Diversity is our Decay

 "Diversity is our strength" is a shibboleth parroted by our careerist and pusillanimous politicians and enforced by human resources departments throughout the West.  A whole legal framework of human rights, not so much codifying inherited civic rights as enforcing an ideology of diversity has binding power throughout the West.   Diversity and its corollary, inclusivity were cited as the justification for perpetuating the war in the Donbas (despite the key diverse idols of homosexuality and abortion being legal in the Russian Federation).  

In terms of the Post-War paradigm being predicated on anti-authoritarianism and imposed unity, this obsession with diversity makes some sense.  Of course, the contradiction is diversity of opinion is not permitted, because then the natural perspective embodied throughout the rest of the world and throughout the history of the whole world including the West, would contradict today's mantras of wokeism.

Indeed, the modern West's obsession with individualistic diversity is exceptional in the sense of being an aberration, with no historical equivalent.  It is contingent upon our Christian culture, while being a perversion and twisting of that inheritance.  For most of mankind's existence the question has not been how to enable and protect diversity, but how to return to holistic unity.  From Plato to Eastern spirituality, we have understood diversity and idiosyncrasy to be a fracturing of a holy unity to which we strive to return as the telos of Mankind.

The Russian philosopher who finally became an Orthodox monk, Konstantin Leontiev, known as the Christian Nietzsche provided a powerful symbol of the body politick's progress towards individual diversity as being akin to the decay of a corpse that fragments and breaks up into individual pieces.  This fragmentation can be contrasted with the ideal put forward by French Integralist Charles Maurras for whom a return to the Catholic Church and the Monarchy would re-integrate French society unifying it and overcoming the disintegration set in train by the Jacobin revolution.

Nonetheless, there is a connection between the disintegration into atomised individualism, where people celebrate their idiosyncratic enslavement to their passions and the Church.  It is though a connection between Orthodoxy and a derivative heresy.  Christian theology of the person and liberal individualism are linked in the same way as Orthodox teaching on the Word made flesh is to Arianism.

Diversity as an idea stems from  liberal individualism, itself a heretical derivative from Man as the image of God, the Imago Dei.  We must understand here that the Christian faith answered the dilemma of Greek philosophy - how to solve the problem of the One and the Many.  For most schools of classical thought the break up from unity into diverse particulars was seen as a fall and a disintegration.  The Church Fathers, in particular Saint Maximus the Confessor were able to provide the answer to this age-old dilemma and the answer lay in Christ.

In His Incarnation Christ joins the transcendent and the immanent, the universal and the particular, the One and the Many, God and Man.  As Saint Athanasius and Saint Irenaeus put it - God became man that Men might become gods.  This intertwining without loss of identity between Christ's two natures - divine and human - was further elucidated by Saint Gregory of Palamas's distinction between Divine Energies and Essence.  The essence of the divine and the human are not confused, but distinct for we are being joined in energies not substance or essence.  Thus identity is retained as in love and sexual union.

Furthermore, the Church revealed that God was not an impersonal One as the Neoplatonists held into which we would be absorbed and dissolved, losing out identity.  God is rather Three Persons in One God, three hypostases and one substance.  This then is the solution to the Greek problem of the One and the Many and it is found in personhood.  We are not simply reabsorbed into a Platonic One, but retain our identities in relationship with the Triune God.

That personhood is expressed through relationship, just as the Trinity is three divine Persons in One.  It is not the degraded atomisation into individualism. And that personhood in Man has a telos, to participate in the Divine, growing into the full stature of Christ.

The sanctity of personhood and freedom have been developed by contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Christos Yannaras.  Our telos is Christ, but it is manifested in our irreplaceability and importantly this irreplaceability of our personhood is expressed through freedom from the passions.

Yes it rests on freedom, because we can only authentically grow into Christ if we choose that path - but it is not freedom to be enslaved to the passions.  This is why Western churches have gone so awry - in their emphasis on inclusivity they say we accept you as you are, whatever passions have enslaved you.  God wants the best for us and will not leave us trapped in our passions.  True identity is unique and irreplaceable, but it is in the fulfilment of our telos to attain the likeness of the divine.  We all start as the imago Dei but having lost the likeness, but our fallen state is put right by attaining likeness though theosis or sanctification.  This is full freedom, not falling short through sin into enslavement to the passions, be that avarice and greed or promiscuity or homosexuality, so promoted by the Western elites.  

The modern West by contrast misunderstands freedom as licence and acquisition of wealth.  Avarice and sexual perversions that distort the image of God in us are celebrated as freedom.   

The Western idea of freedom and rights is a distorted degradation of Christian freedom and personhood.  Unlike the Church Fathers modern ideas are not derived from a high metaphysical principle such as the Trinity and the hypostases.  Enlightenment philosophers simply exaggerated the idea beyond what was justified by metaphysics.  Freedom and the sanctity of the person are indeed sacred principles, but there is no case for putting forward atomised individualism, enslavement to passions or diversity as principles.  They are heretical claims based on nothing more than thin air.  The Church made clear personhood was contingent on the Trinity and that personality could be retained in returning to our Creator as established through Christ's two natures.  The only reason these ideas were developed further into a fragmentary individualism was because of the development of a profound nihilism that ignored the transcendent justification for what we hold dear about mankind.    

And so we must rediscover that the true meaning of freedom is not in what is really the enslavement of "sodomy and usury" celebrated by our corrupt elites, but in the freedom to grow into the "full stature of Christ" through our unique irreplaceability when we are freed from the passions and sin.