Monsters From The Id
From Neoredemptive
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E. Michael Jones
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Touches on many of the same topics and a subset of the history covered in Libido Dominandi, but in a much shorter and more readable form.
Doc's Take
Jones' thesis is a winner. Horror fiction is a well-worn genre with well-established rules. As a culture, we love it, but we cannot coherently articulate why; indeed, even its makers are hard-pressed to explain it without a great deal of hand-waving or self-contradiction. Jones asserts that horror springs from a moral recognition of the failure of the enlightenment: by rejecting God and His created moral order, humanism dehumanizes, but we cannot acknowledge this without repudiating the enlightenment (and with it the sexual license which it asserts for us and to which we have become addicted), so we repress this knowledge (Romans 1) only to see it resurface through otherwise inexplicable morality tales in which sexual liberation (either outright or insinuated) is answered by the emergence of a monster (Nemesis) which brutally re-asserts the consequences of moral order which the enlightenment has tried to prevent.
Jones is a Catholic, and as such we see contraception and abortion generally painted with the same stroke in the same breath; while I think there is a more nuanced distinction to be made between the two, the larger cultural questions to which they are tied -- motherhood and femininity, the difference between loving and using the other, etc. -- are precisely the areas our culture direly needs to re-examine, and precisely the areas about which we are least willing to talk.
Noticeable for its absence in Libido Dominandi and its relatively short appearance in Monsters is the concept of repentance.
