Conservative Conservation

 We all remember David Cameron’s gimmicks to prove the Conservatives in Great Britain were now a party of the environment.  The clumsy cynicism of the husky sledge or cycling to work with a car carrying his papers discredited the PR campaign to prove that conservation could be conservative.  With the recent publication of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine - on the unmaking of humanity this writer formerly of the Left, former eco-warrior and Wicca and now convert to Orthodox Christianity, there is presented to us a genuinely conservative case for environmental conservation against the technocratic and corporate implementation of a technological and profit-driven solution that does not conserve, but rather turns our country into metal and destroys farming.  In his book Kingsnorth taps into a worthy tradition of men of letters from Cobbett to E. F Schumacher to Chesterton and Simone Weil.  We are reminded in his work of an English tradition that seeks to conserve.

The trouble with conservatism in Britain today is that it has been hijacked and ideologically captured by the vested interest of global capital.  The preferred ideology of the globalist capitalists is of course neoliberalism - individualistic and materialist. The need for a sense of roots and place is deliberately attacked by the neoliberal who seeks to reduce us to the economic unit of the atomised individual.  In its emphasis on net zero, which unlike roots and a sense of place, is quantifiable, the globalist presents the solution to the problem as more technological manipulation and the destruction of all that is human scale.

The point here is that true conservatism is not about profit and global business without borders and neither is it about technocratic solutions and disregard for our countryside that gives us a sense of place.  Do not look though to Great Britain’s official Conservative Party for any protection of the human scale, of roots or tradition.  It sides with big and international business and open borders that require more house building over our countryside, much to the delight of the speculative developer.

There is though a genuinely conservative position that addresses conservation.  It is directly opposed to the Malthusian environmentalist as it is to the anti-human global capitalist.  It places the emphasis on roots and place and history.  An analogy can easily be drawn with Burke’s case for the conservation of our inherited constitutional system.  Just as the British system of government is an intricate and evolved system of relationships, not easily subjected to a rationalist reduction, so too the natural ecosystem, which (as mush as Kingsnorth opposes the historical event of enclosure) is a delicate and intricate relationship between nature and Man’s use of the land as the small farmer, as opposed to big agribusiness or the identikit housing development.  Just as we are trustees for our inherited mixed constitution of Monarch, Lords, Commons and established Church, so we hold our environment on trust.  It is the same moral responsibility of conservatism in both cases.  And it is conservation that puts man rightfully in a relationship with Nature - totally opposed to the Malthusian agenda of the likes of the misanthropic George Monbiot who rather than seeing us as custodians seems to see us as a blight on some imagined unspoilt pre-human Nature.  Let’s not shy away from declaring that much of the Malthusian environmentalism such as the programme of Extinction Rebellion has a diabolical character and origin.

Human beings as the imago Dei then are stewards and custodians of our natural environment.  And that natural environment is in a symbiotic and not an adversarial relationship.  That is for as long as we resist the neoliberal and global capitalist agenda, just as much as we resist the anti-human environmentalism.  Both remove the human - one because humans get in the way of global profit and the other because we are seen as an oppressor of nature, not as caretaker.

The traditional small farm, notwithstanding Kingsnorth’s opposition to enclosure, the smaller and old built community, not the sprawling idenitikit housing estates imposed in the middle of the Sussex countryside, are Man working with the English countryside.  And its Englishness is central.  When we understand we are custodians of our “green and pleasant land” rather than being called to be the rootless revolutionary who is actually destroying our countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, then we see how to restore things to a natural order.

Kingsnorth takes a particular line that stands in a genuinely conservative tradition of care for what he lists as “people, place, prayer and the past”.  We find this in Wordsworth’s shock at the changes to nature, in Blake’s revulsion at the dark Satanic mills, in the Fen tigers protecting their environment, in Cobbett’s advocacy of the rural economy,  Chesterton’s and Belloc’s distributism, in Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, in the old Church of England caring for a whole country that is a network of parishes, in our long island story of over a thousand years.  This is not the anti-human cult of the type of environmentalism tacitly encouraged by the technocratic elites.  It is real and rooted, it is patriotic and it is conservative in the ordinary dictionary- sense of the word.  It is also a specifically English manifestation of the idea of our responsibility as the gardener and the caretaker.  This is conservation within a valid tradition.  It stands against the secret alliance between global capitalism and revolutionary environmentalism.  And at its heart it is based on the Christian idea found in Man’s role in Eden and our continuing role as being uniquely placed as the authoritative trustees and custodians of our environment, of Creation. 

