The Philosophical Undoing of America and How the Sixties Nearly Undid Me

Woh, Brannon Howse must be doing something right. The vitriol directed against the man could curdle water (google him and follow the links, you'll see).

Brannon Howse is new to me. Discovered him through Jan Markell's site, and she's also new to me. I forget what took me to his site this morning, but was spending some time there glancing over this and that and found this book, Grave Influence, a book I thought I probably really should have.

Of course I often think that about books and don't buy them anyway, mostly because I can't afford them. Right now I have a little extra money though...

Anyway, this book is all about the thinkers of the past he considers to have been major instruments in the making of America's current philosophical debacle, and it's a great list. Most of them I'd put on a list of my own if I made one. Only a few of them I don't know anything or much about, and I might exchange a few for others or at least add some new names, but overall I have to say that just as it stands it's quite a good list. I think I can justify buying it as an essential reference book.

Its subtitle is 21 Radicals and Their Worldviews that Rule America from the Grave

This is it, the one book you need to read if you want to understand the big picture, connect all the dots, and understand current times, and future events and trends that will be unfolding. This ground-breaking book by best-selling author Brannon Howse is the result of thousands of hours of research over many years and is must reading for every teenager and adult.

Brannon reveals how the worldviews of 21 dead people are still influencing every aspect of American life and vying for the hearts and minds of adults and students. Whether we are discussing, law, science, economics, history, family, social issues, education or religion, the people and worldviews seeking to further their agenda in these disciplines are almost always connected back to four major forces. Brannon reveals the connection between occultism/pagan spirituality, the apostate church, the educational establishment and government/corporations.

Through this book you will come to understand the oppositions worldview, heroes, goals, strategies, masking terms, networks and targets. Those who share the worldviews of these 21 enemies of our constitutional republic and Biblical worldview do not want their agenda and its consequences to be revealed to the American people. Above all, they do not want us to equip and train our children and grandchildren with a Biblical worldview by which to recognize, reject, and fight against their seductive and destructive lies. This book will equip you to do just that as Brannon gives specific and pro-active responses you can take to make this the finest hour for the American church.

Here is the list of twenty-one for which Brannon has dug up worldview facts you must know and prepare to oppose:

Saul Alinsky,
Karl Marx,
John Dewey,
John Maynard Keynes,
Aldous Huxley,
Charles Darwin,
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Margaret Sanger,
William James,
Alice Bailey,
Helen Schucman,
Sigmund Freud,
Alfred Kinsey,
Benjamin Bloom,
B.F. Skinner,
The Frankfurt School,
Soren Kierkegaard,
Julius Wellhausen,
Christopher Columbus Langdell,
Betty Friedan and
Roger Baldwin

Topics covered include:

Corporate fascism, sustainable development, the Third Way, global governance, dialectic process, the Delphi technique, the Cloward-Piven Strategy and deliberate chaos, community organizing, Fabian socialism, the federal reserve and a fiat currency, America's decline is Europe's gain, cultural Marxism, government mandated youth service, legal positivism, postmodernism, soft-despotism, higher-criticism, pagan spirituality, feminism, welfare-state capitalism, the false-dominate church, the Emergent Church, the spiritual battle for America, the United Nations and occultism, unmasking the one-world religion, the deconstructionists in the culture and in the church, psychological labeling of dissenters, behavior modification, a planned economy, the assault on parental authority, the two tracks to globalism, Keynesian economics, collectivism, similarities between America and Nazi Germany, national leaders are a reflection of the people, social justice, why the culture war is lost if the church goes weak, is God judging America?, When and why does God judge a nation?, the environmentalist/globalist connection, cultural revolution/sexual revolution, the right to die becomes the duty to die, the true purpose of the law, why the State wants the children, are we all God's children? And much, much more.

