Creepy Sanctimony

One of the Greats

“One of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time” would be a fair description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or J-JR for short.  But he is also one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Modern period.  We need to understand why both assessments are fair and accurate.

First, the appellation of über-sanctimonious creep.

Paul Johnson, concluding his essay on J-JR, writes:

Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not with to admit.  The acceptability of what Rousseau wrote depended in great part on his strident claim to be not merely virtuous but the most virtuous man of his time.

Why did not this claim collapse in ridicule and ignominy when his weaknesses and vices became not merely public knowledge but the subject of international debate?
  After all the people who assailed him were not strangers or political opponents but former friends and associates who had gone out of their way to assist him.  Their charges were serious and the collective indictment devastating.  Hume, who had once thought him “gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested and exquisitely sensitive”, decided, from more extensive experience, that he was “a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe”.  Diderot, after long acquaintance, summed him up as “deceitful, , vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and full of malice”.  To Grimm he was “odious, monstrous”.  To Voltaire, “a monster of vanity and vileness”.  . . . These judgments were based not on the man’s words, but on his deeds, and since that time, over two hundred years, the mass of material unearthed by scholars has tended relentlessly to substantiate them.  One modern academic lists Rousseau’s shortcomings as follows: he was a “masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latest homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic, introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable, and miserly.” . . . .

The truth seems to be that Rousseau was a writer of genius but fatally unbalanced both in his life and in his views.  He is best summed up by the woman, who, he said, was his only love, Sophie d’Houdetot.  She lived on until 1813 and, in extreme old age, delivered this verdict: “He was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive.  But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness.  He was an interesting madman.”   [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), p.26f.)

He had abandoned his children, almost certainly to their deaths, but the great J-JR sought to turn his infamy into a virtue–a “virtue” for which he is still celebrated and adored and lionised to this day.

To sum up, it is widely known and well documented that J-JR was grossly immoral, unethical, deceitful, and manipulative.  He was also an egomaniac.  Why, then, is he held in such reverence and awe, even to this day?  Because he was a man whose life exemplified his teaching and writing.  J-JR was living the dream.  He shacked up with Therese Levasseur, a twenty-three year old laundress whom he made his mistress.  He ridiculed her in public-both in social gatherings and his writings.  He wanted the world to know that she was beneath him.  He despised her as a “coarse, illiterate servant-girl and despised himself for consorting with her.”  [Ibid., p. 19]  She bore him five children, all of whom Rousseau abandoned, leaving them at the Hopital des Enfants-trouves. 

Roussseau needed to justify this monstrous behaviour.  He did, by resort to developing a doctrine of the state which has proved music to the ears of all who would worship and adore power.  It is at this juncture that J-JR moves from moral monster to virtuous saint in the mind of contemporary Unbelief.  He had abandoned his children, almost certainly to their deaths, but the great J-JR sought to turn his infamy into a virtue–a “virtue” for which he is still celebrated and adored and lionised to this day.

Rousseau developed the idea that

. . . education was the key to social and moral improvement and, this being so, it was the concern of the State. [Hence he was justified in giving up his five children to the State’s care.]  The State must form the minds of all, not only as children (as it had done to Rousseau’s in the orphanage) but as adult citizens.  By a curious chain of infamous moral logic, Rousseau’s iniquity as a parent was linked to his ideological offspring, the future totalitarian state.  [Ibid., p. 25].

As everyone was given up to the State it would train everyone to think and act in concert.  Everyone would therefore be content.  None would resist the General Will, which is the command of the State.

Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to “consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State. . . . For  being nothing except by it, they will be nothing except for it.  It will be all they have and will be all they are.”  The educational process was thus the key to the success of the cultural engineering needed to make the State acceptable and successful; the axis of Rousseau’s ideas was the citizen as child and the State as parent, and he insisted the government should have complete charge of the upbringing of all children. [Ibid.]

