The Case Against the Modern World Quotes

“When we refer to Liberalism, then, we must be understood as referring to the continuous and wide-ranging tradition of the Enlightenment, a tradition which has gone to form the political and social consensus of the modern world, for there is no developed nation that is not a child of this original Liberalism. It informs and dictates the positions and goals of both the American Right and the American Left. If the former seems by its rhetoric to despise it, we must simply remember Davila's observation: "Today's conservatives are nothing more than Liberals who have been ill- treated by democracy.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man’s end—had become that center or origin.”   ~ Leo Strauss”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Anyone familiar with party systems has seen the disgust one party member is apt to show toward another whom he may really know nothing about other than that he is one of "the enemies." He cannot afford to know much about the person, for then he risks finding some redeeming feature in his enemy, and this is unacceptable. Any redemption for the enemy is a failure for propaganda which seeks separation between individuals; communion is defeat.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“There is no such thing as a "general will" any more than there is such a thing as an "average intelligence." That is to say, if we really did compute the "average intelligence" of an American, this number would probably not correspond to any actual living Americans. Every individual would be either higher or lower than the average. Likewise, when we speak of a "general will," things become even more absurd, and even if we could somehow compute such a thing, this artificial will would be at variance with all the real ones for the same reason just mentioned.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The citizen of today, more than ever before, takes a very serious interest politics. He feels, at the same time, responsible for every event that takes place in the political and helpless to alter these events. By subscribing to the notion that the people rule, and acknowledging that he is one of the people, then he feels the pressure that in previous ages only statesmen and kings knew. This pressure, moreover, is multiplied a hundred times over by the fact that his world is exponentially more complex than what was experienced by the kings of old. He is confronted with unprecedented complexity in his surroundings, combined with unprecedented responsibility for them, and this creates a constant sense of anguish and alienation from the very political system of which he has been assured that he is a part. His mind buys into the notion, but reality is constantly refuting it. He is divided against himself. As a culminating blow, there is no longer a public religious presence to assure him that God is ultimately the one who will control the fate of the nation. On the contrary, God is a thing for the private space, which is a very small thing indeed, while the public space is under the direction of men only. So even religion no longer offers solace when it comes to the problems of daily life. Confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, the man arrives home to hear that an election is approaching and it is up to him to choose wisely, lest the nation be obliterated when the wrong party wins the vote. Where is he to turn? He turns on the television to ease his mind. He watches the news. The circle is complete.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“And so, we can say without much room for debate that the church building represents the ornamentation of a society which has become thoroughly infiltrated by the spirit of the faith. It could not have appeared before this point, which is to say that the church is the "fruition" of the long organic process of conversion, and it implies a preceding period of growth and cultural flowering, nourished by real and deep roots.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“When God created the angels he knew that this implied the possibility of devils. He thought it worth the risk. In the act of Creation, God, the cosmic monarch, showed man the path of courage. Modern man chooses instead the path of cowardice. If God had been a democrat, he'd have created very little. He certainly wouldn't have created man. He'd have stopped at the creation of vegetable life, and perhaps a few low animal species: for here he could have been guaranteed a comfortable mediocrity, for animals cannot become devils. But this was not the way of the Creator: he wanted saints, and if he had to suffer death on the cross at the hands of a few devils, he'd suffer it. This was the way of courage the way of the King. "Power corrupts!" the democrat shouts. "So be it," replies the Creator as He gives him the gift of power. Saints he would have, and devils too, but devils for the sake of the saints. The democrat chooses to have neither (and in fact he has neither heretic nor martyr in his regime), and he pats himself on the back for achieving this comfortable mediocrity where none can rise or fall, and where every horizon is dictated by cowardice.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The traditional world saw reality itself, at all levels, as a sacred experience. There was no level of activity that was not permeated by some higher significance. Everything was connected in a concentric circles, at the center of which sat transcendence, and this is why even crafts such as saddle-making had "theologies" and "initiations" for guild members only. 'These practices sprung from their perception of reality and not from the dictates of a religious power imposing them where they did not belong. For men of this mentality, there was no such thing as "spiritual life" vs. "ordinary life," with the two cleanly separated into a dichotomy.