Monasteries and Modernity

 It is hard to over-estimate the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries upon the Kingdom of England.  This network of brotherhoods, these establishments dedicated to prayer, hospitality and healing both kept England orientated towards God and provided a vital safety net independent from the State.  Their dissolution was the real irreversible move to modernity and the consequent atomised individualism, controlling bureaucracy and a dark spirit of power and competition.  

With the monasteries still extant there would have been a safeguard against a usurious economy and an overweening State.  The ever encroaching tide of secular power and de-sacralisation would have been resisted.  In England more than anywhere else its revolutionary declaration of war upon the Church took the form of obliteration of the rich monastic life of the country.  Neither Jacobin France nor Bolshevik Russia went quite so far, far as they undoubtedly did go in their rebellion against God! Without the monks’ prayers is it any wonder England became the chief advocate of secular power and trade?  Those monks’ prayers might have saved us from the deleterious transformation into a modern economic system.

The dissolution of the monasteries coincided with the move to a modern state with a  bureaucracy in large part constructed by Cromwell.  The Elizabethan poor law would become necessary without the safety net of the monastery.  And the eradication of much herbal and medicinal knowledge guarded by the monks would lead to suspicions of witchcraft in those situations where an elderly peasant crone knew something of the lost herbal remedies.  And with the disappearance of the monk soon followed the knight, to be replaced by the merchant and the privateer.

The monastic culture and its establishments distributed across the country was the spiritual heart of England, providing also a  practical apparatus.  The monasteries were not only a place of prayer, but a social and health service.  From their spiritual life many other practical and worldly benefits flowed.   Classical knowledge had been preserved in our monasteries through the period of the fall of the Roman Empire.  The monks provided a basic education for children.  Their artwork in illuminated manuscripts was one example of the creative and artistic work of the monastic world.  Alms, medicine, treatment and shelter were provided to those who needed that safety net and that care.

Most significant and least quantifiable was the prayer-life of the monasteries that must have staved off many threats, spiritual and physical and kept the country Christian.  Had the monasteries been preserved there would have been a counterweight to the worst excesses of modernity.

The dissolution, by contrast, has ensured our country is one of the most secular.  Without the monasteries the avaricious were unrestrained, the poor and weak were unprotected.  With no sanctuary and no spiritual conscience to the kingdom we saw a vertiginous decline into materialism, secularism and quantification.  By contrast, had there remained a strong monastic element to the country would it have been possible for England to become so quickly a privateering country of mercantile and materialist interests.  The disappearance of the monasteries was a de-sacralisation that opened the way to usury, enclosure and the power of the merchant.

With no monastic voice or presence “progress” quickly became the official idol of worship, perhaps concealing the true new god - Mammon.  After the monasteries we would see the excesses of iconoclasm, followed by regicide, then Whig corruption, later came enclosure, and then industrialisation alienating us from our land and finally the ultimate state of the tech era in the techno-capitalist society leading to a new low of anomie.  All around is rampant individualism now degenerating further into wokeness and “diversity”.  Meanwhile the ever-encroaching State seeks to turn us into digital data and remove all personal freedom, absorbing us entirely into their secular machine. 

It is because we have no prayers to bring divine protection and hold us together.  No faithful monastics praying for the King, lords and common people.  We are left exposed to the buffeting and undermining of the evil spirits.  We are vulnerable and yet haughty.  Proud yet weak.  Seemingly dominant yet completely subject to globalist forces that are sweeping us away.  Come back monks of old and save us from ourselves.

