/lit/ - Literature

>>13346520
It is Sade who Jones tries to shoehorn in most often. He suggests that the de-mastication of the Princess de Lamballe at the hands of an angry mob was in part due to the dissemination of Sade’s work. Bunk!—would Jones suggest that the sodomizing of Col. Qaddafi at the hands of Muslims was influenced by Eva Ensler? Even in his day, Sade was a literary and intellectual mediocrity. Chesterton makes the point that Nietzcheans have existed all throughout history; the only difference between those Nietzscheans and Nietzsche himself is that only moderns were so foolish as to take the man seriously. The same with Sade. He was a talentless buffoon with a rapport to the dark undercurrents of human nature; nothing he says is particularly interesting, but for the fact that Sade was able to get away with saying it was. And yet the Marquis de Sade, who for all his inadequacy as a thinker and writer, is, as Ms. Paglia says, one of the most influential figures of the past 200 years. To understand why this particular pervert was able to gain a following is a worthwhile task. Trying to understand the pervert himself is not. And anyway, the ideas proposed by Sade—that the populace must promote sexual license in order to remain revolutionary—was not actually tried until the 20th Century—but more on that below.

Paglia is interested in the intellectual undercurrents behind the sexual revolution in a way Jones is not. Even if Paglia’s assessments are wrong, she at least attempts to give a unifying idea—an overarching story rather than a bunch of vignettes. Freud once suggested his method of psychoanalysis was used to exploit his clients (Jones, in his weak style, uses the same quote countless times); when discussing Margaret Sanger, he states that her opinions about birth control resemble the statement by Freud. This is nothing but a weak literary comparison between two people whose thoughts were greatly different. What could be the jumping-off point to a sociologically-complex theory is merely lame editorializing, pattern spotting, and name dropping.

Perhaps Paglia’s absence is a bugaboo of mine. Worse is Dr. Jones’s elision of Sorokin’s work. Sorokin, a reactionary a sociologist at Harvard, charted the decay of sexual morality in the West and elsewhere and accurately described the relationship between decaying sexual morality and the decay of society as a whole. His work is all but forgotten now—Mary Eberstadt is responsible for making me aware of his books—but it’s hard to think of another academic who could provide so much grist to Jones’s intellectual mill.

all these whiny moderns KNEW jesus was gonna be resurrected and they still threw a fuckin fit. jeez

>>11915705
>>The Parable of the storm and the ship
He isn't talking to the disciples, the people who respond were just sailors.

Also get this idea of "what Jesus means" out of your head, this is where people start to tell you what Jesus meant when in all truthful honestly, no one is really sure. One of the contentions of faith is that meaning changes, and will continue to change. There is no perfect interpretation, so don't become too attached to anyone's idea of Christ.