Saul Alinsky, Karl Marx, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Margaret Sanger, William James, Alice Bailey, Helen Schucman, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, Benjamin Bloom, B.F. Skinner, The Frankfurt School, Soren Kierkegaard, Julius Wellhausen, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Betty Friedan and Roger Baldwin

I first got wind of the Frankfurt School's destructive influence perhaps fifteen years ago, found out how their influence was very big -- pervasive -- and very destructive. Their ideas were part of the air you breathed in a college town in the sixties but at that time I hadn't known the source of those ideas, which are considered to be the underpinnings of Political Correctness. I followed reading up on them with some reading up on Roger Baldwin who founded the ACLU, then John Dewey. I already knew Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Sanger and Freud had made influential undesirable input. I still don't know much economic theory, so Keynes isn't on my own list yet. I didn't know Huxley or Alice Bailey had any particular influence on the culture, or B.F. Skinner, much as I despised his thinking back when it was big. Betty Friedan got her licks in for sure but I never thought of her as a big mover and shaker. So I guess I'll learn a few things from this book -- or disagree on a few things, probably both. In any case such a book is needed.

Funny, I already knew I wanted off this planet by the end of the sixties, when I was still a child of that generation and had no critical perspective to speak of on any of it, no coherent critical perspective anyway though the whole thing had disturbed me in some deep all-embracing way. I'd been part of it up to a point but profoundly alienated from it at the same time. It's hard to be coherent about it now because it wasn't clear in my mind then, but the feeling of distress it engendered in me returns when I think about it at all. In fact, thinking about it now I wonder how I remained at all sane through it.

The sixties is when it all started coming together for the sea change we've been living in ever since. There was something brewing I hated, the philosophical and political atmosphere was poison, but I didn't have any clear names for it then. There was no way to talk about it really either, except to describe the brooding gloomy feelings and the inchoate sense of being at odds with a nightmare world, because instead of gaining coherence by the talking it would be turned into a personal problem of your own, the focus would shift away from the real problem of a world gone loony onto your own problems of adjustment.

I wasn't a Christian until much later, and then Oh eternal gratitude to Thee, Lord, the sun of Reality and Truth broke through. (It just occurred to me now that one reason I never had a strong sense of myself as a sinner saved by grace is that I had SUCH a strong sense of having been saved from this poisonous world. Oh I know I'm a sinner and salvation is from my sins but that other salvation is probably going to dominate me until I see the Lord).

Back in those days B.F. Skinner might have been the only one I could have pointed to as the purveyer of a poisonous doctrine and I hated his stuff with a passion. One thing I knew I knew was that human beings aren't animals or automatons who get "conditioned" mechanistically and unconsciously -- or "programmed" to use probably the more current metaphor.

I didn't like a lot of what Freud had said either but wasn't able to criticize him clearly. I thought evolution was true, had read Darwin, accepted it but did have questions about how to prove his stuff that came up from time to time. I read Friedan but thought most feminism was silly. Not so much pernicious as just addlebrained -- because the earlier feminists HAD won the major battles. Some of the new feminists were deadly serious and even scary. (To be fair, I do think that although by the 60s the major injustices that had provoked the first wave of feminists had been overcome, there still was a patronizing belittling attitude toward women that did rankle and still needed to be dealt with, but nothing that could justify the Marxism-based rhetoric and results of the movement that followed).

It was all quite depressing to me, that decade where we were all supposed to be happy flower children. I wonder if I'm the only one who experienced it as I did, with that inarticulate alienation. It seems that either you hated it and knew why or loved it and knew why. I hated it but in some sense didn't know it, just "went with the flow" at least outwardly, or to the extent I did know it I struggled to understand why. It was hard to get a grip on it at least partly because I was surrounded by people who thought we were living through this wonderful change for the better. All the old musty morals and values were being challenged and brought down, you see, and a new dawn of humanistic possibilities was emerging right before our eyes. I assume everyone on that list of Brannon Howse's contributed to this wondrous new formulation of human potential in one way or another, it's the point of his book. (Just the term "human potential" brings many more names flooding to mind but I'll leave that for another pondering.)

