The Misfit Agenda

 The modern Left has very little to do with class injustice and everything to do with individualistic sexual idiosyncrasy and revolutionary identity, usually sexual or ethnic.  It is both an outgrowth of and an opponent of the classical liberalism the likes of Jordan Peterson defend.  In its active movement it is made up of people with psychological pathologies and slaves to deviant passions.  It takes on the liberal idea of individual freedom from oppression and then defines everything normative and traditional as oppressive.  It is a movement of misfits who desire not to be healed, but a society that is degenerating and therefore making their deviance seem normative.  They talk of “tolerance” and “kindness”, but in their dismantling of all that holds a society together they are full of hatred and express this by active persecution, and destroying their enemies with an inhuman mercilessness.

There is a misunderstanding amongst what we might call “normies” that the misfit is somehow a vulnerable and persecuted victim, who deserves sympathy.  In fact, as we so often see, many of these Leftist misfits are full of hate, vengefulness and turn out to be the real bullies.  Woke ideology, which assumes an abstract compassion for the theoretical victim, is a useful cover for the bully.  It also affirms people in their pathologies, rather than healing them of their resentments, anger, sexual deviance and social alienation.  Many Leftist misfits adopt the most inhuman attitudes - hatred of parents, celebrating the deaths of unborn children, wanting the gender complementarity reversed.  They have a twisted investment in society being dysfunctional as an excuse or justification for their own social or sexual or familial dysfunction.  Society has to be made dysfunctional.  It is not really about liberation, but destruction of society, motivated by the alleged feeling they project onto everyone else - hatred.

Edward Dutton writes of the “spiteful mutants”.  While one can remain sceptical of his Darwinist analysis, he is onto something in pinpointing the supposed victims often being driven by spite and hatred, We saw this very clearly after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Time and time again we see an abstract and theoretical picture of the victim contradicted by the empirical evidence of the bully masquerading as victim - trans men pretending to be women intimidating their critics and real women in the toilets or in sports and games, ethnic minorities relying on affirmative action and equality laws to reap unmerited rewards, the use of the moral crime of the Holocaust by Zionists to justify genocide of Palestinians.  

This is really an abuse of Christian values.  It exploits and misrepresents genuine Christian compassion and the spirit of the Beatitudes to defend sin, deviance and even full-blown Satanism.  Our society finds it difficult to resist the ideology of the misfit because already our Christian ethos has been distorted by the secularised Judaeo-Christian and classical Liberal prism, which has moved away from the central core and orthodox truth into a heretical position.  It is instead the secular justification for degenerate and immoral behaviour that must not be judged.  There is no true repentance and transformation.  So often we see Western churches describe themselves as inclusive, which downplays repentance and transformation.

Instead of true compassion, the compassion that cares enough to put someone on the right path, we have abstract rights and abstract compassion.  The person falling deeper and deeper into passions and nihilism must be affirmed in this subversive system.  Society itself must be reshaped, subverted, turned upside down, in case anyone who has fallen is judged as having fallen.  We are therefore a society that relies on the white lie, fake affirmation and a harsh individualism that abandons people to their bad choices, leading them into passions, social isolation and unhappiness - all understood as revolution against oppression.

The fear of being found out as having committed to the wrong decisions by becoming trapped by our own idiosyncrasies and deviance means society itself must deny reality.  Thus Western civilisation that prides itself on its rationalism, its compassion and secretly on its superiority is turning into a living Hell.  Everyone is going his own way and being affirmed in these deviations.  It is of course fundamentally the democratic spirit, whereby our whims and preferences are the ultimate authority.  As St John of Kronstadt put it - Hell is a democracy.  And thus we all live in a topsy turvy world in which lies are affirmed and truth is regarded as oppressive.

Imitatio Christi - the key to exemplarity

 Exemplarity is an idea that can be found in Platonism, the Church Fathers, Franciscan saints such as Bonaventure and in Orthodox theology.  It is an idea that is based in philosophical realism and a metaphysical understanding of the transcendental - the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  Since corrosive ideas such as nominalism, which denies the reality of universals, we have lost touch with the necessity of participation in exemplarity.  The fullest manifestation of exemplarity is not abstract ideas, but the Person of Jesus Christ, the God Man.

