CXXXVII- (Re)leituras: The demoralization of Western Culture, by Ralph W. Fevre, comments by André Bandeira

This is a book on Sociology, with a preface of Zygmunt Bauman, the inventor of «postmodernism» and its ferocious critic. It's already 14 years old. How can these books be secluded by the press? How can modern democracy pretend they do not exist? I suspect these books are deliberately obfuscated because they moderately denounce the swindle which the Left has operated in the West, in order to serve the most unconfessable purposes. The book has a small, modest objective: to clear the way for a re-moralization of society. It doesn't come out of fundamentalism, neither extremism, nor it claims to show its democratic credentials as some totalitarian turncoats do. The book cannot be placed neither in the Right, nor in the Left, nor even in the Centre. It is a book openly against common-sense. Most of all, it stands against the tiranny of economic rationality, which it claims to have been extended to all levels of life. The fault may be either attributed to science, or to bureaucracy. There are obviously things, which cannot be known -- despite what (bad) science claims -- since using science where one should weigh feelings and sentiment, is non-sense. I'll never know why I fell in love for someone. If I insist in knowing, I'll end up collecting divorces, and measuring my satisfaction with my partners, as a pornography athlete. And it is already too late: women began thinking as men used to think. There are no «opposite sexes» anymore, so there are not anymore room for completion of anything, nor even between parents and children, exception made for the incoming vindication of the legalization of incest. The author advises us to extol from politicians (or fire them) that they warrant us time for sentiment, time for being with our children, instead of devoting overtime to the bosses. He quotes an important study, led by Lawson, among women who came of age in the 70's, and proves how they decided to become faithful to their husbands, probably too late, after a series of bitter experiences. He accuses the Kinsey report of being based on fraud. The book navigates in a nightmare, the one of relativism, and tries to find the appropriate mix of sentiment and reason, in order to make us get out of hell. It describes the idealism in Hitler and the designs of Marx, proving how bad was the science both of them chose to found their doctrines on. Neither Darwin said what Hitler contended for, nor Economics was what Marx said it was. In both of them there is an old idea: the triumph of Mephistopheles over Faust. Faust was a lowsy scientist, as Goethe was, a sort of wreckless alchimist. I read all this but I confess it is too late: in the affair Clinton-Lewinsky, the american public decided, first to accuse the President, just for perjury and then, later, the american public abdicated of any moral judgement. Clinton even got more popular than before, neither because he was having sex, as the actor Jack Nicholson once celebrated, nor because he managed to wash his hands in the Senate, and Monica took her blue dress to the laundry. He became more popular because he proved that, in practice, common sense made moral maxims null and void. Should we re-moralize our society? The author ends his book telling that people, after all, they don't run and die for money. They run for things that people used to run, before, when there was no money, and death used to cut short our chasing around. Neither romantic love was invented by the Bourgeosie. Its roots go back in our History to the Middle-Ages and much before. The trouble is that the agressive noise of modern democracy, where the Left invented «anti-capitalism» or even «capitalism» to engineer a future Paradise, while releasing all our sensuality in our lifetime, makes this reading, to short, too late. Even the author states, at some point, that we were condemned to make our living with labour, that incuding the labour of birth. We signed a Pact with the devil, and the collector is knocking at every door. This game of words betrays how carried away we may be by the magma of of a sensations vulcanoe and signs, while trying to surface and jump out of the furnace. In the many books and articles which are being bribed or outright faked, as science and democracy are, we have to read between the lines. As the soothsayers, once, were able to read the future in the tea leaves, so we'll do with the leftovers of a boiling cauldron.