Jonathan Pageau and the Monsters of this Heterodox Corner of the Internet
Pageau's flurry of Pre-Easter Conversations Exposes the Rifts within the Anti-thesis/Heterodox Cultural Space
In today's video I do some commenting on the Curtis Yarvin interview by @peternlimberg at The Stoa
Why start there when there is SO MUCH @PageauJonathan material that needs covering? Because the four major conversations he had recently, with @BretWeinstein , @BenjaminABoyce and @ConceptualJames , Paul Kingsnorth and @DrJordanBCooper require that we do some mapping.
The mapping has to deal with the questions "What is the nature of the civilizational crises we are facing and what are the apocalyptic/eschatalogical paths out?"
By having these conversations @PageauJonathan offers himself as an interesting frame through which to see the "antithesis" (as @fullydavid likes to call them) options on the menu against the current, dominant Western (blue church, cathedral, machine) narrative.
The "thesis" narrative is one of now post-Christian Protestant Secularity using technology to move a post-human narrative forward. Progressive Liberationism is increasingly giving birth to a trans-humanism.
This recent @WisdomRebel conversation between Paul Kingsnorth, @moveincircles and @fullydavid I think sets the table nicely in terms of the crisis.
Part of the difficulty/opportunity of the moment in this little corner of the Internet is that what holds the "heterodox" community (another @fullydavid term) is the resistance against the hegemonic thesis institutions.
This makes the "heterodox" space to some degree always reactive and that reactivity is antithetical to the sorts of institution building that is necessary for sustained human reformation and flourishing.
This is something @PageauJonathan pointed out in July 2020.
This is where Curtis Yarvin is the perfect foil for @PageauJonathan . They're both deeply conservative. They're both monarchists. Yarvin has done more than many to expose what Paul Kingsnorth calls "the machine" or as Yarvin calls it "the Cathedral".
This was the interest that @peternlimberg had in bringing Yarvin onto "The Stoa". The deep difference between Yarvin and @PageauJonathan is of course overt, explicit, public Christianity.
Both Yarvin and @PageauJonathan are monarchists. Yarvin is a political monarchist while Pageau is a Religious Monarchist whose monarchy begins in heaven, not in the image of the corporation.
This difference is not small, it is everything. You can see that in comparing Kingsnorth to Yarvin. Both are deeply reactionary, but Yarvin finds eschatalogical/apocalyptic hope in technology and corporation while Kingsnorth finds it in limitation.
As we continue to pursue this heterodox taxonomy we'll see more interesting relationships unfold and @PageauJonathan again will be an interesting frame.
We'll see that @ConceptualJames in his talk with @PageauJonathan and @BenjaminABoyce sort of stands with @jordanbpeterson as a "classical liberal" and also an ardent modernist (Protestant) hoping to retard the impending post-humanism but only back to modernity as seen in their conversation.
.@BretWeinstein imagines that human beings MUST be the saviors of the world against the (gnostic) demi-urge of genocidal genetics that push their way into the future. @PageauJonathan keeps trying argue that @BretWeinstein morality comes from heaven But there is no ontology for that source of information in @BretWeinstein 's map of the world.
The @PageauJonathan Kingsnorth conversation was perhaps the most subtle of these because they share Orthodoxy but I suspect Kingsnorth hasn't yet worked through all the implications of his new religion on his apocalyptic/eschatalogical imagination.
The @PageauJonathan @DrJordanBCooper for me is important because the current crisis is going to force Christianity to address its schisms and begin to work together in its mission to this world.
All of these conversations are not random. @PageauJonathan , the Prophet of Purpose is illuminating patterns on "how reality lays itself out". Part of getting through this corpus will be to see the apocalyptic eschatalogical nexus as the spirits battle.
“the current crisis is going to force Christianity to address its schisms and begin to work together in its mission to this world.”
This is spot on. If we take a step back, what has been brewing in the past 5 years or so is really remarkable, and I think we’ve taken it for granted. We’re seeing a truly diverse “interfaith dialogue” occurring on a scale that is perhaps without precedent. It is difficult for me to imagine the sorts of conversations we’re seeing on the internet—with the Pageaus, Bp. Barrons, and PVKs of the world—happening even a decade ago. There is (generally) a high degree of respect and intellectual honesty behind it all, which is encouraging. Of course, there are your orthobros and tradcats and KJV-onlyers flailing about at times, but I think that’s only marginal, and to be expected whenever ideas converge. Underneath it all, there is a tangible truth that binds us, perhaps we can call it the logos. I’m finding more and more that the sensus fidelium is real.
For example, I, a completely convinced Catholic in the Midwest, am daily gleaning great insight from a Reformed Pastor in California and an Orthodox Christian in French Canada, with almost no friction from an orthodox Catholic perspective.
Could Cajetan or Calvin have possibly imagined things turning out this way?
Nice work and I enjoyed your episode. I think one major angle missing here is that civilisations have never been founded (or rebooted) via lots of people having conversations. I am of course *not* dissing these invaluable conversations. Ideally you folks need to fold in someone whose area of expertise is "where did civilizations come from?". There's a German chap whose name is on the tip of my tongue but can't recall who pushes the oldskool great man hypothesis which is relevant in re (&of course cf Spengler metaphysical urge). Whether it is a Luther or a Jesus or a Mohammed or a Ghengist Khan it is *action* that kind of magnetises a direction along with the element of power (Academic Agent has written a book (as well as super-prolific YouTubing) on Italian elite theorist and also de Juvenal "On Power" type angles).
Anyway not dissing the great work and clever folk whose videos I listen to just pointing to the zoom out from "jaw jaw" must lead to some action otherwise just words in the air. Plus the essential point that no-one has talked a civilisation into being (and as for rebooting Christianity in the UK way more moslems go to mosque so one cant ignore demographic replacement).
Long story short how do civilisations historically, non-mythologically-speaking, arise + need to offset this kind of slow meeting of minds of modern representatives of scholasticism and universities - both of whom top notch at jaw jaw but never founded anything.
Keep up the good work and thank you for it. May you be long protected from your potential choice between offline/online incarnations.
Love and peace.