Imitatio Christi - the key to exemplarity

 Exemplarity is an idea that can be found in Platonism, the Church Fathers, Franciscan saints such as Bonaventure and in Orthodox theology.  It is an idea that is based in philosophical realism and a metaphysical understanding of the transcendental - the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  Since corrosive ideas such as nominalism, which denies the reality of universals, we have lost touch with the necessity of participation in exemplarity.  The fullest manifestation of exemplarity is not abstract ideas, but the Person of Jesus Christ, the God Man.

With exemplarity we can see various threads of thought and culture coming together in a virtuous synthesis.  Stoic ideas of self restraint, Aristotlian ideas of the telos of virtue and Neo-Platonic ideas of participating in the transcendental realm all come together in the figure of the exemplar.  Only in the Church is the concept given its fullest and ultimate iteration.  In Neoplatonism participation is in abstract and airy transcendentals.  In Aristotle the telos is eudaimonia, rather than full self sacrifice. In the Stoics, the personal is lost in a pantheist theology.  Only in the Church is exemplarity incarnated in the God Man, in whose life we are to participate and Whom we are to imitate.

The concept of exemplarity requires a vertical and upwards-orientated understanding of reality.  Plato here is helpful in pinpointing reality as being in the realm of Forms, not in this material world of becoming.  The pagan philosopher though went too far in disembodying us from reality.  In the Church's teaching the second Person of the Trinity comes down into our world, incarnate.  Humbling Himself for us, through His kenosis.  The Truth is embodied.  The spiritual manifests in the physical.  The Word made flesh.   Without this we fall into Gnosticism.

If there are heights to which we aspire, if man as much as a lyre or an animal has an orientating purpose as in Aristotle, then it must be more than eudaimonia.  It must be deeper, it must then be love.  We then do not simply seek the happy life, the good life, but love in Christ.  This self-sacrificial love can account more for suffering than simply the virtue for the sake of the good life of eudaimonia.

 If life and virtue are about restraint and freedom from the passions, as with Seneca and the Stoics, then a pantheist cosmos is not enough.  Such  attainment of freedom must involve the personal, not a dissolution into the cosmos.  In the Church we participate in the Person of Christ, not becoming part of the universe.  The personal is the height of exemplarity.

The practical aspect of a chain of exemplarity is participation.  The purpose of our life is not hedonism or power, it is participation in the highest, which is about sacrifice and humility.  Exemplarity requires an orientation towards the highest.  The pagan philosophers could not find an ultimate exemplar.  This ultimate exemplar is Christ, because God as man is the perfect man.

With Christ as the ultimate exemplar, there are lower exemplars who to a greater or lesser extent manifest Christ and can be looked up to as examples and models to follow.  The Medieval notion of knighthood helps with the culture of exemplarity.  The code of chivalry was the warrior's form of participating in Christ.  We thus look up to the knight as an honourable model to follow, but as Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur reminds us, even knighthood as a worldly thing is imperfect and subject to temptation and hubris.

The saints are the greatest exemplars and that is why the churches are full of their icons.  They help us not only through their prayers, but because as flawed men and women they achieved the spiritual heights through Christ.  They can then inspire us in our participation as we follow the models of exemplarity.  The Mother of God, in particular, is to be understood as the ultimate fully-human exemplar of sanctity.

The knights, of course, had a particular veneration for the Mother of God, which was expressed in loyalty and love for their own lady.  The monks are the other zenith of human participation.  The Orthodox monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos dwell on an isthmus dedicated to Mary the Theotokos.  The Mother of God is the first Christian and the only human born in our sinful state to be personally without sin.

The figures of exemplarity are then in a chain of participation ultimately leading to Christ the God-Man.  Monks in particular exemplify this participation in the life of Christ.  As ascetics they sacrifice their life in this world for love of Christ.

Participation in the higher Good is challenging for us in the West.  With Ockham's denial of universals, with Protestantism's destruction of the saints' shrines and its hatred of the Mother of God, with empiricism turning our attention to the material and the particular and with utilitarianism's promotion of hedonism, these beliefs, linked genealogically, have separated us from the transcendental.  Popular culture celebrates revolutionary culture and individualistic self realisation.  We have become unhealthily obsessed with sexual identity.  Western Churches have reinterpreted Christ as an advocate for the secular values of liberalism.  We in the West are cut off from higher meaning.

This is why the statistics show a surge of interest in traditional religion from the young, so-called Gen Z.  Western ideals have been shown to be barren and empty, quite literally in the way our secular values have led to a demographic crisis.  Clearly aspiring to participate in the life of Christ through the Church is not ultimately about utilitarian social benefits, such as restoration of the trust society, solving the birth crisis or regaining our collective Christian identity - these are side benefits.  The true benefit is through Christ we have access to participate again in the Good, the True and the Beautiful and restore our telos, through self restraint and asceticism, in the eventual hope of eternal life with the Father through the Spirit. 

The Reign of the Misfit

 We have recently again seen the extreme point reached of the culture of the misfit, with the evil attack on a church service for children at a Roman Catholic school in Minneapolis.  The murderer and suicide was a transgender misfit, with insane and dark political views.  He was an example of the extreme of what a misfit can become: the atomised weirdo who does not fit in and is full of bitterness, resentment and pride.

Our culture is dominated by and celebrates the misfit.  Clearly most misfits do not turn into gunmen attacking children.  The misfit is made in the image of God too, a created being.  It is a long downward journey to reach the point of nihilistic evil reached by the transgender gunman.  Nonetheless there is a spectrum here of the spiritual state of the isolated and atomised social outcast.

And the social outcast himself is a consequence of the diabolical disintegration of the community in Western civilisation.  Atomisation is the cultural trajectory of our dying civilisation, which has turned its back on collective and spiritual tradition.  Community is a relational society where humans are persons, not individuals, who live interrelated through church and family and community.  The powerful in our society, the liberal elite, has deliberately worked to dismantle this.  Since the Second World War the speed of this intentional disintegration gathered pace.  Now social and cultural disintegration was seen as the antidote to Fascism.  Homosexuality was legalised, as was abortion and popular culture was manipulated to develop a lack of tradition or hierarchy or respect - all seen as authoritarian traits.  In art the CIA promoted degenerate artists who created abstract and idiosyncratic masturbatory self expression.  Meanwhile architecture was redesigned to dehumanise and break down beauty, so the morale of the human being would be spiritually crushed as a result of ugliness in the environment.  This cultural degeneration groomed the misfit, alienated from family, religion and community.  These misfits, socially outcast, unable to feel true empathy exist in a Satanic hubris of resentment.  If not reaching the extreme of suicide or murder or both, they seethe in their resentment hating their family, investigating Satanism and in the school system being bullied and rejected.  He resents being outcast, but fails to understand why he is rejected.

In the West the latest stage in the cultural revolution was the idea of woke.  This was said to be an awareness and consciousness of the intersectionality of oppression.  It manifested as a weird alliance of racial minorities and social misfits, usually trapped in perverted sexual identities.  Movements such as BLM and the Pride promotion of LGBT are specific movements founded and promoted by woke ideology.  

This is in a way a subtle twisting of the Christian message.  Christ urges us to care for the outcast, but the deceptive move in the woke movement is to celebrate the fallen identity rather than the potential to be transfigured into the full stature of Christ.  Woke leaves people in their perversions and confusions and teaches that the fallen place is to be celebrated.  This is the ideology of affirmation of the misfit who seethes in his resentment and often in his sexual deviance.

Self-regarding compassion can be deeply misguided.  It is the equivalent of giving your son a snake when he asked for a fish.  The over-emphasis on individual self-realisation means we do not steer the misfit away from his poison, but tell him to keep drinking deeply.  It tells the misfit to live in a state of pride not humility and repentance.

The misfit is then the ultimate expression of individualism.  He is abused by the group,  but is so alienated can feel no empathy himself.  He is the victim of liberalism as it traps him in his passions, but he takes pride in his passions.  He resents the idea of any authority and worships none but himself.

We read in Dostoevsky’s Demons where the misfit finds himself.  Kirillov, thinking he has achieved the state of the man-god through self realisation is exploited by a ruthless revolutionary to commit suicide as cover for a revolutionary murder. He has got into this mess because he consciously rejected the humble acceptance of the God-Man Christ and instead wished himself to be the god-man through the self asserting act of suicide.  

And this is what the alienated misfit thinks.  He rejects the God-Man, Christ, for himself and his own self-realisation.  Perhaps, most likely, he was once vulnerable, but his inability to fit in with his fellow men turns him to resentment not humility.  He falls more and more deeply into self-obsessed loathing of the world.  He chooses to live how he wants in contravention of societal norms and in a campaign of revenge.  Here we can detect the spiritual zeitgeist of the times - Crowley’s “do what thou wilt”.  As a rejected person this reduced individual gains his only sense of self from his resentment and his assertion of his own will.

What then?  Most do not end up at the final point of shooting innocent children at prayer.  That though is the final nadir of the atomised individualism that our degenerated culture celebrates in its distortion of its founding Christian ethos.  Our society is run by the empowered misfit, be that the transgender man demanding to enter women’s toilets or the homosexual demanding they too should marry as if man and woman.  Normal people live in fear of being hateful, when to hope for something better for our fellow Man, our brothers and sisters is not hate at all.

We must understand that this was always where our culture and society would end up, once we became secular.  Once our society began to aim at a reformed and progressive society rather than patiently waiting for all to be put right at the Eschaton the traits of Babel would appear, and even Sodom and Gomorrah.   Focused as we are on the here and now we became obsessed with secular notions of justice, unable to conceive of the transformative and life-fulfilling power of redemption.  So instead we focused on codified rights that emphasised the reduced individual.  Ideas of the telos of virtue or renouncing sin began to be seen as oppressive rules.  Instead we sought a revolutionary society of freedom.  What has resulted from this right to pursue our own happiness is a tragic alienation and anomie expressed throughout our society and at its most extreme point in the form of the transgender gunman killing children as the children acknowledge in humility and prayer the higher power of God.

Restoring the Paragon

 Our equalising and resentful culture despises the paragon.  While for two thousand years the West has understood we are flawed and fallen, we now live in an age where virtue itself is pilloried.  We are taught heroism and sanctity are fake, unattainable and are just a cloak for hypocrisy.  As a result exemplarity and virtue are turned om their head.  And we instead condone personal vice, immorality and loss of innocence, while demanding adherence to superficial and schematic ideological programmes as though that is where virtue lay.

Our ruling class is deeply afraid of the concept of virtue as much as it is of beauty.  Just as our streets are filled with ugly modern architecture so our stories and entertainment celebrate so-called liberation through moral degeneracy and confusion.  To question this is to be at best prudish but more likely it is seen to be judgemental, intolerant and hateful.  We once were taught to hate sin and hate evil.  Today hate itself is the only sin, by which our ruling class often means opposing the lifestyles of those it wishes us to celebrate.  People though were once wiser.  They were able to distinguish between sin and sinner.  As Saint John of Kronstadt put it:  "Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is within him."

Today though we most certainly live in confusion about Man as the Imago Dei.  Man defiled, lost and fallen is celebrated.  He is no longer recognised as the imago Dei who has something precious that can be marred by sin.  Loss of innocence is regarded as gaining important life experience.  In a culture of hedonism trying the forbidden fruit is to be commended as a sort of personal development.  And this error rests in the first error of losing the sense of Man as the imago Dei and this proceeds from the campaign that those who run our society have worked on with an extraordinary assiduousness to the point of fanaticism to convince us God does not exist and religion is an oppressive force of the past.  And our masters have been aided in their agenda by liberal clergy who sadly never take a stand but instead give a Christian tone to the secular shibboleths that secular Man is so obsessed with as a compensation for his renunciation of personal virtue in favour of political correctness.

Such a framework cannot allow paragons.  If anyone overcomes their passions they are a threat to a society based on hedonism and self indulgence.  The woman who chooses to struggle bringing up a child alone strikes fear in the hearts of those who promote killing the child in the womb - such a woman must be discredited as a slave of the patriarchy.  The man who seeks a girl who has maintained her innocence is ridiculed and attacked as a shameless and controlling misogynist.

Paragons, male and female, are a serious threat to the system, a system that rests on control by enslaving us to our appetites and passions.  This is why sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, female hyper-sexualisation, no-fault divorce and same- sex marriage are promoted - to attack Christian virtue and to enslave us to our weaknesses and appetites.  By contrast, to inspire people to be better, to follow an ascetic spirit is dismissed in popular culture with zeal and rigorous enthusiasm, because such a spirit must never be permitted to revive.  

Men enslaved to their appetites are easy to suppress.  It is why Israel beamed pornography onto television stations in Rafah.  It is why Hollywood promotes God-less ways of life as though about freedom, not enslavement.  When a man loses his integrity and his sense of his own virtue he loses his own self respect and cannot resist the emasculating oppression by our corrupted political class.

We can see that this way of thinking goes back to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno's description of the authoritarian personality.  He feared the strength of the man who could exercise sexual restraint as a dangerous political force nigh impossible to control.  Such thinking has fed into the way popular culture manipulates us to become morally loose and unable to master ourselves with integrity.  

And this is why the landscape of the Western city is a multicultural and atomised place with Pride parades taking place on streets of dystopian and anti-human architecture.  The alternative is a restoration of traditional values in traditional and rural communities.  Yes we are fallen, but through prayerful connection with God men can again become virtuous, even holy.  For such men women will keep themselves pure.  For such men gangs of people hostile to our culture will no longer have the temerity and the contempt for us to attack us.  A culture of virulence and virtue would not have turned a blind eye on the grooming gangs.

A culture that has a sprit of asceticism will not be made up of people easy to manipulate either in terms of their behaviour or their political thoughts.  Far more important than the temporal political benefits though would be the preservation of our humanity, that gift from God and furthermore the transfiguration from our fallen state into a redeemed existence.  And this is where one realises the stakes are even higher.  Our eternity is under threat.  If politicians and multinational capitalists have selfish and cowardly interests in degrading us, there is a far more serious matter in question.  

Baudelaire once said that the Devil's greatest trick was convincing men that he did not exist.  As we arrogantly live impure lives, manipulated not only by Hollywood and liberal politicians, we are also manipulated by Satan himself.  He has his own game - to steal from us our eternal future he has shut himself off from due to his incorrigible pride.  Enviously he wants to degrade the image of God in each one of us.  He wants us to sleep around, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, to be lured into more deviant sexual practices, to live for money, to work for a usurious system.  The politicians and film makers and media class and global capitalists are in this sense just his tools.  They only seek to emasculate and enslave us in this world.  But there is a far more serious threat and it is the prize of our souls and their eternal future.

For this reason virtue and asceticism must be rediscovered.  We must again strive to be paragons and no longer live for hedonism.  We must realise we were made in His image and that by Christ there is a way back to the restoration and transfiguration of our state.  We must therefore look to paragons of virtue and ourselves strive against our fallen nature, to be saints.  In so doing we will also find we are rebuilding the traditional society. 

Resisting Progress

 It is an article of faith and a hidden presumption of the secular West that progress is real and that it is an unqualified good.  Modernisation is a necessity it is taught and must be imposed.  Resistance is reactionary and morally suspect.  It was modernity though that produced totalitarianism, environmental exploitation, loss of the sacred, nihilism and anomie.  Progress then makes a totalitarian demand that is imposed on us, regardless of what of value is sacrificed to facilitate this.  Value is the main loss, quality is neglected for the sake of quantity.