I'm not sure I'd have done a lot better among people who hated the time and knew why, though, because I don't think they'd have had the right terms for what was really bothering me about it. (I now realize that must be because for them the problem was predominantly political, while for me it was philosophical. Their heirs are today's patriotic right-wing conservatives and I DO identify with them up to a point, those of my own generation particularly, but if they managed to live their lives without being unraveled by the sixties, even pleasantly engaged during that time, there's a limit on how far we can go together).

Anyway, what was bothering me about it: The attacks on America were part of it, the accusation of "American imperialism" from the left wing activists, but just a small part of it. It seemed to me that rationality had deserted the nation, at least it had deserted my generation. That much I did have clear in my mind. And the seventies were even worse, the pits, the dregs, as then there came sweeping in to fill up the holes that had been blown in Rationality the most irrational collection of babbling idiocies, the eastern religions and their Americanized offshoots.

I'm still incoherent about all this. It's still a blurry gray fog of experience I once had. I'm saved from it, it's safely Out There now, and from a Christian perspective it is possible to look at bits of it with some objectivity, a huge relief from the unnerving sense that everything was just going to go on chaotically and meaninglessly forever after. In a sense there is no longer a need to understand it even if I could, for my own personal wellbeing anyway, but I would still like to be able to get a better grip on it than I've had.

It's all about ideas, the ideas that were in the air, that have now come to define today's philosophical environment. The Zeitgeist of today. Can people still be saved from it?

So I want to read this book for what it may offer of further understanding of all that.

A Rant Against Feminism

Ugh. I don't know if I'm even going to be able to get through Kassian's Feminist Mistake. So far she's pretty much just spelling out the feminist point of view, not discussing it or answering it. It just reminds me of what I always hated about feminism and I have little patience for it. The stupidity of their accusations and arguments. Blech.

I could never stand the idea, so common in the 60s, that our beliefs and traditions were "conditioned" by hostile or irrational forces, but such an idea is freely thrown about as the explanation for everything someone thinks is wrong with society and of course feminism slings it about too. "Oh it was just conditioned in us by people who want to control us." Blah blah blah. By a "priestly class" perhaps or whatnot.

I hate the practice of giving made-up explanations anyway and this one is pure fantasy. The very term "conditioned" curdles something deep inside me. Yeah I know I'm not being very clear here. This is a post for venting reactions and I hope I'll get more analytical later.

But here's famous anthropologist Margaret Mead being quoted about how we're "conditioned" into our sex roles:

"Mead, in Sex and Temperament (1935) and Male and Female (1949), contended that there was no fixed pattern of male-female interaction and roles. She concluded that differences between male and female were learned and conditioned by culture rather than set by nature." (36)

I knew somewhere deep in my inarticulate gut that was false the first time I heard it. I have a feeling many others did too. But the "scholars" and the "intellectuals" chaired university departments with such idiocies and filled up the world with such mystifying nonsense for years and years, and I guess they're still doing it.

Of course the biggest stupidity, contained in this cultural conditioning notion, was the idea that men and women aren't really different at all, the differences are all made up; therefore the solution to inequities is to assume we're identical by nature and change social forms to free us up to remove all barriers to full and complete personal expression and define ourselves from scratch. The absolute mess that's been made of the family and sexuality and marriage since such notions took over ought to have woken us up, but uh uh.

I could also never see the sense in fighting biology. Women get pregnant. That seems to me to be a rock-bottom fact of life. But feminists knocked themselves out trying to overcome that simple biological fact. How does it help us better know our worth as women to have our very nature talked about as something we have to get rid of?

These things are all problems that have to be thought about in any discussion of female complaints about disenfranchisement by culture or the church, but it seems that feminists and other activists always have to rush to a "solution" before they understand the problem. Or they "understand" the problem by pasting a fantasy label like "conditioned" on it.

I also hated the analysis that women's discontents were the result of Patriarchy (of course patriarchy being a purely "conditioned" artificial cultural situation imposed on us by men rather than God). I never had anything against patriarchy. I always LIKED the idea of men being at the head of things, family or society -- the right KIND of men of course, the just ones, the fair ones, the kind ones, the competent ones, not the "silly boys and drunks and rowdies" Elizabeth Cady Stanton so rightly complained had powers and privileges women didn't have, and not tyrants and misogynists. No, patriarchy in itself isn't the problem, and now I know also that patriarchy is given by God.

