Our Ongoing Cultural Revolution

Here are a couple of multisyllabic words for today. Michael Lind has written an essay comparing iconoclasm with antinomianism. Both words contain many syllables. We regret that we cannot ask our mentally challenged vice president to explain the difference.

Clearly, both are at war with tradition. Iconoclasts want to tear down statues and to revise history in order to replace it with another version. No more czar; Lenin and Stalin.

Antinomians, Lind explains, believe in rebellion for the sake of rebellion. They thrill to lawlessness and want simply to tear things down, for the thrill of it all. They are against what the Greeks called nomos, meaning that they oppose rules and norms. 

In both cases, they oppose tradition, and thus consider conservatives, those who respect past traditions, their enemies. They are especially opposed to patriotism, to nationalism, and to the nation’s heroes. And, of course, they reject traditional Western religions:

Everywhere we see our political, cultural, and financial elites bankrolling activists to dismantle traditions. While flags and slogans celebrating racial or sexual identity are proudly displayed by Western governments and corporations, overt displays of national patriotism are regarded by establishmentarians on both sides of the Atlantic as vulgar and distasteful. Religions tend to be viewed with distrust and contempt by the trans-Atlantic elite, unless their premodern teachings have been modified into alignment with the views of the campus left. The Western canon, instead of being enlarged to include unjustly excluded authors, has been jettisoned, and liberal education has been replaced by ideological indoctrination in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Lind suggests that the antinomians do not want to set up a new tradition, with new heroes and new villains. They have preferred to censor and to recreate traditional works of art, to reconstruct them with multicultural characters:

But the cancellation of the Great Books curriculum has not led to a new consensus canon featuring minority, female, and nonbinary authors along with a smaller number of “dead white males” who are deemed acceptable. Instead, much of the energy of woke jihadists goes into purging or censoring existing works of art and thought—rewriting the novels of Roald Dahl, for example—or randomly parachuting nonwhite or “queer” characters into movie remakes instead of creating something new.

Antinomianism feels a lot like anarchy. It pretends to liberate people from rules and laws, the better to allow them to express their inner truth:

Unlike iconoclasm, antinomianism is not a temporary campaign of destruction of older iconography and traditions to clear the way for the imposition of new canons and orthodoxies. Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy.

Today’s antinomians are at war with the West. They want to ensure that the system does not function, that people cannot think clearly and that rebellion will prevail over the forces of order.

At the moment, the fashionable justifications invoked by the elite antinomian vandals attacking Western society from within are climate change, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and “anti-fascism” as a catchall category. Upper-middle-class young men and women who throw paint at artistic masterpieces or glue themselves to trains claim they are defending the earth’s environment, but they could just as well say they are fighting white supremacy or patriarchy. They are acting out the ethos of a Western elite culture that believes the act of transgression itself is virtuous; the alleged goal of the transgression is merely an excuse.

One might add the epidemic of smash and grab robberies that has inflicted America’s blue cities. 

So, antinomians reject all societal norms, beginning with patriotism and including gender norms:

 The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms—the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.

Now, this is not a rebellion by the masses. It does not see the proletariat rising up against capitalist oppressors. In truth, the leaders of the antinomian attacks on tradition and custom often belong to our intellectual and business elites:

The members of the credentialed corporate-government-nonprofit-academic-media oligarchy, along with billionaire entrepreneurs and bankers who themselves are usually born into managerial-professional families, are almost all modernist in their aesthetics, libertine in their views of sex and recreational drug use, and dismissive of nationalism and patriotism and religion, which they regard as mental diseases of the lower classes. They work in offices designed by trendy “starchitects” decorated with abstract art, and often live in postmodern homes designed to be sterile, off-putting, and the very opposite of petty bourgeois comfort.

It has become a rebellion against the proletariat:

What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?

The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat. Instead of shocking the bourgeoisie, our post-bourgeois managerial overclass now delights in shocking the working class. Most working class people in the U.S. and Europe of all races and classes live in suburbs or exurbs—therefore our elite pundits and academics constantly denounce suburban “sprawl,” idealize life in high-style micro-apartments and expensive designer tiny houses, and call for the replacement of cars by mass transit. Many working class people like to cook with natural gas, so naturally our elite seeks to ban gas stoves. Gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers? Forget it. California will ban gasoline-powered lawn equipment in 2024. Rising incomes that accompany development allow the masses to eat meat; therefore meat is redefined by the oligarchy as unhealthy and harmful to “the planet.”

Antinomian elites are strongly opposed to populism. You see, populism opposes the new establishment; it opposes the new elites; it wants, however clumsily, to return to traditional values. And, it does not feel contempt for people who love their country and who attend religious services:

To add insult to injury, when the multiracial working class rebels at the ballot box against this unrelenting and unprovoked bullying by the overclass and casts protest votes for demagogic and usually ineffectual anti-establishment politicians like Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, the elite denounces the protest voters as irrational and bigoted cretins who threaten to overthrow democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law. 

Of course, human societies abhor anarchy. They will default to order, one way or another. According to Lind, people will eventually rise up to rebel against rebellion. They will discard the purveyors of anarchy, but that will mean that they will need to replace it with something old, something that they can pretend is really new.

When the current rebellion by the managerial elite against the proletariat is exhausted, as the rebellion against the bourgeoisie was exhausted generations ago, there will be nothing left to rebel against except rebellion itself.

Most people in Western countries might welcome a revolution against revolution with relief.

You may agree or disagree with Lind. Surely, his ideas are worth a post.