For these doctrines, Rousseau is lionised in the West to this day.  He is the first Western apostle of  the State as Saviour and Redeemer.  From him descend the Marx’s, the Lenin’s, the Mussolini’s, and, albeit in milder form, the statists of our day, still clamouring for universal compulsory State education as the key to unlock human redemption. 

It is aptly ironical that the most influential Father of Western statism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, and remains, one of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time. 

Modern Aristo-Plutocrats

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Marie Antoinette’s infamous, “Let them eat cake” has entered the popular lexicon as a byword for sociopathic disdain for the poor.  There is some serious doubt as to whether poor old Marie ever uttered the phrase.  It was attributed to her by one Jean Jacques Rousseau who never let the facts get in the way of a ripping slander. 

Rousseau’s Confessions (in which the slander appears) was written in 1768–two years before Marie Antoinette moved to France.  The line also appears in Rousseau’s journal notes “years before Antoinette was born.”  Ouch.  But it proved a useful pretext and propaganda tool to stir up envy and anger, inciting the odd riot or two.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.172.]

The picture of an uncaring, wealthy aristocracy who hate the poor abides.  It appeals to our baser instincts.  It certainly appealed to Rousseau who, himself, was an acute despiser of the poor and a “suck-up-to-nobility-kind-of-chap”.  If Rousseau could not join the aristocracy, he hated them; when he was welcomed and celebrated in their circles, he fawned over them.  He was a pathetic fellow in so many ways. 

But his bitter word, falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette, lives on.  Ironically, it is amongst modern democrats and socialists that the sentiment conveyed by Rousseau has the most traction.  Uber-wealth and gaudy displays are the hallmark of the modern celebrity culture, along with a fashionable assuaging commitment to socialism.  The latter serves to salve the conscience for all that wealth so ostentatiously on display.  Marie Antoinette had nothing on our modern aristo-plutocrats.

From medieval times through the end of the Enlightenment, kings and queens draped their monarchies will sumptuary laws and rules of grammar to communicate to all, including themselves, that they were special.  The only place in America where such arrangements endure is in the oxygen-enriched confines of Hollywood doyens (and those outposts of modern medievalism known as college campuses). 

Jennifer Lopez bars people from photographing her elbows.  Mariah Carey has an assistant whose only job is to hand her towels.  Also, wherever Mariah goes, her courtiers must first remove posters of rival “divas”, lest they offend her delicate sensibilities: Thou shalt have no divas before me!  Kim Basinger is “allergic” to the sun and requires an assistant to carry an umbrella to protect her on the off chance she might be exposed to solar radiation. . . .

Sylvester Stallone . . . once refused to continue with an interview until his hotel room was painted a more “likeable” peach.  Mike Myers almost quite the filming of Wayne’s World because he didn’t have any margarine for his bagel.  Sean Penn had an assistant swim the dangerous and polluted currents of New York’s East River just to bring him a cigarette.  Only members of Jennifer Lopez’s double-digit entourage re permitted to gaze into the windows of her soul.  Various stars travel with full-time aromatherapists, masseuses, acupuncturists, and, one presumes, court jesters.  Oprah Winfrey has a bra handler.  Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, and, of course Barbra Streisand are just a handful of the folks who think they’re on the same plateau as Japanese emperors, Turkish pashas, and medieval kings.  [Jonah Goldberg, op cit., p. 175f.]

Poor Marie would have been left gasping with incredulity.  But virtually to a man or woman these latter day monarchialists also espouse socialism for the masses–by which they mean others–most notably business corporations and “rich people” (that is, people less wealthy than themselves), should be made to pay for the poor via government extorted redistribution.   Ah, that noble member of the lumpen proletariat who swam the river to bring Sean Penn his cigarette!  The glory of the heroic labourer displayed for all to gaze upon with wonder.  And Sean choreographed it all.  Long live King Sean.