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“We do indeed live in an 'information age," but we tend to forget that the sheer availability of information may or may not have any impact on whether or not that information can be distributed effectively, much less utilized properly. In fact, we could say that the greatest lie of the information age is that, just by piling up trillions of bits of data, we perpetually increase the intelligence of the human race as a collective whole. This optimistic assumption about the human mind has been almost universally accepted since the rise of humanism, and is completely false. There is a very rigid limit on the amount of knowledge that an individual can absorb and utilize, and it is never very much. We all live and die in ignorance of almost everything there is in the world to know. To say this is not pessimism, but is simply an honest acknowledgment of the vastness of our reality, its laws, and its mysteries.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Because the attainment of the level of competence described above (knowledge of a political candidate as a person and an understanding of the job itself) is obviously impossible for the average man who works and maybe even has a family, and because democracies like the United States are predicated on the notion that this same man can and should choose the president anyway, then democracy itself can be said to be predicated on the reinforcement of Augustinian ignorance. It not only suggests but demands that a man pick and choose between a thousand things he knows nothing about, and which he may have never even considered.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The first possible objection to childhood suffrage might be the obvious lack of knowledge in the child-voter, whether that knowledge be acquired through experience or study. This objection is obviously valid, but it cannot be the objection that the proponents of democracy, as we hear them in the streets, have in mind. For if the problem was one of intelligence, then we'd be led down a very uncomfortable road since there are quite a few adults whose judgment and intelligence is arguably not much better than that of a boy of, say, 15-years-old—and in addition we can say that there are some young men of 15 whose judgment is quite sound, even without many years of experience to mold it. And so, if we accepted the qualification of intelligence, we'd be no better off, because we'd either have to admit that not all children ought to be disqualified, but we have to also admit that many adults ought to be.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Whether we are speaking of the philosophical history of the concept (universal suffrage) or the contemporary reality of its application, everyone stops somewhere. They all set a limit, even if that limit is the requirement of adulthood (a completely arbitrary classification if there ever was one). This unwillingness to apply the principle completely tells us something: First, it tells us that almost everyone knows that there ought to be some sort of qualification for electoral participation; and second, it tells us that no one knows exactly what this qualification ought to be. Because everyone agrees, even if unconsciously, on the first point—that qualifications there must be—then we can consider this an implicit acknowledgment that universal suffrage, even where it is preached, must be considered a purely sentimental notion which no one is actually willing to implement. We may then set about examining the second point, concerning the necessity and nature of the qualifications that ought to be set before the voting citizen.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The new views about human intelligence were necessitated by the Liberal revolution, because if they were not true then the various revolutions, whether we are concerned with secular democracy or the private interpretation of scripture, would have been defeated from the start. Their inner logic depends on the truth of the premise that man is rationally self-sufficient, because the alternative would automatically necessitate an interdependent hierarchical arrangement in the corresponding spheres (political and religious).”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Thomas Carlyle once said that "Democracy prevails when men believe the vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ." Although most democrats would not perhaps admit this degree of prejudice, Carlyle's words do capture the spirit of the democratic mind. So afraid are we of offending against the doctrine of equality—of implying that one man might actually be better, wiser, more virtuous than his neighbor—that we cannot bring ourselves to make any distinctions, however glaringly obvious they may be.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“These general ideas will, sooner or later, congeal into a semi-coherent, seemingly obvious, set of assumptions. This collection of assumptions is like a warm blanket for the mind—covering everything and concealing all of its own contradictions, hiding the uniqueness of every individual case by painting it over with the generality. If such a collection of general ideas are fitted together and popularized, it will become socially sanction and eventually unconscious set of preconceptions which allow men to answer every question without ever having to solve the problem it raised. This "master key" to life is called an ideology. Our present ideologies are several, but interconnected: liberalism, capitalism, socialism, nationalism, secularism, individualism, etc. Of course, as Tocqueville explained, the ideologies never correspond to reality, but rather reality is pressed into the ideologies by brute force, and is always badly mauled in the process. We must remember, however, that ideologies are not only flattering, but necessary to the modern man: he requires ideology, not just for the sense of empowerment, but in order to believe in the great idea of democracy. For if he did not have answer to all the Great Problems, he would at that moment cast a shadow of doubt on his competence as a voter; and then the modern world would collapse.