Understanding Postmodern Political Anarchism

 

When Jesus said “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone,” He was referring to a specific sin, that of adultery. You can comb through all of Jesus’ maxims, precious distillations of godly wisdom, and you will find that He was less preoccupied with “sins of the flesh” than, say, a modern professor of second wave feminism or a publisher of smut.

Jesus’ only advice to the adulterous woman in danger of being stoned was to go and sin no more, a thing easy to say but hard, in the absence of the grace of God, to do.

“Then Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?

“No one, Lord,” she answered. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Now go and sin no more.”

We happen to live in an age where smut of one kind or another, pornography or politics – don’t titter; the two have much in common – are in the air we breathe, and there are some refreshing signs that the ubiquity of both may be becoming tedious and off-putting to thoughtful young folk, about whom it is tritely said “they are the future.” In the post-modern age – whatever that means -- bumper-sticker wisdom of this kind has become a substitute for thought, a sort of mental daydreaming.

Thinking is laborious work. But in a time in which it has become so easy to get along without thought, to drift in the stream – or, better, to rent the thoughts of others -- thoughtlessness becomes fatal. Not for nothing did G. K. Chesterton say that even a dead thing can float with the current, but it takes a living thing to swim upstream against the current. Much later, contemplating the evil of death camps in a Hitlerized Germany, the philosopher Hanna Arendt disappointed nearly everyone by tagging the perfidies of Heinrich Himmler as a certain indication of the “banality of evil.”

Evil… banal?

Evil is not less evil by being banal. Even Satan, it is said, knows how to clothe himself as an angel of light. We may take that as a metaphor, but everyone knows, in the marrow of his bones, that real evil needs the permission of the will to operate in the world, and how better to anesthetize the will than  by presenting evil as good, clothed in the purist light. White sapphire may be a diamond; a lump of coal can never be mistaken for a diamond. And it is only sleepers or the inattentive that fall through manholes.

There is a difference between the liberty of the person – the old fashion notion that people should not be obstructed when they are innocently going about the business of being their potty old selves – and the libertine anarchism of the Marquis de Sade, which leans heavily on the corruption of others, moral, spiritual and political – yes, political.

Drawing from nature, always red in tooth and claw, and unwilling to fall back upon a classical view of man and God, whom the materialistic philosopher must banish from his mind and the public square, de  Sade reasoned that the order of nature, which destroys old forms to create new realities, was the only possible model for morality. To put it in the plainest terms, power must displace morality because in nature power is all in all.   

The Marquis de Sade was, French philosopher Albert Camus reminds us in The Rebel, a highly sophisticated political thinker, the father of what we may call postmodern nihilism. We are his children, willing or not.

Any arc of history that begins with birth control and ends with late term abortion and the selling of baby parts to doctors, banal though it may seem to the sellers and buyers, is a de Sadian rainbow over the pit of Hell. Far from swimming against the current of his day, de Sade IS the current of postmodern, political moral anarchy.

Crime and murder in nature, the real natural order of things, was for him – and some of us – a mantle of divinity and a sign of ultimate liberation. In a heaven empty of divinity, “human crime,” as de Sade put it, “continues to be man’s answer to divine crime.”

For “men like gods” – Caligula, de Sade or, moving towards the postmodern world, Hitler, Stalin and Mao – crime and murder are indispensable tools in our postmodern political tool box. Stalin is reputed to have said, possibly about the famine he created in Ukraine, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Dostoevsky described in a single line the arc of postmodern murder and crime in the blood drenched 20^th century: “Without God, all things are possible.”  Crime and murder, once thought immoral, become in the postmodern vision the highest form of morality. Not only art but an inverted, inartistic morality apes nature.

That is what moral anarchists in our own day – one thinks of ANTIFA and other like groups – mean when they set fire to a church to protest the indignities of history.