Degenerate Moderns
Jones, E. Michael
1 n 1938, the English novelist Aldous Huxley admitted something that the other literary mandarins of his day probably wished he had kept to himself. Huxley's revelation was this: the real reason...
...Modern academics, unembarrassed by metaphysics, will scoff at the notion that the spiritual structure of our personality is deeply DEGENERATE MODERNS: MODERNITY AS RATIONALIZED SEXUAL MISBEHAVIOR E. Michael Jones Ignatius Press/ 259 pages / $16.95 reviewed by GEORGE SIM JOHNSTON taking stock of their ideas...
...Shouldn't theories be considered on their own merits, rather than on the basis of the messy lives of their progenitors...
...Both writers show that the twin creeds of modernity—personal hedonism and social utopianism—are the products of the disordered lives of middle-class intellectuals...
...Here we get to the Achilles heel of modernism...
...All thinking," writes Gay in his biography of Freud, "including the most abstract and objective, can be shown to have nonrational sources...
...But until recently the squalid sex lives of people like Jean-Paul Sartre or Margaret Mead or Bertrand Russell were treated delicately by biographers...
...It is, after all, difficult to portray as a great friend of humanity someone who on every page is using other people, especially sexual partners, like Kleenex...
...Freud detested his father (whom he called a "pervert") and had a violent sexual attraction toward his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, which may or may not have been consummated...
...CI 78 The American Spectator November 1993...
...Apart from the usual white-washing of liberal icons, there was another reason for the biographical silence, one that has much to do with the spiritual dislocations of our age...
...Darwin, Marx, and Freud all claimed in one way or another that the human animal is driven by blind, irrational forces...
...rationalized sexual misbehavior...
...Huxley's revelation was this: the real reason intellectuals of his generation had embraced modernism was that it gave them license to have unlimited sex...
...Toward the end of his life, Freud himself lamented that "our cures are less effective than Lourdes...
...How, then, did Mead get everything so wrong...
...A classic example is the economist John Maynard Keynes, the scratch of whose pen turned the Western democracies into fiscal junkies...
...The answer comes from Mead herself...
...These reports are ideal for distribution to your friends, business colleagues, teachers, and political representatives...
...Jones's thesis is simple: Modernity is 76 The American Spectator November 1993 American Spectator Reprints Available The Real Anita Hill by Onyx] Brock Y Canton's Big Mama by Mime...
...As E. Michael Jones shows in his brilliant new book, Degenerate Moderns, Keynes was hardly an isolated case...
...If the human mind is the plaything of blind, material forces, then its productions, including Das Kapital and The Interpretation of Dreams, have no objective value whatsoever...
...All of them can best be understood in light of the moral disorders of their founders, proponents, and adherents...
...But Keynes would have done a great service if he had begun The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money with the disclosure that he was a Bloomsbury aesthete and practicing homosexual...
...In novelistic detail, Mead painted a paradise where sex was plentiful and guilt-free...
...Terry Eastland's dissection of Rush Limbaugh's Revolution...
...Marx as a young man wrote poems to Satan...
...After being diagnosed with cancer in 1978, Mead started visiting a Chilean psychic, with whom she discussed, among other things, the two "spirit guides" who accompanied her...
...If Samoans are as sexually strict as Freeman and other anthropologists say, where did she get the idea that they regard adultery as unimportant...
...The claim that the private vices of intellectuals can spread through the whole fabric of society like an ugly stain will land Jones in the same hot water as Paul Johnson, whose Intellectuals was another rogue's gallery of secular prophets who preached public benevolence while leading lives of the utmost moral squalor...
...The relatively new discipline of anthropology lent itself to the rationalization of their behavior...
...Nor will they like the idea that, under the guise of scientific objectivity, thinkers like Freud, Jung, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kinsey constantly distorted the truth so that it would fit their peculiar sexual agendas...
...Keynes was a promiscuous homosexual, but his first biographer, Sir Roy Harrod, refused to admit the existence, much less the significance, of Keynes's orientation...
...The result was Coming of Age in Samoa, which has sold millions of copies in a dozen languages...
...The more selfish and pathological their conduct is revealed to have been, the more fervently their disciples insist that there is no connection between what people do and what they think...
...On the other hand, a selfishly corrupt will to pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality...
