The Judicious Hooker

I have mentioned this before, but it is extremely important: Richard Hooker, writing in the 1500s, already had an essentially full understanding of ideologies as epistemic closures.

My copy of Ecclesiastical Polity is boxed at the moment, so I will quote Eric Voegelin quoting Hooker. What is  fascinating here is to note how completely Hooker’s description of the Puritan ideologues of the 1500s apply to our current versions. I will fill in just one parallel for you, but you can easily fill in more on your own. So:

“In order to advance his ‘cause,’ the man who has it will, ‘in the hearing of the multitude,’ indulge in severe criticisms of social evils… Frequent repetition of the performance will induce the opinion among the hearers that the speakers must be men of singular integrity, zeal, and holiness, for only men who are singularly good can be so deeply offended by evil. 

[Murray Rothbard again and again indulges in severe criticisms of “the State”!]

“The next step will be… attributing all fault and corruption, as it exists in the world because of human frailty, to the action or in action of the government. By such imputation of evil to a specific institution the speakers prove their wisdom to the multitude of men who by themselves would never have thought of such a connection…”

[Rothbard mesmerizes the gullible to become “ancaps.”]

“Next comes the decisive step… ‘[of] persuading of men credulous and over-capable of such pleasing errors, that it is… special illumination… whereby they discern those things in the word, which others reading yet perceive then not.’ They will experience themselves is the elect; and this experience breeds ‘high terms of separation between such and the rest of the world’; so that, as a consequence, mankind will be divided into the ‘brethren’ and the ‘wordlings.’”

[Here we have “libertarians,” who even if we disagree with them, at least have principles, and “statists“ who just want to smash peoples heads in to get them to do what they want.]

“Once a social environment of this type is organized, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to break it up by persuasion… [The elect] are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled.”

[So repeated demonstrations that the “nonaggression principle” (NAP) is empty of concrete implications will have no effect whatsoever, and Rothbardians will simply continue to cite it as though something follows from it.]

But I don’t mean to pick on Rothbardians: You can easily fill in this template with Marxists and reactionaries, or “anti-racists” and “white supremacists.” The single evil that generates all the world’s many evils, the single magic bullet that will eliminate all evils, and the identification of the demonic resistance that must be eliminated to bring about heaven on earth, are constants in every such “cause.”