Logos Rising is a Tour de Force

Kant once said: “I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.” In a similar way, I must confess that it was E. Michael Jones’ valorous works over the years that interrupted my dogmatic slumber and piqued my interest in numerous studies. Through a lifetime of path-breaking scholarship and impeccable research, Jones has repeatedly and painstakingly undermined our intellectual laziness and philosophical complacency about modernity and its anti-Logos philosophy. Jones’ works such as Libido Dominandi, Dionysos Rising, Degenerate Moderns, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Barren Metal, Islam and Logos, The Catholic Church and the Cultural Revolution, The Angel and the Machine, are themselves breakthroughs which can only force us to reexamine our underlying assumptions and preconceived notions about the essentially pernicious principles upon which the modern age rests. St. Athanasius articulated the view that any system that deliberately and categorically denies or dismisses or attacks Logos and its manifestation in the world will end up being Satanic. Satanism, according to this view, is a world in which practical reason and the political order are deliberately banned and dismissed for ideological purposes. Satanism is anti-Logos. Satanism is, in Nietzschean terms, the transvaluation of all values, the overthrow of what Kant would call the categorical imperative and anything logocentric.

Manifestations of Satanism or anti-Logos ideologies are all around us. The Neoconservative movement is a classic example of Satanism in action. In fact, in order for the Neoconservative ideology to survive, lies had to be summoned, innocent people had to die, the average American had to be deceived, an aimless and purposeless war on Islam and Muslim countries under the misleading name of “war on terror” had to be waged, and a six-trillion-dollar war had to be the end result. With a bevy of historical facts and logical inferences, Logos Rising meticulously deconstructs Satanism, coherently puts practical reason back on the philosophical and intellectual table, and finally provides a refreshing and rigorous meditation of how, as Jones puts it, “Metahistory is back in style.” 

Jones also shows that Logos will eventually triumph over Satanism because Logos, according to Friedrich Hegel, has its cunning way of working itself out in history, despite mankind’s pernicious intentions. “In every age,” says Jones, “the forces of Logos confront the forces of anti-Logos, and more often than the forces of anti-Logos win out, forcing irrepressible Logos to appear ever new yet ever the same in the following generation.” As an example of the work of Logos in history, Jones mentions the events leading up to the war in Iraq in 2003. He forcefully writes (pp. 715-716):

The American invasion of Iraq was a classic example of what Hegel referred to as the cunning of reason (die List der Vernunft) because the Neoconservatives, who orchestrated the American invasion to secure Israel’s interests in the region, actually brought about the opposite of their intentions by eliminating Iran’s main rival in the region and securing the Shi’a crescent which allowed Iran to move missiles to Lebanon, which allowed Hezbollah to thwart the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. So, the United States operating in Israel’s interests brought about the opposite of Israel’s intentions by creating the Shi’a crescent—Iran, Iraq, Hezbollah in Syria, and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—which led to the most serious threat to Israel’s existence since the 1967 Six Day War. More significantly from the point of view…. No matter how messy their activity seems, the mills of history always grind out the truth. At the moment when the movement of Logos in human history seems to have expired—as when Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘end of history,’ Logos makes an unexpected return, as it did in 1979. History is dialectical, but it is also teleological; it is always in some sense a manifestation of God’s will. To say that it isn’t is to affirm the atheism which ended up in the dustbin of history in 1979.

What Jones is telling us here is that there is no need to be living in fear or despair because ultimate victory is not in the hands of the enemies of Logos; ultimate victory belongs to Logos and to those who ally themselves with it. To use a classic example, Israel and the United States thought that victory was within grasp when they diabolically started supporting the Syrian rebels/terrorists and ISIS way back in 2011, and Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren explicitly admitted that Israel preferred the “bad guys” in Syria—namely the terrorists—over Assad. But as the years progressed, Logos once again worked its way out and stunned its enemies. As an example of Hegel’s cunning of reason, both Iran and Russia got onto the political stage and essentially stopped both Israel and the United States in Syria and rescued the Syrian government—the same government which actually was protecting Christians, Muslims, and other religious minorities in the region. 

Surely the forces of darkness did not expect this heavy blowback. Why? Because carnal men simply do not have the insight to see this cunning of reason in the world. Carnal men are blinded by materialism and “scientism,” a worldview which basically says that nature is all there is or ever was or ever will be, and that man is just an assemblage of chemicals and DNA and nothing more. As Francis Crick declared in The Astonishing Hypothesis: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules… you’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Back in 2010, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow declared in The Grand Design that “philosophy is dead” and that it “has not kept up with modern development in science, particularly physics.” Jones, however, shows that the materialism as articulated by people like Bertrand Russell and Yuval Noah Harari is philosophically and intellectually dying, largely because Logos—the absolute and rational design in the world, as Hegel puts it—is not only rising but is repositioning the central role of practical reason in the political and moral firmament. “By 2008,” Jones writes, “it was clear that Western consumerist materialism had failed almost as spectacularly as the eastern version of dialectical materialism had failed in 1989.” 

Like St. Augustine’s City of God, Logos Rising divides human history into essentially two camps: “The main battle is between those who believe in Logos and those who don’t.” Those who deliberately and categorically attack Logos in all its manifestations are by definition anti-Logos. Building on the work of David Hawkes of Lehigh University, Jones meticulously writes: “The alliance of those who don’t—which sometimes goes by the name of postmodernism, and sometimes by the name deconstruction, after its champion Jaques Derrida—now controls academe, turning Protestant Marxists into a slightly antiquated persecuted minority based on an obsolete revolutionary movement, like, say, Anabaptism or Freemasonry.”

One can say that Logos Rising is one of Jones’ most ambitious works because he has meticulously and methodically woven together strands of material from many sources into an elegant tapestry of insight and logical inference. It is also a refinement of more than twenty years of reflection on some of the noted thinkers who have shaped the West—thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Maritain, etc. As a serious thinker and researcher, Jones pointedly pairs historical and philosophical data with fresh interpretation. By so doing, he provides a provocative, compelling, comprehensively insightful, profoundly lucid, and deeply erudite account. Jones once again has brought his wide-ranging knowledge of the history and philosophy of Logos to bear and presented his explanation as to why Logos is actually rising in a prose that is elegant, accessible, modest, and convincing. Logos Rising is a tour de force and a game changer.

Jonas E. Alexis, author of Zionism vs. the West