If you don't read Done with Mirrors, or don't read it very often, you are missing some great stuff. I go over there less often than I would like, but try to read it at least a couple times a week. And there's a reason I do that. Posts like this. In the article Callimachus is writing about, there is one of the clearest descriptions of monomaniacal radicalism I have seen. Frankly, this puts into words something I have long felt but have not been able to describe adequately.
I take it as axiomatic first that human existence is always to some extent unsatisfactory, and second by that most, or at least many, men desire transcendence in the sense that they want their lives to have some larger purpose than the flux of day-to-day existence. Shopping and going to the pub are all very well in their way, but for people of larger spirit they are not enough.
Radical politics answers the need for transcendence and provides a plausible, though erroneous, explanation for the existential shortcomings of human existence. It kills two birds with one stone. It gives a transcendent purpose to life, by allowing participants the illusion that they are helping to bring about a life that is completely without dissatisfaction.
The religiosity of Marxists has long been remarked by the non-believers, the doctrine of Marxism being that history has a plan for the redemption of mankind. When it became impossible for anyone, except perhaps Professor Eric Hobsbawm, to believe any such thing, just as earlier Christianity had lost its credibility for most people, a new outlet for the religious impulse that motivated belief had to be found.
A further two axioms need to be added to explain the rise of monomaniacal fanaticism. The first is that hatred is a much more powerful political emotion than love, and is therefore also a stronger motive for action. It is my guess, for example, that Mr Brown hates the rich much more than he loves the poor, and that anti-racists, for example, hate whites, even when they are white themselves, more than they love members of minorities.
The second additional axiom is that aggressiveness, destruction and violence are their own reward, because they are enjoyable, at least for quite large numbers of people, in themselves. There is also great pleasure to be had from intimidating and striking fear into people. This is no doubt a regrettable feature of human nature, but it is a real one. Anyone who has observed a riot will have been struck not by the misery of the crowd but by its happiness. To feel morally superior while doing evil is one of the most exquisite pleasures known to man.
Callimachus' Additional commentary is why I try to visit that site:
I don't want to keep piling on animal-rights activists and environmental extremists, in part because that's too easy. But then Dalrymple's essay is about a broader topic. That's just the doorway into it.
What he's offering up here is a convergence of historical threads into a modern phenomenon of hate-driven secular religion. His pieces usually are worth attention, and this is no exception. As a secularist myself, I've sometimes tried to warn people about the trap: That medieval mumbo-jumbo you're so proud of being enlightened enough to live without, it's inside you as well as outside you. It's what feeds an inborn hunger, and even if you decide to stop eating, your hunger will keep looking.
And the old organized religions, as dreary and cold as they may seem, survived in part because they took a hot, fierce human passion and channeled it through rituals that kept it from burning to the ground all human civilization. Even Islam. It takes centuries and hecatombs of victims to work out the kinks. But as our Enlightened Founders knew (here in America); if you see how bad man is with religion, imagine him without it and shudder.
By all means, go visit Done With Mirrors for yourself.
