Modernity and Madness

There is something about an over-emphasis on the rational that leads to a sort of irrationality.  The West became the rationalist culture that had the hubris to believe it could step outside and over and above its own rootedness, its own  heritage and its own culture.  Rationalism becomes a sort of reductive madness.  And the West has ended up with post-modernism and transgenderism.

The root of the madness lies in the attempt to remove ourselves from our historical and cultural context.  We deny our spiritual beliefs. We see ourselves as modern and able to view the world objectively and neutrally.  In the end though it means we become completely rootless and disorientated so we can no longer account for the reality of gender, why cultural and ethnic homogeneity is necessary to cohesion or what the difference is between human consciousness and AGI.

Modernity, with its objective rationality and scientific and empirical approach actually contained the very seed of subversive and irrational post-modernism.  The madness all around us is rationalism gone mad.  We need to be able to have an orientation for the higher and for what is beyond us if we are actually to remain sane.  A completely materialist and rational world sends us mad, because we cannot contain human reality within such a reductive paradigm.

In trying to be objective and neutral, in denying the existence of the mysterious or the spiritual we are no longer able to defend what is most precious or sacred.  No longer ethnocentric, we are unable to defend our culture and instead take the side and promote the interests of the alien against our own culture.  Reducing our people to atomised individuals where no generalities or universals hold but are seen as oppressive, we are chemically castrating our children in the name of the absurdity of transgenderism - objectivity as a refusal to judge has led to the ultimate subjectivity. It is the subjectivity of the rootless mad man who belongs to no general identity but only exists in his solipsistic world containing only himself as reality.

And so the unquestioned shibboleths of modernity - objectivity, individualism, materialism - and the shaking off of what is dismissed as obscurantism and superstition has sent us mad.  Modernity turned out to be a pathological neurosis not a great liberation and enlightenment.  Indeed much of what is most important and most sacred about being human is no longer understood, valued or given any place.  Instead we have created a cage of our own making and are trapped by a great machine in the name of our own liberation.  All those identities we dismissed as oppressive and rooted in obscurantist mythologies turned out to validate and give proper status to all that is sacred about being human.

It turns out that putting liberation from tradition and the sacred at the pinnacle of our so-called values has alienated us from our humanity.  We have become enslaved to a system of our own making and keep ourselves falsely satisfied with the dainties and distractions modern industry can mass produce.  Now our very existence is becoming virtual as we disconnect even from the mass-produced physical items.  The more general identities - gender, ethnicity and religious faith gave our lives meaning and purpose, but were cast off as primitive prisons as we actually imprisoned ourselves in a world of ugliness - the world of the Machine.

Our survival as families, as ethnos, as a Church is all under attack.  Liberal legislation has broken the family.  Our borders are left open and we are losing our ethnic and cultural identity.  Our established Church promotes the very ideological agendas destroying us.  We live in a system of abstract and legal rights, but the very value of our lives as everything worth belonging to is taken away is being degraded.

Modernity is not post modernity.  It focused on the objective, the scientific, the rational.  This though was a reductive process.  Seemingly sterile, modernity actually spawned a gross, mad and degenerate monster - the worst aspects of post-modernity that have subverted everything and created the very topsy turvy and upside down world  in which we in the West all languish.  in the dialectic of modernity post modernity challenges the logocentrism of Enlightenment modernity, but in reality it was the next stage in the West's unquestioned faith in human "progress".

The Hexing of the West

 When Father Seraphim Rose, the American Orthodox monk, published his book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, he warned of a coming re-enchantment not in the rediscovery of traditional Christianity, but in occultism, New Age and fascination with the extra terrestrial.  As time went on with the rise of New Atheism and aggressive secularism it seemed to have been a misreading of the signs.  Today though, as has been emphasised in the works of Father Spyridon Bailey, we are facing a dangerous re-enchantment by the demons.  Another Orthodox writer, Rod Dreher, has argued in his book Living in Wonder that the bleakness of Western secularism has led to a craving for spirituality, but often being found in the wrong place  as well as in the increasing growth of traditional Christianity.  Both occultism and traditional Christianity are now on the rise with the Boomer secularists becoming less of a cultural factor.