The Virtual Person

 Once we quantify the human being by reducing him to flesh and blood alone and chemical reactions in the brain it is no longer easy to differentiate the human being from the A.I. facsimile or the robot.  Those who speak in favour of abortion often refer to the unborn baby as nothing more than a cluster of cells.  This fits with their materialist ontology, but it is unclear why the born baby, the child or the adult is any more than a cluster of cells.  From the materialist perspective we are all as soulless as the foetus.  And if we are soulless then how are we different from the robot?  A similar question arises for the non-physical virtual personality that can be created by artificial intelligence.  It is not about being physical or not.  It is rather about what it is that makes the human-being fundamentally different from technological manufactured automata that mimic us with such accuracy and potentially even seem to act spontaneously. 

There is a bizarre concept that emerged from the tech world of singularity that is known as “speciesism”.  This idea draws an analogy with racism and applies a similar opprobrium.  In this case though, to favour the human “species” as a whole is seen as a prejudiced and discriminatory approach.  To most sane people it is clear this has reduced concepts to the absurd.  While we perceive this though, the parameters of debate and the ontological and spiritual assumptions of our society mean we can no longer articulate reasons for the uniqueness of Man.  Man is no longer the imago Dei, but a consequence of impersonal evolutionary and biological forces.  We are thus silenced by the materialist limits of thought in the modern world.

We urgently need an understanding that affords an explanation of why human beings are fundamentally different from simulacra, automata and facsimiles.  Instead of adopting the reductive rationale of materialism, which deprives us of satisfactory accounts of what it is to be human, we need an understanding that affords an adequate account.

Such an exercise is only necessary if we still believe humans are more than mere mechanisms driven by a biological momentum for survival.  If we are instead ready to adopt a mechanistic and materialist view of the human being, then we must be prepared to acknowledge then the inevitable reduction of no value, no quality and a loss of any sense of why our own kind are in a special sense unique and sacred.  One might be ready to accept such a bleak world, but it means denying the value of human love, human art, human history, human faith and the intrinsic value of human life.  This, it is suggested, is not a belief system, but pathology.

In some sense Kant’s transcendental argument seems to help here.  The God postulate is necessary to explain what cannot be explained.  So much of human value, the conscience, morality, telos, requires that we postulate God as existing.  This though seems an over-rationalised and deracinated argument for higher meaning.  Instead, more convincing on a human level, rather than at a theoretical level, is our experiential existence that tells us what is real, prior to the sort of abstraction that both science and philosophy impose upon our immediate experience.

Our most real experience is as a person and it is of other human people.  All the interactions, from the babe in arms responding to his mother’s expression and touch, to our meeting of strangers - all is personal.  This is the primary and real experience.  And this is what helps us perceive the artificiality of the artificially-created reality.  Furthermore, after people we also encounter Creation itself as real, with a clear imprint of the divine Person.  Afterwards, abstract ideas are imposed that try to suggest viewing through the microscope or the telescope (perspectives that while real involve abstraction by abolishing either distance or scale) is more real that what we encounter in our lived reality as personal beings encountering one another and a personally-created cosmos.

We should not then discard the very attitude that helps us distinguish the real from the virtual.  And as stated above there is a reductive move that can legitimately be seen as pathological by abstracting to such an extent that we lose that perception.  So instead we need an explanation that affords validity to that perception and it is not to be found in abstracted philosophy or science.  It is primarily the personal encounter, which involves freedom and faith.  Freedom, because the personal interaction is not controlled and faith because we trust a higher purpose to the uncontrolled encounters.  

We must then turn to an account of the world that is deeply personal.  The abstracted and scientific mind tends to see this as biased and lacking the necessary objectivity.  This scientific attitude though is exactly the problem.  It tries to turn us into neutral observers who have no existential commitment to the phenomena we encounter.  We are taught instead to detach ourselves and observe the world in artificial laboratory conditions.  It is such an approach that means we can no longer distinguish the value of the real over the virtual.

What affords a full understanding then is that through our experiential encounter with phenomena we encounter others as persons and a world crafted by a Person.  The human being is recognised as the imago Dei and the reality of the world is understood as a personal Creation of the ultimate Person.  This affords an understanding of why the real and the actual person is fundamentally valuable in a way that the virtual is not.  There can be no artificially created human, the artificial world of virtual reality is not real.  We understand rather that it is a creation by a partial and finite person, unlike reality itself as the creation of the infinite Person.  Artificial worlds and creations have value of course aesthetically, but we understand that they are not real.  And they are valued inasmuch as they enable us to participate in something through their material parts that is of value beyond those material substances.  The great painting is not merely paint on canvas, it creates a picture of a world that we encounter because we recognise the person of the artist speaking to us about something of value.  We do not though mistake it for complete reality.

