Just saw this at Don Colacho’s Aphorisms:
A “revolutionary” today means an individual for whom modern vulgarity is not triumphing quickly enough.
I know I’ve said this before, but I don’t understand how Leftists can always be going on about how “enraged” they are, how “subversive” their beliefs are, and so forth. If I were one of them, I’d be deliriously happy. They’re the establishement. Everything’s moving their way.
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I think it’s sort of as if liberals were children, and the natural order of things were the family. Often it happens that the child raised by strict parents, who expect him to do chores, who have trained him carefully from his youth, is not as rebellious as the child whose parents’ sole expectations are that he not use hard drugs. The more we fall away from natural limits, the more the existing limits weigh upon us.
It is sort of the flip side of the fact that, in the 50s, one can find writers who thought the world was going to pot–and were often more insightful than similar authors today. Because things had not fallen apart as much, they were more aware of the natural order of things, and so more aware of degeneration; rather as in saint’s lives the holiest people are the most disgusted at their own sins.
Like saints in reverse, the more one rejects God’s order, the more what order remains seems pointless. While what the social order was meant to preserve remained, and could be seen, it made sense; when it has been mostly destroyed, the fragments that remain seem rather senseless. Cf. MacIntyre, first bit of After Virtue.
“I do not understand how one can be a leftist in the modern world when everyone, more or less, is on the left.”
No entiendo cómo se puede ser izquierdista en el mundo moderno, donde todo el mundo es más o menos de izquierda.
–Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (Bogotá: Villegas Editores, 2005), p. 96