What do you think?
Rate this book
Degenerate Moderns: Modernity As Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior
In this ground breaking book, Jones shows how major determining leaders in modern thought and culture have rationalized their own immoral behavior and projected it onto a universal canvas. The main thesis of this book is that, in the intellectual life, there are only two ultimate alternatives: either the thinker conforms desire to truth or he conforms truth to desire. Degenerate Moderns is a marvelous tour de force. Required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the intellectual fashions of the Twentieth century.
259 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1993
12 people are currently reading
914 people want to read
About the author
E. Michael Jones
69 books361 followersCatholic writer, former professor at Saint Mary's College in Indiana and the current editor of Culture Wars magazine.
E. Micheal Jones is controversial for his criticism against judaism.
E. Micheal Jones is controversial for his criticism against judaism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 17, 2012
In 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 intellectuals of his generation had embraced modernism was that it gave them license to have unlimited sex. Modern intellectuals, of course, often pose as sexual revolutionaries. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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 taking stock of their ideas. A classic example is the economist John Maynard Keynes, the scratch of whose pen turned the Western democracies into fiscal junkies. 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. 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. He could have explained how he and his friends did not believe in self-denial or consider that they had any obligation to posterity. Perhaps as a result we might have lower federal deficits.
As E. Michael Jones shows in his brilliant new book, Degenerate Moderns, Keynes was hardly an isolated case. Jones's thesis is simple: Modernity is rationalized sexual misbehavior. Lust, of course, is a common enough vice. But
the crucial intellectual event occurs . . . when vices are transmuted into theories, when the "intellectual" sets up shop in rebellion against moral law and therefore in rebellion against truth. All modern "isms" follow as a result of this rebellion. . . . All of them can best be understood in light of the moral disorders of their founders, proponents, and adherents.
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. 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. 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. 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. Thomas |Aquinas~ says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who is not subjectively "interested," can know the truth. 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.
Modern academics, unembarrassed by metaphysics, will scoff at the notion that the spiritual structure of our personality is deeply sensitive to sexual 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. But Jones makes a strong case that this, indeed, is what modernity has been all about.
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. Mead went to Samoa as a young graduate student in 1925; she spent a mere six weeks learning the language and then set about investigating the sex lives of the natives. The result was Coming of Age in Samoa, which has sold millions of copies in a dozen languages. In novelistic detail, Mead painted a paradise where sex was plentiful and guilt-free. A day in Mead's Samoa begins as "lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes." Her Samoans "laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity," and smile on "casual homosexual practices." 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.
Mead's book was seized on by intellectuals like Bertrand Russell as proof that the sexual strictures of Judeo-Christianity were cultural accidents and that people could get along fine without them. Unfortunately, as anthropologists like Derek Freeman eventually showed, every detail of Mead's book turned out to be false. If anything, Samoans are more puritanical about sex than Westerners and place a far higher premium on female virginity. 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." 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.
Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be, in Jones's words, "about as scientific as the screenplay of Blue Lagoon." How, then, did Mead get everything so wrong? 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 answer comes from Mead herself. 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). The young Mead belonged to a set of New York intellectuals who discovered sexual liberation decades before Haight-Ashbury. The relatively new discipline of anthropology lent itself to the rationalization of their behavior. 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."
It doesn't say much for the discipline of anthropology that Mead's book was, and still is, treated as a classic. As for Mead herself, her later life was spent making goofy, oracular pronouncements while descending a spiral of drugs (Dexedrine), sex, and the occult. This last item is of interest. In the thirties, Mead and Benedict were visiting a Harlem necromancer--as clients, not as researchers. 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. 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. . . . They were jolly lucky that the National Enquirer didn't find out."
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. 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. Carl Jung, Freud's disciple who later broke with him, was involved with alchemy and UFOs. Marx as a young man wrote poems to Satan. This is the dark, irrational underside of modernity that still awaits its master interpreter. It illustrates Chesterton's remark that people who don't believe in God will believe in anything.
The primary villain in Jones's line-up is Freud, whom Jones correctly views as an ideologue of atheism rather than a scientist. 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." The chief goal of Freud's psychology was the transvaluation of all values. And at that it was very successful. It certainly hasn't cured many people. Toward the end of his life, Freud himself lamented that "our cures are less effective than Lourdes." (Freud, like many modern rebels, seems to have been obsessed by the Catholic Church.) 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. 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." 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. 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.
But Freud, according to disciples like Peter Gay, is to be exempted from the sexual analysis that Freudians use to undermine the credibility of everyone else. Here we get to the Achilles heel of modernism. Darwin, Marx, and Freud all claimed in one way or another that the human animal is driven by blind, irrational forces. "All thinking," writes Gay in his biography of Freud, "including the most abstract and objective, can be shown to have nonrational sources." 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." Freudianism, like all modern "isms," is self-cancelling. 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.
Some might disagree with Jones's use of biography to undermine the central tenets of modernity. Shouldn't theories be considered on their own merits, rather than on the basis of the messy lives of their progenitors? Well, yes--if the theory is truly scientific and therefore subject to what scientists call falsification. Newton was as weird as they come, but his theories can be tested and shown to be true for most of material reality. But modern ideologies are not scientific; 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. And since many of them began as deliberate distortions of reality, the biographies of their founders are very much to the point.
Lately, we have been told that history, understood as an Hegelian clash of paradigms, is coming to an end. According to thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, democracy and pluralism, despite complications in the Balkans and elsewhere, are the final terminus of mankind. Books like Degenerate Moderns make one wonder, though. Is mankind going to spend the rest of its existence in what Jones calls "ever-constricting ruts" of sensuality and materialism? 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. The question is whether modernity turns out to be a free lunch. If the lives of its founders are any indication, that is a dubious proposition.
George Sim Johnston is a writer of this review. The review originally appeared in The American Spectator. 26.11 (Nov. 1993): p76
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. 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. 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. 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.