Just a few days ago we were treated to the embarrassing spectacle of Oprah Winfrey taking umbrage at a member of the lower classes in Switzerland who apparently did not realise just how wealthy Winfrey was.  A shop assistant (like all good thrift-conscious Swiss) tried to steer Winfrey to consider a cheaper handbag. (In Switzerland they call this customer service.) Winfrey was offended. Cheaper!  Does she not know who I am?  Winfrey then reportedly went on a crusade of self-affirmation, grandly disclosing to the world that for a while she considered  going back to the store to buy out all the stock just to make the plutocratic point that she could.  But maybe that was a bit too gauche.  Instead she made herself out to be a victim of racism, which was fifty times worse. But, let’s be clear.  Winfrey was the victim here. Her aristocratic sensibilities had been offended.  Maybe her bra-handler mishandled her underwear that day and Winfrey was in a bad mood.  Good help is hard to find, after all. Who knows.  More importantly, who cares.

For our part, we recall the proverb learned at the kitchen table: “a fool and his money are soon parted”.  And so it shall no doubt be for our modern monarchial plutocrats. In the meantime, spare a thought for these poor creatures, having to live one’s life surrounded by fawning Rousseauesque bra-handlers, elbow protectors and cigarette fetchers.  They deserve the prison walls of their self-spun cocoons.

Diabolical Alternatives

In Chains, Everywhere

The ethic of freedom has become the engine of oppression.  At first blush, this seems nonsense.  How could the ideal of being free from compulsion, constraint, and restraint become the instrumental cause of force, compulsion, and oppression?  Unless we work this out, freedom is a dangerous concept.

Let’s start with Jean Jacques Rousseau–one of the more pathetic figures in Western annals.  He famously proclaimed that man was born free, but is everywhere in chains.  The image is powerful.  We know what  being in chains means.  We have seen dogs on a leash or chained.  We have seen them leap forward only to crash to the ground as the chain restrains.  Rousseau’s idea intuitively conveys the idea of human enslavement; freedom is being released from constraints.  But for Rousseau, freedom meant being released from constraints of any sort. 

If you were to come into your neighbour’s house and he asked you to remove your shoes, Rousseau would have us believe that chains were rattling.
  If you complied, you would be enslaved to your neighbour.  Being free, according to Rousseau, meant that you could (and should, if you wished) walk through your neighbour’s house tramping mud on the carpet with complete disdain of his request.  If you complied against your wishes, you would be be in chains.  You would not be free.

There is a straight line to be drawn between twentieth century existentialism and Rousseau’s idea of freedom.  Jean Paul Sartre was once discussing the concept of being free.  Very much like Rousseau, the essence of freedom is to have an authentic existence, which means to act in a manner true to oneself.  If someone were to be suddenly crossing the road in my path, should I run him down in my car?  Is it right to hit him, or avoid him?  Which is the genuinely free act?  Sartre argued that it mattered not what you did.  You could either run him down, or avoid him as long as you were doing what you genuinely wanted–as long as you were being authentic to yourself at that instant.   

He is reported as saying: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”  Running the guy down or avoiding him is something you alone must decide.  That is freedom.  Straight from Rousseau.  

But this creates an immediate dilemma.  Since men are everywhere in chains (living and acting according to customs, conventions, commands, expectations, traditions, directions, and rules of others) who will set them free from this body doomed to slavery?  A Redeemer.  Someone or something sufficiently powerful and effective to roll back all the chains that shackle us, liberating us from their constraints.  Modern Western minds know of only one Redeemer potentially powerful enough to liberate.  The state.  And like all liberators and redeemers, the Redeemer has the right to command and compel total allegiance: to deny subservience to one’s Redeemer is to return again to slavery.  

. . . Rousseau did not define freedom as the assertion of rights against the state;  freedom meant liberation from the forms and institutions of society–family, church, class, and local community.  The state, in fact would be the liberator.  By destroying all social ties, the state would release the individual from loyalty to anything except itself.  “Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men,” proclaimed Rousseau, “and absolutely dependant upon the state.”  [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 171. (Emphasis, authors’).]

To be both redeemed and free, one has to be completely dependant on someone or something.  That is the essence of what it means to be a creature.  Dependence is the name of the game.   To be free is to be under a yoke.  This is what Rousseau understood–and understood profoundly, albeit it wrongly.  To be free is to be enslaved.  An overlord must first liberate, then command.

This was the first time that the state was actually portrayed as a liberator.  For Rousseau, the state “is the agency of emancipation that permits the individual to develop the latent germs of goodness heretofore frustrated by a hostile society.”  And so was born what one historian calls “the politics of redemption,” the idea that politics can be the means not only of creating a better world but of actually transforming human nature, creating “the New Man.”  (Ibid.)

But in this Rousseau was correct: the Redeemer will liberate from slavery, but by right of redemption has the authority to command and control the liberated hereafter.  This is precisely what the Scriptures reveal to be the case.  Israel was in slavery: God redeemed them from Israel by a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm.  Thereafter they were to be in bondage to Him.  But–and here is the big qualification–His burden is easy and His yoke is light.

Returning to our example of the fastidious neighbour, the redeemed of the Lord honours the request of the neighbour to remove shoes.  He is freed from being enslaved to self.  His Redeemer commands him to love his neighbour as if he were himself.  The Redeemer has liberated him from the chains of sin to be what he was created (and therefore commanded) to be.  He was created and liberated to be a grateful and thankful bondslave of the Creator.

We grant that  such notions are highly offensive to modern Western minds.  But the alternative is diabolical.  We will either be enslaved to the Christ who did all things according to the will of His heavenly Father, or we will be enslaved to the state.  One or the other.  Choose you this day, said Joshua, whom you will serve.  If we do not choose God, we will be forever racked with the dialectic that has riven the West for over three hundred years:  wanting to be freed from all constraints, we are left enslaved to the state as our only hope to make it so.

The thus the ethic of freedom has become the engine of oppression.

Strange Bedfellows

The Metamorphosis of Marx

They say that politics make strange bedfellows.  Never is this more evident in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  There is a strong current of support for Palestinians and Islamic causes generally in the West.  Often-times the support comes from “progressive” components of the political spectrum.  But echoes can also be found in residual anti-semitic groups, the main stream media, and the universities. 

Strangely, what is being defended and implicitly promoted is a cause which has overtly fostered and promoted the killing of innocents to make a political point and to terrorise others.  It is a cause notorious for its authoritarianism, its subjugation of women, its maltreatment of homosexuals, and its authoritarian subjugation of all under its sway.  How come?  How does it come about that Western feminists, homosexuals, libertines, and the licentious apparently are relaxed and comfortable supporting and advocating for those who would snap their necks in a second if they had the chance? 

One possible cause is ignorance and condescension.  Often times progressives in the West are so ideologically hidebound they remain remarkably ignorant of actual humanity and reality.
  The rationalisation runs something like this: all human nature is intrinsically good, therefore all humans are decent, upstanding, respectful, life-honouring, and noble.  All contrary beliefs and actions exist only because of external causes, such as poverty, oppression, and exploitation, over which these oppressed folk have little no control.  If these external conditions are changed, ignorant beliefs and brutish practices will fade away.  Change the circumstances and nirvana will break forth.  What is offensive in Islamic ideology will dissipate.  The need for Islam (and religion generally) will evaporate.  Palestinians in the West Bank will end up being the mirror image of a cardigan wearing, intellectual in the sociology department of Progressive College, New York.

At this point we need to acknowledge the perverted genius of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that misshapen child of the Enlightenment, who proclaimed that man was born perfect, but corrupted by society. His disciples are now legion.  We hear the muttered mantras throughout the Western Commentariat–“We are all Rousseauians, now.”  Indeed, you are. 