With exemplarity we can see various threads of thought and culture coming together in a virtuous synthesis.  Stoic ideas of self restraint, Aristotlian ideas of the telos of virtue and Neo-Platonic ideas of participating in the transcendental realm all come together in the figure of the exemplar.  Only in the Church is the concept given its fullest and ultimate iteration.  In Neoplatonism participation is in abstract and airy transcendentals.  In Aristotle the telos is eudaimonia, rather than full self sacrifice. In the Stoics, the personal is lost in a pantheist theology.  Only in the Church is exemplarity incarnated in the God Man, in whose life we are to participate and Whom we are to imitate.

The concept of exemplarity requires a vertical and upwards-orientated understanding of reality.  Plato here is helpful in pinpointing reality as being in the realm of Forms, not in this material world of becoming.  The pagan philosopher though went too far in disembodying us from reality.  In the Church's teaching the second Person of the Trinity comes down into our world, incarnate.  Humbling Himself for us, through His kenosis.  The Truth is embodied.  The spiritual manifests in the physical.  The Word made flesh.   Without this we fall into Gnosticism.

If there are heights to which we aspire, if man as much as a lyre or an animal has an orientating purpose as in Aristotle, then it must be more than eudaimonia.  It must be deeper, it must then be love.  We then do not simply seek the happy life, the good life, but love in Christ.  This self-sacrificial love can account more for suffering than simply the virtue for the sake of the good life of eudaimonia.

 If life and virtue are about restraint and freedom from the passions, as with Seneca and the Stoics, then a pantheist cosmos is not enough.  Such  attainment of freedom must involve the personal, not a dissolution into the cosmos.  In the Church we participate in the Person of Christ, not becoming part of the universe.  The personal is the height of exemplarity.

The practical aspect of a chain of exemplarity is participation.  The purpose of our life is not hedonism or power, it is participation in the highest, which is about sacrifice and humility.  Exemplarity requires an orientation towards the highest.  The pagan philosophers could not find an ultimate exemplar.  This ultimate exemplar is Christ, because God as man is the perfect man.

With Christ as the ultimate exemplar, there are lower exemplars who to a greater or lesser extent manifest Christ and can be looked up to as examples and models to follow.  The Medieval notion of knighthood helps with the culture of exemplarity.  The code of chivalry was the warrior's form of participating in Christ.  We thus look up to the knight as an honourable model to follow, but as Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur reminds us, even knighthood as a worldly thing is imperfect and subject to temptation and hubris.

The saints are the greatest exemplars and that is why the churches are full of their icons.  They help us not only through their prayers, but because as flawed men and women they achieved the spiritual heights through Christ.  They can then inspire us in our participation as we follow the models of exemplarity.  The Mother of God, in particular, is to be understood as the ultimate fully-human exemplar of sanctity.

The knights, of course, had a particular veneration for the Mother of God, which was expressed in loyalty and love for their own lady.  The monks are the other zenith of human participation.  The Orthodox monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos dwell on an isthmus dedicated to Mary the Theotokos.  The Mother of God is the first Christian and the only human born in our sinful state to be personally without sin.

The figures of exemplarity are then in a chain of participation ultimately leading to Christ the God-Man.  Monks in particular exemplify this participation in the life of Christ.  As ascetics they sacrifice their life in this world for love of Christ.

Participation in the higher Good is challenging for us in the West.  With Ockham's denial of universals, with Protestantism's destruction of the saints' shrines and its hatred of the Mother of God, with empiricism turning our attention to the material and the particular and with utilitarianism's promotion of hedonism, these beliefs, linked genealogically, have separated us from the transcendental.  Popular culture celebrates revolutionary culture and individualistic self realisation.  We have become unhealthily obsessed with sexual identity.  Western Churches have reinterpreted Christ as an advocate for the secular values of liberalism.  We in the West are cut off from higher meaning.

This is why the statistics show a surge of interest in traditional religion from the young, so-called Gen Z.  Western ideals have been shown to be barren and empty, quite literally in the way our secular values have led to a demographic crisis.  Clearly aspiring to participate in the life of Christ through the Church is not ultimately about utilitarian social benefits, such as restoration of the trust society, solving the birth crisis or regaining our collective Christian identity - these are side benefits.  The true benefit is through Christ we have access to participate again in the Good, the True and the Beautiful and restore our telos, through self restraint and asceticism, in the eventual hope of eternal life with the Father through the Spirit. 