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 taking stock of their ideas. A classic example is the economist John Maynard Keynes, the scratch of whose pen turned the Western democracies into fiscal junkies. 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. 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. He could have explained how he and his friends did not believe in self-denial or consider that they had any obligation to posterity. Perhaps as a result we might have lower federal deficits.
As E. Michael Jones shows in his brilliant new book, Degenerate Moderns, Keynes was hardly an isolated case. Jones's thesis is simple: Modernity is rationalized sexual misbehavior. Lust, of course, is a common enough vice. But
the crucial intellectual event occurs . . . when vices are transmuted into theories, when the "intellectual" sets up shop in rebellion against moral law and therefore in rebellion against truth. All modern "isms" follow as a result of this rebellion. . . . All of them can best be understood in light of the moral disorders of their founders, proponents, and adherents.
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. 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. 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. 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. Thomas |Aquinas~ says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who is not subjectively "interested," can know the truth. 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.
Modern academics, unembarrassed by metaphysics, will scoff at the notion that the spiritual structure of our personality is deeply sensitive to sexual 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. But Jones makes a strong case that this, indeed, is what modernity has been all about.
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. Mead went to Samoa as a young graduate student in 1925; she spent a mere six weeks learning the language and then set about investigating the sex lives of the natives. The result was Coming of Age in Samoa, which has sold millions of copies in a dozen languages. In novelistic detail, Mead painted a paradise where sex was plentiful and guilt-free. A day in Mead's Samoa begins as "lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes." Her Samoans "laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity," and smile on "casual homosexual practices." 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.
Mead's book was seized on by intellectuals like Bertrand Russell as proof that the sexual strictures of Judeo-Christianity were cultural accidents and that people could get along fine without them. Unfortunately, as anthropologists like Derek Freeman eventually showed, every detail of Mead's book turned out to be false. If anything, Samoans are more puritanical about sex than Westerners and place a far higher premium on female virginity. 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." 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.
Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be, in Jones's words, "about as scientific as the screenplay of Blue Lagoon." How, then, did Mead get everything so wrong? 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 answer comes from Mead herself. 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). The young Mead belonged to a set of New York intellectuals who discovered sexual liberation decades before Haight-Ashbury. The relatively new discipline of anthropology lent itself to the rationalization of their behavior. 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."
It doesn't say much for the discipline of anthropology that Mead's book was, and still is, treated as a classic. As for Mead herself, her later life was spent making goofy, oracular pronouncements while descending a spiral of drugs (Dexedrine), sex, and the occult. This last item is of interest. In the thirties, Mead and Benedict were visiting a Harlem necromancer--as clients, not as researchers. 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. 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. . . . They were jolly lucky that the National Enquirer didn't find out."
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. 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. Carl Jung, Freud's disciple who later broke with him, was involved with alchemy and UFOs. Marx as a young man wrote poems to Satan. This is the dark, irrational underside of modernity that still awaits its master interpreter. It illustrates Chesterton's remark that people who don't believe in God will believe in anything.
The primary villain in Jones's line-up is Freud, whom Jones correctly views as an ideologue of atheism rather than a scientist. 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." The chief goal of Freud's psychology was the transvaluation of all values. And at that it was very successful. It certainly hasn't cured many people. Toward the end of his life, Freud himself lamented that "our cures are less effective than Lourdes." (Freud, like many modern rebels, seems to have been obsessed by the Catholic Church.) 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. 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." 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. 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.
But Freud, according to disciples like Peter Gay, is to be exempted from the sexual analysis that Freudians use to undermine the credibility of everyone else. Here we get to the Achilles heel of modernism. Darwin, Marx, and Freud all claimed in one way or another that the human animal is driven by blind, irrational forces. "All thinking," writes Gay in his biography of Freud, "including the most abstract and objective, can be shown to have nonrational sources." 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." Freudianism, like all modern "isms," is self-cancelling. 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.
Some might disagree with Jones's use of biography to undermine the central tenets of modernity. Shouldn't theories be considered on their own merits, rather than on the basis of the messy lives of their progenitors? Well, yes--if the theory is truly scientific and therefore subject to what scientists call falsification. Newton was as weird as they come, but his theories can be tested and shown to be true for most of material reality. But modern ideologies are not scientific; 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. And since many of them began as deliberate distortions of reality, the biographies of their founders are very much to the point.
Lately, we have been told that history, understood as an Hegelian clash of paradigms, is coming to an end. According to thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, democracy and pluralism, despite complications in the Balkans and elsewhere, are the final terminus of mankind. Books like Degenerate Moderns make one wonder, though. Is mankind going to spend the rest of its existence in what Jones calls "ever-constricting ruts" of sensuality and materialism? 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. The question is whether modernity turns out to be a free lunch. If the lives of its founders are any indication, that is a dubious proposition.
George Sim Johnston is a writer of this review. The review originally appeared in The American Spectator. 26.11 (Nov. 1993): p76
July 26, 2022
8/10.
It's surprising how many of us moderns think that slavery is freedom, and continue to insist so while in chains. Those chains may be internal instead of external, but they enslave us nonetheless. The great chain for modern man is lust. A small voice inside of him — his withering conscience — may shout at him to stop, but most cannot connect their lifeless personality and behavior to their worm-like habit.
Before the first upstart of the sexual revolution in the 1920s, and its ultimate victory in the 1960s, social mores and the Church constrained man's sexuality. An agreement was made: if you have sex with a woman, then you shall marry her. You shall have sex for procreation (a biological necessity before the pill and the legalization of abortion). Nature's purpose was fulfilled in the sexual act and deviants were shunned by society. In the Medieval Ages, homosexuals were thrown in swamps. So too were adulterers. Instead of the modern situation, where the groin controls the mind, those in the past wanted to constrain their passions. Like Plato's great chariot rider, Reason, they wanted to take control of the unruly horses of Passion.
