Progress and Death

 When people bemoan our modern world the usual retort is an instruction not to romanticise the past and to consider the lifesaving utility of medical science.  The merit of medical science, in the hands of pharmaceutical oligarchs, is itself questionable.  Modernity from the dissolution of the monasteries to the categorisation of the wise woman of the village with herbal knowledge as a witch cut us off from inherited collective knowledge.  This indicates that today large corporations simply have to rediscover ancient knowledge never analysed and then they patent it.  That aside, progress in large part justifies itself as a successful flight from death.

Through the technological advances of progress we are cossetted from the severity of our mortality.  Death is made hygienic in a place of face masks and medication.  Coffins are not open at funerals, people generally die in a sterile environment amongst medical experts.

The argument here is not that the advances of medical science should be rejected.  The human being was endowed by his Creator with the talent to solve the problems presented by a hostile fallen Nature, outside of Eden.  Nonetheless this ability is ambiguous, it also leads to a subtle Luciferianism.  This is most strongly demonstrated in the idea of Singularity from the dark technical minds of Silicon Valley, in the idea an imitation of our personality recorded on technology is a means of immortality.

Most  human beings with any consciousness of their soul understand that this method of denying death is by no means immortality.  Nonetheless, we all seek to avoid death and prolong at least a healthy existence if not an unhealthy one.  The other side of this idea latent in progress that the future will be hygienically healthy cannot really tolerate to look at the physical decline of illness and old age.  Even though the technology progress itself produced can prolong people in a sort of nether region of half-life. this is not considered hygienic and as much as the body of the deceased must be concealed, the infirm are considered to have no dignity and we take upon ourselves the right to choose when we live and die or even when others should die (as soon as their scientifically prolonged existence tarnishes the bright and clean future).

Without wishing back a time of pestilence, plague and violence, we must also recognise in the hygienic world of progress a spiritual aspect of human nature has been somewhat curtailed.  We have not and will not conquer death, but we have hidden it.  It is no longer really considered necessary to find a spiritual answer to our mortality, instead our mortality is hidden, because science will solve that question before our turn comes.

A spiritual answer to death does not require some morbid and macabre focus, as though we need to dig up our relatives' decomposing cadavers to take part in a grotesque theatre of afternoon tea.  Somehow that seems reminiscent of the frozen corpses of Americans committed only to life in this temporal world.

Pestilence, famine and war asked us serious questions about the meaning of life that a life of medical care and shopping malls somehow conceals.  We should therefore along with serious thinkers such as Martin Heidegger or Aleksandr Dugin, continue to think seriously about death and how it actually imparts meaning upon our lives.  Without death there is certainly no sense of eternity.  Only with limitation can life choices be meaningful.  Only when we think of our frailty in the face of time can we gain a sense of the eternal.

Modern man might mock the apparent "superstitions" of his ancestors who faced death day in day out, but is that not only because he hides from the question of his mortality? And in hiding from his mortality he is also hiding from the eternal.  Consumption is the answer to ignore the pressing and creeping sense of limitation.  Phrases such as "you only live once" as a justification for existential curiosity that Heidegger saw as inauthentic, are really ways to evade death not to acknowledge it.  In hiding from our mortality, in living for our passions, we are also denying the demands of eternity upon us. 

There is a political question here.  It is with GDP, more consumer choice and liberalisation of laws to "free" us to engage our passions that a global political class can keep us passive.  It means no really difficult questions are asked about what is happening and why it is happening.  Arguably a citizen of Russia or Iran is far less politically-naive than those living in Western democracies where we can sate ourselves and hide from our mortality.

There is also, more obviously a religious question.  For the Westerner death can be regarded as some sort of Malthusian solution that does not necessarily touch me.  Pestilence and famine keep the numbers down and resist the Malthusian bogeyman of overpopulation.  In reality, if we truly recognise each person as more than a mere avatar of their passions, more than a consumer whose identity is defined by his career, by what football team he supports or what genre of popular music he enjoys, more even than which political party he supports, - if we actually see the human person as the imago dei, then his annihilation through physical decomposition is an affront to all that holds real value.

If we finally look at what death really means - the seeming annihilation of the personality, we can see it as the reductive and unnatural force that it really is and therefore reject its right over us.  That though is not in terms of some artificial download onto a computer.  It is instead a theological question, a cosmological question.  How can death exist in contrast to the human person?  It is only then we can recognise that for all our technological and medical progress, the real question is spiritual.  It is only then we can see the real answer is that this fallen world, following the laws of Darwin, is not natural.  It must be the consequence of sin, of a fundamental primary distortion of reality.  That means it cannot be solved by all the cunning techne of human ingenuity.  It is instead solved not by technological or political solutions, but by personal repentance.  We should not let technological, medical or political progress distract us from this. 

 

  

Progress and Alienation

 Hegel wrote of alienation from modernity and Marx wrote about it in terms of alienation from what we create through work.  Neither with Hegel should we agree to strive to  reconcile with modernity, nor with Marx should we simply diagnose alienation as a primarily economic problem linked to  a specific economic system - capitalism.  Marxist economics were equally alienating because it was a radical Enlightenment system.  Nietzsche saw through the shallowness of modernity and advocated the Ubermensch.  Traditionalists such as Evola and Guenon were important in diagnosing this spiritual alienation as a consequence of the whole project of modernity, the reign of Quantity.  Today Dugin advocates the Radical Subject as the way forward for the traditionalist and sacred spirit.

Modernity is a project beginning before the Enlightenment, back to the Renaissance, developing through Baconite science, Newtonian Physics and then of course the  Enlightenment itself.  Its ideology is in a very broad sense liberalism. Its economics are also revolutionary and disruptive of communal life, whether as revolutionary industrial Soviet Communism,  global capitalism or the Technocratic Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Heidegger in particular was able to present an alternative view of being open again to Being, rather than trying to capture it and as a consequence being enframed by our own metaphysics and technology, cut off from Being as the concealed.

The project of modernity, with its blind faith in Progress, what the man on the Clapham Omnibus might term "change for change's sake" (the ideology really is that crude and shallow), was intentional.  The interest in the Occult and magic of the early scientists, their receptivity to the demonic, "progressed" into the ideology of the secret societies, such as the Illuminati and the Free Masons.  Whether the Freemasons today adhere to this ideology no longer matters, but there was a time in history when the secret societes including freemasonry were committed to the revolution which ultimately meant pulling down the ancien regime - Crown and Altar.  (Even if monarchs could for a time serve as vessels of modernisation and religion could be recapitulated as deism or a proto theosophy).

What was the utopia with which they planned to replace the ordained structure of human society?  Well it encompassed liberation through atomisation, technological development and universalism.  Indeed those revolutionaries who paraded the Goddess of Reason through the streets of Paris coined the shibboleth that became the cry of all subsequent revolutions - liberty, equality, fraternity.  This was not the prescriptive liberty rooted in ancient rights under the King that Burke referred to when talking of the liberties of Americans and Englishmen under the English Common Law founded upon precedent.  No this was formed by the theories of  elite thinkers such as Rousseau, whose ideas led to the formation of secret societies amongst the elites.   The Enlightenment itself was fundamental to the shift in thinking, but the very Enlightenment itself was part of the revolutionary fervour of rejecting inherited wisdom, as can be seen in Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?"

The so-called Enlightenment was a philosophical project working in tandem with the sciences to dislocate Western Man from his traditions, his history and his religion.  It was the zeitgeist of the Eighteenth Century, conceived in earlier centuries in Renaissance Humanism and the alchemy of the early occultist sciences.  It was a rising up against the Divine.  And universalism, which meant in reality complete atomisation and dislocation in effect, was its creed.

This is what has led to transgenderism and will in turn lead to transhumanism in this quest for supremacy over reality.

As technology, metaphysics and ideology have worked together, the human being has been reduced to homo economicus, a mere unit of production whether that was in the English Industrial Revolution, Soviet Russia or Capitalist-Fordist America.  This is the real alienation and it is not simply the Marxist account of losing the control of what one's own labour produces.  This is only one possible symptom of the shift to materialism that is fundamental to the idea of Progress.  A strange and irrational faith emerged that the Greeks would not have accepted - history is evolving progressively.  A new thought indeed!  Instead of a fallen post-Edenic, post Golden-Age world, we were to believe Man could again construct Babel.  The real effect was a deep spiritual alienation that manifested in destruction of home and hearth, disconnection from the home gods, the ancestors, the transcendent.

The irrational faith in Progress then, bolstered and supported by theories such as Darwin's evolution, was what really alienates us.  From ugly architecture to grotesque art in aesthetics, to dislocation and insecurity in employment and in economics we are always more and more alienated and torn away from our embeddedness.  Furthermore in a materialist paradigm we are unable to find the words to forge an argument against this pressure to move further and further, deeper and deeper into this mistake, this putting our own technological advances and liberation above the sacred and the human.

it is no accident that culture has decomposed and decayed.  In a world of alienation atomisation and ennui are the result.  This is expressed in our artwork.  It manifests in terrible and senseless crimes, in sexual promiscuity, in deviance.  There is no longer a Higher Authority, there is no longer a purpose, a telos, outside of and above this fallen world.  The only purpose is more liberation from authority and tradition.  Technology is intimately connected to cultural change and adds to our pride that we can create a new Luciferian world in defiance of cosmic law.   In the end they plan to defy death itself with their Singularity concept, bypassing the need for the Cross or so they think in their pride.

"And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."      

Of course technology in itself is not an evil.  It is to an extent of course a consequence of the Fall and linked to Cain.  Nonetheless, the Empire became Christian.  Art was created to glorify and venerate the Divine and the Saints.  Freedom is neither a moral evil.  The trouble is that by dislocating us from our cosmic position we have misunderstood freedom.  From the Greeks onwards,  Plato and Aristotle, through to the Stoics and culminating in the Church Fathers, freedom was understood as freedom from the passions and the potential to participate in the Divine.  The debased view of Man that emerged from the Enlightenment misunderstood freedom as a shallow lack of constraint by authority to be able to indulge the very passions that the ancients understood enslaved us.

The whole driving force of Progress is the passion of pride and it is pride that separates us from God and will as a consequence alienate us from our neighbour, our culture, our very purpose of existence.

Philosophers on the Right turn to the Ubermensch or the Radical Subject.  That though is still a modern response.  In "riding the tiger" of modernity the Traditionalist has already accepted the inevitability of Modernity.  There is no inevitability about it.  Man might build in pride, but Babel was destroyed.  This ideology of a universal system that now manifests in the dogmas of the WEF and the other globalist institutions, is nothing more than men of clay trying to replace God.  No paradigm is inescapable.  One simply has to look at the premise.  And the premise of modernity is Promethean.  It is an attempt to usurp the Divine.  It was the presumption that led to the downfall of Nebuchadnezzar.  However high we build we still have feet of clay.  And by attempting to usurp the Divine we have simply been degraded to slaves of the passion of Pride.  It is indeed Luciferian.  This is the dogma of Lucifer's revolution in the heavens replicated here in earth.  It is no accident that the supposedly secular advocates of Progress have always been fascinated by the occult and drawn to Lucifer as the progressive figure of Light.  It is why the Lucis Trust is so deeply entwined with the United Nations.

If we have faith though and have not given in to the materialist ideology of the Revolution then we know how this ends.  Indeed we know the victory is already won and this is simply the intermediate stage before the consummation of that victory and the building of the new Celestial City - not Babel, but the heavenly Jerusalem.