Human Nature and the Individual

 A common theme in this series of weblogs is the impact of the philosophical turn to nominalism in the late Middle Ages in Western Europe.  This move, initiated by one William of Ockham dispensed with the idea of universals, reducing everything to the particular.  One can see how this led to many aspects of thought and practice - empirical science, cultural individualism, political liberalism.  Most significantly was the detachment from the metaphysical or eternal realm.  God was not a personal reality and no longer by ascent of theosis could we participate in His energy.  Instead God is reduced to a gigantic individual Who must be placated, the ultimate despot and this idea gradually had political implications whereby we all became individual powers within our own realm, existing for our own power rather than participation and relation with the Higher.

If one takes Platonism as the opposite extreme in thought to Ockham's nominalism, we find everything universal and metaphysical is seen as more real than the transitory world of becoming..  Transitory and particular things are real insofar as they participate in the forms of eternal and metaphysical reality.  The realm of Being is real and those who follow this idea of metaphysical reality are called realists, for they do not believe universal categories are merely nominal.

The Church is the Golden Mean, instead of the indivisible particular unit of the individual we find the person, who is interrelational and participates in the higher for his meaning.  The highest point is not the Platonic One, impersonal and abstract, but the personal inter-relational Triune God of three hypostases.

From here we can see that the person is very different from the individual.  If we understand the personal as the unique energies of a common nature, then just as God manifests in His personal energies, distinct but not separate from the divine nature, so the human person is the energy uniquely expressing the imago dei of the common human nature.   Human beings then should be understood not as atomised and completely autonomous individual units, but as the imago dei.  This actually means unrepeatable uniqueness, whereas individualism, while breaking us apart, makes us all individual units identical in our enslavement to our passions.  Think of the shopping-mall consumer.

In terms of nature or ousia, human beings share a fallen and mortal nature.  We are corruptible, overshadowed by death.  We are limited by time and space.  We survive by striving against one another, competing as individuals.  This is the life of death.  However fallen our collective nature is though, we do all share one nature.

In sharing one nature, human nature, we are not completely autonomous.  Our own actions affect our shared nature.  The sins of one man defile human nature and therefore all of us.  Even if there is not a direct effect on another individual by our actions we still affect our shared nature - its fallen-ness.  This is why the liberal idea that I can do what I like if I do not affect another individual is a fallacy - we can still tarnish or soil human nature, the nature we all share.

Our energy is not completely separated from our nature and in that sense we are all connected through our shared nature.  Much of what is celebrated in the West in terms of sexual degeneracy is defended on the basis that it does not directly affect any other individuals.  That argument only works if you accept the nominalist idea that everything, including people, is particular and isolated.  That is not the case if we share a common nature.  The so-called victimless acts of pornography use, paying another person for sex in a free-market transaction, committing sodomy on a consenting adult, exercising my freedom to choose my own  euthanasia are all wounds on the shared human nature.  Human nature is degraded and its fallen-ness is emphasised.  It also means I too participate in that sinfulness by my connection to others, even if I do not personally carry out that sin.

This is why Dostoevsky’s character in Brothers Karamazov said: “Because everyone is guilty for everyone else.”   

And in terms of that shared nature we cannot simply blame another group as guilty of harming our shared nature.  As Solzhenitsyn famously said:  “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart- and through all human hearts.”

The radical individualist move of breaking off into autonomy from our shared nature is a false move and it is this false move that the liberalism of the modern West is based upon.  If we are all completely atomised from our shared nature then what we do does not affect anyone else unless we outright harm another individual.  This perspective is a failure to see that there is a common and shared nature.  When we do something degenerate, sinful or immoral, when we lose our way, that has a direct impact on our shared human nature.  No man is an island as John Donne put it.

Social Atomisation and the End of Gender

 What does a late-Mediaeval philosopher and an early-modern scientific theoretician have to do with transgenderism?  It is how two thinkers in particular were significant in undermining the idea of universals and general categories.  When William of Ockham articulated nominalism, whereby he reduced universal categories to mere formal naming with no relation to real categories he began the dissolution of knowledge and higher understanding.  When Francis Bacon decreed real scientific knowledge could only be gained by empirical data rather than an Aristotlean methodology where nature was teleological a further blow was struck against higher knowledge, metaphysical and theological.

The long term social consequence of this was the atomisation of the humans in society.  General categories and higher universals were seen as arbitrary.  And people no longer belonged to real categories.  Instead, as Alexander Dugin has argued, all general identities came to be seen as an imposition and something to be liberated from, be that an empire or even gender.  As Alain de Benoist has argued, the egalitarian underpinning of the liberal philosophy that emerged in the West is that everyone is the same.  Such an idea that abolishes hierarchy and universal higher meaning leads to liberalism.  In the crudest sense just as there is no difference between pushpin and poetry, so in the same way as aesthetics, all people are identical units.

What this seems to mean at first with classical liberalism is that because we are all of equal value we must as individuals have rights.  That assumption hides the underlying dehumanisation and alienation from human culture, which really means that we are interchangeable atoms and therefore replaceable.  No person has his particular and unique place in the community in accordance with a higher meaning and the cultural values of a longstanding community orientated to the transcendent and sacred.    

The way this works out in reality can be seen in Socialist revolutionary countries, but, arguably even more so in the West’s fixation with rights, especially those associated with feminism.  While there are variants of feminism that do value the universal category of the feminine to an extent and in a distorted sense, in reality feminism is the theory that as we are all individual atoms who do not participate in the higher meaning of gender with all its cultural and social implications, we are interchangeable as men and women.  There are no longer social roles that are specifically masculine or feminine and there is no longer any hierarchy, with the Man as the head.  Of course a society is complex and hierarchies overlap, the mother over the child, the queen over her subject.  All these higher meanings interplay and are overlapped in a traditional society where people have not been reduced to individual atoms as in liberalism.

Feminism must be adhered to as dogma in Western societies.  So women are placed in the frontline in policing and the armed forces.  This denies that there will be a human reaction from men if a female colleague suffers injury at  the hands of an enemy or criminal. If a man loses this instinct to protect a woman and simply regards her as another interchangeable colleague, he will have lost a part of his humanity and will probably also lose the protective instinct for members of his society in general he is supposedly trained to protect.  

It is ironic that feminists in particular are opposed to transgenderism in many cases, because they are thereby contradicting their own fundamental ideology that human beings are interchangeable regardless of gender and that gendered roles are an unfair or unjust imposition.  While the transgender movement does in one sense reaffirm gender roles, they are only nominalist and cultural constructs - names for non-existent universals and therefore can be applied in an arbitrary way.  In their shared idea of reality, as opposed to the world of "social constructs", feminists and transgenderists agree that we are nothing more than identical atoms and the adoption of gender characteristics is nothing more than playing with arbitrary social constructs.  Feminism inevitably led to transgenderism or rather both feminism and transgenderism are the inevitable conclusion of Ockham’s nominalist move against universal and metaphysical categories, practically supported by a shift in science towards a focus on the particular and the rejection of teleology by the Baconites.  

From a traditional conservative perspective, which is not represented by so-called centre-right parties in the West, but far more by Putin’s government, this is an attack on reality.  Conservatives are philosophical realists for whom reality is to be found in the hierarchies and universal categories of tradition.  We are not mere atomised units, interchangeable and replaceable.  We are persona existing in a social and cultural context.  What the reductionists refer to as social constructs is where truth is to be found.

Generation Wars

While the roots of Western decline can be traced back to nominalism in the reduction from universals to the particular, in our contemporary era this reductionism has manifested between the generations today.  If those who fought in the Second World War were the greatest generation, those coming of age in the 1960s, the so-called baby boomers were manipulated by and participated in a social and sexual revolution, the harmful consequences of which are causing psychological pathologies and social ills still today amongst later generations.

The social revolution has continued to today. We saw the millennials captured by the mind disease of woke ideology and in Generation Z we see on the whole a continuation of this ideological imprisonment, but with signs of hope amongst those most active and energised in their thinking and activity.  Marine le Pen’s party saw significant support amongst Gen Z and in the UK Reform was the second choice of all the parties amongst Gen Z.  Gen Z seems to be more capable of thinking at least on the margins.

A generation that gets off without any real examination is that of Generation X, the children of the babyboomers.  They did not rebel politically or socially, but neither did they try to turn back the harmful impact of their parents’ generation, which had put self indulgence before the Greatest Generation’s sense of duty and sacrifice.  They had benefited from the stimulation to the economy of bloody war and were able to have homes and often jobs for life.  True with economic recessions after the break down of the Bretton Woods arrangements and the failure of the Keynesian model there were broken dreams and the harsh reality of home repossessions and unemployment.  Much of what the babyboomers suffered though was self inflicted - living on credit, breaking their marriages, not bringing up their children to have traditional values.  And Generation X simply accepted the settlement and took what was normative for the sixties as the settled answer to the great social questions.

So Generation X, often lamented from the Left for not engaging in student protests or being militant enough, should also be found wanting by the Right.  It did not protest because it accepted the settlement of self indulgence of 1968.  There was no move to push back or retrieve the lost standards.

While it is right to be sceptical of an all-rosy 1950s, there was still a sense of duty and an importance given to traditional roles.  The 1950s did see a major shift to materialism with the invention of household white goods and domestic appliances and property price inflation, the extended family was broken down for the more individualistic nuclear family.  Notwithstanding this, ideas of duty and higher values, God and country remained. The fundamental paradigm shift came in the sixties then set for succeeding generations.

In comparison to previous generations, Generation X was characterised more by a certain nihilism of self indulgence, drugs and raves.  While the 1920s were too glamorous to be an adequate comparison to the dreary grunginess of Gen X, it believed in nothing and valued only hedonism.  It was the fruit of 1960s moral and social degeneracy.  And yet, while many did not really think very politically, there was an understood lazy adherence to sixties shibboleths.  The full impact of these changes had not yet played out in all their disastrous consequences for the personal selfishness combined with socialist values at a political level yet to be blatantly questionable.

With Generation X what mattered was hedonism and tokenistic gestures against traditional values.  Superficial as this sounds with the development of the Marxist concept of political correctness - a sort of proto-cancel culture, the ideological commitment was real. With the fall of the West’s main geopolitical rival, there was no fashionable alternative anymore and the babyboomers and GenX turned to electing the most strategic Leftists of the Post War era - Clinton and Blair. Promoting sexual degeneracy and individualistic hedonism at home, the New Left was evangelical in spreading the contagion of their values abroad, imposed from above. In their liberal-interventionist foreign policy a brutal dismembering of former Communist states took place through fomenting ethnic grievances.  The voters complacently continued to regard their liberal-Left governments as benign as the level of human death mounted.  Only with Iraq  did the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives overreach.  This was only a temporary pause though as soon Libya and Syria were being destabilised and turned into failed states - to no one’s benefit but Israel’s.  And yet there was an underlying complacency amongst the babyboomers and Generation X, for all their anti-patriotic Leftist rhetoric, that the liberal West was a benign force in the world.  There was no real holding to account of governments for their foreign policy - Bush and Blair were re-elected.

A way to understand generation X in its superficial following of the babyboomers was that for all its hedonism and nihilism it was extremely self important when it came to left wing politics.  The students might have been too stoned to bother, but Leftism and liberal social values were normative and woe betide anyone who questioned this unthinking and self righteous political stance.

So Generation X put up no real resistance to controlled speech as the screeching millennials entered political debate on the university campuses.  Multiculturalism, the environment, feminism and gay rights were all unquestionable dogma for Generation X too and so when the millennials put some energy into these left-side causes both babyboomers and gen X just saw this as a continuation of the inevitable and justified revolution of progress.  Only the obvious logic of transgenderism in the pattern of the ideology began to unnerve them.

As if to cover for their hedonism many Gen X are as earnest and uncompromising in their political correctness as millennials in their wokeness.   Social media aided the millennials in their oppressiveness, but in a social situation with Generation X one will often find a reciting of shibboleths and PC talking points when not simply engaging in frivolous and meaningless nonsense.  Do not expect a serious conversation about politics, but wait to hear the reciting of approved positions and horror if anyone thinks outside of those approved stances.  This generation, too lazy to be politically active will nonetheless be particularly intolerant of “bigoted” positions to demonstrate that for all their hedonism and their frivolity they are really “serious” people.

Gen Z however, shows more intellectual energy and political dynamism.  Backing le Pen and Farage is not all.  While it is important to remember that there is a mainstream Gen Z that still unthinkingly follows the official establishment line and is far more likely to vote Labour or Democrat; there is a critical mass of motivated Gen Z that cares enough to question the values of the sixties and to stand up for higher values and a meaningful life.  In part this is of course because Gen Z is bearing the brunt of the sixties social experiment more than Gen X.  Generation X could rely on existing social capital still being in place to provide them with a stable home-life and relatively homogeneous society and  a degree opening up to work that pays.  Not the case for Gen Z.  If universities churned out little ideologues obediently following the party line, Gen Z, faced with the reality of the failed liberal experiment had to question the system that was clearly so stacked against them.  And while some might have turned to the radical Left, more seem to have realised amongst those who care about their country and their future that it is  revolution of some form from the Right that is all that can save their futures.  Similarly to politics Gen Z is returning to church, but specific churches - those with traditional theology and ritual - Eastern Orthodoxy and Latin-rite Roman Catholicism.  The mainstream liberal churches telling their ageing congregations that abandoning cherished and meaningful ritual was necessary to attract the young are seeing the young do not see them as having the gravitas to help reach to the eternal.

It is emerging that much cultural vandalism was not about appealing to the young, but depriving them of their inheritance and was motivated by malicious ideology.  In terms of Generation X, which was able to free ride on the remaining social-capital of conservative values not yet stamped out by the cultural revolution there is real culpability.  If they had been politically active, not to continue the cultural revolution from the Left, but defend what their parents’ generation had attempted to wreck, then things might not have been so bleak for Gen Z, some of whom now see enough of what has happened to know that right-wing politics and a return to religious faith are the only answers to the problems left by the sixties cultural and social revolution.

The Person and the Individual

The human being is identified in the West as an individual and from this concept stem the individual rights codified into human rights legislation and the market economy that works on the basis we are rational agents.  The sense of autonomy that underpins liberal values also depends on the human being conceived of as an individual.

There are many implications from regarding humans as autonomous units. This way of viewing us was not always so natural as it seems. A process of atomisation and objectification took place in the West, linked to changes in metaphysics, the development of scientific methodology and the growth in technology. Closely linked to the process of objectification, the atomisation of individualism leads us to see ourselves as self-contained units surrounded by a world not of encounter, but one of objective data ripe for exploitation as standing reserve. And the more we exploit through techne, the more isolated and atomised we become - stuck on our mobile telephones not encountering what is around us. This is where individualism leads and in the process greatly diminishes our capacity for empathy. The self-contained atom is a deeply reductive view of the human being - a mere consumer or subject of political power.

Much as we lost some connection with Scripture when it was translated from the more expressive Greek into the more legalistic Latin, so our way of defining the human being is too Latinised. The individual is the indivisible unit, who by dint of being indivisible is also a self-contained and self-sufficient autonomous agent. There is another way to describe the human being and that is as a person.

While “individual” is linked to the Latin etymological root for the indivisible, “person” comes from the Greek “prosopon”, meaning to face towards. Thus in the very definition of the person, he is relational and not autonomous. This is a very important difference. It means the human being exists in relationship, not as an autonomous unit and what atomises us does not free us, but diminishes our humanity.

In his seminal work, A Secular Age, Canadian Roman Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor distinguishes between the understanding of self in the enchanted Mediaeval world and the disenchanted and secular world of modernity. Mediaeval Man saw himself as porous, but in modernity Man is a buffered self. What this means is that the human being in the Mediaeval world was porous to cosmic forces, angelic and demonic. He was thus relational both vertically and horizontally with his community. Modern Man is the buffered self, autonomous and protected from external forces and thus his world becomes disenchanted and he therefore becomes alienated and atomised.

Perhaps the darkest definition of Hell was articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he said “Hell is other people”. This is a statement of the atomisation of the atheist West. Other people are an imposition to the buffered self that does not relate, but might (like Sartre) indulge in totalitarian Marxist fantasies of imposed community while not belonging to his own parish or village.

An Orthodox perspective on the person comes from the leading Greek Orthodox theologian, Christos Yannaras. For him the human person, using Heideggerian language is always a being-towards, not an isolated and atomised thing. Individualism is, for Yannaras the consequence of the Fall and the life under the curse of death. Existence becomes a struggle for individual survival, not life in communion, more in accordance with Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” than the Gospel. Yannaras writes:

“For Orthodox theology, the fall of man takes place when he freely renounces his possibility of participating in true life, in personal relationship and loving communion - the only possibility for man to be as a hypostasis of personal distinctiveness. The fall arises out of man’s free decision to reject personal communion with God and restrict himself to the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his own nature.”

And this fall leads to a fragmentation whereby the natural needs of man turn into enslaving passions - leading to death. And now Man living under this curse of death brought about by autonomy leads to an inescapable ancestral sin:

“For nature does not exist except as personal hypostases, and the first man identified the fact of his existence, not with the personal distinctiveness of his natural hypostasis, but with its survival and self-existence. Thus each new human person is born subject to his individual nature’s need to survive as existential autonomy. He is born condemned to be the bearer of an individual or natural will subordinated to the absolute need for survival.”

Yannaras thus contrasts the existence of the person in communion with the diminished and post-lapsarian life of the autonomous individual. The person relates to the Trinitarian God - three divine Persons or hypostases in relationship.

In the secular West there is a great deal of emphasis on individual autonomy as the expression of authenticity. Once we realise the human being is a person this ceases to be a credible perspective. As much as he attempts to assert his freedom the individual becomes a slave to his passions. Many of the expressions of individuality in the form of New-Age tattoos or following particular subcultures simply amounts to becoming absorbed in a new collective identity that does not embody any higher meaning, but is simply cliched and participation in what Heidegger would call the “they self”.

Yannaras places emphasis on personal distinctiveness and irrepeatability as the key aspects of the person. By contrast the individual is humanity reduced to repeatable atom, driven by passions and in his very autonomy no longer sovereign. This personal distinctiveness of Yannaras's person is something like that which we term in common parlance, the personality.

We derive the word “personality” from the person. Our personality exists in relation to others, not in isolation. And once we are isolated we cease to empathise with the other’s personality. Another word derived from person is of course “persona”. Again, looking at modern secular ideas of authenticity, the word “persona” linked as it is to the word mask, is seen as suspect and inauthentic. That though is because we are thinking of it within the paradigm of modern individualism. A mask has important ritualistic and social functions. In his work on ethno-sociology, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin looks back to the most primitive culture and the role of the persona in ritual and social meaning. For primitive societies the individual was not a concept. The individual, as Nietzsche explained, is a very modern idea.

Dugin explained the role of the persona thus:

“It is significant that the Greek word for 'persona' or 'person' literally means mask. In the ethnos, everything is a mask. The structure of ethnic being is personified. Ethnic thought does not question who the mask conceals or whom the mask indicates. ‘Personality’ is a moment of ethnic noesis and possesses qualities but no substances.”

The persona exists only in the ethnic context, only in communal meaning. Clearly, as Dugin’s work shows, tracing the shift from ethnos, to people, to nation, we are not in that same cultural existence now. Nonetheless, it teaches how the persona can only exist in a non-individualist communal way. Clearly each persona performs a ritualised and socially determined role.

That though is the most authentic form of existence.  The shaman is gone, but it is when we perform socially-defined roles today, such as husband or father, wife or mother, that we find our personal distinctiveness and therefore true freedom. We are no longer drifting atoms, buffeted by our passions, but real people.

As Yannaras, using Heideggerian language, explains:

“Beings are [einai) only as phenomena, only insofar as they become accessible to a referential relation of disclosure. We cannot speak of the being-in-itself of beings; we can only speak of being-there or being-present (par-einai), of co-existence with the possibility of their disclosure. We know beings as presence (par-ousia), not as essence (ousia).”

Both the Palamite and Heideggerian undertones here are noticeable. Dasein itself is disclosed through its energy, not its substance. And here we are at the heart of Yannaras’s argument about the person. It all hinges on the Palamite distinction, but not separation, between energy and essence (ousia). We encounter the personality through its energy. And we encounter God through His energy. Yannaras famously refers to how we can recognise a piece of newly-heard Mozart from another composer’s work because of the energy of Mozart’s personality.

With Yannaras we avoid the univocity of Being of the Franciscan schoolmen. God is not simply the biggest autonomous Being and we the smaller autonomous beings - despots within our own boundaries of Nozik individualism. No, with Yannaras we turn to apophaticism and with the help of Heidegger understand the following:

“As the refutation of exclusively conceptual affirmation of God and of the practical necessity of God [Niezschean as per Heidegger} nihilism stands for a radical denial of the ‘conceptual idols’ of God, and as the unrestricted limit to questioning it offers further possibilities of rescuing the divinity of God.”

For Yannaras Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s nihilism consigns metaphysical accounts of God, the God of the philosophers, to the realm of defeated ideas thereby opening us to the possibility that God is or is not. For Yannaras this can lead to apophatic knowledge as personal participation.

Once freed from the conceptual constraints of metaphysics and rationalism the human being can again engage with God as a person. One might say the person is Being-towards- God through communion.

As individuals in our fallen and atomised state we rebelliously verify and conceptualise. When reconnected with our personhood we do not adopt such hubristic Cartesian methods. For Yannaras we are freed from this prison by Christ’s Incarnation, the second Person of the Trinity - the relational Godhead. He unites the human and the divine in communion through his Theanthropic nature as the God Man.

Life in the Church leads to a personal knowledge through participation, not fallen subjective and reductive knowledge. It is the encounter with the energy of God, which is articulated in catholic knowledge.

In this sense the rediscovery of the human being as a person not an individual leads to a re-established relationship with God. However, this can only happen through Christ, because Christ became incarnate. We were trapped in the paradigm of the individual and of autonomous survival. Christ changes that and recapitulates our existence as a personal existence of communion.

To return to the atheist existentialist Sartre, Yannaras has an answer for his famous misanthropic comment, by turning to Dostoevsky:

“Before Sartre, Dostoevsky had already defined hell in a similar way but more fully, summarising the theological teaching on hell of the Orthodox tradition: ‘Hell is the torment of not loving.’ It becomes evident from this definition that ‘other people’ are the occasion of my own hell, although the cause lies in my own inability to relate to them, in my imprisonment in the egocentric autonomy of atomic individuality, in my own ‘freedom’. Hell is therefore all the more tormenting when the ‘other’ is not an atomic individual at a distance from me who nullifies the possibility of relation, but is a person who presents himself to me as a living ecstasy of self-offering and calls me to a fulfilling communion and relation for me remains unattainable. This inability to relate, the punishment of someone not loving, is the ultimate failure of existence which summarises the Church’s teaching on eternal punishment. It is not God who is the punisher and creator of hell.”

Therefore, to be reduced to autonomous individuals from relational persons who can participate in God’s energy, is not simply a difference in terminology, but the road to Hell.




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The false rebirth of the Renaissance and False new dawn of the Enlightenment

 In its claims of rebirth the Renaissance made a breach with a continuity that stretched back  through Patristics to pagan philosophy, by taking pagan culture in isolation from later developments, discovering humanism and cutting itself off from the transcendent and canonical tradition. Then, in its dismissal of all that came before it the Enlightenment by its own naming displays a tendentious agenda in painting all that came before as benighted - from Classical Greek philosophy to Aquinas and the Scholastics.

Most of the evils of today are dismissed by the advocate of the secular Enlightenment as counter -Enlightenment, but Fascism, Nazism, Communism are all creatures of the Enlightenment.  They would not have been possible without that breach with the transcendent and canonical tradition, the sophia perennis, so to speak.  If one contrasts Kant and the Marquis de Sade, one must understand that de Sade is impossible without Kant, who reduced morality to rationalism.  The Enlightenment was the final cut with the link to transcendental and eternal meaning.  It was the final stage that began with nominalism, was developed through Renaissance Humanism and finally developed in the aforementioned great revolution in thought, the so-called Enlightenment.

We all exist in a post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment paradigm.  Our language is not one of mysticism or the transcendental or the divine, but of revolution, rights, procedures, modernisation.  Taking Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment together, we find a reduction of all meaning to power games.  Post-modernism in this regard is merely a continuation of the philosophical idea that supposed higher meanings conceal base power agendas.

We should not underestimate the evil figure of Machiavelli anymore than we should underestimate the Marquis de Sade in understanding the modern West.  As John Milbank, the Anglican theologian, put it:

"It is [Machiavelli's] explicit preference for the Roman option and his return to the etymological root of virtue as 'heroic manliness', to be cultivated supremely in war.  This preference encompasses also the view that continued class conflict within the republic is functionally useful in preserving political 'liberty' - the habit of independence."

Here in this complete rejection of  the Christian ethos, we find a root behind the perpetual conflict of democracy, the state of continuous revolution.  From feminism to Black Lives Matter we can see what Milbank terms - the ontology of violence.  We are in a perpetual state of conflict for our rights.  This is a direct contradiction of the Christian ethos to "resist not evil".  And it helps us understand why everyone in the West feels the only politically legitimate position is one of rebellion, while priding ourselves that the inevitability of conflict is resolved through democratic process.  The existence of perpetual conflict and revolution is assumed to be the natural state of existence.  And it is in this way, amongst many others, such as the invention of the individual genius artist and abandonment of iconography, that Renaissance humanism makes an ethical and spiritual breach with the Sacred Tradition.

Christ's incarnation settled the questions of the Greek philosophers as much as the prophesies of the Jews.  The Renaissance attempted a radical return to pagan humanism, by ignoring the succeeding development and evolution of the canonical story through Christ and the Church.

The Enlightenment only further contributed to the idea that traditional meanings were cloaks of meaning concealing realities of power.  This was of course developed politically by Marx, but the idea is very much there in all the major thinkers of the Enlightenment. They too, made a deliberate breach with the inherited wisdom of the canon, as per Kant's exhortation in his essay "What is Enlightenment?"  Empirical science could now discredit faith and tradition with objective data.  The likes of Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopedists asserted the institutions of the ancien regime and religious faith were a trick of hiding true power, because everything can be reduced to power.  All this manifested politically in the American and French revolutions.

Lost was the Byzantine sense of the Christian Imperium.  After the fall of Constantinople though, a new force entered the West - occult magic and alchemy.  Brought by refugee magicians who had existed on the margin of Orthodox Byzanitium, their practices found a fertile ground in mainstream Western society.  Magic appealed to a mind-set where all was reduced to power.  Manipulation of the world as objective data gave rise through magic to the later empirical science used to undermine the Church and the Tradition.  This is what Descartes would later understand as the dichotomy of the human subject and the objective world to justify his own Enlightenment philosophy so pivotal to the development of the Enlightenment, but Heidegger would identify as engaging with the world as standing reserve.  It led to technical power but a deep inauthenticity of Being.  

Taken in isolation the rediscovery of pagan philosophy (as ancient wisdom was brought out of Orthodox East)  Neoplatonic ideas for example meant a return to a dark mysticism developing into the occult.  Neoplatonism had been developed through Church Fathers such as Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa and others into a foundation of Christian theology.  In isolation from later developments in thought rediscovered Platonic ideas became dangerous encouragement to Luciferian power and thereby the reductive humanist agenda of the Renaissance.

Why though did the interaction with ancient wisdom play itself out in this way in the West?  Because even before Machiavelli there was an emphasis on power within Western thought.  After the schism with the Orthodox Church, Saint Anselm, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury worked out an idiosyncratic understanding of Christian soteriology.  In mimicking the world of the recent Norman conquest, Anselm understood God the Father as a feudal monarch demanding payment for sins.  This was his satisfaction theory of salvation.  He reduced the meaning of the crucifixion to payment of debt for a sin to a vengeful God the Father.  The idea of Christ freeing us from death and the Devil on the cross was reduced to a payment necessary to a feudal Lord.  The story of the crucifixion is reduced to one of power relationships.  The deeper and more profound soteriology of the Orthodox East meant it could tolerate magic on the margin of the municipality without being corrupted.  In the West we were already reducing all to power narratives and magic as manipulation of the standing reserve of the world found a fertile home.  And magic led on to the excesses of techne through science and the enframement of which Heidegger writes.

Machiavelli was right to look back to ancient Rome to understand society as power battles for liberty, becasue this is where such a concept of power was rooted.  And in the idea of Papal Supremacy that led to the Great Schism (the Pope regarding himself like Caesar as the Pontifex Maximus) we find an assertion of power and rights that broke the West from the Orthodox Church, making room for the power-theology of Anselm.

It is important not to be too reductive though, as the West still retained much that was Orthodox.  In the last stages of the Medieval world Dante was a figure of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic resistance.  In his understanding that all motion in the cosmos is motivated by love we find a traditional, canonical and Orthodox perspective.  This runs entirely contrary to the Machiavellian idea of virtue as power.  Dante's perspective was the Christian one.  Importantly he did not dismiss our pagan heritage, but was guided by Virgil and met the classical philosophers in the afterlife.  For Dante, as with Saint Vincent's "what has been believed everywhere, always, by all", we find a sophia perennis fully realised in revelation and the Incarnation, precursors of which existed in the pagan world.

Techne when misused as power and manipulation, Heidegger's "machenschaft", separates us from Being and authenticity.  It is the manipulative exercise of power over the world as an objectified "standing reserve".  Such a mind set became dominant and politics became all-pervasive as expression of power - be that the power of the individual over himself through his rights or the power of the State over the person through the rights of the race or the proletariat.  Liberalism is not distinct from Fascism or Communism in its metaphysics.  Only the Church answers the problem of power.  Whether the LGBT protestors or the Brownshirts, all is rooted in a metaphysics of power, assertion of rights and one form of revolution or another.     

And here we must mention one of the most heretical and Luciferian thinkers of them all - William of Ockham.  This reduction of all to power narratives would not have been possible without his Luciferian theories.  In his rejection of universal truths for particularity, in his argument that universal truths were nothing more than names and therefore artificial categories we find the break down in the participation of higher meaning.  Centuries beforehand he had laid the foundation of the Western Enlightenment.  Contrast this with Platonism and the higher meanings human beings participate in as their very telos and the chasm in perspectives is striking.  We understand, as evidenced by the renaissance that a return to Platonism by itself leads to the occult and political manipulation.  Understood through the Church Fathers, plundering the Egyptians as per Saint Basil of Caesarea, Platonic philosophy is baptised to help us understand participation in higher levels of meaning.  Ironically through a return to a Christian understanding where life is based on love as the fundamental foundation and not power, we can reconcile the apparently mutually contradictory philosophies of classical Neoplatonism and Twentieth century Phenomenology.  It is through something like Husserl's intentionality that we are able to recognise higher meaning and the spiritual.  Through both phenomenology and Christianised Platonism we can see past the reductive narrative of power and rights, revolution and political might, to the higher meaning of love as an eternal and transcendent value, but not as an impersonal force, but as very personal relationship - as the worship of the Triune God.

             

R.I.P Toryism

 The name Tory, originally derived from the Irish insult for a horse thief, goes back some hundreds of years.  The Tories emerged as the force of reaction against the then progressive Whigs, so-called as an insult for extreme Scottish covenanters, being Calvinists.  In a Traditionalist sense the Tories were the political force in the Parliamentary system defending Monarchy and Hierarchy against the rise of mercantile Protestantism,  They were the political manifestation of the Cavaliers who had fought for the King and his divine right to rule in the English Civil War.

Today Toryism is associated more with the merchant class and the City of London than were its political ancestors.  As Socialism became the main threat, the Tories shifted from being defenders of landed gentry and the rural system of protectionism and to favouring of the new establishment - Whiggish capitalism.

This was a long journey.  Having been entirely excluded from power by the Whigs after the Glorious Revolution, the Tories became extinct during the Whig supremacy, which favoured a corrupt mercantile class over landed gentry - the South Sea Bubble and the rest. 

Toryism as a force re-emerged during the American War of Independence when on both sides of the Pond, Tory was a word again hurled as a form of abuse against the supporters of the King's allegedly obtuse stubbornness  in the face of American colonists' demands.  Arguably from a Tory perspective the revolutionaries were working towards a new type of state - a propositional state based on Enlightenment principles hostile to monarchy, established church and tradition.

One champion of the colonists' demands, a certain Rockinghamite Whig of Irish family, was to become the great philosopher of English conservatism - one Edmund Burke.  Known as the Father of conservatism, having sympathised deeply with American rebels and been a champion of compromise, he took a very different view of the French Revolution.  Seeing their old enemy the French King in difficulty, the English aristocracy was inclined to interpret the initial moves of the Jacobins as nothing more than an equivalent of their own Glorious Revolution of 1688, reaffirming ancient liberties and parliamentary sovereignty..

Seeing the American rebels as in a great English tradition of liberty, Burke realised the abstract theories and radical rationalism of the French revolution were far more radical.  This was a far more serious challenge to the ancien regime of Crown and Altar - the two cornerstones of Western European civilisation, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant.

In the later wars against revolutionary France and Napoleonic France, the United Kingdom fought for the principles of tradition, monarchy and Christianity against Jacobin revolutionaries and Napoleon the demagogue and dictator.  Pitt the Younger's government, with its authoritarian crackdowns on those with French sympathies and his adversarial clashes with the more liberal Whig, Fox, found he and his followers again inheriting the name of Tories.

After the wars, Liverpool and Wellington as Tory prime ministers found themselves under extreme pressure from the democratising forces that led to the collapse of the Tories, amidst the Peterloo massacre, in the face of the Whigs and their Great Reform Act of 1832 extending the franchise.

Sir Robert Peel, one of the Tories, who as Home Secretary had established the Metropolitan Police, known as Peelers or Bobbies, after their founder, re-established the Tory Right as the Conservative Party, which would come to dominate British politics and is the oldest political party in the world.   From Burke, who defended aristocracy and High Anglicanism, Peel found the principle of piecemeal reform as an alternative to radical or revolutionary change based on abstract theory.  In the context of his own political career prior to his premiership, with Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Act, one can understand this willingness to reform.  It became his undoing as Tory backwoodsmen representing rural constituencies, resisted his free trade policies in the context of the Irish potato famine.  Peel believed free trade would relieve the starving Irish, but Conservative backbenchers rejected the new orthodoxy of free trade in favour of protection.  The party split and re-emerged in opposition reduced to a rump, calling themselves the Protectionist Party.

Under the charismatic Jewish leader, Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservatives or Tories as they were still known colloquially, became a powerful political force again, opposing Liberal William Gladstone's free market policies.  Disraeli fought to keep the rich and poor as one nation in the division resulting from capitalist industrial change, with a growing gap between rich and poor.  The phrase One Nation retains resonance in today's Conservative Party.

After Conservative success under Lord Salisbury, when working class voters newly enfranchised by Disraeli's Conservatives, repaid the honour by putting the last peer, Lord Salisbury into Number 10 and delivering a Conservative majority with their votes at the turn of the last century, disaster stuck.  Joe Chamberlain, a Liberal defector to the Tories over home rule and father of the famous Neville, championed the cause of tariff reform.  His group of Unionists passionate about Ireland's place in the United Kingdom had joined the Tories and given it the new name of the Conservative and Unionist party.  Chamberlain, a powerful political figure in Birmingham, with a strong social conscience for the poor, was deeply committed to the British Empire.  Tapping into old Tory sympathies for protectionism, he wanted tariffs to protect the British Empire and the abandonment of free trade.  The party split and foundered.  It only re-emerged as the stabilising force in the turmoil after the First World War as the Liberals collapsed and Labour emerged as the other major party.  

Moderate conservatism in the spirit of piecemeal reform was the order of the day under Baldwin.  This continued after the Second World War as the Tories accepted the Socialist settlement of the post-war Labour Government and governed as a consensus party.  Only with the collapse of the Keynesian model did the Conservatives adopt a radical position under Margaret Thatcher as the free marketeers, in economic terms resurrecting Gladstone's economic liberalism. 

Recent context then is of a divide between Thatcherite free marketeers and left wing One Nation Conservatives.  A similar division along similar lines arose over Brexit.  Like repeal of the Corn Laws or Tariff Reform, the Tories tore themselves to pieces over the Brexit referendum.  

An obvious conclusion from a progressive perspective is that forces of reaction divide and destroy the Tories.  There is though a very different interpretation.  It is rather this specific point taken from Burke of accepting piecemeal reform and the idea of an evolutionary polity has been the problem.  #it has meant accepting the Left's agenda, even when the public want it to be resisted.

While rejecting the abstract theory of the Left the Conservatives have always accepted implicitly the agenda of whoever the progressives of the day happen to be.  This means Tory causes are lost causes, even if they did not have to be.

It meant for example in the last fourteen years the Conservatives failed to reverse the radical constitutional changes by the Blair government and never had the courage to confront woke agendas such as transgenderism.  The lesson of history is not that the reactionaries split the party, putting it out of power.  The real lesson is the minority of true conservatives in the party were fighting for genuine conservatism, but the party establishment had already surrendered the ideological or philosophical battle.  Progressivism will inevitably win, is the assumption and the Tories must simply mitigate the impact.

As a result of this way of thinking the Conservatives have time and again failed their own supporters.  This is not a liberal or progressive nation.  However, the only centre right party able to win under our constituency system has already  always surrendered the battle of principle.  It has accepted the revolution and merely wants to slow it down to make it more palatable to a conservative country.

This is why the Conservative Party always fails in the end.  It has always misinterpreted the lessons of history.  It has always assumed the progressives, nearly always part of the elite, are probably right.  And this is because so many of the Conservative Party hierarchy exist in the same social and class world as the arrogant progressives - who are always from the top of society.  So there is no intellectual confidence amongst Conservatives.  And indeed some of the Conservative establishment agree with the progressive agenda, but believe their job is to help a conservative public to accept what is inevitable.

In large part the establishment still accepts a positivist and progressive idea of history.  From its very roots, with Peel's acceptance of Whig reforms, in its genesis the Conservative Party accepts the Right has nothing to say about the direction of history, only how to mitigate the impact of fast-paced change.  They accept that the progressives have rightly identified the direction of history and they simply have a political role to mitigate, to slow and to make acceptable the changes the Left pushes onto the country.  And this is why the Conservative Party is facing an electoral wipe out on Thursday.