A second cause is related to this prevalent ignorance.  “Soft-Marxism” remains an extremely powerful force in Western minds.  When the avatar of the perfect society failed with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Marxists did not fade away.  The ideology morphed into other outlets.  For some reason, Marxists or those whose world-view was consciously or unconsciously shaped by Hegel and Marxism, were not persuaded by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.  Nor were they persuaded by Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilizations.  For these lingering Marxists–hugely influential in colleges and the media and the Commentariat–the belief in inevitable secular progress remained firm.  History continues to move forwards to a great and glorious climax.  The path remains the well-trodden highway of revolution.  Since progress is inevitable the basic commitment of Marxism and its fellow travellers remains to tearing down authority, structure, and powers so that the inevitable progress of history towards ultimate consummation can be hastened. 

This explains what homosexuals, feminists, and minority grievance groups find in common with other oppressed minorities, such as Palestinians.  These groups blame all their ills upon external oppressors.  They find natural ideological kinship with other minority oppressed groups such as Muslim enclaves in Western nations.  Instead of “workers of the world, unite!” the ideological slogan morphs into “oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”

As Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey put it

In the classic Marxist drama of history, the oppressed were the proletariat (urban factory workers); in the newer multiculturalist ideologies, the oppressed are women, blacks, or homosexuals.  In classic Marxism, the proletariat will rise up against their oppressors–the capitalists; in the updated form, people of various colors and genders are likewise called to harness their rage and do battle against their oppressors–usually white male homosexuals. 

The politically correct campus today offers countless variations on the Marxist theme, but the common core of all these variations is revealed by the way they overlap and complement one another.  The University of California at Santa Barbara offers a course listed as Black Marxism, linking Marxism and black liberation.  Brown University connects black and homosexual liberation in a course called Black Lavender: Study of Black Gay/Lesbian Plays.  UCLA relates Hispanic ethnicity with homosexuality n a course listed as Chicana Lesbian Literature. . . . As a result of this massive politicization of  education, college students are being taught to apply Marxist categories to law, politics, education, family studies, and many other fields.  [Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 233.]

Given this backdrop it is not surprising at all that the Commentariat instinctively rushes to support embattled Muslim enclaves wherever they are found.  Stupid, to be sure.  Naive, without a doubt.  Myopic, unquestionably.  But, understandable nonetheless.  Marxism always was amongst the most stupid and foolish of ideologies and philosophies.  We expect nothing less from its modern step-children.

Western support for Islamic terrorism, for the “right” of Palestinian rockets to rain down incessantly upon Israel without Israeli retribution, for Islamic alls for the obliteration of Israel from the map, while grotesque is both expected and understandable, given the idolatries that wrack its collective psyche.  It serves to unveil the modern Western mind, exposing how perverted and corrupt it has become. 

>A Man For all Seasons

>Dagon On His Face

Here are some insights from an exceptionally good biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entitled Rousseau–The Self Made Saint by J. H. Huizinga (New York, Grossman Publishers, 1976).

Rousseau is undeniably an important figure in the West.  To this day he is probably the most influential shaper of Western pedagogy and teaching methods.  He, more than any other, is responsible for “child-centred education”–that oxymoron of oxymorons.  Huizinga tells us that modern scholarship is besotted with him.

Never, therefore, was there an intellectual of immense renown whom it is so difficult to take seriously.  Yet few writers have been the object of such painstaking study.  Few have kept and are still keeping so many erudite scholars at work analysing and interpreting the maestro’s every word; putting the most ingenious constructions on his chaotic incoherence so as to “unify his thought”; annotating his thousands of letters so as to reveal that words like “I have a cold” in the first draft were replaced by “I have a bad cold”; digging out yellowed documents so as to acquaint the world with the details of the great man’s laundry bills (which–believe it or not–fill twelve pages in the latest edition of his collected works); . . . (Op cit., p. 20)

It is ironic that the Unbelieving West has chosen Rousseau as one of its patron saints.  It turns out that he was a self-inflated, opinionated gadfly, his writings riddled with contradictions and his life oozing hypocrisy from every orifice.

Firstly, his writings: