The Closed Society and its Enemies

 In the post war era many conservatives have regarded liberalism, particularly classical liberalism, as an ally.  This last week at ARC Dr. Jordan Peterson has called for a synthesis of traditional conservatism and classical liberalism.  Outside mainstream debate, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin argues to the contrary that liberalism has just as strong totalitarian tendencies as Fascism and Communism - the machinations and interventions of Karl Popper’s student George Soros seem to provide the empirical evidence that Dugin is right, falsifying any conservative hypothesis that liberalism can be an ally.

In the 1945 general election Churchill made much of Karl Popper’s teacher, Friedrich Hayek and his book, “The Road to Serfdom”.  Margaret Thatcher famously brandished a copy of Hayek’s book, declaring “this is what we believe”.  There are certainly compatibilities between conservatism and liberalism - a distrust of utopian ideologies and a faith in the little platoons of voluntary society.  At the same time, with Popper came a radical change in liberalism, it was declared that the “open society” (the secret utopia of liberalism) has enemies.  As Dugin has pointed out once a society believes it has internal ideological enemies that is the beginning of totalitarianism.  We saw this totalitarian tendency in the reaction to J D Vance’s post-liberal speech, when Eurocrats insisted that it was right to suppress the free speech of those who were against democracy (by which they meant of course populist opinions opposing the completely undemocratic decision to open Europe’s borders to Third World migration).

For Popper the key enemies of the Open Society were Plato, Hegel, and Marx.  All of them he argued had totalitarian tendencies.  He criticised them for their idea that society could be rationally resolved according to higher non-empirical principles (Plato in particular) and the notion of historicism - that history has a direction -  mainly advocated by Hegel and Marx.  Most conservatives rightly distrust the idea that history has a political and social direction, but the rejection of the idea that there are higher values to which society should be orientated as per Plato is more problematic.  Traditionalist politics do depend on a certain top-down metaphysics, which Popper directly opposed.

This is the point of fundamental disagreement between liberals and traditional conservatives.  Peterson tries to resolve this by arguing for traditional conservatism setting the foundational and normative ethos, wherein people can operate as free individuals as per a type of J S Mill negative liberty.  Does this really resolve the tension?  

Soros would certainly reject this.  This promulgator of liberal democracy is quite happy to use his influence to attempt to subvert democratic choices on Brexit or abortion.  For Soros as for European leaders certain democratic choices, if they are populist and conservative can be regarded as illegitimate.  There are ideas that are not entitled to be tested out, contrary to the scientific theory of falsification.  Such high-handed liberalism that puts certain conservative perspectives outside of the Overton Window is by definition incompatible with conservatism.  The transcendental values of conservatism at least have the right to be put to the test and arguably have the right to demand acceptance over and above radical scepticism.

We can see liberalism’s totalitarian tendencies very starkly in foreign policy as per the military excursions of liberal interventionism, the meddling through colour revolutions in supposedly “closed” societies.  It lies in the fact liberalism is a universalist ideology and entails that other very different societies with very different cultures and histories should also comply.  This is where Popper’s criticism of historicism is contradicted by the practical implications of this universalist ideology.  Because it turns out liberalism is not neutral in allowing free choice as to how to live.  It has instead reduced cultures and societies to their individual components.  To grant liberal negative freedom to individuals worldwide, one must deny the rights and traditions of cultures.  China has no right to defend its Confucianism, Russian Orthodoxy makes contrary claims that liberals believe justifies the illiberal attacks on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  It turns out progress is a liberal concept - all societies are progressing towards the liberal and open society and Soros and his ilk are keen to aid those on what they regard as the “right side of history”.

But the closed society, where the individual is not the ultimate measure, has a right to exist too.  And such societies have more in common with conservatism in their opposition to the reductive individualism of social liberalism.  Whereas conservatives in the liberal West struggle to articulate their support for marriage, faith in the public square, the need for social taboos and their opposition to LGBT, abortion, secularism, the closed societies are staunch in their defence of traditional values.

For the liberals society can make no collectivist claim over individual rights.  This though is a very unique and Western European perspective that has no right to claim universal validity.  Europe and America are sui generis creatures of the Enlightenment and it should be noted consequently find themselves suffering from anomie and disintegration, the so-called meaning crisis.  Nonetheless the Western political elites, because they recognise no authority above the individual and believe in the cause of universal and liberal human rights believe they can and should intervene in other cultures via engineered revolution or invasion to make them Western.

Liberalism has long been totalitarian and revolutionary abroad, but at home too it attacks old taboos and hierarchies as irrational and having no authority.  It is an ideology that claims to be about neutrality and freedom, but in effect it has very totalising tendencies. We see this most obviously with cancel culture and restrictions on freedom of speech, so that illiberal or populist opinions can land you in gaol (the UK for example).

By contrast the closed society is very often more traditional and more conservative.  It still regards taboos and traditions as valid over and above the basic individual.  Cultural and historical context matters to the closed society.  We are not all random individuals, mere citizens of a post-modern world.  This also leads to a greater respect for other traditions and cultures that have their own specific context.

This is not the same as Western multiculturalism, which is a force that abolishes the traditions and collective identity of nations, instead by radical intermingling and relativism within one society actually again reduces us to mere individuals.  The closed society recognises it must defend its own coherent cultural context, while respecting the context of other ethnoses.  It does not mean that only one ethnos can exist within a polity, but that even when there are other ancient indigenous cultures, while these are respected, they are not weaponised to attack the collective identity of the main culture.

This might seem to paint a rosy picture of non-Western countries and empires.  It is important to recognise that most non-Western countries have been subject to revolution and anti-traditional regimes.  But today the atheist and Marxist politburos recognise more and more the validity of tradition in the face of radical Western universalist claims for liberalism.  The point is these profound and ancient traditions are bigger and more powerful than any Marxist political establishments and as they turn to tradition they will find hierarchies of value are restored.  This seems to be an organic process taking place in former Communist countries and now the West is trying to interfere, because it turns out liberalism was not the inevitable direction of history, but instead it is possible to return to hierarchical values with a sense of the transcendent.     

The Madness of Rationalism - or why broken fences make for bad societies

 The American poet Robert Frost famously wrote that “good fences make good neighbours”.  We know fences have an important purpose in preventing violations of boundaries and thereby sustaining the common good.   There is another famous quotation about fences, this time by an Englishman, one much loved by many Americans and whose specific quotation on fences was much loved by President Kennedy.  G K Chesterton the conservative who would always deny he was a conservative wrote:

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”

This very Burkean sentiment gets to the essence of real conservatism, which is closely linked to what is termed “phenomenal conservatism”, the epistemological alternative to rationalism.  Here will be set out the problems and anti-conservative tendencies of rationalism. By rationalism here what is meant is the Cartestian idea that any truth has to be verified.  Generally in philosophical terms there is a distinction between rationalists, who verify a priori, in their minds by rationalism, and empiricists who regard only the data our senses encounter as verifiable.  Hume was to prove both forms of verification are impossible in terms of concluding any general or universal truth. He was a radical sceptic.  For the purposes of this article all these perspectives, rationalist, empiricist and sceptic are described as rationalist.  This is on the basis they all require absolute verification for something to be concluded as true or real.

In a recent youtube discussion ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNlAmRpLJGU ) between Roman Catholic Matt Fradd of Pints with Aquinas and Orthodox Jonathan Pageau of the Symbolic world, Fradd pointed to phenomenal conservatism as the way to understand our world as opposed to a sort of neurotic rationalism that has to verify something before we act.  In the discussion they point out reality is on the whole predictable and we can proceed without verifying whether, for example, the road will collapse as we walk along it.  In the same way, we do not need to verify religious faith inasmuch as it works.  This is not a blind leap, but rather a testing out of a prayerful life shows it works and we continue, we do not need to adopt a rigorous and unnecessary process of verification of the truth of religion, especially as God is surely beyond our fallible capacity for verification.

Fradd also made the interesting aside in an informal discussion that Descartes in his rationalist move was trying to save faith from the radical scepticism and new science of the times.  Nonetheless, he instead made an edifice of thought that collapsed.  Instead of rationalism, better is living according to what works, what makes your life better is a more useful methodology than trying obsessively to verify everything.  This works far better with the far-less individualistic Apostolic churches such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.  Indeed this tendency to have to verify everything yourself, that would make life impossible if we really lived that way, can be detected in Protestantism, where your own personal verification trumps tradition.  In Orthodoxy one interprets one’s encounters through the collective tradition.

This phenomenal conservatism is very analogous to Burke’s political philosophy that he put forward in opposition to revolutionary politics when most of England’s Whig elite was still celebrating the French Revolution as being in the vein of what they saw as the benign Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England.  Burke rather spotted the rationalism at the heart of Jacobinism, which rejected what he termed the “wisdom of the ancestors”.  By this he meant the great wealth of social and political collective wisdom by which a kingdom functions, which is impossible for any individual fallible rationalist to verify. 

A good example today of how this rationalist approach goes wrong is the Blairite reform of the House of Lords.  Removal of the hereditary peers and creating a house of political placemen and donors has rather discredited an institution that had previously had genuine independence  from partisanship and disinterested commitment for peers rooted in our history and outside of the Westminster bubble.  Applying a rationalist approach to the upper house has destroyed it in effect.  People often say about the English system of government “if you were starting from scratch you would not design it this way.”  From a Burkean perspective that is precisely its strength.  Put a system in the hands of the rationalists and their fallible individual intellects will design something with unforeseen and inefficacious at least or even deeply harmful consequences - like the bloody Terrors in both revolutionary France and the USSR.

Burke’s perspective that the prescriptive holds authority, that our systems and societies have emerged accumulating more than individual expertise, but instead a weighty collective wisdom beyond analysis and rational verification is pithily summed up by Chesterton’s fence analogy.  We do not know why everything works and if we try to unpick it we may well cause political disaster.  Chesterton not only illustrates Burke’s perspective, but also the phenomenal conservatism described by Fradd.  Dismantling fences without knowing why they are there can also apply to the madness of the rationalist neurosis in day-to-day life and indeed in the atheist’s approach to religion.  

If we think of the opposite to Chesterton’s warning, we are left with the rationalist approach, which can be reduced to - take down a fence unless you know why it is there.  This bold approach comes from hubris.  Rationalism unlike phenomenal conservatism is rooted in pride.  The approach of the Burkean or the phenomenal conservative by contrast is a manifestation of the spirit of humility - that I do not and cannot know it all.  Rather I trust in the world, trust in Being, trust in God.  

In the illustration we can imagine if a fence is removed when you do not know why it is there then carnage can result.  Carnage did result as a result of the French Revolution.  Carnage has resulted in social terms leading to anomie and despair when the atheists and agnostics started arguing that it mattered that you cannot “prove” God exists.

Removing fences lets the monsters in.  The Enlightenment, in removing the fences of the Church dogma and man as the imago Dei, let in the Marquis de Sade, who was a creature of the Enlightenment much as the philosophers believed they were ushering in a progressive and enlightened era.  Modernity itself culminated in the horrors of revolution, Nazism, the Holocaust and the Gulag.  If the fences are down then the monstrous will find a way in from the periphery to the centre.  Even the monstrousness of transgenderism and woke subversion can be understood as the continual progressive removal of fences without knowing why they are there in the first place.

How then to understand the motivation to pull down the fences?  Pride has already been mentioned.  It is a pride that we can link to Lucifer, to grasping the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the aim to be like God, with Promethean usurpation.  The rationalist will point to the technological progress resulting from the scientific method of verification.  But at what social, cultural and spiritual cost?  Indeed technological advances are an ambiguous good.  While they have made life easier they have also been a manifestation of our Luciferian desire to manipulate and control.  And technological progress gave us Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic invention.  So we are always one diplomatic blunder away from the eschaton.  This is where technology has led us.  It is no accident that technology in the Bible is linked to the line of the first murderer Cain.  

That being said, technology in itself clearly is not evil and is also a manifestation of Man’s creative capacity as the imago Dei, he imitates his creator.  It is though potentially dangerous, but not inevitably.

The priority is in what spirit we act.  Undoubtedly early scientists and the philosophical rationalists were too tempted by Promethean pride and fell into hubris.  We know that another and overlapping fascination of the New scientists was the occult and magic.  Strange as it seems at first, magic is closely linked to science.  Much like science it is about the manipulation and control of the world through special knowledge.  It is therefore again motivated by pride.  Figures such as Newton, the founders of the new rationalist and enlightened science were equally if not more preoccupied by the occult and magic.  They came from the same spirit.

And rationalism itself is entirely of that spirit.  I must verify, I must have access to the facts or they must be dismissed.  This is a hubristic desire for control as much as anything else and were men to live by it day by day they would go mad as they believed themselves becoming ever more powerful.  Whole kingdoms must fall to placate my desire to know and have power, as most notably Monarchist France and Tsarist Russia did fall and the hubris led to bloody terror.

How then must we live?  In a spirit of trusting humility.  Does that mean a return to plague, pestilence and war?  All those terrible inflictions we link to the Medieval world.  The Enlightenment needed its Dark Ages for its own propaganda.  Look at the Gothic cathedrals compared to modern architecture, built by generations with the divine and posterity, with the Good, the True and the Beautiful in mind.  There are few more tendentious and self serving terms than the “Dark Ages”.  Such an idea justifies the term “Enlightenment”.  But even in terms of medical science are we so sure we are better of?  Modern medicine and vaccines have side effects.  Big Pharma has vested interests.  One of the first social phenomena with early modernity was the persecution of witches.  More likely these were the village spinsters who were custodians of the medical and herbal knowledge of their ancestors.  The University of Nottingham discovered Anglo Saxons had a herbal remedy that could cure the superbugs spawned by our use of antibiotics.  As for vaccines, we are all aware of the prevalence of vaccine injures that the hubristic exhortation to “trust the science” would not allow to be considered during the covid crisis.  Covid itself in its likely emergence from a laboratory in Wuhan is more evidence of the hubris of the verification method and how it creates neurotic obsessions to access knowledge.

By contrast a spirit of humility is to be prepared for our death through repentance.  While the Silicon Valley tech billionaires strive to hide from death through singularity, we must rather prepare ourselves with humility to meet our Maker throughout our life.  If we adopt the neurotic rationalism of verifying before we can believe in anything we will find our way to Hell.  Instead, we humbly recognise the longevity of the Church and accept that our lives will make sense, that we will achieve eudaimonia and human flourishing if we follow our ancestors and believe as Saint Vincent of  Lerins put it:

“Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus”
[ that which has everywhere been believed in

the Church, always been believed, and

by all universally]

But not simply believe, but also to practise.  The revolutionary Jacobins paraded an idol of Madame Reason through the streets of Paris to supplant the veneration for the Mother of God.  Never has there been such a worship of the work of their own hands - they were making an idol to their own rationalism.

Instead of bowing to the idol, we should rather venerate in true humility, the Mother of God, the Holy Theotokos.  In such an act of supplication and humility we reject all of the hubris and Promethean spirit of the modern project and we will thereby save our souls.  And we will also be, metaphorically, re-erecting the fences that held Europe together and kept the monsters at bay.

        

The Dangers of Darwinism

 When Darwinism is debated the focus is usually on proving it is not empirically verified, that there are alternative more credible explanations, that Darwinism is itself a leap of faith.  What is not examined is the impact upon our ethos and understanding of ourselves as human beings.  We are being told we are beasts not the imago Dei and Darwinism, that-which-must-not-be-questioned, is weaponised to diminish the value of the human being and in recent history to justify inhumane political policies and systems.  Social Darwinism has caused much suffering and cruelty.

We could of course take the position that if Darwinism is the ontological reality of life then it is only our Christian bias that leads us to place special value on human life, to care for the weak, to oppose greed and seeking power over others.  This indeed was at the root of much Nineteenth Century thinking, from Herbert Spencer’s classical liberalism (it was he, not Darwin who coined the term survival of the fittest) and Nietzschean worship of power.  Darwin’s theories led to dark schemes about eugenics and plans to exterminate the poor and weak.  We are most aware of Nazi eugenics, but the liberal establishment in the West did not only advocate the economic Darwinism of capitalism, but contemplated biological intervention to enhance the Darwinist processes of eliminating the weak.  Darwin’s theory not only damaged the Church but also led to cruel and inhumane theories and the latter development was a corollary of the other, not an unrelated consequence.

Instead of the Beatitudes the West became obsessed with ideas about the strong and the powerful and suppressing so-called biological defects.  The war against Nazism meant these theories in the West had to go underground, but from the promotion of abortion for “defective” babies to euthanasia for the elderly and infirm, our elites have continued, now using the language of compassion and rights to justify elimination of those considered weak in Darwinian terms.

Well is Darwinism true and is any sort of Christian ethos a sentimental opposition to truth as power and strength?  In a sense Darwinism is real in that it describes our postlapsarian existence.  Cast out of Eden we are limited by time and space and this gives rise to an individualist struggle of every individual against the other for his own survival over limited resources out of fear of death.  Hobbes was right, but only right because of the Fall, to describe the State of Nature as “nasty, brutish and short”.  But within our social contract we still see the strong and powerful oppress the weak, showing politics is never the solution to the Fall.  Greek theologian and much-respected academic, Christos Yannaras has written much about the sin of individualism and how this post-lapsarian struggle for survival, essentially nature as Darwin described it, is a deeply unnatural state that must be overcome,  not by politics, but through the spiritual journey of theosis.  As Saint Seraphim of Sarov put it: “acquire the Holy Spirit and a thousand souls around you will be saved.”

How does theosis then overcome Darwinian survival?  Yannaras writes in the Variations in the Song if Songs:

“To share our soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance) really refers to: a mental product of love.  A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable.  And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defence, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego.  Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions.  It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying.  A change of mind about the mode of thinking or being.”

We can then have use for Darwin and his description of how Nature and biology work as understanding what Man’s Fall means in terms of its cosmic consequences and how Darwinian survival of the fittest is not some beautiful explanation, but what we must seek to overcome through prayer and participating in the mysteries of the Church, thereby living not in individualistic competition but in relationship.  That will lead to a renewal through Christ of life.

If we do truly repent and turn to Christ we will no longer live according to the laws of Darwinian fallen nature.  Instead we will live in self-emptying relationship.  We will overcome Original Sin, or what Dawkins calls the selfish gene.

For the biologists, the scientifically-minded, the question though should be answered:  Is Darwin describing fact or is he wrong?  Surely he described the fallen world as he saw it in its fallen state.  It is a theory not fully demonstrated empirically.  It appeals to the Western mind as it applies Ockham’s razor and avoids extra levels of explanation.  The appeal of the reductive does not mean it is true.  Specifically though, is Man made imago Dei or is he bestial, a mere animal, a primate?  Well Genesis tells us we were made from dust and that could conceivably include a bestial stage in the process of being made into the imago Dei.  Really it is not something to be preoccupied by; rather we should focus on understanding the Truth that we are made in the mage of God, we are fallen and Christ has opened the way back or to an even higher state than Edenic innocence.  Questions about how we were formed by God are not on the same level as understanding the meaning of being created in the image of God.

Virtues and Rights

 The West in both its classical and Christian heritage had a strong sense of virtues, of the cultivation of the character.  Today the moulding of one’s personal character to develop personal virtues has been replaced by an emphasis on rights.  People either guard their rights jealously or actively campaign for more rights.  One’s own character is valued according to one’s tolerance of the rights of others and it seems all other virtues are forgotten, perhaps regarded as patriarchal.

If we go back to Aristotle, the most important thinker in terms of virtue ethics, he understood the acquiring of virtues to be the human’s telos.  Just as a lyre is made to be played so a man exists to acquire the virtues.  In acquiring those virtues men attain true happiness, not the hedonism of the Enlightenment utilitarians, but eudaimonia - the good spirit, a type of happiness of superior quality, like Christian joy being a more elevated form of happiness, linked to one’s purpose and to meaning.  The shaping or honing of the character in Aristotle’s thinking led to the acquiring of habits, good habits and these good habits were the virtues.

Aristotle would be a major influence on the Christian theologian, the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas.  For Aristotle the virtues included courage, temperance, magnificence, friendship, truthfulness, justice, friendliness, and phronesis or prudence, which in some sense governed the exercise of the other virtues,.  .

For Aquinas there were the theological virtues of faith, hope and love and the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, courage and justice.  These are not exhaustive lists of the virtues, but give a picture of the many virtues Man has to hone to develop his character.

With the Renaissance and the Enlightenment a different emphasis on virtue developed.  Machiavelli wrote about virtu, meaning the use of virtues as a means to a political end.  It was a return to a different aspect of the classical heritage, virtue as power and excellence.  This was a major departure, the consequence of the action rather than its moral quality was what counted.  It was the idea of the ends justifying the means and for Machiavelli his idea of virtue was more about excellence in power than either the Aristotlian or Christian ideas of the good for its own sake.  The Enlightenment further lost touch with ideas of virtue due to its reductive tendencies.  Material happiness and political freedom achieved by self- interested individuals was more of the emphasis rather than the development of personal character.  In England in particular with the development of utilitarianism there was a real loss of a sense of virtue as a goal of its own.  As ever J S Mill tried to mitigate the excesses of Bentham’s theories, but inevitably the emphasis was more one of individual liberty rather than virtue.  Hedonism was the inevitable result.

Again contrary to virtue and the utilitarians, the Enlightenment Colossus Immanuel Kant completely placed the emphasis on duty and the moral aspect of the action regardless of eudaimonia or social consequences.  This deontological approach is suspicious of happiness deriving from doing the right thing.  For the virtue ethicist we attain eudaimonia, a higher, more true happiness by fulfilling our purpose of virtue.  For Kant deriving pleasure from a righteous act discredits our reason for fulfilling the duty because we act out of self interest.  Thus virtue ethics now found itself between two Enlightenment ethical theories - utilitarianism emphasising the greatest happiness for the greatest number even by questionable means - so-called consequentialism and by contrast Kant’s deontology that only gave moral status to completely disinterested actions regardless of consequences.

The Enlightenment, for all its claims of its supposed victory (still believed by thinkers such as Steven Pinker) has long been in intellectual trouble.  It has revealed its innate tendencies to reduction, narrow rationalism, infatuation with science, modernity and progress, a moral and cosmological meaninglessness and hidden revolutionary aims.  Nietzsche exposed the Enlightenment and advocated a sort of exuberant nihilism where will to power was the new value.  But there was also another alternative - modern virtue ethics.  

In the Twentieth Century thinkers such as Elizabeth Ascombe resurrected interest in the long-forgotten pre-Enlightenment theory of ethics.  Roman Catholic thinker Alasdair MacIntyre, in his work On Virtue, dismantled Enlightenment assumptions to reveal their inevitable tendency to Nietzschean will to power and then presented the alternative of living virtuously, by which we attain the happiness of eudaimonia.

In popular contemporary life however, despite the great strides in the academic world made by virtue ethicists, virtue is rarely discussed.  Post-modernism with its Leftist interpretation of Nietzsche, has made far more of an impression.  Rather than live virtuously we can attain meaning by either engaging in hedonism or fighting the patriarchy.  

If we understand the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as a picking apart of what was believed by everyone, everywhere, at all times - what we might call the Tradition- then we have finally ended up in the total subversion and chaos of post-modernism.  In addition, with the utilitarians we think hedonism or pleasure to be the meaning of life.  If we think more broadly than that then our idea of the virtue of justice is not Scholastic righteous indignation, but more about promoting the freedom of others to engage in ever more subversive forms of pleasure and hedonism. 

There is some hope.  The rise of figures such as Jordan Peterson, who have challenged the woke revolutionaries and post modernism, arguing it is better to sort out your own life rather than try to change society have been welcome.  Nonetheless, there is still not a general return to a culture of virtue on the whole.

For the sake of our civilisation there must be a shift from the language of rights to the language of virtues.  Righteous indignation being expressed on behalf of the most depraved forms of hedonism is not virtuous.  Virtue must be about the development of character, not self indulgence and narcissistic infatuation with our identities.

Courage is a virtue noticeably absent from our culture.  The cowardly woke virtual- mob, hidden behind avatars throw around accusations of wrong-think and anyone who expressed an opinion once commonly held but not woke collapses and retracts.  Everywhere there is moral cowardice in the face of a capricious and self indulgent movement of hedonistic rights-focused revolutionaries.  

If we had honed character, if we had developed the virtue of courage in particular, but all the other virtues as well, then our society would be far more healthy and those extremists now running the agenda, indulged by our left-wing establishments and facing no real opposition however ridiculous and harmful their goals would instead not have been able to get going in the same way.

Sober men, finding personal reward through eudaimonia in developing the strength of character to be wise, courageous and truthful could have stood up to the insanity of the last decade or so.  Instead we have seen only pusillanimity on the part of those who should have resisted.  

Only with a return to virtue will there be a society strong enough to hold the lunatics back and to prevent the self-harming agendas of our political elites.  For several hundred years the West has been abandoning the development of character through virtue, we are now reaping the consequences.

The Legacy of the Second World War - Globalist Liberalism

 The Second World War saw the victory of the liberal United States and the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Most of the fighting was on the Eastern Front and the Communists essentially defeated Nazi Germany, to the benefit also of the USA (which also fought alongside the British Empire on the Western Front and against Japan).  The USA meanwhile defeated Imperial Japan by being the only country to use the atom bomb (twice).  The end of the war meant a new geopolitical settlement. In Eastern Europe and Russia this meant the temporary hegemony of the Communists over Eastern European countries and in the West the seemingly permanent hegemony of liberalism, with the British Empire defenestrated by the USA and the resurgent Germans reduced to a NATO colony.  

For the West there were important cultural and political consequences.  By allying with the Communists political liberalism and international capital secured their dominance in the West  intellectually and economically.  The CIA through Project Long Leash and MK Ultra, sought to shape the West as ultra-liberal, sexually open and culturally avant garde, thereby contrasting it in propaganda terms with Soviet conservatism.  Before World War Two, Communism had been associated with gender and sexual liberalism, but to save the USSR from the Nazi threat, Stalin realised the cohesiveness of social conservatism was vital.  The Cold War was different, to dismantle the Soviet Empire, the Western establishment decided Western culture should be dismantled too via the sixties cultural revolution with the aim that atomised individualism would infect the Eastern Bloc.  

Lying behind this also was the victory of the post modernists in the Academy such as Derrida and Foucault, who were setting about a cultural revolution from the Left in their rejection of Stalin’s conservative Communism and orthodox Marxism.  So-called Cultural Marxism and Post Modernism were used to reject Marxist structuralism and instead to introduce a chaotic meaninglessness, where all meaning, conservative or Marxist was seen as oppressive phallogocentrism.  Heidegger was deliberately revised to justify Derrida’s decontructionism.  The West became the champion of revolutionary social disintegration.  The spirit of 1968 won out over the Gaullist nationalism that could have been a genuine alternative to American liberalism, Soviet Communism and defeated European Fascism.

The CIA sponsored abstract art and the use of psychedelic drugs to transform Western society into a revolutionary and individualistic society.  The West reinvented itself as the anti-Fascist civilisation, whereby all taboos were regarded as nascent Fascism.  Behind this deconstructionism was not only Derrida, but the writings of Adorno, who in his Fascist Personality linked the existence of sexual taboos and sexual suppression to the causes of Fascism.  

As a result the West set fire to its heritage of virtues and ethics in favour of  a return to Weimar degeneracy.  Any form of authority was rejected as Fascist, by the Twenty-First Century it was to become impossible in the West to discriminate between virtue and vice as the trajectory reached its extreme.  This was always there in Western philosophy, but victory in the Second World War led to a hyper-liberalism and a consequent social breakdown, with broken families, homosexuality, sexually-transmitted diseases, single parenthood and an all-pervasive anomie.  Finally we now see gender dysphoria normalised and the masculine rejected as evil.

These are the consequences of a sort of runaway revolutionary liberalism drunk on its defeat of Nazism.  There is a blindness here.  First not to realise that such Weimar-style degeneracy causes a reaction in the form of a more authoritarian politics,  Secondly, much as the modern Westerner would hate to admit it, Nazism with its social Darwinism, its eugenics in the camps and its focus on technological advance was the other face of Western modernity, not a return to pre-Enlightenment tradition.  Nazism too was a creature of the Enlightenment.  When  all hierarchical values and God are rejected then Nazism becomes conceptually possible.  Practically the West would benefit from Nazi science and would recruit Nazi scientists after the War.  Morally there was little difference between Nazi eugenics and the aims of establishment liberals in the West such as H G Wells.  The Nazis did their eugenicist dirty work for them.  The fruit of the scientific knowledge gained  therefore could then be consumed by the West, as a result of Nazis violating all normative and Christian morality.

Today the Nazi focus on eugenics is still being tacitly implemented, but disguised with the language of rights and individual autonomy, be that with abortion or assisted suicide.  The Nazis conveniently did the research for the West on a range of scientific obsessions.

Contrary to the claims of the West there is far more in common with the social Darwinism of Nazism and our own disregard for the sanctity of life today.  The key propaganda ingredient is the language of consent and rights, but the end result is people who are weak and infirm or are defenceless babies are still being killed.

Nonetheless, the political language about the “patriarchy” or racist oppression is all linked to the Second World War and the fight against Fascism.  It means that oppression and authoritarianism are detected in any attempt to defend virtue or objective morality or even sanity as ideas about gender differences or protecting ourselves from mass-migration are seen as Fascist.  Normal debate becomes impossible as all is defined in a hysterical way within the Second-World-War paradigm.  

Jonathan Pageau, Orthodox intellectual and icon carver recently published a video in which he discussed the way our world is defined by the myth of the Second World War (to be found herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vstNGNtl-B4).  He discusses the deep symbolism of the Holocaust and the way we interpret the dropping of the atom bomb as well as the way the image of Hitler is used as a political insult in politics.  He also touches on how the narrative of Churchill refusing to appease the tyrant has been used in every post- war conflict.

For example, with its unipolar moment after the fall of the other post-war victor the USSR, the USA used the moral claims of victory over the Nazis to justify an expansionist and violent foreign policy under the names of liberal interventionism and neoconservatism.  Perhaps the consequences were foreseen, but apart from the massive number of deaths of civilians in “democratised” countries and the consequent growing of Islamist extremism, this policy also caused the migrant crisis which will eventually further weaken Europe and if Russia can be reduced mean the continent becomes a vassal of the United States.

Another foreign policy consequence has been the unquestioning support for Israel even at risk of our people’s interests.  While Russia is condemned by the West in the Ukraine, a policy of full-scale slaughter by Israel, to which Russian intervention cannot be seen as a moral equivalent, is permitted with impunity.  The whole mythos of the Second World War makes it impossible to criticise Israel and what criticism there is has been sidelined and syphoned off to the extreme Left, thereby discrediting any conservative criticism by association.  

Jonathan Pageau’s claim that we can only understand our world in the context of a mythos about World War Two that hides the bad faith of allying with an equally horrific ideology in the form of Stalinist Russia is therefore true.  Furthermore the victory of the so-called cultural Marxists from Marcuse to Adorno (who actually rejected true Marxism) is linked to the rejection of any concept of moral or political authority and this position is consequent upon anti-fascist propaganda.  But this has not led to freedom.  Instead we have found ourselves governed by the victors of the Second World War - global finance and the Wilsonian advocates of global governance.  These technocratic globalist institutions are anti-fascist and define the term broadly.  From the UN to the WEF a progressive agenda is promoted that very much has come to be at odds with the democratic wishes of American and European populations.  Whether Trump, Brexit or the various right-wing parties in the European continent such as the ADF and National Rally there is a struggle for power between the demos attracted to populists who resist the globalists and the globalist technocrats who detect within any opposition the stirrings of Fascism.

And related to all of this is the situation in the Ukraine.   This is both an old-fashioned geopolitical struggle and also an ideological one.  To become part of the US empire the Ukraine must abandon any form of conservatism, throw away its Orthodox religious faith and embrace LGBT and woke ideas.  Russia meanwhile is painted as fascist (ironically the very country that defeated Fascism and for which that victory defines its identity).  Its move into the ethnically Russian areas of the Donbas is painted as a re-run of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.  While literal Nazis fight the Russians and local military groups, the Western propaganda paints it as another battle against Fascism.  Because Russia still maintains some traditional values it is categorised within the nebulous definition of Fascist and as an enemy of all the modern West stands for - open borders, no sexual borders and a rejection of any populist-democratic will (Zelensky unlike Putin - who won resoundingly - cancelled elections and now rules with no democratic mandate).  Democratic opinion is supposed to be part of the New World Order, but only if it produces the answer the technocrats favour (see Romania and Georgia).  Otherwise it is dismissed as populism, which we are told is the first step towards Fascism.

In the end we must understand who won the Second World War.  Not the British Empire.  Not the nation state.  It was rather a global network of international finance and liberal internationalist political actors allied as a matter of convenience with Stalinist Russia.   These groups have their own agendas favoured by the breakdown of traditional values and traditional social groups.  Since the War this agenda has been implemented as an aggressive policy that has been implemented without democratic support.  Any successful resistance to this unaccountable agenda that has caused such misery and anomie and broken lives must again re-establish ideas of authority, virtue, borders in morals and countries, orientation towards the transcendent and a rejection of enslaving hedonism and atomistic individualism.

Liberalism - the ideology of hedonism and covert totalitarianism

 Liberalism claims to be all about freedom, but it is a very reductive idea of freedom, one that removes virtue and human telos from cultural possibilities.  What it does is to focus on the freedom of choice as the optimal aspect of human ethics, not what we choose, not freely choosing the virtuous way.  It reduces all choices to equal worth, Bentham’s “pushpin equals poetry”, thereby reducing human eudaemonia to hedonistic pleasure.  It is through pleasure, as with Bentham’s Panopticon or the bread and circuses of the ancient world, that a population is controlled.  Liberalism is the chosen ideology of the globalist elites because it is the most powerful and most subtle form of control.  It controls us through our passions and appetites.

The end of the Second World War, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union over forty years later meant the victory of liberalism as a global force, Fukuyama’s “end of history”.  There was an added layer to the liberal perspective now.  It had played its part in history leading not to ideas of human flourishing, but to the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.  While men in suits in America and at the Council of Foreign Relations proclaimed the victory of liberalism, looking very conservative, their ideology was one that would lead to moral degeneracy and end in the promulgation of LGBT and hedonism.  The ideology was ruthlessly implemented with colour revolutions and the subversion of conservative election victories via the power of non-state actors such as NGOs like Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Liberalism accepted Adorno’s definition of the Fascist personality so that all authority and tradition are seen as dangerous forces to be vanquished.  All this means political manipulation and ostracising of dissent in the liberal world and outright subversion of political states in the East, from the Ukraine to Georgia.  It means acting deceptively and in a controlling way, seemingly contrary to Locke and Mill.

Nonetheless, we need to understand that what is now the globalist establishment, with roots in English liberalism, which was the offspring of English Whiggism, sees in liberalism an opportunity to control and manipulate the world population.  Liberalism is the rejection of value and therefore depends upon an atheistic mind-set where hierarchies of value are regarded as an authoritarian position.  What this means in effect is the degradation of humanity.  The moral compass of cultures is smashed in favour of a morality that says do as you will so long as you do not interfere with anyone else’s pleasure.  In this it both destroys personal integrity and fractures communities, reducing us to atomised individuals enslaved to our idiosyncratic or trite passions. Indeed idiosyncratic degeneracy is celebrated through Pride events and marches - the dominant group asserting its power over the traditionalists subdued by legislation and pressure.

Real human freedom and dignity have nothing to do with this.  Real human values recognise man has a telos of virtue and that the value of his freedom is in choosing the right path towards virtue.  When the choosing itself rather than the choice being the right one is sacralised we are on the road to degradation.  Yes freedom is fundamental because otherwise a compelled virtue is meaningless and not indicative of any internal spiritual victory.  Simply to say that whatever you choose is valid because you chose it leads to moral degradation and enslavement to our passions.  Hedonism eats up our sense of integrity, preoccupies us and makes us into malleable slaves.

So looking behind the curtain, we see that all these fair minded liberals are connected to the revolutionary elites of the Enlightenment who want to cut us off from our telos and degrade us.  If we accept liberalism we are unable to resist degradation and then the State suddenly starts to expand, despite the supposed small state of liberalism.  As atomised individuals without any of the intermediary institutions such as the little platoons to defend us from an overbearing state, we are left as isolated, degraded atoms faced with no community other than the regulatory and bureaucratic State.  Now is the real moment of power for globalist elites able to impose their absurd and misanthropic agendas they have planned for us.  Because in their deep misanthropy the ultimate revolution is against the human being.  Man is a Malthusian blight on the environment and depopulation via technocracy can now be carried out as the long term solution.  Abortion, assisted dying, lockdowns are all means of demoralising us, atomising us and devaluing the human being as the Imago Dei.

There was always a deeply anti-Christian and anti-human agenda to the Enlightenment, with discreet links to secret societies and revolutionary political bodies.  The call for liberation that identifies kings and aristocrats, the Church and the family, the male gender, the European as the oppressor will come to identify the human race as the oppressor of Gaia and Mother Nature. Only the enlightened ones are above the sin of being human.  And we discover too late that we were not liberated at all, but rather enslaved to hedonism.  We find ourselves imprisoned, surveilled, monitored and in the final stage euthanised as per the inhuman ideas of Jeremy Bentham with his hedonism and his Panoptican.

Liberalism it transpires is the ultimate and most effective means of control - no need for the Gulag or the secret police. Atheism and consumerism are far more effective. The only way to true freedom is to rediscover spiritual meaning and a telos of virtue.  Only this will free us from our enslavement to the passions, by which we are controlled.

Emperor Nero - Woke LGBTQ+ Icon

 In these strange times that persecutor of Christians and sadistic pervert and matricide Emperor Nero seems to be undergoing a rehabilitating revision by academic historians.  A closer look makes clear why.  Nero was all about breaking sexual taboos and having a sense of entitlement to validation regardless of objective and aesthetic judgement.  Whether charioteer, poet, or musician, Nero expected praise. He was an all-powerful and mad millennial snowflake in ancient Rome.  One can possibly see his character type in the very masculine transgender who demands to be told he looks feminine.  

Contrary to our own era’s revisionists, we know from sources as different as Suetonius and Tacitus that Nero was a complete degenerate.  In particular his sexual depravity is well known. Suetonius recalls a scene, one perhaps fitting for a future Pride parade:

“Nero practised every kind of obscenity, and after defiling almost every part of his body finally invented a novel game:  he was released from a cage dressed in the skins of wild animals, and attacked the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes.”

Tacitus recalls his cruelty to his wife Octavia and finally her death:

“But Octavia was bound, and all her veins were opened.  However, her terror retarded the blood flow.  So she was put into an exceedingly hot vapour bath and suffocated.  An even crueller atrocity followed.  He head was cut off and taken to Rome for Poppaea to see.”

His elaborate plots to commit matricide on his mother Agrippina reached burlesque levels.  She had ensured through cruel Machavellian politics his accession to the position of Caesar, but he decided he wanted rid of her.  Collapsing boats failed, but she was eventually despatched.

For centuries the Western world regarded Nero’s vicious perversions as a sign of moral turpitude, but in the modern West this is celebrated and seen as something to be proud about.  He hated the Church and  had the martyrs thrown to the lions in the circus for the voyeuristic entertainment of the masses.  Today our masses gorge themselves on the bread and circuses of reality television, artificial food and consumerism.  It is almost as though Nero prefigured our culture.  In particular, just as in Nero's Rome the Church is hated by our own establishment elites.  

Nero has sometimes been identified with the number of the Beast, six-hundred and sixty six in the Apocalypse.  Whether it was murdering his brother, his wife, or his mother or engaging in depraved sexual acts, the proud and easily-offended Nero, so needy of praise, looks like the lowest depth to which humanity could sink, despite his elevated position as Emperor of the whole known-world.     

And yet despite the martyrs, despite his depravity, despite his vanity and despite his cruel murders it was at this time that the Apostle Paul, to be put to death and martyred by Nero in Rome, instructed the Church to honour the emperor as being ordained by God.  It might have been that declining pagan Rome produced Nero, but the office itself was still a bulwark against the forces of chaos and a capstone of the order of society.  The Church is not a politically-revolutionary movement.

As we look at today's political attacks on our Christian inheritance it seems to be often directed through attacks on supposed sexual-restrictions.  In that sense we are seeing a manifestation of Nero's spirit that expressed itself in pushing sexual taboos to their limit.  If Nero can be identified in some sense as a type of the apocalyptic beast then as the enemies of the church use "sexual liberation" and "pride" as their key weapons of attack we seem to be participating in a dark and demonic pattern.

The right to be able to practise any form of sexual deviance is now how those in the Pride movement define their identity.  To condemn, question or be repelled is seen as an injury to them, analogous to not enjoying and sycophantically praising one of the Emperor's recitals.   The most opaque aspect of the Pride movement is the mysterious "+".  What is this intended to promote?  There is surely a point when sexual passions pass a boundary of acceptability?  For a society to function it cannot simply be a permissive arrangement of “anything goes”, but rather we have to hold together the general consensus of decency and morality.  Under Nero, Rome still had some residual sense of sexual standards and public probity and an idea of what a good emperor should be - Augustus.  Nonetheless, for all Seneca's stoical instructions of the young Nero, nothing stopped the reprobate's depravity, even Seneca himself became his victim.

What we must therefore be very wary of then is politics dedicated to liberation from taboos and that this does not push us yet further.  If we want to understand where we will end up, we should remember the Emperor who fed the Christians to the lions and burnt down the city of Rome.  Political movements dedicated to the destruction of taboos and the celebration of the passions will not benefit the common weal in the long run.  And the survival of the common weal requires an enforcement of common standards of moral behaviour, not simply tolerance alone.