This philosophy seems to be lost. So too does the concept that one's control of one's sexuality has any connection to the virtuousness of an overall person. Society tells us that sex is in the private realm and has no effect on public behavior. I disagree on many counts:
First, if you cannot constrain your sexual impulse, you will be unable to constrain other impulses. You will be highly likely to be addicted to food, drugs, or alcohol. You will be highly likely to be a lazy, pleasure-chasing, struggle-avoiding couch potato. Not only do these lethargic traits correlate, but repeated masturbation to porn causes one to become lethargic in all aspects of life. Masturbation decreases the size of one's prefrontal cortex, thus destroying your ability to have the control of Plato's charioteer over your immediate desires; it increases your chances of depression and anxiety; it makes you unable to get an erection, thus impeding your ability to have children; it dirties your mind and makes you feel disgusting. Just as overeating does not just impact one's life in relation to food, so too does masturbation not just affect one's sex life. Both start the domino effect of sloth and spiritual gluttony (the continual seeking of ever-more intense pleasures).
Second, if you are a whore and choose to randomly fornicate with masses of males, you will not be a wifely woman. You will have a 85% chance of divorcing your husband (as opposed to ~15% for virgins). You will be constantly aiming for the attention of men — distracting them in the workplace, the park, and in church. Your sexual desire and attention-seeking will have a deleterious effect on society.
So yes, the amount of "private" lust in your society does have great ramifications. Modernity is a great swindle where the smut-peddlers take advantage of our natural lust. Instead of a civilized constraint, they want us to become zoological specimens. They want us to mount each other like donkeys in public. That's "pride", right? LGBTABCDonkey?
How utterly disgusting. It is unfortunate that man is lustful, that the money-makers know that and make a completely immoral use of it, that they continue to feminize our men and defile our women, but that is sin for you. How important it is to keep virtuous men in power! How important it is to keep your own people in power!
Oh, how modernity is a great big charade — a great play where the actors pretend they are so happy, a great play put on by the money-grabbing theatre directors, but a play full of actors who are internally confused, anxious, and depressed. Uncertain of their roles, told to "follow their passion", their animal selves let loose, their spirit degrading by the day, threatened with vile hatred if they don't follow their masters' commands, the actors don't know how to escape. Where is the escape portal? Where is the trapdoor? How can we escape this tremendous rouse that our wicked masters put on?
We cannot here. The rouse will continue until bad gets to worse. Here's some news: we're there. We are surely worse than Babylon. Our society surely deserves fire and brimstone. Our only hopes lies in virtue and in the eternal. Only He who came from the heavens can save us. Eternal values must remain poignant in our mind, for our fight is the fight for our souls. Each day we choose to embrace eternal Goodness or reduce ourselves to our shit-filled surroundings. We pray to Christ to save us and call Him for the strength we need to survive. For, weak that we are, God is infinitely strong and eternally alive. Babylon is temporal; Christ is eternal. May we lift our heads high and proclaim with our hearts and our minds: "Deus vault!".
It's surprising how many of us moderns think that slavery is freedom, and continue to insist so while in chains. Those chains may be internal instead of external, but they enslave us nonetheless. The great chain for modern man is lust. A small voice inside of him — his withering conscience — may shout at him to stop, but most cannot connect their lifeless personality and behavior to their worm-like habit.
Before the first upstart of the sexual revolution in the 1920s, and its ultimate victory in the 1960s, social mores and the Church constrained man's sexuality. An agreement was made: if you have sex with a woman, then you shall marry her. You shall have sex for procreation (a biological necessity before the pill and the legalization of abortion). Nature's purpose was fulfilled in the sexual act and deviants were shunned by society. In the Medieval Ages, homosexuals were thrown in swamps. So too were adulterers. Instead of the modern situation, where the groin controls the mind, those in the past wanted to constrain their passions. Like Plato's great chariot rider, Reason, they wanted to take control of the unruly horses of Passion.
This philosophy seems to be lost. So too does the concept that one's control of one's sexuality has any connection to the virtuousness of an overall person. Society tells us that sex is in the private realm and has no effect on public behavior. I disagree on many counts:
First, if you cannot constrain your sexual impulse, you will be unable to constrain other impulses. You will be highly likely to be addicted to food, drugs, or alcohol. You will be highly likely to be a lazy, pleasure-chasing, struggle-avoiding couch potato. Not only do these lethargic traits correlate, but repeated masturbation to porn causes one to become lethargic in all aspects of life. Masturbation decreases the size of one's prefrontal cortex, thus destroying your ability to have the control of Plato's charioteer over your immediate desires; it increases your chances of depression and anxiety; it makes you unable to get an erection, thus impeding your ability to have children; it dirties your mind and makes you feel disgusting. Just as overeating does not just impact one's life in relation to food, so too does masturbation not just affect one's sex life. Both start the domino effect of sloth and spiritual gluttony (the continual seeking of ever-more intense pleasures).
Second, if you are a whore and choose to randomly fornicate with masses of males, you will not be a wifely woman. You will have a 85% chance of divorcing your husband (as opposed to ~15% for virgins). You will be constantly aiming for the attention of men — distracting them in the workplace, the park, and in church. Your sexual desire and attention-seeking will have a deleterious effect on society.
So yes, the amount of "private" lust in your society does have great ramifications. Modernity is a great swindle where the smut-peddlers take advantage of our natural lust. Instead of a civilized constraint, they want us to become zoological specimens. They want us to mount each other like donkeys in public. That's "pride", right? LGBTABCDonkey?
How utterly disgusting. It is unfortunate that man is lustful, that the money-makers know that and make a completely immoral use of it, that they continue to feminize our men and defile our women, but that is sin for you. How important it is to keep virtuous men in power! How important it is to keep your own people in power!
Oh, how modernity is a great big charade — a great play where the actors pretend they are so happy, a great play put on by the money-grabbing theatre directors, but a play full of actors who are internally confused, anxious, and depressed. Uncertain of their roles, told to "follow their passion", their animal selves let loose, their spirit degrading by the day, threatened with vile hatred if they don't follow their masters' commands, the actors don't know how to escape. Where is the escape portal? Where is the trapdoor? How can we escape this tremendous rouse that our wicked masters put on?