 Thinking specifically now of the human person, his qualitative value is that he is also both in his physical existence and is his body, but also something beyond this.  He is also spirit and he is made by and oriented towards his personal Creator.  He is not mere matter alone and neither is he a mere mechanism.  His existence is orientated towards the highest value and even if that orientation is awry, still like the divine Creator he is a person whom we encounter and relate to as a person and not a facsimile.  But only if we reject the mechanistic understanding of the material as the total reality, can we personally encounter the personal reality.

The tech fanatics then are rather like Chesterton’s lunatic in the asylum.  They exist in a compact and complete world that is internally completely rational and yet he is detached from reality outside of his mind.  He rejects the validity of the encounter with the person, reducing it to a merely materialist understanding.  It is for this reason he can talk seriously about “speciesism” or assert that he can be downloaded onto a computer.  We have seen though instead that the traditional understanding of God, man as imago Dei and reality as created affords an understanding that means we can recognise and distinguish the real from the virtual.    

We must remember this truth as we confront the growing potency and ubiquity of the virtual and artificial.  It seems as though the only way to survive the confusion that will compromise the value of all that is valuable is the religious outlook.

Atheism for you, Moloch for us

 Since the age of Revolution and Enlightenment, secret societies and interest in the occult have been a major factor amongst the new and revolutionary elite.  Meanwhile atheism and materialism have been promoted to the masses, cutting them off from Christ.

The atheism in our society being actively promulgated and pushed, through entertainment, education and scientific “experts” is plain to see. Only the most gullible would fail to see an intentional agenda, even a conspiracy.  Many of the powerful families in the British establishment, the Darwins, the Huxleys and others have been part of an elite that has worked to undermine faith in Christ.  The occult element to the elite is more difficult to pin down, by its very nature.  There are rather hints and suggestions.  To look at the world from a more spiritual perspective and observe the hubris of scientism, the promotion not only of atheism but sexual degeneracy, it is clear though that a concomitant agenda is at work.

Atheism clearly disempowers people, makes them feel life is meaningless, enslaves them to appetites and passions.  People lose their agency if they are cut off from God.

The elites have no desire to lose agency for themselves by contrast.  Control is their whole philosophy.  And this was achieved historically through magic and alchemy and today through manipulation of nature by science.  It is no great leap to suggest they also wish to control us.  Elites who cared for their people would not be actively promoting atheism, homosexuality and abortion.  This nihilistic society is somehow explained by the impoverished ideology of “secular liberalism”.  Is it not more the case that our globalist elites are all about control and manipulation?

It is easy to see how the promotion of feminism and abortion or alternatively, the promotion of opern borders and multiculturalism are in the interests of global capital and have by contrast created economic difficulties for our own people.  It is here contended that it is not simply about avarice and greed, but a more sinister form of control. 

The ideology of our elites is very anti-Christian.  It devalues man so that he is a mere individual driven by passions and appetites and no longer the imago Dei.  He is told this enslavement to passions that leads to the break down of society and family is all about “freedom”.  Of course it leads to unhappiness, anomie and purposelessness.  Why do our elites want this for us?  There is something more evil than the love of money, even if that was initially at the root of it, to reference the Apostle Paul.

This love of money has become further disfigured into a lust for power that thrives on the degradation of the people.  Today in the West it is seen as a matter of great cultural value that people parade the streets taking pride in their sexual sins.  We celebrate the extreme lack of virtue, loss of a telos, and indulgence in every passion.  This is not freedom, it is degradation and enslavement and certain people benefit from our degradation.

Rather like Bentham’s Panoptican, we are threatened with the surveillance society in which we are left to our passions and controlled prisoners in an open, but continually monitored gaol.