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“In the ancient world the higher forms of knowledge were supra-individual: the sacred books of the Hindus, for example, have no author, are not expected to have had an author, and this fact is not considered to present any problems for the Hindu mind. In the West, this simply would not do—we must know the author, and it must be demonstrably proven that authorship is correctly attributed. There is no better illustration than this of the difference between an individualist, rationalist approach to knowledge and one that is supra-individual and supra-rational one. The East has retained the latter, while the West has settled inflexibly into the former.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Propaganda, and the ideologies it develops and encourages in order to further its ends, is the life-blood of democratic operations. These elements combine to distill a beverage that the average man can drink, and which will intoxicate him so that he applauds actions he does not understand and fills out ballot sheets covered with names of men he does not know. We recognize the fruits of this distillation in various forms: political slogans, catchphrases, party platforms, and most of all ideologies which are by definition over-simplifications of reality. All of these represent pre-packaged sets of opinions, most of them meaningless or at least too vague to present any specific and useful meaning, which serve to comfort the consumer, telling him that he comprehends the actions of the State agrees with them—nay, that they are his actions. The program offered is the program he himself wanted. This function—the manufacturing of certainty for the individual—is one of the primary functions of propaganda. The individual thirsts for it; and the government cannot do without it. It satisfies both, and so both collude to keep the intoxicating beverage flowing.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The rule of St. Thomas More in his Utopia, although openly utopian, had a rationale which anyone can admit as sound: Anyone who campaigned for a public office became disqualified from holding any office at all. The obvious reasoning here is that men who seek most fervently after a public office are often of precisely that character most prone to corruption by power; that is to say, the man whose desire is strongest for wine is probably the man with whom you'd least want to drink it. A man who so passionately believes himself worthy of an office that he is willing vie for it in the shameless fashion that we see in every electoral campaign, is a man in whom the virtue of humility is only tenuously active. By allowing the holding of offices to become the prizes of popular competition, those men of moderate temper whose constitutions will not allow them to participate are automatically excluded, and in their place a category of most undesirable candidates is ushered in.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“It is a fact of history that no king could push his people into war as rapidly and as fluidly as George Bush or Barack Obama. And this cannot be dismissed as a technological issue brought about by progress. It stems directly from the configuration of power structures. Here we must emphasize the difference between a stratified society and the modern egalitarian regime. In the latter, the state has direct authority over each individual or group, and this is true primarily because all have been reduced to one dead level. Access to one member on any single level implies access to all. In the stratified framework, however, the authority of a man at the uppermost level does not imply access to any other level beyond that which happens to be immediately adjacent to his own. He does not subsume command of all that falls below him in the vast hierarchy. He sits on the top rung, indeed, but his arms aren't any longer than yours or mine, and so he can only grasp at the next rung down from his own. The medieval king could command his dukes, but he could not command their knights. He could draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his own estate (which was not much larger than a duke's), but he could not draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his dukes' estates. In this way the monarch had no effective way of exercising direct dominion over anyone but the dukes themselves. Any influence on the peasantry was indirect, as a result of convincing the nobility of the justness of his cause. It was open to them to refuse in a way that no American governor can refuse mobilization of his population for a military engagement.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The common man was aware of the king, or the emperor, but the more distant the ruler the further removed was he from the peasant's own life. In short, his relationship to his authorities was the inverse of what ours is today, where those who impact our lives the most are those furthest from us. The peasant and his patriarch formed a more or less autonomous sphere, although this sphere existed in conjunction with concentric or intersecting circles. Because of this subsidiarity, what little sway the peasant had in the eye of his superior had more in common with that of a son to his father, and it would be anachronistic to imagine him to be as impotent as a modern American would be if deprived of voting rights. The peasant's voice was incomparably louder because the ratio of ruler to ruled was so much smaller within in the jurisdiction where he fell.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Instead of a President whom he'd never see and or representatives he'd never meet, the peasant had a single lord. This lord was a local master whom he knew by sight even though he had no television or newspaper. This proximity allowed for an organic familiarity between ruler and ruled. They were not "on a first name basis," of course, but they were acquainted in the sense that they could be rightly considered "neighbors," even if they were not equals. This organic familiarity meant that the peasant paid his taxes in person, complained in person, and if need be he hung the lord from a local tree in person.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“In a family where the father is considered the "head" and actually functions in that role, the mother technically does not have any "rights" explicitly stated, much less do the children have any sort of "suffrage." However, although the child does not have a vote, he has his father's ear. He knows his father, and his father knows him and is intimately familiar with the life and situation of the realm where he so governs. In this patriarchal arrangement, the "subjects" do not have any of the rights and safeguards of the modern citizen, but they have infinitely more sway within that patriarchal sphere. It is an "organic" political power and is therefore far more reliable that any abstract legal measure.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Universal suffrage enfranchised everyone and, in doing so, reduced everyone's power to the smallest share possible. While this was acceptable when it was conceived as impotence over others, it becomes intolerable when we realize that our power over ourselves is included in the bargain. The individual in a regime of universal suffrage has an absolute minimum of influence.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Self-government" is a marriage of two terms, expressible mathematically as a ratio (self-government). The first thing we should observe about this relationship is that the first term is always static while the second is potentially infinite. The smaller the second term, which is to say, the fewer are the "others" that go to make up the apparatus of government, which within democracy is theoretically everyone, the more tolerable we find the arrangement. But as the second term approaches infinity, the more we feel our isolated "self' dissolving into insignificance. The wider the circumference of the "self-government," the smaller the share of each self in the governing of the selves which comprise it. We begin to understand that what was flattering in theory can become terrifying in practice.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“I am tempted to think that King Solomon, when faced with the famous dispute between two mothers, would have actually cut the baby in half, had he been a democratically elected official. I say this because all elected officials seem to be, at most, half-acceptable specimens. They always split the people down the middle, and in like fashion the justice that emanates from their offices always has an abortive character to it. If a good law enters, it comes out maimed and disfigured beyond recognition because they are bound, by the nature of their position, to always tend toward the "happy middle," the "reasonable compromise.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Because great leaders are differentiated—that is to say, they are inherently unlike the common man, in that they surpass him in wisdom and virtue and boldness— democratic societies immediately run up against a conundrum: either they demand that these differentiated men pretend they are not what they are, that is to say, they demand hypocrisy; or else they drive these men out of their midst and choose "leaders" who are not leaders but are simple experts in mediocrity.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“When we select a candidate for any office we are not selecting a leader—in fact we are not looking at character traits at all—we are merely selecting a mirror, and the man who can best function in that reflective capacity is the victor. Unfortunately, since this requires the politician not only to try to "mirror" my desires, but also a thousand others, the one who wins is not simply a mirror, but a complex "prism" of sorts, attempting to "represent" a thousand wills at once. The last person he is actually allowed to be is himself. Needless to say, no authentic man—much less a great leader—would subject himself to such degradation. And yet we demand it of all politicians.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“One could well imagine that if seven out of ten cavemen wanted to do a thing collectively in one way and the three others decided differently, the majority of these cavemen (assuming that they are of about equal bodily strength) could force the rest to accept their decision. The rule of majorities in combination with the employment of brutal force, is likely be the most primitive form of government in the of mankind.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“The truth is that it is impossible to bestow a right. Only duties can be placed on a man, and anyone pretending to offer you a right is trying to smuggle "the last of all oppressions" right under your nose. But this is how it has always gone, for Liberalism is a flatterer.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“Consider the fact that universal suffrage has always accompanied conscription. All through the days of kingship, it is true that men could not vote, but neither could they be pressed into service. I say to a peasant: You may now govern your fellows and yourself, like the aristocrat of old, but you must therefore also fight, like the aristocrat of old. And before long the deception becomes clear: I allow him to fight and to die, like the aristocrat of old—but he dies wondering whether or not he ever really got to govern himself, much less anyone else.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought