The Orthodox iconographer and public intellectual Jonathan Pageau has pointed to the carnivalesque subversion being intrinsically linked to an impending level of control, of which covid was a foretaste. Russian philosopher Aleksander Dugin has argued that liberalism as the third political theory will also have its totalitarian stage. Why should absolute licentiousness be linked to control? It is all to do with the metaphysics of liberalism and the disconnection not from an arbitrary but a transcendental view of the Good found in traditional Christianity, in which man is not a little tyrant in his own liberal empire, but the imago Dei. It is also connected with a blind faith in historical progress that has replaced the divine and that must extirpate reaction and obscurantism from the society. Links can be drawn with the absolute control of Communism or the French Terror that as religious symbols were desecrated high levels of totalitarian control were being introduced.
Jonathan Pageau uses the language of Revelation whereby the licentiousness of the Whore of Babylon brings in the Beast of absolute control and domination:
“I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.” Rev. 17:7
Saint John the Divine with inspired intuition on Patmos understood the link between immorality and totalitarian control. And how is it they go together? The reduction of men to mere slaves of passion is rooted in a metaphysics of violence, as John Milbank put it and as Milbank made clear is linked to Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of the meaning of virtue as power. When we are reduced to little tyrants exercising our own passions, even if we remain within our own individual boundaries as Nozick might put it, there is no ontology of love, but only one of violence and power. John Locke, seemingly softer and more optimistic than Hobbes, also framed a paradigm of individual power. When power is all there is, rather than the common good or the Platonic Good, then there is no real moral case against the enforcement of power by the Empire or the State. Just as individuals exercise their power to sate their passions, so even at the level of government there is no participation in a higher good. Instead the ideology is really just about power.
Today’s globalist Left uses benign language of equity (as defined by the American Left, not equity as protected by the Lord Chancellor in English law) to cloak an agenda of power through technocratic control and cancel culture. While we must be careful in how we refer to what is happening in the United Kingdom, control is the other side of the coin to a permissive culture that reduces us to our passions. The globalist ideology is one of disintegration, “diversity is our strength”. It is about breaking down ideas of higher goods and higher meaning. Instead everything is reduced to the bestial - we are simply advanced apes after all.
Progress is in a sense allowing us to indulge our inner ape, with freedom to be driven by lust and not be restrained by higher principles. When they regard us animals though, it is a thin line before they start to manage us as animals. The figure of the Whore of Babylon casts her shadow.
Nonetheless this all starts for “good” progressive reasons. The enemies of this positivist idea of progress are on the wrong side of history. With their atavistic prejudices, their attachment to tribe, their love for exalted institutions, their “superstitious” religion, these atavistic obscurantists must be eliminated for the sake of process. And soon it is not only kings and aristocrats being slaughtered, but the peasants of the Vendee region or the Kulaks of Russia are being murdered en masse. The Beast also overshadows the actions of revolution and eventually becomes dominant.
Accompanying the underlying narrative of liberation (which is nothing more than a power narrative blind to higher meaning) is an ever increasing level of brutal control, for the “greater” good of this notion of historical process. And all this is consequent upon the hubristic heresy that our telos is manifested in the here and now, not the hereafter. It usually manifests as some form of global government, from Babel in Genesis to the WEF today.
With caution one mentions the show trials in the United Kingdom. The Labour Government is busy imprisoning rioters and protesters from the class it claims specifically to represent. While not for one moment condoning violence, there are clear signs here of this pattern of the ideology of liberation leading to control and punitive enforcement. Those who rioted or supported riots in England are facing custodial sentences and being sentenced summarily. The punishment of these rioters differs in its severity from different rioters who are not resistant to the ideology of the powerful - that is that diversity is our strength. The Fabian Government of the UK understands that a residue of traditional values, both ethnic and nationalistic remain within the working class. How it has manifested is disturbing, but there is a determination now to extirpate these human feelings from the public realm, not simply to punish those who clearly broke the law.
The breaking down of any metaphysical hierarchy, a perspective that underlies globalism, whether manifesting in the Ukraine or the United Kingdom, means anything goes in the cause of liberating progress, whatever the cost. Whether that cost be to human life in conflict or to prescriptive liberty and freedom of conscience, all is justified if you are on the "right side" of history. The scientific rightness of the cause of Progress means to liberate control has to be introduced. It is the age-old story of revolution from the Puritans banning Christmas to the Fabian cautious but determined revolutionaries of today’s U.K.
It is also of significance how the Post-modern Left interpreted Nietzsche. While Nietzsche was of the Right his ideas allowed a moral relativism that was promoted in the revolutionary spirit of 1968. As this manifests in woke politics, we see control appearing very early on with cancel culture. There is no reason to obey any code of the marketplace of ideas or freedom of speech and thought, because there are no higher principles, only the new table of subversive values you are creating.
What must be understood here is that as we cut ourselves off from Truth and higher values in a manifestation of pride, we instead find there are no restraints on what we are allowed to do. The globalists are writ large what Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was, who understood with no God “everything is permitted” for the sake of history, in his case of great men such as Napoleon or himself. Those who impose control are ideologically possessed. They are driven by a revolution of liberation. And so LGBT marches parade through the streets and the flag of sexual liberation becomes more important than the national flag. This liberation is one side of the story, the other is penalties and punishment for those who express doubts or opposition to sexual liberation.
And therefore liberation is progress, but the final goals of that liberation are a subversion of all that the human race has ever held dear in its traditional values. Consequently for the sake of achieving this progress, our worldly telos, the human reaction against it must face punitive levels of control.
No comments:
Post a Comment