Those who imprison us have clearly reached the height of hubris and with that comes a spiritual sickness.  This ultimate lust for power stems from the revolutions of the Eighteenth Century, which promoted the so-called values of the Enlightenment, which released the perversions of the Marquis de Sade.  The ultimate and most cruel power is sexual, the intimate control of another human being, their degradation, their torture.  This was the nature of the cults the ancient Hebrews encountered in the Promised Land.  They encountered the cults of Moloch and Baal, symbolised by the Star of Remphan.  Many in the Renaissance became fascinated by the similar occult knowledge that reached them after the sack of Constantinople.  The heart of the Christian empire in the East had a dangerous margin of black magic and occultism and this was brought to the West and helped fuel the Renaissance, humanism and a fascination with magic and alchemy.  The Western elites ignored Orthodoxy, but utilised the occult underbelly of the East.

Magic is the manipulation of Nature and in that sense a precursor of the New Science.  The occult, from the Renaissance on, was at work to undermine Christendom and was working in tandem with the seemingly secular and rationalistic Enlightenment.  It is not an unjustified inference to conclude the New Science and rationalist philosophy were a cover for the occult and revolution.  Newton himself embodied the mechanistic new science with the occult.  This is because a mechanistic view of the cosmos is one that permits manipulation and exploitation.  Empiricist philosophers such as Hume denied the existence of the soul and presented Man as a mere passive receiver of sensation thereby in the end justifying a Benthamite utilitarian manipulation.

What to conclude?  There are many hints and much uncollated evidence that the elite’s secret societies and spiritual fascinations are linked to the occult, to Moloch and to Satanism.  Whether it be the symbolism of the Apple in tech, the six colours of the LGBT flag referencing the symbolism of number six, the spirit cooking of Marina Abramovic, the activities at Bohemian Grove, the promotion of killing unborn babies, homosexuality and gender confusion, the hostility to Christianity, there is something spiritually dark at work that involves more than a simple atheistic denial of the divine and supernatural.  Atheism promoted in mainstream society separates the people from God and removes their spiritual defences.  It is promoted by those who are most likely not atheists, but fascinated by the demonic.  

We must then understand the influence of Aleister Crowley, a figure in British intelligence, on the so-called values of secular liberalism.  Crowley promoted sexual depravity as a means to harness demonic power.    His famous phrase is what the Western liberal calls for “freedom” really means - do what thou wilt.  Here is the ultimate expression of individualism that destroys the person’s likeness to God and turns him into an atomised and hedonistic individual.  This is the “value” the West has come to stand for and we should not underestimate how well-connected or how accurately Crowley manifested the state of our Western/globalist elites.

But it was always about more than simple base appetites for them - such drives were for the masses in this social Darwinist vision.  They understood they could enslave us to our hedonism.  Our seemingly benign and dusty elites, the likes of Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw were wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Taking the model of the Roman General Fabius who held back from directly confronting Hannibal in the second Punic war, they too did not promote outright revolution, but revolution by stealth.  Their group that produced so many Labour Prime Ministers, the Fabian Society, chose as its symbol the wolf in sheep’s clothing that Christ warned us to beware of and recognise as a deceiver who would consume us.  And for all their talk of progress they really represented a dark scientism to be implemented through eugenics.  The elite families of Britain were behind this Fabian Society and its current Prime Minister ( a declared atheist), introducing digital identification, is a member.

The real nature of the revolution, it must be understood, all the way back to the French Revolution, is not about politics alone - it is consciously spiritual.  It is against Christ and His Church.  It aims to enslave us for the sake of Luciferian progress, a better world as they see it, but one which is deeply inhuman and atheistic.  Because at some point atheism is not simply materialist, but is an endorsement of the revolutionary demonic forces that rebelled against God led by that hero of our elites Satan, as portrayed so effectively by that English poet John Milton (his civil-war Puritanism being a prototype for secular revolution).  Milton was confused by his fascination with Satan, later elites would embrace their fascination.

It is about power and control through revolution.  They want us unbelieving and bewildered, enslaved to our passions, so that they can rule like progressive Platonic Philosopher Kings, keeping us in our degenerate state with the “noble lie” of atheism.

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.