We cannot here. The rouse will continue until bad gets to worse. Here's some news: we're there. We are surely worse than Babylon. Our society surely deserves fire and brimstone. Our only hopes lies in virtue and in the eternal. Only He who came from the heavens can save us. Eternal values must remain poignant in our mind, for our fight is the fight for our souls. Each day we choose to embrace eternal Goodness or reduce ourselves to our shit-filled surroundings. We pray to Christ to save us and call Him for the strength we need to survive. For, weak that we are, God is infinitely strong and eternally alive. Babylon is temporal; Christ is eternal. May we lift our heads high and proclaim with our hearts and our minds: "Deus vault!".
August 25, 2016
I really want to like this book more than I do. I agree with the fundamental argument, I enjoy the Paul Johnson book he's bouncing off of, and I find the writing entertaining enough. But I always read through the book happily enough until I come to the last chapter, where Jones discusses Martin Luther, and then I start to doubt everything he’s said about everyone else!
Luther was prone to hyperbole, which makes it easy for people who want to show him in a bad light to find quotations in support of their claims, but he was not the antinomian Jones presents him as. Luther may have drawn a firm line between law and gospel, but it was not a line between good and bad – Luther presents them both as representing God, and both as good. From Luther’s perspective, the law tells us what we have done wrong, while the gospel tells us how we may be made righteous before God.
According to Luther, growing in Christ means to obey God’s laws, and he firmly believed that the Bible tells us what God’s laws are. Luther’s problem was not with God’s laws per se, but with the idea that following those laws is an act of human effort (or human will), and with the idea that following the laws without love is an accomplishment, which latter directly contradicts 1 Corinthians 13:1-3.
Luther demands, not just physical obedience to the law (acts), but heart obedience to the law (feelings). Luther had no time for the argument that faith was an act of will because of verses like Romans 10:17, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” or passages like 1 Corinthians 12:9 or Galatians 5:22, which list faith as a gift or fruit of the Spirit. But at the same time Luther warned people that they would be accountable for their sins if they did not turn to Christ and (as a result of that repentance) change their ways.
Even Erasmus, Mr. Freewill himself, recognized that, “As in those who lack grace (special grace, I mean), reason is darkened but not destroyed, so it is probable that their power of will is not wholly destroyed, but has become ineffective for upright actions.” Erasmus could not Biblically deny the fact that the Bible presents salvation as in some way an act of God's Grace. Where Luther and Erasmus differed is not about God’s act in salvation, but in Erasmus’ belief that Christians could, through an act of will, do good things for God. Luther’s position was that we may sometimes think or feel like that’s what’s happening, but in actual fact, if it is a truly good thing we're doing, then it is God working through us, not us working for God.
When Jones so completely misunderstands Martin Luther, I hesitate to take his word on other human beings. OTOH, I have seen people in my own life who demonstrate Jones’ fundamental argument that sinning results in philosophical justifications, while my very attempts to verify or disprove his various specific claims about people lead me to interesting places, and I have enjoyed a fair number of the books he references.
For all its faults, I have read this book a couple three times now, and will probably read it again, because it makes me think.
Luther was prone to hyperbole, which makes it easy for people who want to show him in a bad light to find quotations in support of their claims, but he was not the antinomian Jones presents him as. Luther may have drawn a firm line between law and gospel, but it was not a line between good and bad – Luther presents them both as representing God, and both as good. From Luther’s perspective, the law tells us what we have done wrong, while the gospel tells us how we may be made righteous before God.
According to Luther, growing in Christ means to obey God’s laws, and he firmly believed that the Bible tells us what God’s laws are. Luther’s problem was not with God’s laws per se, but with the idea that following those laws is an act of human effort (or human will), and with the idea that following the laws without love is an accomplishment, which latter directly contradicts 1 Corinthians 13:1-3.
Luther demands, not just physical obedience to the law (acts), but heart obedience to the law (feelings). Luther had no time for the argument that faith was an act of will because of verses like Romans 10:17, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” or passages like 1 Corinthians 12:9 or Galatians 5:22, which list faith as a gift or fruit of the Spirit. But at the same time Luther warned people that they would be accountable for their sins if they did not turn to Christ and (as a result of that repentance) change their ways.
Even Erasmus, Mr. Freewill himself, recognized that, “As in those who lack grace (special grace, I mean), reason is darkened but not destroyed, so it is probable that their power of will is not wholly destroyed, but has become ineffective for upright actions.” Erasmus could not Biblically deny the fact that the Bible presents salvation as in some way an act of God's Grace. Where Luther and Erasmus differed is not about God’s act in salvation, but in Erasmus’ belief that Christians could, through an act of will, do good things for God. Luther’s position was that we may sometimes think or feel like that’s what’s happening, but in actual fact, if it is a truly good thing we're doing, then it is God working through us, not us working for God.
When Jones so completely misunderstands Martin Luther, I hesitate to take his word on other human beings. OTOH, I have seen people in my own life who demonstrate Jones’ fundamental argument that sinning results in philosophical justifications, while my very attempts to verify or disprove his various specific claims about people lead me to interesting places, and I have enjoyed a fair number of the books he references.
For all its faults, I have read this book a couple three times now, and will probably read it again, because it makes me think.
October 23, 2019
Exactly the summarized biographic reading you'd expect from a traditional Catholic on intellectuals such as Freud, Margaret Mead, Keynes, Kinsey, Picasso as well as some lesser characters he seems to have a personal grudge against. This goes as far as claiming Martin Luther was the prototypical "cumbrain". Every theoretical innovation in practically all fields can be explained away as just rationalized rebellion against a priori natural law. Somewhat amusing reading nonetheless.
...if an election were held for this century’s representative man, one would be hard pressed to find two better candidates than Anthony Blunt and Pablo Picasso—ideologue, subversive, artist, sexual revolutionary. It is the century in a nutshell; the attack on life—cultural, moral, intellectual, and physical—went by the name modernity.
August 11, 2018
An unflinching expose of some of the biggest frauds who've been peddling much of the garbage responsible for corrupting our society, in their efforts to make it more "modern," aka "progressive."
Jones expertly peels back the onion on these so-called intellectuals as he reveals them for the fraudsters and scam artists they've actually been.
The surprising thing is how easily and how often they duped the public into buying all their nonsense as being "the final answer" in their self-anointed fields.
Jones expertly peels back the onion on these so-called intellectuals as he reveals them for the fraudsters and scam artists they've actually been.
The surprising thing is how easily and how often they duped the public into buying all their nonsense as being "the final answer" in their self-anointed fields.
March 1, 2009
Very good.
October 27, 2023
Only reason I don't give 5 is because of the chapter on Luther.
September 22, 2025
"In the end modernity was debunked by its own biographies."
In this essay collection, E. Michael Jones takes aim at some of the various folk heroes of modernity from Margaret Mead to Kinsey to Picasso to Freud and Luther. Each represents their own branch of intellectual modernity in rebellion against the moral law. He argues that "the intellectual life is a function of the moral life of the thinker" and that their work became a sort of wish fulfillment that transmuted their own vices into theories in order to rationalize them.
He begins by debunking Mead's anthropology as a reflection of her own infidelity. Being an anthropology major, his two essays discrediting "cultural relativism" and its founding theorists were of particular interest since Mead is enshrined as an untouchable saint in the field and feminists frequently use her bunk research to justify sexual libertinism. Never mind that her Samoa research (the lie that Samoans had no sexual taboos around adultery) has been proven wrong. "The real attraction of cultural relativism was that it condoned sexual license."
In "Homosexual as Subversive" Jones articulates the duality of the homosexual psyche (the so-called "double life"): "Necessary to the homosexual vision is a duality that neatly parallels the distinction between esoteric and exoteric knowledge so congenial to the Gnostic view of things."
He discusses the Bloomsbury homos who believed love between men is superior to that of man and woman, that the "home (domesticity of marriage) emasculated everything," and that "Higher Sodomy" was a liberation from the inferiority of women. Jones makes an interesting point about how, as the barriers against sodomy fell, the more gays punished themselves (that the prevalence of sadomasochism in gay sex is a manifestation of self-hatred and unexpiated sexual guilt).
"Left to fester long enough, the self-subversion that is implicit in every homosexual act will extend beyond itself to include an attack on society, first as manifested in the family, but then as manifested in one's country as well."
On Kinsey: "Without the legitimatizing aura of Darwin, without evolution as the scientific justification of deviance, Kinsey would have been just one more middle-aged man obsessed with pornography."
Jones goes on to expose the shocking sexual crimes at the center of Kinsey's research. Namely, the sexual abuse of pre-adolescent boys in order to obtain his data on the "incidence of orgasm."
In "Cubism as Sexual Loathing" Jones shows that Picasso's cubist "art" was merely the hateful mutilation of his ex-lovers once the relationships went south. He'd depict his lovers beautifully at first and then as disfigured monsters (an expression of his sexual loathing towards them).
With his Cubist distortions, Picasso was "mounting what he saw as a frontal assault on the traditions of the West" and against Realism, which saw the transcendent value of the human person. "Picasso's mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice."
"By the end of his career, Picasso had reached the logical outcome of his aesthetic. The cycle of attraction and disgust had collapsed into one image, a cubist face and a realistic crotch. Spirit was disfigured and desire was retained in pornographic detail."
On Freud (by far the longest essay), Jones explores the connection between his theories and his own incestuous desires. Freud's obsessions with, and eventual marriage with, his sister-in-law becomes rationalized in The Oedipus Complex where he projects the latent desire for incest on humanity. Later, Freud even claims that to undo the neurosis stemming from sexual guilt, you must re-enact the perversion that led to it in the first place, which in Freud's case was the perversion of his father.
"Incest would then be a diabolical inversion of the respect due to a father. Committing incest would be a way of wreaking revenge on a father for some wrong which he had done. It would be a way of destroying the authority of the father, and by extension...of destroying the authority of God, the 'exalted father.'"
"Perversion is not just the antithesis of neurosis and therefore its cure; it is an opening into the realm of religion as well. Since religion...is the antithesis of perversion, then perversion becomes, in the numinous way taking shape in Freud's mind...the undoing of religion as well. The Oedipus project becomes a way of using the powers of the nether world to overcome those of above."
"By linking incest and perversion, Freud furnishes us with the final term in the equation. Incest becomes the perversion that will cure Freud of his neurosis. In committing an act of incest...he will also avenge himself on the father who was the cause of the neurosis in the first place; beyond that he will rob God, the exalted father, of his dominion as exercised primarily through the realm of morality. As with the Egyptian pharaohs...committing incest elevates the person who practices it to the level of a 'god,' which, according to the account of the Fall in Genesis was also the aspiration of Adam and Eve when they acquiesced to the suggestion of the devil."
The conflation of love and evil, in Freud's own words, is "an intellectual hell, layer upon layer of it, with everything fitfully gleaming and pulsating and the outline of Lucifer-Amor coming into sight at the darkest corner."
"If morality is God's hold on man's everyday life, then the Oedipus Complex, in severing that connection, puts man on God's level. He becomes the 'superman' and the sign that he is such a 'god' is his willingness to break the ultimate taboo, to commit incest."
Lastly, Jones takes aim at the Lutheran doctrine of the "enslaved will," which "degrades man to the level of a beast" by its contradictory condemnation of sin and simultaneous assertion that "the will is not free to resist sin or do virtue." This obliterates culpability and leads to a capitulation in the struggle against sin, granting that forgiveness can precede repentance which contradicts Scripture and the Catholic conception of free will. "God's grace precedes everything, including our repentance. However, He in no way coerces it, nor will he violate our free will by granting forgiveness without it."
In this essay collection, E. Michael Jones takes aim at some of the various folk heroes of modernity from Margaret Mead to Kinsey to Picasso to Freud and Luther. Each represents their own branch of intellectual modernity in rebellion against the moral law. He argues that "the intellectual life is a function of the moral life of the thinker" and that their work became a sort of wish fulfillment that transmuted their own vices into theories in order to rationalize them.
He begins by debunking Mead's anthropology as a reflection of her own infidelity. Being an anthropology major, his two essays discrediting "cultural relativism" and its founding theorists were of particular interest since Mead is enshrined as an untouchable saint in the field and feminists frequently use her bunk research to justify sexual libertinism. Never mind that her Samoa research (the lie that Samoans had no sexual taboos around adultery) has been proven wrong. "The real attraction of cultural relativism was that it condoned sexual license."
In "Homosexual as Subversive" Jones articulates the duality of the homosexual psyche (the so-called "double life"): "Necessary to the homosexual vision is a duality that neatly parallels the distinction between esoteric and exoteric knowledge so congenial to the Gnostic view of things."
He discusses the Bloomsbury homos who believed love between men is superior to that of man and woman, that the "home (domesticity of marriage) emasculated everything," and that "Higher Sodomy" was a liberation from the inferiority of women. Jones makes an interesting point about how, as the barriers against sodomy fell, the more gays punished themselves (that the prevalence of sadomasochism in gay sex is a manifestation of self-hatred and unexpiated sexual guilt).
"Left to fester long enough, the self-subversion that is implicit in every homosexual act will extend beyond itself to include an attack on society, first as manifested in the family, but then as manifested in one's country as well."
On Kinsey: "Without the legitimatizing aura of Darwin, without evolution as the scientific justification of deviance, Kinsey would have been just one more middle-aged man obsessed with pornography."
Jones goes on to expose the shocking sexual crimes at the center of Kinsey's research. Namely, the sexual abuse of pre-adolescent boys in order to obtain his data on the "incidence of orgasm."
In "Cubism as Sexual Loathing" Jones shows that Picasso's cubist "art" was merely the hateful mutilation of his ex-lovers once the relationships went south. He'd depict his lovers beautifully at first and then as disfigured monsters (an expression of his sexual loathing towards them).
With his Cubist distortions, Picasso was "mounting what he saw as a frontal assault on the traditions of the West" and against Realism, which saw the transcendent value of the human person. "Picasso's mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice."
"By the end of his career, Picasso had reached the logical outcome of his aesthetic. The cycle of attraction and disgust had collapsed into one image, a cubist face and a realistic crotch. Spirit was disfigured and desire was retained in pornographic detail."
On Freud (by far the longest essay), Jones explores the connection between his theories and his own incestuous desires. Freud's obsessions with, and eventual marriage with, his sister-in-law becomes rationalized in The Oedipus Complex where he projects the latent desire for incest on humanity. Later, Freud even claims that to undo the neurosis stemming from sexual guilt, you must re-enact the perversion that led to it in the first place, which in Freud's case was the perversion of his father.
"Incest would then be a diabolical inversion of the respect due to a father. Committing incest would be a way of wreaking revenge on a father for some wrong which he had done. It would be a way of destroying the authority of the father, and by extension...of destroying the authority of God, the 'exalted father.'"
"Perversion is not just the antithesis of neurosis and therefore its cure; it is an opening into the realm of religion as well. Since religion...is the antithesis of perversion, then perversion becomes, in the numinous way taking shape in Freud's mind...the undoing of religion as well. The Oedipus project becomes a way of using the powers of the nether world to overcome those of above."
"By linking incest and perversion, Freud furnishes us with the final term in the equation. Incest becomes the perversion that will cure Freud of his neurosis. In committing an act of incest...he will also avenge himself on the father who was the cause of the neurosis in the first place; beyond that he will rob God, the exalted father, of his dominion as exercised primarily through the realm of morality. As with the Egyptian pharaohs...committing incest elevates the person who practices it to the level of a 'god,' which, according to the account of the Fall in Genesis was also the aspiration of Adam and Eve when they acquiesced to the suggestion of the devil."
The conflation of love and evil, in Freud's own words, is "an intellectual hell, layer upon layer of it, with everything fitfully gleaming and pulsating and the outline of Lucifer-Amor coming into sight at the darkest corner."
"If morality is God's hold on man's everyday life, then the Oedipus Complex, in severing that connection, puts man on God's level. He becomes the 'superman' and the sign that he is such a 'god' is his willingness to break the ultimate taboo, to commit incest."
Lastly, Jones takes aim at the Lutheran doctrine of the "enslaved will," which "degrades man to the level of a beast" by its contradictory condemnation of sin and simultaneous assertion that "the will is not free to resist sin or do virtue." This obliterates culpability and leads to a capitulation in the struggle against sin, granting that forgiveness can precede repentance which contradicts Scripture and the Catholic conception of free will. "God's grace precedes everything, including our repentance. However, He in no way coerces it, nor will he violate our free will by granting forgiveness without it."
Want to read
July 8, 2014Apparently the author says that Stanley Fish was influenced by his adulterous affairs to reject classical literature that condemned adultery (pp. 79-84).
January 7, 2022
Excellent. Jones makes a convincing case that modernity is simply an expression of sexual lust that has been rationalized, externalized, and projected onto the world.
December 2, 2025
Elitist Degeneracy, Unacknowledged Guilt and the Corruption of Thought.
From the stable and elevated platform afforded and informed by Moral Absolutes the author does a deep, deep dive into the personal moral degeneracy that more than colored the lives of some of western society’s most influential thinkers. A degeneracy that became constituted as a projection of unacknowledged guilt that lies unintended in full view between the lines of their most famous works. If only you have the eyes to see it.
In this work the author gives you the eyes to see it.
From Martin Luther to Sigmund Freud to Margaret Mead to Alfred Kinsey to Pablo Picasso and some other less known luminaries, the author makes an arguably good case that each of their essential works constituted a denial of truth. A denial rooted in the individual moral failings of each of these Cultural Icons.
The denial takes the form of faulty science or distorting art that legitimizes that which otherwise would be deemed perverse and deviant. Granting, as the author describes, a “permission slip” to do as one will with a plausible veneer of a scientific basis or the panache of the avant-garde.
Whether it’s Martin Luther’s Enslaved Will, Freud’s Oedipus Complex, Mead’s Cultural Relativism, Picasso’s Cubism or Kinsey’s groundbreaking “studies” on Human Sexuality the author forces the reader to do a double take.
A double take on some of the most profound thought shaping concepts to enter the societal bloodstream. Concepts that more often than not destructively altered Society and Culture by undermining morality and traditional values. Concepts that essentially attacked the foundation of Western Civilization- that being Christianity.
As the Author repeats more than once; “One can either conform one’s actions to the moral law or conform the moral law to one’s actions.”
“The former calls for repentance, the latter rationalization, ideology, and ultimately social activism in which those who feel guilty will unite and try through political means to make wrong right.”
From the stable and elevated platform afforded and informed by Moral Absolutes the author does a deep, deep dive into the personal moral degeneracy that more than colored the lives of some of western society’s most influential thinkers. A degeneracy that became constituted as a projection of unacknowledged guilt that lies unintended in full view between the lines of their most famous works. If only you have the eyes to see it.
In this work the author gives you the eyes to see it.
From Martin Luther to Sigmund Freud to Margaret Mead to Alfred Kinsey to Pablo Picasso and some other less known luminaries, the author makes an arguably good case that each of their essential works constituted a denial of truth. A denial rooted in the individual moral failings of each of these Cultural Icons.
The denial takes the form of faulty science or distorting art that legitimizes that which otherwise would be deemed perverse and deviant. Granting, as the author describes, a “permission slip” to do as one will with a plausible veneer of a scientific basis or the panache of the avant-garde.
Whether it’s Martin Luther’s Enslaved Will, Freud’s Oedipus Complex, Mead’s Cultural Relativism, Picasso’s Cubism or Kinsey’s groundbreaking “studies” on Human Sexuality the author forces the reader to do a double take.
A double take on some of the most profound thought shaping concepts to enter the societal bloodstream. Concepts that more often than not destructively altered Society and Culture by undermining morality and traditional values. Concepts that essentially attacked the foundation of Western Civilization- that being Christianity.
As the Author repeats more than once; “One can either conform one’s actions to the moral law or conform the moral law to one’s actions.”
“The former calls for repentance, the latter rationalization, ideology, and ultimately social activism in which those who feel guilty will unite and try through political means to make wrong right.”
April 3, 2018
This is such a powerful thesis, and as such is all but unknown/out of print today. Invaluable going forward, in fact a subject I have long been interested in myself: How much of cultural norms and trends are the cumulative byproduct of sexual perversion, reprobate minds, and hence running on nothing but impulse whilst proclaiming the final revolution which is always just the latest revolution, which in terms is not a revolution at all? Hard to believe mere decades ago this Here-comes-everybody publisher dabbled in something so far beyond the recyclable dispensing of contextual morphine.
December 22, 2022
Esperava mais. Achei que o EMJ perdeu muito tempo em especulações sobre possíveis acontecimentos na vida dos autores degenerados. Entendo que esse era o intuito dele para poder refutar as teorias porém esperava um aprofundamento teórico e não apenas apontamentos sobre a vida pessoal e íntima de Freud, Foucalt, Jung e etc... Me pareceu mais um livro de fofoca do que um estudo social. Porém pode ser uma leitura interessante para aqueles que não sabiam previamente sobre a biografia de tais autores e pensadores modernos, como eu já sabia, achei repetitivo e até mesmo cansativo.
April 3, 2020
Stellar. A great book to read before diving into his incredible work, "Libido Dominandi."
One of the things I like about Jones' writing is that you feel the urge to be a decent and moral person when you're done. Despite the limitations of his Catholic worldview, you can tell he's a very sincere and decent person. His work always edifies.
One of the things I like about Jones' writing is that you feel the urge to be a decent and moral person when you're done. Despite the limitations of his Catholic worldview, you can tell he's a very sincere and decent person. His work always edifies.
April 5, 2020
Another must read (or, in this case for me, a must listen, narrated by Alex Linder). Casting a small bit of light on many of the foundational theorists that make up the ///modern intellectual pantheon\\\ shows how absolutely rotten and without integrity most of the theorist and theories that are pushed by our rootless, cosmopolitan overlords actually are.
June 28, 2017
Fascinating read and insights—could use some general editing, though. And, unfortunately, the pages began falling out after just reading through it once (at least 3-4 pages fell out while reading).
November 2, 2022
Jones is nazi scum
June 1, 2024
Excellent book, certainly one of the best I've read this year. Jones does an excellent job of tracing and expounding a root of the error of modern philosophy.
August 18, 2019
This book is quite moderate compared to the ecstatic rants Dr Jones issues nowadays. There is very little to disagree with even if you are not a catholic. Western Culture has not improved under the influence of crooks like Margaret Mead and Freud. Chapters on say Stanley Fish or liberal guilt of mothers who have aborted were not too deep, but fortunately short.
January 10, 2022
Como o subtítulo do livro já entrega, o ousado E. Micheal Jones, nos apresenta um obra rica em argumentos que se propõe demonstrar que uma das faces da modernidade é a perversão da moral sexual e como esse processo é produto do esforço de intelectuais e de personalidade influentes, no esforço para justificar as transgressões que sustentam em suas vidas. Desse modo, na esperança de que a sociedade concorde com suas ideias e suas consciências sejam aliviadas.
Como intelectual católico, a tese sustentada pelo autor é muito coerente com uma antropologia cristã, que leva o fator de pecado e vicio e a dificuldade de supera-los a sério, como é incrivelmente demonstrado pelos casos relatados: fraudes acadêmicas, experimentos que abandonaram qualquer parâmetro ético, a decadência do meio universitário nos Estados Unidos e no mundo, a maioria desses casos, onde teorias parecem ser mais apreciadas por meio de Lobbing que por coerência lógica e boas metodologias, são protagonizadas por figuras, no mínimo, curiosas como Freud, Jung, Kinsey e Lutero. Todos esses personagens são explorados por diferentes razões, contudo, a raiz comum permanece, e, para Jones, é como o aprofundamento no vício(impureza) influenciou em suas ideias e como essas pouco refletem a realidade das coisas e do homem. Vale ressaltar que o clima jornalístico da obra torna a leitura muito leve e instigante. Ótimo livro.
Como intelectual católico, a tese sustentada pelo autor é muito coerente com uma antropologia cristã, que leva o fator de pecado e vicio e a dificuldade de supera-los a sério, como é incrivelmente demonstrado pelos casos relatados: fraudes acadêmicas, experimentos que abandonaram qualquer parâmetro ético, a decadência do meio universitário nos Estados Unidos e no mundo, a maioria desses casos, onde teorias parecem ser mais apreciadas por meio de Lobbing que por coerência lógica e boas metodologias, são protagonizadas por figuras, no mínimo, curiosas como Freud, Jung, Kinsey e Lutero. Todos esses personagens são explorados por diferentes razões, contudo, a raiz comum permanece, e, para Jones, é como o aprofundamento no vício(impureza) influenciou em suas ideias e como essas pouco refletem a realidade das coisas e do homem. Vale ressaltar que o clima jornalístico da obra torna a leitura muito leve e instigante. Ótimo livro.
November 26, 2023
Como o subtítulo do livro já entrega, o ousado E. Micheal Jones, nos apresenta um obra rica em argumentos que se propõe demonstrar que uma das faces da modernidade é a perversão da moral sexual e como esse processo é produto do esforço de intelectuais e de personalidade influentes, no esforço para justificar as transgressões que sustentam em suas vidas. Desse modo, na esperança de que a sociedade concorde com suas ideias e suas consciências sejam aliviadas.
Como intelectual católico, a tese sustentada pelo autor é muito coerente com uma antropologia cristã, que leva o fator de pecado e vicio e a dificuldade de supera-los a sério, como é incrivelmente demonstrado pelos casos relatados: fraudes acadêmicas, experimentos que abandonaram qualquer parâmetro ético, a decadência do meio universitário nos Estados Unidos e no mundo, a maioria desses casos, onde teorias parecem ser mais apreciadas por meio de Lobbing que por coerência lógica e boas metodologias, são protagonizadas por figuras, no mínimo, curiosas como Freud, Jung, Kinsey e Lutero. Todos esses personagens são explorados por diferentes razões, contudo, a raiz comum permanece, e, para Jones, é como o aprofundamento no vício(impureza) influenciou em suas ideias e como essas pouco refletem a realidade das coisas e do homem. Vale ressaltar que o clima jornalístico da obra torna a leitura muito leve e instigante. Ótimo livro.
Como intelectual católico, a tese sustentada pelo autor é muito coerente com uma antropologia cristã, que leva o fator de pecado e vicio e a dificuldade de supera-los a sério, como é incrivelmente demonstrado pelos casos relatados: fraudes acadêmicas, experimentos que abandonaram qualquer parâmetro ético, a decadência do meio universitário nos Estados Unidos e no mundo, a maioria desses casos, onde teorias parecem ser mais apreciadas por meio de Lobbing que por coerência lógica e boas metodologias, são protagonizadas por figuras, no mínimo, curiosas como Freud, Jung, Kinsey e Lutero. Todos esses personagens são explorados por diferentes razões, contudo, a raiz comum permanece, e, para Jones, é como o aprofundamento no vício(impureza) influenciou em suas ideias e como essas pouco refletem a realidade das coisas e do homem. Vale ressaltar que o clima jornalístico da obra torna a leitura muito leve e instigante. Ótimo livro.
June 8, 2023
Would rate it higher, except these "Moderns" are much less important then they were 30 years ago when Jones wrote the book, and its hard to get worked up about them. And we think much less of them. They all seem very 20th Century.
Does anyone in 2023 NOT think Freud was a quack? Or not know that Kinsey and Meade were frauds? Or that Picasso was a sexist creep and not the greatest artist since Rembrant? So, the book's a little like someone telling you a convicted fraudster, thief, and drug dealer was also a sexual degenerate.
Anyway, Jones puts another nail in coffin of Freud, Picasso, Margaret Meade, Kinsey, and Spy Anthony Blunt. His analysis of Homosexuality in the Bloomsbury Group and the British Cold war traitors was excellent as was his revelations of Freud's rather odd inter-family sexual relations. With also get some writing on Stanley Fish, Anna Quinlin, and Ali Mazuri, but I doubt anyone knows or cares about them anymore.
Does anyone in 2023 NOT think Freud was a quack? Or not know that Kinsey and Meade were frauds? Or that Picasso was a sexist creep and not the greatest artist since Rembrant? So, the book's a little like someone telling you a convicted fraudster, thief, and drug dealer was also a sexual degenerate.
Anyway, Jones puts another nail in coffin of Freud, Picasso, Margaret Meade, Kinsey, and Spy Anthony Blunt. His analysis of Homosexuality in the Bloomsbury Group and the British Cold war traitors was excellent as was his revelations of Freud's rather odd inter-family sexual relations. With also get some writing on Stanley Fish, Anna Quinlin, and Ali Mazuri, but I doubt anyone knows or cares about them anymore.
June 24, 2007
Covers about a dozen modern social thinkers and shows how their bias' and rationalizations may have shaped their theories. It's interesting to consider the influence the thinkers had on modern assumptions given that it's so baseless.
May 14, 2008
not sure how much of this is true, but it sure made me think
October 10, 2023
Just read Libido Dominandi. This is a bunch of random essays on the same theme.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews