RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Negative Theology
Aired: 2022-12-16
Duration: 05:06


=== Endless Hitler (04:51) ===

[00:00:00]  When I was growing up in the 90s, you would turn on cable and cable television, that is, and the history channel would almost literally be the Hitler channel.
[00:00:13]  Like, it was Hitler's henchmen at 8 p.m., you know, Hitler versus Churchill, the battle that defined the century at 9, and then, like, Holocaust.
[00:00:25]  It was just endless.
[00:00:27]  Black and white programming involving all of it, involving the Holocaust maybe to a less degree.
[00:00:33]  It's mostly Hitler and maybe some D-Day in there, too.
[00:00:37]  So we're obsessed with Hitler.
[00:00:39]  He is fast and endlessly fascinating and grotesque, at least in the way that he's represented, etc.
[00:00:48]  But it's not just that.
[00:00:49]  It's that we have like liberalism has a negative theology and a kind of negative morality.
[00:00:59]  right?
[00:01:00]  And so, you know, even conservatives will stress this, is that who are we to judge anyone's lifestyle?
[00:01:10]  You know, who are we to tell them you can't become a woman, or you can't be a sexual pervert, or you can't consent to this or that?
[00:01:23]  And maybe even that you can't take this illegal drug on your own time so long as it's not hurting.
[00:01:29]  This is the so-called non-aggression principle.
[00:01:32]  And it is a, you know, effectively, if you are not harming anyone but yourself, you are free to do that.
[00:01:42]  That's the kind of libertarian form of it.
[00:01:45]  I think the liberal form is just a kind of more robust and kind of self.
[00:01:52]  Exploratory version of that negative morality.
[00:01:56]  We're going to start recognizing multiple sexualities and we're going to start recognizing new forms of sexual experience and new identities.
[00:02:11]  There are new minorities that we didn't even know about.
[00:02:16]  But it's all negative.
[00:02:18]  And so it's all about not being Hitler, in effect.
[00:02:22]  And Hitler is at the very center of this ideology.
[00:02:24]  So it's this negation of any form of affirmation and just a positing of not Hitler as your moral compass.
[00:02:36]  And this goes along with other forms of negativity.
[00:02:41]  I mean, if you go to Germany, it's becoming like this in the United States, in a way.
[00:02:48]  In Germany, it's pretty intense, where any new memorial in the town is more or less about the Holocaust.
[00:02:57]  So I remember one of the last times I was in Berlin.
[00:03:01]  It wasn't the last time, but anyway, I was in Berlin.
[00:03:03]  They had just announced this Holocaust memorial, and it was these weird, dark, curved shapes that almost looked like tombstones in this huge array.
[00:03:17]  And it was extremely monotonous, but I think more than that, I was kind of unnerving in the way that postmodern art can be.
[00:03:25]  And so it was this way of like the monument affecting you, demoralizing you, the monument unhinging you, the monument unnerving you.
[00:03:37]  And so the public space that might have had an image of...
[00:03:43]  Frederick the Great or Goethe or whatever is kind of being replaced by this negation of a monument, a kind of anti-monument, this contemplate the Holocaust injunction.
[00:03:56]  And what marks our time, and I do think it's kind of changing, and how this will play out is interesting, but what marks our time is this negative theology and negative morality.
[00:04:11]  A negative morality of not Hitler and a negative theology of the Holocaust.
[00:04:16]  So you're placing this like negation, literal annihilation of human beings as a kind of like the center of Jewish identity and in a way Christian identity too.
[00:04:30]  I think this is profound.
[00:04:34]  And I also think it's probably unsustainable as well.

=== Morality's Herd Guidance (00:29) ===

[00:04:38]  Like, what does it mean that we can't, you can't assert a myth, ultimately.
[00:04:44]  You can't, like, and the only more, I mean, people might have sexual morality in their own personal lives.
[00:04:51]  Surely many do, but it's, morality is ultimately about collecting the herd and pointing in a certain direction.
[00:05:03]  And in an anti-morality, you can't do that.