The Reign of the Misfit

 We have recently again seen the extreme point reached of the culture of the misfit, with the evil attack on a church service for children at a Roman Catholic school in Minneapolis.  The murderer and suicide was a transgender misfit, with insane and dark political views.  He was an example of the extreme of what a misfit can become: the atomised weirdo who does not fit in and is full of bitterness, resentment and pride.

Our culture is dominated by and celebrates the misfit.  Clearly most misfits do not turn into gunmen attacking children.  The misfit is made in the image of God too, a created being.  It is a long downward journey to reach the point of nihilistic evil reached by the transgender gunman.  Nonetheless there is a spectrum here of the spiritual state of the isolated and atomised social outcast.

And the social outcast himself is a consequence of the diabolical disintegration of the community in Western civilisation.  Atomisation is the cultural trajectory of our dying civilisation, which has turned its back on collective and spiritual tradition.  Community is a relational society where humans are persons, not individuals, who live interrelated through church and family and community.  The powerful in our society, the liberal elite, has deliberately worked to dismantle this.  Since the Second World War the speed of this intentional disintegration gathered pace.  Now social and cultural disintegration was seen as the antidote to Fascism.  Homosexuality was legalised, as was abortion and popular culture was manipulated to develop a lack of tradition or hierarchy or respect - all seen as authoritarian traits.  In art the CIA promoted degenerate artists who created abstract and idiosyncratic masturbatory self expression.  Meanwhile architecture was redesigned to dehumanise and break down beauty, so the morale of the human being would be spiritually crushed as a result of ugliness in the environment.  This cultural degeneration groomed the misfit, alienated from family, religion and community.  These misfits, socially outcast, unable to feel true empathy exist in a Satanic hubris of resentment.  If not reaching the extreme of suicide or murder or both, they seethe in their resentment hating their family, investigating Satanism and in the school system being bullied and rejected.  He resents being outcast, but fails to understand why he is rejected.

In the West the latest stage in the cultural revolution was the idea of woke.  This was said to be an awareness and consciousness of the intersectionality of oppression.  It manifested as a weird alliance of racial minorities and social misfits, usually trapped in perverted sexual identities.  Movements such as BLM and the Pride promotion of LGBT are specific movements founded and promoted by woke ideology.  

This is in a way a subtle twisting of the Christian message.  Christ urges us to care for the outcast, but the deceptive move in the woke movement is to celebrate the fallen identity rather than the potential to be transfigured into the full stature of Christ.  Woke leaves people in their perversions and confusions and teaches that the fallen place is to be celebrated.  This is the ideology of affirmation of the misfit who seethes in his resentment and often in his sexual deviance.

Self-regarding compassion can be deeply misguided.  It is the equivalent of giving your son a snake when he asked for a fish.  The over-emphasis on individual self-realisation means we do not steer the misfit away from his poison, but tell him to keep drinking deeply.  It tells the misfit to live in a state of pride not humility and repentance.

The misfit is then the ultimate expression of individualism.  He is abused by the group,  but is so alienated can feel no empathy himself.  He is the victim of liberalism as it traps him in his passions, but he takes pride in his passions.  He resents the idea of any authority and worships none but himself.

We read in Dostoevsky’s Demons where the misfit finds himself.  Kirillov, thinking he has achieved the state of the man-god through self realisation is exploited by a ruthless revolutionary to commit suicide as cover for a revolutionary murder. He has got into this mess because he consciously rejected the humble acceptance of the God-Man Christ and instead wished himself to be the god-man through the self asserting act of suicide.  

And this is what the alienated misfit thinks.  He rejects the God-Man, Christ, for himself and his own self-realisation.  Perhaps, most likely, he was once vulnerable, but his inability to fit in with his fellow men turns him to resentment not humility.  He falls more and more deeply into self-obsessed loathing of the world.  He chooses to live how he wants in contravention of societal norms and in a campaign of revenge.  Here we can detect the spiritual zeitgeist of the times - Crowley’s “do what thou wilt”.  As a rejected person this reduced individual gains his only sense of self from his resentment and his assertion of his own will.

