentially popularized a distorted version of Nietzsche and
therefore some elements of Sade’s legacy. She notably claimed to have
been the most implacable philosophical enemy of Kant, a title that
surely belongs to Sade and not Nietzsche, let alone Rand.
I actually more or less agree with this. The Nietzchean influence on Rand–and she very definitely did read him–seems clear to me. John Galt is an Uebermensch, in the proper fashion. Nietzsche, at least as I understand him, never intended crime per se to be the mark of his hero–he was not a proper Sadeiam, as this author tries to suggest–but rather obstinate creation of the highest order while surrounded by mediocrity. The Uebermensch DOESN”T CARE what ordinary people think. He owes them nothing, and he gives them nothing. He is superior to them.
This was the interesting part of the Nietszchean project, and that of Rand, to my mind; resurrecting the notion of qualitative difference in a materialistic world in which all life devolves in the end to mindless atoms.
He then goes on to say this:
Sade’s contempt for property and the rationalist philosophical system
derived from its defense indeed places him well to the left of the
Jacobins and most other French revolutionaries.
Again: I came up with the term Cultural Sadeist after a fair amount of thought. It is the right term, in my view, to describe what I see.
Here he drops into farce: “Is anything, in this sense, more Sadean than self-negating Tea Party
slogans such as “keep your dirty government hands off my Medicare?”
What Tea Party members are saying this? Medicare is broke. I’m sure as hell not saying it.
And I will submit again that definition is one of the most basic requirements for the use of reason, and all he has done here is equate alleged sloppy thinking with Sade. Plainly, he is simply trying to get in gratuitous shots for the Cultural Sadeist camp, but it would be equally valid to say that A=not A is “Sadean”.
He tried to argue that somehow totalitarianism is an end product of rationalism. This is stupid. Only an academic could be this dumb. There is nothing “logical” or rational about Fascism or Communism (note how he tries insert Stalinism rather than the correct word for the global malignancy he plainly intends, and still defends), if we take as our orienting intent the improvement of human life. Neither did so. Quite the contrary.
Here is how reason works: you determine what you want to achieve, which includes a clear definition. If you do not achieve what you said you wanted to achieve, then your means was irrational. If you nonetheless continue to use the same means, you are worse: you are a Democrat or a Frenchman.
Classic Liberalism is rational. It is a proven means for the development of human freedom, and possibility of self expression. To the extent we face crises of meaning in our society, it is precisely because of the illogic and philosophical incompetence of idiots like Hussein.
And at last, the coup de l’imbecile:
Much of American culture is committed to
egalitarianism, and demands and expects certain social and economic
protections from government. But simultaneously, and often in the same
breath, it venerates extreme wealth, individual privilege, and the
prerogatives of the rich.This dichotomy is
driven, at least in part, by the classic American illusion of widespread
social mobility and the idea that anyone can join our morally
unrestrained power elite by hewing to the character-defining virtues of
hard work, while also incongruously courting the favor of fortune.
Meanwhile, a powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has
pushed many toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed
sadistic (though hardly Sadean), thought of Ayn Rand. Economic Darwinism
is thus bizarrely repackaged as a corrective for corporate amorality—as
well as the cure-all for absurd social injustices such as bailouts for
financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”
I want you to read those paragraphs carefully, slowly. You need to understand that these are the basic presuppositions–myths–of not just this man, but substantially all the academics working anywhere in this country anywhere close to the Humanities, of any sort.
It is STIPULATED that wealth is wrong. Why? Well, if they were able to use reason to defend their views, we might have some chance of finding out. But they don’t. They simply assume it.
The poor in America live better than 3/4ths of the world. The 3/4ths of the world that lives in abject poverty lives that way in almost all cases because they have been pursuing some combination of socialism and outright Communism for most of the last century.
On the one pole you have Singapore, which did everything right and is very prosperous. On the other you have China and India. China, under the tyranny of the Cultural Sadeists, broke everything that had worked, killed tens of millions of its citizens through stupidity and outright murder, then after a half century of failure allowed Capitalism of a Fascist sort, and is achieving steady growth in the wealth of its richest citizens. What is happening in China, in other words, is pretty much what he alleges is happening here, but isn’t.
In India, they installed a socialist regime after Independence, and saw between thousands and millions die annually of hunger until they opened up the markets for competition in the early 90’s, and have seen steady growth in the living standards of ALL their citizens.
This man, Hussein Ibish, demonstrated a PERSONAL interest in the work of Sade, which he confessed early in the piece, knowing that his invocation of politics at the end would cause the usual stupid people to do the usual stupid thing, which is forget this.
But I want to point out that Sade vividly portrays the rape, torture, murder, and cannibalization of children. He kills and kills and kills in his books, the more lasciviously the better.
And he has the AUDACITY to condemn Ayn Rand as in any way REMOTELY similar to Sade? Rand spoke CONSTANTLY about the ethical imperative to never use violence against anyone for any reason other than self defense.
What are we to take from this? That like all Leftists he is a fundamentally fucked up human being. Or, let me use his words:
But Sade, that shadowy doppelganger of the Enlightenment, still lurks in
the dark corners and liminal spaces of our culture, whispering that
reason often carries a very hefty price tag—and with ever more elaborate
punishments to come.
What punishments? I don’t know. Ask Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett. They carry 120 Days with them everywhere they go.