You can see that I didn't find much in feminism to attract me. Mostly it gave me a stomachache, EVEN THOUGH I had at times felt mislabeled and insulted for being female and welcomed SOME kind of redress, so you'd think I'd be eager to grasp at any effort to remedy the situation. But I wasn't. The remedy was more offensive than the problem.

Let nobody think all this apparent wisdom I'm showing here worked itself out in my life though. Nope, I didn't live by my own wise intuitions. I was more than happy to "invent" myself, do as I please, ignore biology and get myself deep in sin and social catastrophe. Even with my cynical inner voice telling me it's all a crock. Boundaries were broken down nevertheless, meaning was lost, order was lost, standards were lost, the world was spinning out of control even if it WAS all a crock.

Well I'll try to go on reading Kassian. I would like to know how all this worked itself out in the church, because of course I wasn't a Christian in the early days of feminism, the 60s and 70s. Oh well -- *sigh* -- on second thought I'm sure I know anyway. Liberal Christianity refuses to take the Bible as God's word and so did feminism. We'll just rewrite it to suit our idea of what's right and proper. It was all just invented by men anyway.

No. Any real analysis of the problems of women has to start with a forthright acknowledgement of the facts of life and the fixed decrees of God. THEN we can maybe start to think about it all.

Hm. Come on, Mary Kassian, let's get to the part where you brilliantly dispense with the feminist mistake and show us the REAL way to understand our female dilemmas, our role in the church particularly.

Catching Up With Fifty Years of Feminism

In my last two posts I turned toward feminism as a blog topic and I've continued to read up on it. I'm reading Mary Kassian's books more closely now for starters. (They're both online at the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood website -- just put "Mary Kassian" in the search box.)

Her focus is on modern feminism from the sixties on, and reliving that period through her book, The Feminist Mistake, seems to be bringing up old feelings of my own that go back years, feelings I've apparently suppressed, which is evidenced by the fact that I haven't felt them in all this time -- not since the 60s or 70s at least, some of them anyway. Some of them, however, I've been discovering, go all the way back to early childhood. Hurt feelings, angry feelings, depressed feelings, confused and conflicted feelings, all surrounding my sense of myself as female or my sense of the world's attitude to femaleness, and particularly of course, feelings encountered in specific relationships with others -- parents, siblings, friends, boyfriends, authorities, institutions etc.

So feminism could turn out to be an emotionally very bumpy topic for me. That probably explains why I've avoided the whole arena of women's situation as much as I have. For instance, I researched the woman's head covering quite thoroughly, which is discussed in some cases as part of a broader discussion of women's position as defined by the Bible, but quite definitely did NOT want to read beyond the head covering in any of those discussions. Partly I've just never known how to understand a great deal of what the Bible teaches about women's role and I didn't want to encumber my study of the head covering with other issues. But I have to admit I'm not sure I really want to know too much about the subject. Insofar as I grasp that it places me in a class beneath men, and that this is God's own decree, I've more or less gritted my teeth and determined to accept it, hoping the Lord comes soon and rescues me from this benighted world (since there is no distinction between the sexes, or even sexes at all, in the Kingdom of God). There's a defensive disdain for the whole subject I've cultivated in my attitude, that says something like "I don't need to know all the particulars, just tell me what my role is and because I love God I will make myself live it." It's a cross to bear after all. In other words, a recipe for ignoring the very feelings I'm now having to recognize.

The idea that one could be wholly emotionally in harmony with God's decree doesn't enter into my mental set. Perhaps there are women for whom it is completely fulfilling, but I would have to surmise that there's some conflict for a great many of us. Not because there's anything wrong with God's decree, but because, in this fallen world, God's decrees are distorted in so many ways, and our own natures are so distorted in so many ways, finding such a happy correspondence must be rare. Even God's own good decree is an instrument of death. Just living in this broken world is a cross if we face it rightly.

I should add, however, that I am aware of factors in my personal experience that predisposed me to my own peculiar conflicts about sex roles. If it adds to the topic I'll include some of that as I go, but I really don't want my blogs to turn into a place to vent my own personal angsts. It may be that as I continue my pursuit of understanding these issues it won't really be necessary. I'll have to see as the subject continues. I did want to write some in that direction, though.

See, I lived through the sixties, in a university town where ALL the "liberationisms" of the day were in-your-face all the time. Since becoming a Christian I've come to recognize all that as the amazingly fertile seedbed of what really should be called the Sin Liberation Front, that has now grown up and put out tentacles like some horror-movie monster to engulf the entire world. Not that it was all bad of course. Violations of civil rights needed to be confronted after all. Unfortunately the way it unfolded in the sixties involved "liberating" some very unsavory elements such as the criminal Black Panthers (read David Horowitz's Radical Son for the best expose of that movement and that whole period I've ever seen). The sixties "liberated" such types as Charles Manson and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Everywhere you looked there was some kind of Liberation Army rising up. There were gut-wrenchingly spooky and scary militant feminists too, who wore overalls and heavy boots and carried around Chairman Mao's Little Red Book as their Bible. There was the Society for Cutting Up Men, or SCUM.

I also attended a "lecture" once in those years about "Gay Liberation," still new in those days, which was nothing but an abusive harangue against heterosexuality and against anybody who didn't think they had any homosexual impulses, insisting we're all "bisexual" and in such violently angry terms it was hard to sit and listen to it, but impossible to leave at the same time. If the speaker had had any political power half the audience would have been thrown into concentration camps for claiming to be exclusively heterosexual.

Those years were very depressing to me. I thought the world had gone completely mad. I'd entered the sixties with idealistic notions about the value of reason and intellectual integrity building a sane and civilized world -- you know, truth, beauty and goodness etc. -- only to find the sixties ending up by throwing it all out as the evil fruit of evil Western Civilization ("hey hey ho ho, Western Civ has got to go"), and I just wanted it all to vanish as a bad dream. All I wanted to do was suppress the whole thing -- and apparently I succeeded.

Before it all reached such a fever pitch, of course, the feminist ideas were circulating in a quieter way. Betty Friedan's Feminist Mystique was a conversation piece early in the decade, along with De Beauvoir's Second Sex. Neither of those books interested me one bit, however. It's certainly not that I was immune to the problems of being female in a prejudiced world that they were trying to address -- far from it, as I indicate in my first few paragraphs above -- but for some reason the way they addressed them didn't speak to me, and that continued to be the case throughout the whole development of feminism since the sixties. Although I'm about as temperamentally unsuited to the traditional woman's role as it's possible to get (I'm not bragging and I'm not apologizing, it's just, perhaps sadly, true), I gravitated more to the traditionalist arguments against the feminism I was encountering. The feminist argument was just irritatingly irrelevant and alienating simply BECAUSE I wasn't immune to the same problems they thought they were addressing. But the traditional arguments left me out too after all, so I was philosophically stranded in a no-man's land (or no-woman's land) with respect to both sides of the argument.

Mary Kassian only glancingly touches on the nightmare side of sixties feminism, and sticks to the major theories that launched the saner side, or at least the more intellectual side, of the feminist movement, including Friedan and De Beauvoir as the beginnings but continuing through names unfamiliar to me. She follows the history of both the secular and the religious feminist arguments which she says developed in parallel to one another.

Again, none of this was relevant to me for some reason, and in a way still isn't. Kassian does speak partly for me when she says she believes the feminist movement raised legitimate questions but came up with wrong answers. I can recognize my own experience in that to some extent, but mostly I just want to get to Kassian's own answers to see if I find my experience recognized there. (I don't mean to be making my own experience the important thing, by the way, it's God's word that must determine everything, but the point is that Kassian is right that something in the feminist movement IS legitimate and DOES reflect a social and psychological injustice to women that needs to be sorted out). Yes, I've skimmed ahead but don't see what I'm looking for yet. I suppose I have to read through it all for it to fall into place.

Which I will now continue to do.