It almost looks as though New Atheism simply served the purpose of attacking the Church and the long term strategy of the Enemy was a reinvigoration of occult spirituality and the use of demons interpreted as alien extraterrestrials.  The battle lines are now drawn between the witchery and occultism of the dark forces on the one hand and the forces of light in the reinvigoration of traditional Christianity on the other.  Both Latin Rite Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are seeing significant growth in the West, especially amongst young men.

Nonetheless, the establishment is clearly on the side of the occult and anti-Christian forces.  Anti- establishment figures such as Donald Trump are targeted by witches loyal to the establishment of the West.  And it is no wonder witches are loyalists as in the name of secularism and/or multiculturalism or any other justification they can think of Western governments are targeting the Christian faith with lawfare.  There are famous cases from one of the most anti-Christian countries, the United Kingdom, of people being arrested for praying.

The links between the establishment and the occult go back a long way, to John Dee at least.  The lead Satanist Aleister Crowley was close to British intelligence.  He indeed encapsulated liberal values with his Satanist maxim - do as thou wilt.  Undoubtedly senior American Democrats such as the Clintons and Jack Podesta have Satanic links, not only because of their links to Marina Abramovic and spirit cooking, but because of their bloodthirsty advocacy of killing unborn children and even post-natal abortion (infanticide).

As Father Spyridon Bailey has explained in his book Orthodoxy and the Kingdom of Satan, occult and demonic ideas reach to the very top of globalist institutions, in particular through the influence of theosophist Alice Bailey at the United Nations.  Her Lucis Trust, etymologically derived from the name Lucifer, the light bringer, has special privileges at the United Nations and Ms. Bailey set out her own manifesto for the globalists, in terms of destroying the church, the family and promoting homosexuality that has been pushed through in most countries in the West at least.  

Recently on youtube in an interview by Michael J. Knowles of the Daily Wire with former witch and Christian convert Julie Lopez, https://youtu.be/fFWvO6t8Zvw?si=ikzJIMVVeZqmgNhd  much was revealed about the power of witchcraft in the Western system.  This followed on from the conversion of former Satanist Kat Von D to Christianity, who revealed much about the influence of the occult.  Mrs Lopez in particular pointed to the corruption by witchcraft in high places and how political leaders are handing over countries to the Devil,  

In certain Western countries we see the domination of LGBT, the promotion of castration of confused teenagers and abortion, which all indicate the power of the demonic over society.  In a youtube talk entitled Did the Witches Win? in late 2024, https://youtu.be/S75AfTuzLQg?si=RNMQfZ_QAeEqtLz3  Orthodox iconographer Jonathan Pageau discussed ideas of witchcraft in the early modern period as found in the book the Malleus Maleficarum.  He draws the conclusion that the means by which witchcraft achieved its ends can be seen today.  Methods used by witches were intended to spread infertility.  They would cause children to be stillborn or steal male seed via a succubus visitation, men would be magically castrated.  All this was to achieve their envious goal of destroying human fertility.

Pageau identified several links between ideas of witchcraft and what is occurring today in Western society.  The killing of babies is achieved through abortion.  Male seed is stolen by succubi through the female image in pornography.  The male member is destroyed through operations to “transition” from male to female.  All these methods are regarded as weirdly sacred and beyond criticism by the Western establishments.  This has led to a demographic crisis whereby Westerners are not reproducing, which as it happens is the excuse for replacing indigenous Westerners with Third World migrants.

It is starting to look like the West, formerly Christendom, has been hexed by witchcraft.  The narrative used to justify these seemingly demonic moves is that of liberation and the gaining of rights.  The real consequence has been demographic collapse, demoralisation, anomie and meaninglessness.  It is as though some force behind our political class is motivated by a deep hatred of the West and its traditions.  

We see witchcraft moving into mainstream culture with Wicca and white witches.  Satanism too is being promoted in popular culture.  These movements, which are defined by their parasitic relationship with Christianity, are increasingly dominating the narrative and pleading liberal tropes such as freedom of religion, protection from discrimination and liberation from patriarchal institutional religion.  Many deprived of meaning in this secular and empty inheritance from the Post War generation are drawn to New Age spirituality and the idea of being “spiritual but not religious”.  It looks more and more as though Father Seraphim Rose understood exactly what was happening in Western society and was not at all off the mark.  We should never have doubted his perspicacious analysis of our declining civilisation.

Have witches then hexed and cursed the collective West?  That might be what has happened.  It may be even more likely that establishment figures drawn to the murky beliefs and practices of the occult reshaped the West in a way that meant we lost touch with Orthodox belief and became more and more Faustian as a culture, where many micro decisions accumulated to alienate Christendom from Christ.  No doubt powerful figures were determined to help this process along, which they arguably initiated to a degree.

We have become a culture that has struck a Faustian bargain with filthy lucre and technology.  Since Genesis with the figure of Tubal-Cain of the line of the first murderer the spiritually wise have understood the link between technology and evil.  Technology is not in itself evil, but is easily exploited to manipulate and control the world.  Its practice is rooted in the same ethos as magic - the attempt to control the world pridefully for our own ends and not to pray for God’s grace and providence.

There is an ideology behind the secular West, rooted in a rebellious rejection of faith in the Christian God.  It is one of taking control of the world, which led indeed to great technological advances, but we also sold our collective soul.  What we see now with the growth in the interest in black magic and witchcraft is the fruit of the Faustian powers that be.  

In reaction to this and the meaning crisis, traditional Christianity is likewise seeing a resurgence.  We must be prepared to understand that in the West we are entering a period of spiritual warfare and should keep the words of the Apostle always in our heart:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Power Narratives

 It is a very long time since and perhaps was never fully manifested that our culture was truly based on value and quality.  The family lived by love, the community flourished, but always with qualification.  Everything was always imperfect.  There has though, since the revolutionary and Enlightenment period been a direct attack on anything not reducible to power.  All is understood as being about power and anything of more qualitative value is dismissed as a form of false consciousness designed to cloak and disguise the real relationship of power.

We should not of course imagine that the postlapsarian earlier eras were a type of golden age without corruption.  As with Berdyaev’s advocacy of a return to the Middle Ages, when he made clear he meant a return to the ideals not the Medieval failures to attain the ideal, we can recognise the past itself did not live up to the eternal values, but that by no means requires us to dismiss the ideal.

Nonetheless, this dismissal of eternal values is the game that has been played by those powerful groups who really do operate as though power were the only reality.  We have been taught to cut ourselves off from eternal values as though they were a distraction from the brute reality of our lives where anything holy, anything tender, anything loving, anything loyal is a deception to keep us enslaved.  This means that we are no longer allowed to think in an alternative way from their materialist power narratives.

Perhaps a seed of this might be found in the Reformation, because, while it was true there were abuses in the heterodox Catholic Church, the Protestant reformers, particularly the Puritans, went on to find all ritual and religious aesthetic as a cloak for power and corruption, whereby the laity was being manipulated.  This new paradigm set the intellectual framework from which the Enlightenment could emerge.  Therefore instead of targeting corruption itself, all beauty and hierarchy became suspect per se.  In radical Protestantism is the seed of New Atheism.

The Church though always understood human failings differently, more mercifully.  Yes there was sin in this postlapsarian world, but essentially the world is good.  The Church remains the Body of Christ even when its flawed members sin.  The family, male authority, the gentle and intuitive wisdom of the woman as mother and wife, the king in his castle, the bishop in his palace - all could at times reflect the higher values they strove in their flawed ways to embody.

While very different in terms of ontology and metaphysics from the heretical gnostics, the philosophers such as Diderot and the Encyclopedistes similarly saw all as evil and judged it harshly as found wanting, much as the Mephistophelian Marx would in the next Century.  

This reductive narrative about power is extremely effective albeit fake.  It rejects any higher explanation and applies a brutal Ockham’s razor that devalues everything.  Nothing can be said in resistance without declaring oneself an enemy of progress and a dishonest advocate for the powerful.  Such arguments only work though by cutting out all the alternative explanations as invalid before debate even begins.

Qualitatively we can easily perceive family as a vessel of selfless love, but in a reductive rationalist argument the qualitative has no place.  Indeed, it was the rationalists, in the footsteps of the Protestants, who dismissed in particular the feminine.  Feminine wisdom was always more intuitive and qualitative - an important complement to masculine rationalism.  Deprived of a place (unlike the Medieval female saints and the central importance of the Mother of God) the feminine perspective could not counter the reductive rationalism of the male mind when on a revolutionary trajectory.  Much of value - home and hearth, the family, one’s community around the parish church  - was where the feminine outlook was far more central than we imagine today.   In the pre-industrial age when men were still much more amongst their wives and children as they worked on the land, there was not the same divide between the sexes in terms of being so removed from one another all day.  It is partly for this reason, this fear of a more intuitive perspective that the highest feminine archetype, Mary, the Mother of God was subject to hostility from Protestant and Jacobin alike.

Indeed a later key step in the revolution was to eject women from the family home into the workplace as employees separated from their children.  In doing this an important element was to turn women from loving wives and mothers into gender warriors against their perceived oppressors, their husbands.  Again the flaws of men were totalised as a complete explanation as men being political and economic oppressors.  The same narrative applied as in all other aspects of society.

The irony is that those revolutionaries who most accuse every other group in the old natural order of hierarchy of being oppressors are themselves the ones who exercise power ruthlessly.  For the revolutionary in every age, the ends justify the means and that really means grab and seize power without principle.  Dostoevsky in his novel Demons, most powerfully portrays this demonic brutal work to achieve power by the supposedly idealistic and romantic revolutionaries.  They are the ones who cloak their own agenda for power by using their propaganda and manipulation.  This runs through the whole spectrum of progressivism from the Bolsheviks to the Fabians.

How to resist this progressive agenda?  We need to be able to articulate the qualitative value of much that is sacred, precious and sacrosanct.  This cannot be argued for when the terms of debate are set so that anything good is dismissed as a cloak of power and the value of things that ensure human flourishing is not taken into account.  There is a sort of Satanic devaluing of what is most important by the progressives in looking always to the lowest and most reductive explanation of religion, politics, society and culture.  That to an extent means to resist we must rediscover a more intuitive approach to argument and challenge the reductive spiral of rationalism where all is accounted for in the most debased and cynical way.

The alternative to a progressive attack on all that is of value is not so much a going back to the past as a rediscovery and reassertion of eternal values.  These eternal values are first and foremost belief in God, but also rediscovery of metaphysical hierarchy, rediscovery of human telos and the Aristotlian final cause, the qualitative over the quantitative and the personal over the objectified.  We need to grasp again the European or Western perspective on ontology before our revolution in thought and from that everything else will flow.  We can find this primarily in the Bible and the Church Fathers, but importantly in the works of Dante Aligheiri in understanding the cosmos as motivated by love and also, more practically, in rediscovering liturgy and sacred art.  Furthermore we must rediscover personal interaction and local community.  We must cease to see human beings as economic resources or means to an end.  We need to go deeper than Kant, we need to be more than moralistic in not seeing a person as a means to an end - we need to be more positive and see those around us as the imago Dei.  This will be the way to defeat the revolutionaries who now control the West.  

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.