What then?  Most do not end up at the final point of shooting innocent children at prayer.  That though is the final nadir of the atomised individualism that our degenerated culture celebrates in its distortion of its founding Christian ethos.  Our society is run by the empowered misfit, be that the transgender man demanding to enter women’s toilets or the homosexual demanding they too should marry as if man and woman.  Normal people live in fear of being hateful, when to hope for something better for our fellow Man, our brothers and sisters is not hate at all.

We must understand that this was always where our culture and society would end up, once we became secular.  Once our society began to aim at a reformed and progressive society rather than patiently waiting for all to be put right at the Eschaton the traits of Babel would appear, and even Sodom and Gomorrah.   Focused as we are on the here and now we became obsessed with secular notions of justice, unable to conceive of the transformative and life-fulfilling power of redemption.  So instead we focused on codified rights that emphasised the reduced individual.  Ideas of the telos of virtue or renouncing sin began to be seen as oppressive rules.  Instead we sought a revolutionary society of freedom.  What has resulted from this right to pursue our own happiness is a tragic alienation and anomie expressed throughout our society and at its most extreme point in the form of the transgender gunman killing children as the children acknowledge in humility and prayer the higher power of God.

Restoring the Paragon

 Our equalising and resentful culture despises the paragon.  While for two thousand years the West has understood we are flawed and fallen, we now live in an age where virtue itself is pilloried.  We are taught heroism and sanctity are fake, unattainable and are just a cloak for hypocrisy.  As a result exemplarity and virtue are turned om their head.  And we instead condone personal vice, immorality and loss of innocence, while demanding adherence to superficial and schematic ideological programmes as though that is where virtue lay.

Our ruling class is deeply afraid of the concept of virtue as much as it is of beauty.  Just as our streets are filled with ugly modern architecture so our stories and entertainment celebrate so-called liberation through moral degeneracy and confusion.  To question this is to be at best prudish but more likely it is seen to be judgemental, intolerant and hateful.  We once were taught to hate sin and hate evil.  Today hate itself is the only sin, by which our ruling class often means opposing the lifestyles of those it wishes us to celebrate.  People though were once wiser.  They were able to distinguish between sin and sinner.  As Saint John of Kronstadt put it:  "Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is within him."

Today though we most certainly live in confusion about Man as the Imago Dei.  Man defiled, lost and fallen is celebrated.  He is no longer recognised as the imago Dei who has something precious that can be marred by sin.  Loss of innocence is regarded as gaining important life experience.  In a culture of hedonism trying the forbidden fruit is to be commended as a sort of personal development.  And this error rests in the first error of losing the sense of Man as the imago Dei and this proceeds from the campaign that those who run our society have worked on with an extraordinary assiduousness to the point of fanaticism to convince us God does not exist and religion is an oppressive force of the past.  And our masters have been aided in their agenda by liberal clergy who sadly never take a stand but instead give a Christian tone to the secular shibboleths that secular Man is so obsessed with as a compensation for his renunciation of personal virtue in favour of political correctness.

Such a framework cannot allow paragons.  If anyone overcomes their passions they are a threat to a society based on hedonism and self indulgence.  The woman who chooses to struggle bringing up a child alone strikes fear in the hearts of those who promote killing the child in the womb - such a woman must be discredited as a slave of the patriarchy.  The man who seeks a girl who has maintained her innocence is ridiculed and attacked as a shameless and controlling misogynist.

Paragons, male and female, are a serious threat to the system, a system that rests on control by enslaving us to our appetites and passions.  This is why sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, female hyper-sexualisation, no-fault divorce and same- sex marriage are promoted - to attack Christian virtue and to enslave us to our weaknesses and appetites.  By contrast, to inspire people to be better, to follow an ascetic spirit is dismissed in popular culture with zeal and rigorous enthusiasm, because such a spirit must never be permitted to revive.  

Men enslaved to their appetites are easy to suppress.  It is why Israel beamed pornography onto television stations in Rafah.  It is why Hollywood promotes God-less ways of life as though about freedom, not enslavement.  When a man loses his integrity and his sense of his own virtue he loses his own self respect and cannot resist the emasculating oppression by our corrupted political class.

We can see that this way of thinking goes back to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno's description of the authoritarian personality.  He feared the strength of the man who could exercise sexual restraint as a dangerous political force nigh impossible to control.  Such thinking has fed into the way popular culture manipulates us to become morally loose and unable to master ourselves with integrity.  

And this is why the landscape of the Western city is a multicultural and atomised place with Pride parades taking place on streets of dystopian and anti-human architecture.  The alternative is a restoration of traditional values in traditional and rural communities.  Yes we are fallen, but through prayerful connection with God men can again become virtuous, even holy.  For such men women will keep themselves pure.  For such men gangs of people hostile to our culture will no longer have the temerity and the contempt for us to attack us.  A culture of virulence and virtue would not have turned a blind eye on the grooming gangs.

A culture that has a sprit of asceticism will not be made up of people easy to manipulate either in terms of their behaviour or their political thoughts.  Far more important than the temporal political benefits though would be the preservation of our humanity, that gift from God and furthermore the transfiguration from our fallen state into a redeemed existence.  And this is where one realises the stakes are even higher.  Our eternity is under threat.  If politicians and multinational capitalists have selfish and cowardly interests in degrading us, there is a far more serious matter in question.  

Baudelaire once said that the Devil's greatest trick was convincing men that he did not exist.  As we arrogantly live impure lives, manipulated not only by Hollywood and liberal politicians, we are also manipulated by Satan himself.  He has his own game - to steal from us our eternal future he has shut himself off from due to his incorrigible pride.  Enviously he wants to degrade the image of God in each one of us.  He wants us to sleep around, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, to be lured into more deviant sexual practices, to live for money, to work for a usurious system.  The politicians and film makers and media class and global capitalists are in this sense just his tools.  They only seek to emasculate and enslave us in this world.  But there is a far more serious threat and it is the prize of our souls and their eternal future.

For this reason virtue and asceticism must be rediscovered.  We must again strive to be paragons and no longer live for hedonism.  We must realise we were made in His image and that by Christ there is a way back to the restoration and transfiguration of our state.  We must therefore look to paragons of virtue and ourselves strive against our fallen nature, to be saints.  In so doing we will also find we are rebuilding the traditional society. 

Resisting Progress

 It is an article of faith and a hidden presumption of the secular West that progress is real and that it is an unqualified good.  Modernisation is a necessity it is taught and must be imposed.  Resistance is reactionary and morally suspect.  It was modernity though that produced totalitarianism, environmental exploitation, loss of the sacred, nihilism and anomie.  Progress then makes a totalitarian demand that is imposed on us, regardless of what of value is sacrificed to facilitate this.  Value is the main loss, quality is neglected for the sake of quantity.

From Heidegger to Guenon, Leontiev to Weaver, very different thinkers have challenged the unquestioning faith in progress as a force for good.  We have seen the secularisation of belief and the enframement by technology.  As much as we recognise benefits such as ease and efficiency, the eradication of disease and the increase in comfort we must realise we have in a sense become disconnected from authentic existence.

A key factor is quantification, whereby everything is measured and reduced to data.  This mathematical process is reductive, it always leaves a remainder - that remainder is quality, which cannot be accounted for by the modern mind.  Quality is therefore dismissed as merely subjective.  The Platonic triad of the Good, the True and the Beautiful once having transcendental authority and meaning is now reduced to mere preference and idiosyncratic tastes of the atomised individual.

This shift to quantification of existence leads to atomisation be that via Marxist Socialism or free-market capitalism.  Value has to be measured and therefore all that counts is a materialist assessment.  This is reductive and anti-spiritual.  It also means that whatever we attempt to measure we cannot take into account the true spiritual value of the quality.

So the real process is one of disintegration whereby hierarchies and organic connections are dissolved into individual atomised and dislocated units.  This degeneration is justified both in terms of a positivist scientific process and a political achievement of liberation and equality.  Liberation though means dislocation and equality means the destruction of uniqueness found in the traditional and organic hierarchies of human society.  In economics all that is measured is the data of productivity, so purpose and activity occur on the basis of consumerism, not principles.  Hedonism becomes the only purpose, replacing asceticism and sacrifice.  This is the totalising event of modernity.  It turns us all into identical units driven by passions and appetites.  The only value is material quantity.

