Briefly Noted: Farmer Gates--EE-I-EE-I-O!

Just one of those weird things about life in the 21st:

Bill Gates Becomes America's Largest Farmland Owner While 'Great Reset" Says Future Is 'No Private Property'

Are these Globalists hiding the ball from us? According to Forbes:

“After years of reports that he was purchasing agricultural land in places like Florida and Washington, The Land Report revealed that Gates, who has a net worth of nearly $121 billion according to Forbes, has built up a massive farmland portfolio spanning 18 states.”

“His largest holdings are in Louisiana (69,071 acres), Arkansas (47,927 acres) and Nebraska (20,588 acres). Additionally, he has a stake in 25,750 acres of transitional land on the west side of Phoenix, Arizona, which is being developed as a new suburb.”

And he's not the only one:

Recommended Reading For Christmas

It's Christmas--so I'm taking a break. However, I came across a couple of provocative articles that I wanted to at least link to.

First up, because there's been so much commentary about secession v. revolt, is Tom Luongo's Luongo: End The Great American Myth - Secession, Not Revolution. Luongo seems to be a bit of a thinking man's Libertarian, in that he appears to sense--if not fully grasp--the shallowness of Classical Liberalism. He understands that the Classical Liberal vision of Man is patently failing, but doesn't realize that Classical Liberalism's own theoretic weaknesses--its flawed understanding of human nature and ignorance of history-- foredoomed it to failure. Nevertheless, it makes for an interesting read even if, like me, you can't totally buy into his version of American history:

... as a libertarian, I always think in terms of secession first, rather than revolution. It sits on my shoulder whispering in my ear the truth of what’s in front of us.

We’ve reached a very important moment in world history. It is that moment where the promises of classical liberalism are failing in the face of a creeping totalitarian nightmare.

America as mythology has always stood as the ‘shining house on the hill’ for this enlightened idea that the wishes of the individual pursuing his bliss creates the community and culture which lifts the world out of a Hobbesian State of Nature.

The war of all against all, (bellum omnium contra omnes).

But America as Mythology and America as Reality are two vastly different rough beasts. And it is that difference between them that is being exploited today by The Davos Crowd to set the process in motion for their next victory.

 

This final paragraph that I'll quote is important. We'll return to it a bit further down:

But, leftism as practiced today, is aggressive. It is rapacious and rests on the idea that no one can exist outside their preferred outcome lest anyone see their world for the nightmare it truly is.

UPDATED: Christopher Dawson's Profound Understanding Of Modernity

I turn once more to the ideological roots of the Current Crisis and, in an ultimate sense, even of what the Russia Hoax is largely about. Big Picture stuff.

When I was growing up I lived in a house that was full of books, and of great importance for me was my father's collection of books by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), the great English historian. He's little known now, and sometimes sneeringly referred to as an "autodidact" and enthusiast of the Catholic nostalgia for the Middle Ages. But he was much more than that. Dawson was a philosopher of history--as you can learn from these Dawson references on this blog. In his day he was ranked with such as Toynbee and in the 60s was sought after for lectures at Harvard.

So I was delighted to discover a Twitter feed that preserves the memory of Dawson's profound understanding of the nature of Modernity. Dawson died in 1970, but already in the 1930's he had a clearly developed understanding of the coming tyranny of Modernity that we see emerging in fully developed form around us--Post Modernist, Gramscian Marxism. And the "Church of Vatican II" is among the most ardent converts to the message of the Neo-Gnostic prophet of modernity, Hegel. (See, for example, by the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei: The Roots and Historical Consequences of Modernism)

Of course, such movements of thought or of the human spirit of rebellion, have deep roots. Dawson traced those roots to the Reformation but, as I've tried to show on this blog, the roots go much deeper into the Platonic and Augustinian traditions that are the true Western tradition. Here is the tweet that first caught my attention yesterday, in which Dawson captures in his typically condensed and trenchant form (almost a paradoxical style for a shy, retiring man) the roots of Modernity in the "Reformation":


Christopher Dawson:‏

@cdawsonquotes

What Hegel valued in the Reformation was in fact that it had destroyed the Church as a substantial unity and had restored the unity of human consciousness in one universal objective moral organism — the State.

12:33 PM - 1 Mar 2019

​And this is precisely the agenda of Modernism and of the Church of Vatican II (V2). Rather than two kingdoms, one of which orients Man toward Christ the King who directs Man on earth--with all the limitations of human institutions that implies--toward his transcendent goal, the V2Church rushes to embrace the tragic results of the Protestant Revolt--the State ascendant in all human life, an Ecumenic State for a new Ecumenic Age (Eric Voegelin's term). And this is quite explicit in the V2Church's embrace of and idealization of the two State sects--Anglicanism and Lutheranism, one named for a country, the other for a man.

​This explains, if explanation is needed, the nature of Bergoglio's "ecumenism", which is intended to include all men in a universal earthly State without borders--one State to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. It also explains why the V2Church has no sympathy for persecuted Christians, e.g., in China or in Islamic realms.

The Rise of the World Religions

Christopher Dawson begins Chapter VI of Progress and Religion, "The Rise of the World Religions," by situating these "world religions" within the context of “a cultural change of the most profound significance” that swept the civilized world in the first millennium B.C. This cultural change primarily involved a change of thought rather than of material culture, and was felt across the middle part of the world, from Greece through the Middle East, Iran, India and all the way to China--a geographical spread that lead Eric Voegelin to term this period "the Ecumenic Age.". Dawson associates this far flung cultural change with an outpouring of religious literature--“the writings of the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, of Buddha and the authors of the Upanishads, of Confucius and Lao Tzu”--and he seeks to find a common denominator. Thus, he poses the question: “What link can there be between the Hellenic vision of an intelligible universe or the ethical humanism of Confucius and the bloody rites and barbarous myths of the old pagan culture?”

In formulating his answer, Dawson first focuses (p. 100) on the violent upheavals that transformed the political landscape--invasions of the older civilized regions by “more warlike but less civilized” peoples who “destroyed the old theocratic order,” and introduced a “dual character” to the new cultures that arose, producing “a spirit of criticism and reflection.” The resulting cultural unease, and a corresponding idealization of the “vanquished order as a golden age,” says Dawson, gave rise to “a sense of moral dualism, an opposition between that which is and that which ought to be,” between the divinely ordained order of the cosmological societies (characteristic of Eliade's “archaic man”) and the new reality of human existence governed by brute force and strife. Under the impact of these new conditions the sacred ritual order of archaic man became “moralized and spiritualized,” focusing on justice and truth more than on ritual and ceremony.

Religion and the Origins of Civilization

Christopher Dawson's Progress and Religion is a remarkable book. Written in 1929 when Dawson was not yet 40 it is, in effect, Dawson's attempt at an overall theory of history. While in many ways it addresses scholarship that is now dated, especially with regard to theories of the "origin of religion," it also has much in common with the later work of Mircea Eliade--in fact, in some respects Dawson goes beyond Eliade (whom Dawson preceded by several decades) by more explicitly relating archaic culture to later developments of large civilizations, world religions, and Christianity. (Eliade does seek to draw parallels between archaic thought and modern “existentialist” thought, but fails to fully consider much in between.) Nevertheless, because Dawson lacked an understanding of the archaic ontology of archetypes which Eliade elaborated, he was unable to fully exploit his unquestionably valuable insights. In what follows we will therefore attempt to evaluate Dawson's insights in light of Eliade's understanding of archaic man's ontology of archetypes and repetition.

In Chapter IV, “The Comparative Study of Religion,” Dawson set forth his views on archaic culture. In doing so he was at pains to oppose the materialist views of human culture that were current at the time. Then, in Chapter V, “Religion and the Origins of Civilization,” Dawson addresses the transition from “primitive” societies to the earliest civilizations.