...S ome might disagree with Jones's use of biography to undermine the central tenets of modernity...
...Mead's book was seized on by intellectuals like Bertrand Russell as proof that the sexual strictures of JudeoChristianity were cultural accidents and that people could get along fine without them...
...The primary villain in Jones's line-up is Freud, whom Jones correctly views as an ideologue of atheism rather than a scientist...
...All modern "isms" follow as a result of this rebellion...
...The Incredible Shrinking AIDS Epidemic report...
...Is mankind going to spend the rest of its existence in what Jones calls "ever-constricting ruts" of sensuality and materialism...
...The question is whether modernity turns out to be a free lunch...
...There are disturbances in the modern psyche which can elude a theorist sitting unmolested in a think tank near the Potomac, but which may yet play themselves out on a large canvas...
...Perhaps as a result we might have lower federal deficits...
...A day in Mead's Samoa begins as "lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes...
...As for Mead herself, her later life was spent making goofy, oracular pronouncements while descending a spiral of drugs (Dexedrine), sex, and the occult...
...He could have explained how he and his friends did not believe in self-denial or consider that they had any obligation to posterity...
...The chief goal of Freud's psychology was the transvaluation of all values...
...But Jones makes a strong case that this, indeed, is what modernity has been all about...
...But modern ideologies are not scientific...
...But the crucial intellectual event occurs...
...Wattenbers Copies of Michael Fumento's report on Magic Johnson & AIDS...
...Robert Novak's portrait of Bill Clinton...
...Thomas [Aquinas] says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of spirit...
...To say that the rest of us have the same compulsion is, in Jones's words, rather like Bonnie and Clyde telling us that mankind has a universal compulsion to rob banks...
...Since Luther and Descartes, there has been in the West a notion that what we do with our bodies has no effect on how we use our minds...
...If the lives of its founders are any indication, that is a dubious proposition...
...Carl Jung, Freud's disciple who later broke with him, was involved with alchemy and UFOs...
...Lust, of course, is a common enough vice...
...And since many of them began as deliberate distortions of reality, the biographies of their founders are very much to the point...
...As one of Mead's bitter ex-husbands wrote to her, her brand of anthropology was simply a "dishonest way of treating your private affairs...
...From this standpoint, it is easy to maintain that a Russell or a Sartre always managed to keep their obsessive sexual lives in a sealed container whenever they sat down to write philosophy...
...Her Samoans "laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity," and smile on "casual homosexual practices...
...But Freud, according to disciples like Peter Gay, is to be exempted from the sexual analysis that Freudians use toundermine the credibility of everyone else...
...One of Freud's disciples wrote to him excitedly in 1930 that psychoanalysis "has reversed all values, it has conquered Christianity, disclosed the Antichrist, and liberated the spirit of resurgent life from the ascetic ideal...
...At the time she was examining the Samoans, Mead, who was married, had two affairs going, one with a man and one with a woman (the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who was Mead's lesbian lover until Benedict's death in 1948...
...Freudianism, like all modern "isms," is self-cancelling...
...Only he who wants nothing for himself, who is not subjectively "interested," can know the truth...
...The young Mead belonged to a set of New York intellectuals who discovered sexual liberation decades before Haight-Ashbury...
...But Jones's book breaks new ground in probing the subtle regions of the human heart where desire confronts truth and rearranges it for its own ends...
...They were jolly lucky that the National Enquirer didn't find out...
...Mead's biographer, Jane Howard, quotes someone who knew Mead as saying: "Many of Margaret's friends were most anxious lest anyone know that she, this public essence of rationality, went to a faith healer...
...Dabbling in the occult, Jones demonstrates, has been a sideline for a number of modernist figures who are supposed to have been paragons of rationality...
...If anything, Samoans are more puritanical about sex than Westerners and place a far higher premium on female virginity...
...Modern intellectuals, of course, often pose as sexual revolutionaries...
...As Jones writes, "If Gay really means 'all thinking,' then he must be speaking of Freudian thinking as well, in which case he has demolished his own ideology...
...One: $5 Ten: $35 Fifty: $130 Five: $20 Twenty-five: $75 One hundred: $250 (Quantity discounts apply only to orders for the same report...
...In the thirties, Mead and Benedict were visiting a Harlem necromancer—as clients, not as researchers...