A key turning point was the development of nominalism by William of Ockham, whereby universals were rejected and only the particular was regarded as valid.  The connection with the realist tradition back to Plato was broken and the march of modernity through meaning and telos was initiated.  With the Renaissance and the release of occult and kabbalistic theories from fallen Constantinople, a further turn brought complementary ideas of manipulation and magic as power over reality.  Modernity developed further in hubris and the infatuation with technological progress and political revolution grew more.

Modernity, the dream of the Enlightenment and the revolution is the reduction of human existence, the loss of the spiritual level and the separation from our ancestors.  Modernity then kills the value of human civilisation. 

The resistance to progressive disintegration must be a focus on a return to the sacred, the hierarchical, the meaningful, the telos and at an overarching level the transcendental Logos.  This return to the Logos is not to be misinterpreted as reductive rationalism, but in a rediscovery of transcendental meaning and overall a structured and purposeful cosmos. This is then in reality a reinvigoration of our civilisation and culture by a reassertion of what Saint Vincent of Lerins described as Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus. Progress, by contrast, has meant disintegration and reduction and the atomisation of the human being whether as a self-interested rational actor or an egalitarian member of international sameness, disconnected from tradition, heritage and culture.  We cannot continue on this path of quantification and disintegration.

The Bishop Fish and the Spaghetti Monster

 On the cusp of the modern age, in the twilight of the Medieval era, a figure seeming to have emerged from the margin of a manuscript was caught by fishermen and presented to the King of Poland - a fish that seemed to wear something like the vestments of a bishop.  This novelty was a great delight to the King, but when his bishops met the fish it indicated its desire to be freed.  The episcopate prevailed upon their monarch who reluctantly released the fish.  On its return to the sea it turned back and made a sign of the cross over those who released it.

This strange folk tale is clearly about a liminal figure, with the characteristics of absurdity and the monstrous one might expect to emerge from the sea.  And yet does it reveal the arbitrariness of the late Medieval Catholic faith?  Is not the bishop fish something like the arbitrary caricature of a deity reminiscent of the new atheists’ spaghetti monster, which was created to indicate the arbitrary absurdity of a world governed by a divine Logos rather than chaos.

The spaghetti monster is propaganda for the case that religious faith is arbitrary and a random belief.  In one sense the Bishop Fish is both absurd and arbitrary.  He emerges just as the world of Medieval symbolism is breaking down and nominalism is about to gain a hold over the European mind.  Nominalism being that theological perspective that asserted God as free and therefore arbitrary.  America is about to be discovered and the world proved to be round.

We can better understand this seemingly arbitrary figure through the work of the Pageau brothers, who make the case for the meaning and coherence of Medieval and Ancient symbolism.  The marginal figure is indeed absurd because he represents the edge of and the limit of order.  Jonathan Pageau has pointed to the gargoyles on the edge and outskirts of the church building, otherwise designed to follow a very exact and non-arbitrary hierarchical order, from the chancel to the nave.  It is on the edge that symbolism breaks down.  The monsters are found on the edge of the world.

From a traditional religious standpoint a character as arbitrary as the spaghetti monster would only be found in the liminal space - the edge of the world, the ocean.  It points to the new atheist misunderstanding of religious faith in that traditional religion is an assertion of the order and structure of reality and the claim that reality is not arbitrary.  Indeedin our postmodern times,  the materialist’s world quickly breaks down into flux, with nothing transcendent to hold its structure together.

But the Bishop Fish is not simply liminal.  He has the authority to give a blessing.  In this sense he is more like the strange Orthodox icons of Saint Christopher depicted with a dog’s head (a favourite figure of Jonathan Pageau).

Surely what we see in the figure of the Bishop Fish is the order of the Logos through the Church giving meaning and structure even to the chaotic realm of the sea - formless and churning.  One is reminded of the beginning of Genesis - And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The Logos speaks order and form into the dark void of the deep.  And a bishop who is also a fish might just symbolise the domain of the Logos over the watery chaos.  And the Logos operates upon the world through His Apostolic Church.  A bishop is an authority of the Church, a fish is a strange and monstrous creature, living under water, without legs or arms, existing in a dark and uninhabitable place.  The combination has meaning, it is not arbitrary.

Is this just a story to illustrate the invisible God’s authority over the void?  Perhaps, on the cusp of modernity, there is even more to this strange figure.  And here one risks inviting the ridicule of the New Atheist.  It is about perception.  In the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Century we are at the final waning of the Medieval mind that was able to perceive differently, perhaps perceive more holistically than our nominalist and empirical senses of modernity.

The Medieval man, much like the ancient and classical man existed in a more full world, symbolic and rich with meaning.  Everything pointed to God, as we find in the work of the last great Medieval voice as modernity corroded all around him - Dante Alighieri and his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy.  Nothing was random or arbitrary; nothing represented the meaningless and random combination of the Spaghetti Monster’s characteristics.  

In this symbolic world there was a heightened perception of reality and that which is not palpable.  The highest faculty was the mind or the nous - itself invisible and intangible.  The ultimate aspiration was the heavenly realm.  At the same time the immaterial soul was entirely embodied in physical Creation that was good and, though fallen, pointed to God.  There was nothing at all arbitrary about the ancient or Medieval worlds.  And we still hold onto much of that immaterial realm, bar the transcendental principle of God upon which these aspects depend - logic, morality, that the cosmos is governed by consistent principles (the Christian idea at the root of science, because empiricism would be meaningless unless rules discovered held and did not change the next day).

Everything in the cosmos pointed to the glory of its immaterial and spiritual Creator.  The chasm between Creator and creature was bridged by the Incarnation of the Godhead in the physical reality of Jesus Christ in First-Century Palestine.

It was therefore possible to perceive the world and the particular creatures making it up more holistically and see their spiritual meaning.  In that sense it is entirely credible that a strange and exotic deep sea creature might point very clearly to the glory of God.  We now would not be capable of perceiving this, existing in a materialist paradigm.  The fish is described as looking as though it wore bishop’s vestments, not actually wearing vestments.  And in this almost-modern world those who reference this folk tale express some scepticism.  Nonetheless, when creatures point to their and our Creator they will do so in the realm of mystery.  It will be subtle and only perceived by the spiritually-attuned.

This bizarre story, in which the fluid realm of the unknown, the liminal, the monstrous and the chaotic is shown to have in some sense ecclesiastical orders is an affirmation of order and structure even in the deep.  It is an affirmation of the universal governance of God through His Logos.

In that sense this strange Bishop Fish is not an assertion of the bizarre, freakish, and laughably superstitious.  No it is an affirmation of the ordering principle of the Logos and the preeminence of the Church as Christ’s body on earth.  In that sense it is the very opposite of not only the Spaghetti Monster, but our world of flux, chaos and nihilism - the world of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin.  A world with no boundaries and no meaning.  And yet we moderns and post-moderns have the temerity and lack of self awareness to mock the Bishop Fish.  Indeed it seems that the Spaghetti Monster is a far more fitting deity for our post-modern world than it would ever have been for Christendom.

The Person or the Individual - conservatism versus liberalism

 The great contradiction within Western conservatism is its focus on individualism.  True and unadulterated conservatism is a collectivist philosophy, not an individualist philosophy.  It is differentiated from Leftist collectivism not through individualism but first in having multiple layers of relational identity rather than reducing identity to one level, such as class or race and secondly in the voluntary element of the collectivist identities, which are based on love, not upon compulsion.

The overlap between classical liberalism and conservatism is not ideological, but pragmatic.  It is best represented by Dr. Jordan Peterson in popular culture, but goes back as far as Edmund Burke the Whiggish father of British conservatism and was politically most effectively implemented by President Reagan and Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher.

Individualism became the shibboleth of conservatism during the Post-war period, under the influence of Friedrich Hayek, a liberal political philosopher, who clearly spelt out his rejection of conservatism in his magnum opus, the Constitution of Liberty, in which he identified himself as a Whig and not a Tory.

At root conservatives and liberals have a different anthropology.  For liberals the human being is an atomistic individual motivated by self interest, for the conservative the human being is a person, defined by his relationships with other people, with traditions and identity.

This fundamentally different starting point explains some of the confusion in the position of the highly popular and influential Dr. Jordan Peterson.  In Thatcherite wording he talks of individual responsibility as being the cornerstone of civilisation.  This fails to grasp that to be in relationships one must be more than a self -interested individual as per Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer.

In misidentifying conservatism Peterson then misidentifies the Left, regarding the modern woke movement as a sort of cultural Marxism, rooted in collectivist identity.  He does not understand that breaking all familial, cultural and historical ties to assert one’s identity is the supremely individualist move.  Yes there are superficial groupings in the world of intersectionality. But these have no collectivist depth and are so superficial as to be a mere coming together of deeply atomised people alienated from all the collective identities they have inherited.

In misdiagnosing the problem, liberal individualists such as Peterson also misdiagnose the solution - it is not more individualism, but a reassertion of all the collective and traditional ties that bind human beings together.  Such ties are the Church, the family, national and ethnic identity, one’s local community, be it town or village.  These are collective identities, although they do not compel via bureaucracy like a Marxist system.

Marx is held up as the arch collectivist and yet much of his philosophy was devoted to the destruction of collective ties as false consciousness leaving only class identity - which would be overcome when everyone would live as liberal individuals in the communist utopia after the temporary collectivism of Socialism.

A conservative solution is not to reduce us to individuals, but to re-establish the hierarchy of the ties that bind.  Individualism emphasises the revolutionary, the atypical, the innovative, but also alienation and selfishness.  Individualism is a threat to conservatism.

If we turn to Greek philosopher theologian Yannaras we can understand that the human being is more than an atomised individual - individual from the Latin for indivisible, essentially a unit - and is rather a person, from the Greek prosopon, which is again related to hypostasis (from the theology of the Greek Fathers).  Just as the Trinity is relational so we in its image are relational and the word prosopon brings with it an emphasis on looking towards others.

Thus who we are is defined by a complex network of identities, not a reduction to an atomised individual.  The individual is the person abstracted from the organic and spiritual reality of life and this concept led to such contractual and reductive understandings of politics such as the social contract following an imagined state of nature and the emphasis on a progress that moves away from that which roots that ground us.

This deep contradiction, which is not a synthesis, can be found in the policies of the Conservative Government of the 1980s, which undertook radical economic reforms that atomised people and alienated them from communities built around the imperfect world of the industrial economy.  The Conservative Government was in part fighting the revolutionary Marxist movement that was controlling the working class through the trade union movement, but used the weapon of liberalism not conservatism to fight that war.  

Margaret Thatcher herself famously said that there is no such thing as society.  In a seeming paradox she went on to contradict herself by caveating that there did exist the social fact of the family, which surely transcends the atomised individual and is the foundation of a cohesive society.  Nonetheless her neoliberal economic policies turned Britain into a country not of communities, but of individuals seeking wealth and material advancement.  This was then to be further progressed by the Blairite Labour Governments that undertook a radical policy of social liberalism thereby further alienating and atomising us, to be taken to the furthest extreme with same-sex marriage under Cameron’s Conservatives - in which marriage became not a social good but a contract of disconnected individuals manifesting their non-communal and non-familial emotions and desires.  Marriage as the complementarity of the genders for social cohesion and the procreation of children was redefined.

The intellectual surrender of conservatism to liberalism, so that the modern Conservative Party is a classical liberal party today has meant the dismantling of British society.  The Left has continued to push not for collectivism, but rather a consumer social society to match consumer economics.  Through a Leftist philosophy of self realisation and autonomy people have alienated themselves from a collective identity seen as oppressive in favour of autonomy and irregular and ad hoc identities.  Such a social trend and such reductive cultural values cannot be resisted by classical liberalism, which has a very weak idea of society.  Now even gender is a consumer choice.

What needs to happen instead is a smashing of the idol of free market economics as an end in itself and the replacement of an anthropology of individualism with a Christian idea of the person - relational, communal and not defined by autonomy but by his traditional society.  In this we should look more to the Church Fathers than the reductive thinkers of liberalism from Locke to Mill.  

What differentiates conservative collectivism from Leftist collectivism is the emphasis on love rather than statist compulsion.  We love our families, we love our countries, we love our God.  This is not a system either of bureaucratic or commercial corporate compulsions. Individuals bereft of collective identities other than the State will find themselves compelled by State and Multinational Employer in a way that the person of enriched and traditional identities cannot be.  

We need a rich understanding of the human being and human culture, not a deracinated and reductive ontology of random and autonomous individuals for whom the demands of relationships and hierarchies are seen as a compromise of identity, whereas they are of course the very framework of our identities - they make us human.