Mike Reads Eric Voegelin

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – So I’ve turned to reading some older conservative authors.  One of them is a gentleman by the name of Eric Voegelin.  Voegelin was a mentor to Russell Kirk.  I think that in Voegelin’s book Science, Politics and Gnosticism, which is a really small book, at one part of it he identifies what is really at work here.  This has to be transcribed because you have to read this.  It’s posted as a comment in one of my posts.  I also posted part of this as a post on the fan page on Facebook.  I want you to listen to his and keep an open mind.  Think about what Voegelin is writing here way back in 1968.

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  So I’ve turned to reading some older conservative authors.  One of them is a gentleman by the name of Eric Voegelin.  Voegelin was a mentor to Russell Kirk.  I think that in Voegelin’s book Science, Politics and Gnosticism, which is a really small book, at one part of it he identifies what is really at work here.  This has to be transcribed because you have to read this.  It’s posted as a comment in one of my posts.  I also posted part of this as a post on the fan page on Facebook.  I want you to listen to his and keep an open mind.  Think about what Voegelin is writing here way back in 1968.

[reading]

Only in one respect has a situation of political science changed.  As indicated, there has emerged a phenomenon unknown to antiquity that permeates our modern societies so completely that its ubiquity scarcely leaves us any room to see it at all: the prohibition of questioning.

[end reading]

Mike:  When he talks about the prohibition of questioning, just think all the grief that you and I and anyone who is a noninterventionist has to suffer when brining up nonintervention in Republican / Tea Party circles.  You’re not supposed to question; you’re supposed to go along.  See:

“Mike, you need to toe the Romney line” phone callers, emailers, Facebook posters and Twitter haters.  It is the prohibition on questioning, which is a very, by the by, Marxian thing to do.  To shut out the question is to shut out the possible answer.  We’ll get into this in a second.

[reading]

This is not a matter of resistance to analysis—that existed in antiquity as well.  It does not involve those who cling to opinions by reason of tradition or emotion, or those who engage in debate in a naïve confidence in the rightness of their opinions and who take the offensive only when analysis unnerves them.  [Mike: In other words, when they get personally offended by someone insinuating you’re wrong about that.]  Rather, we are confronted here with persons who know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma.  This position of a conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly elaborated obstruction of ratio constitutes the new phenomenon.

[end reading]

Mike:  So way back in the ‘60s, in the emergence of the ‘60s nut jobs, Voegelin saw, as others did, what was going on here and wall these revolutions and counterrevolutions that we had, which is shut down the questioner.  Don’t question; accept.  Don’t question; do.  As he points out in later parts in this essay, when you shut out the question, you remove the possibility of the answer.  You have to accept what is presented as gospel.  This is the way things are done.  If you wonder why it seems as though you can’t even have reasoned conversations with some of your friends, whether they’re liberals or whether they’re decepticons, this explains it.  These aren’t debates that we’re having, because there’s nothing substantive that’s being debated.  We’re arguing over percentages.  We’re arguing over how fast we’re going to get into the ruin.

As a matter of fact, in one of the rare times we actually do have an admission that is relevant, you hear this in the “We’re going over the fiscal cliff.  Maybe we can slow the train down to 60 miles an hour instead of 75 with Obama at the helm.”  In the rare instances it is admitted that there needs to be serious questioning and serious critique of what we’re currently doing, then in the next breath is, “We’re going to go over the cliff.”  I hope that makes sense.  No one seems to think that we’re not going to go over the cliff, is my point, and it would be Voegelin’s point, too.  [mocking] “Yeah, we’re going over the cliff and there’s nothing we can do about it.”  Of course there’s something you can do about it.  As long as you’re alive and you have free will, you can always do something about it.  We’re basically told today, in the great issues of our time, that there is really nothing you can do.

End Mike Church Show Transcript