...But a recent spate of biographies, notable for their lurid sexual detail, strongly suggest that the private lives of modern intellectuals cannot be breezily dismissed when George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York City...
...The American Spectator, P.O...
...Degenerate Moderns begins with a quote from the German philosopher Josef Pieper, whose thoughts about this matter could not be more unfashionable or correct: Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowledge of the truth to the condition of purity...
...The Oedipus complex, for which there has never been a shred of scientific evidence, turns out to be, in Jones's words, "nothing more than Freud's personal history disguised and writ large...
...According to thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, democracy and pluralism, despite complications in the Balkans and elsewhere, are the final terminus of mankind...
...Freud, like many modern rebels, seems to have been obsessed by the Catholic Church...
...It illustrates Chesterton's remark that people who don't believe in God will believe in anything...
...And against Mead's claim that the idea of rape was "completely foreign to the Samoan mind," Freeman discovered one of the highest rates of forcible rape in the world, then and now...
...Unfortunately, as anthropologists like Derek Freeman eventually showed, every detail of Mead's book turned out to be false...
...Send for your copies today...
...Box 549, Arlington, VA 22216-0549 Yes, please send me: copies of Michael Fumento's "This Magic Moment" $ copies of David Brock's "The Real Anita Hill" $ copies of Daniel Wattenberg's "Gunning for Koresh" $ copies of Daniel Wattenberg's "Lady Macbeth of Little Rock" $ - copies of Terry Eastland's "Rush Limbaugh: Talking Back" $ - copies of Robert Novak's "The Trouble With Clinton" $ - copies of Michael Ledeen's "Lawrence Walsh, Grand Inquisitor" $ copies of "The Incredible Shrinking AIDS Epidemic" $ copies of Lisa Schiffren's "The Unauthorized Clinton Financial Audit" $ Total enclosed $ Name: Address: City: State: Zip Code: RP9311 77 sensitive to sexual behavior...
...Mead went to Samoa as a young graduate student in 1925...
...Daniel Wattenberg's report on David Koresh...
...Jones's first "degenerate modern" (he could have found a subtler phrase) is the anthropologist Margaret Mead, whose reporting of the sexual habits of Samoans became a bible of modern paganism...
...This is the dark, irrational underside of modernity that still awaits its master interpreter...
...Michael Ledeen's exposé of Lawrence Walsh...
...Well, yes—if the theory is truly scientific and therefore subject to what scientists call falsification...
...Freud was obsessed with the devil and first took cocaine on Walpurgisnacht, the night of April 30, 1884, in liquid form, in imitation, as a number of commentators agree, of the way Faust drank the magic potion in Goethe's play, which was being performed in Vienna at the time...
...And at that it was very successful...
...when vices are transmuted into theories, when the "intellectual" sets up shop in rebellion against moral law and therefore in rebellion against truth...
...Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be, in Jones's words, "about as scientific The American Spectator November 1993 as the screenplay of Blue Lagoon...
...It doesn't say much for the discipline of anthropology that Mead's book was, and still is, treated as a classic...
...Books like Degenerate Moderns make one wonder, though...
...David Brock's investigation of Anita Hill...
...As for Samoan adolescence being a blissful period of sexual ease, Freeman found that the suicide rate for this group was and is unusually high and that many of the suicides relate to "shame at illicit sexual unions...
...Newton was as weird as they come, but his theories can be tested and shown to be true for most of material reality...
...she spent a mere six weeks learning the language and then set about investigating the sex lives of the natives...
...Young Samoans, according to Mead, get so much sex in every direction that their adolescence is entirely free of the stresses which typify this period in more advanced cultures...
...they have an explanation for everything (natural selection, economic repression, the unconscious) and so finally explain nothing: when they run into contradictions, they simply mutate...
...Jones's brilliant treatment of Freud suggests the reason why, in the long run, Freud's main impact on the history of psychoanalysis will have been merely to delay the introduction of pharmacology as the primary means of dealing with neurotic disorders...
...and Lisa Schiffren's exposé of the Clintons' Tax Returns are available to TAS readers...
...It certainly hasn't cured many people...
...Lately, we have been told that history, understood as an Hegelian clash of paradigms, is coming to an end...
...This last item is of interest...
...Daniel Wattenberg's profile of the real Hillary Clinton...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