From Heidegger to Guenon, Leontiev to Weaver, very different thinkers have challenged the unquestioning faith in progress as a force for good.  We have seen the secularisation of belief and the enframement by technology.  As much as we recognise benefits such as ease and efficiency, the eradication of disease and the increase in comfort we must realise we have in a sense become disconnected from authentic existence.

A key factor is quantification, whereby everything is measured and reduced to data.  This mathematical process is reductive, it always leaves a remainder - that remainder is quality, which cannot be accounted for by the modern mind.  Quality is therefore dismissed as merely subjective.  The Platonic triad of the Good, the True and the Beautiful once having transcendental authority and meaning is now reduced to mere preference and idiosyncratic tastes of the atomised individual.

This shift to quantification of existence leads to atomisation be that via Marxist Socialism or free-market capitalism.  Value has to be measured and therefore all that counts is a materialist assessment.  This is reductive and anti-spiritual.  It also means that whatever we attempt to measure we cannot take into account the true spiritual value of the quality.

So the real process is one of disintegration whereby hierarchies and organic connections are dissolved into individual atomised and dislocated units.  This degeneration is justified both in terms of a positivist scientific process and a political achievement of liberation and equality.  Liberation though means dislocation and equality means the destruction of uniqueness found in the traditional and organic hierarchies of human society.  In economics all that is measured is the data of productivity, so purpose and activity occur on the basis of consumerism, not principles.  Hedonism becomes the only purpose, replacing asceticism and sacrifice.  This is the totalising event of modernity.  It turns us all into identical units driven by passions and appetites.  The only value is material quantity.

A key turning point was the development of nominalism by William of Ockham, whereby universals were rejected and only the particular was regarded as valid.  The connection with the realist tradition back to Plato was broken and the march of modernity through meaning and telos was initiated.  With the Renaissance and the release of occult and kabbalistic theories from fallen Constantinople, a further turn brought complementary ideas of manipulation and magic as power over reality.  Modernity developed further in hubris and the infatuation with technological progress and political revolution grew more.

Modernity, the dream of the Enlightenment and the revolution is the reduction of human existence, the loss of the spiritual level and the separation from our ancestors.  Modernity then kills the value of human civilisation. 

The resistance to progressive disintegration must be a focus on a return to the sacred, the hierarchical, the meaningful, the telos and at an overarching level the transcendental Logos.  This return to the Logos is not to be misinterpreted as reductive rationalism, but in a rediscovery of transcendental meaning and overall a structured and purposeful cosmos. This is then in reality a reinvigoration of our civilisation and culture by a reassertion of what Saint Vincent of Lerins described as Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus. Progress, by contrast, has meant disintegration and reduction and the atomisation of the human being whether as a self-interested rational actor or an egalitarian member of international sameness, disconnected from tradition, heritage and culture.  We cannot continue on this path of quantification and disintegration.

The Bishop Fish and the Spaghetti Monster

 On the cusp of the modern age, in the twilight of the Medieval era, a figure seeming to have emerged from the margin of a manuscript was caught by fishermen and presented to the King of Poland - a fish that seemed to wear something like the vestments of a bishop.  This novelty was a great delight to the King, but when his bishops met the fish it indicated its desire to be freed.  The episcopate prevailed upon their monarch who reluctantly released the fish.  On its return to the sea it turned back and made a sign of the cross over those who released it.

This strange folk tale is clearly about a liminal figure, with the characteristics of absurdity and the monstrous one might expect to emerge from the sea.  And yet does it reveal the arbitrariness of the late Medieval Catholic faith?  Is not the bishop fish something like the arbitrary caricature of a deity reminiscent of the new atheists’ spaghetti monster, which was created to indicate the arbitrary absurdity of a world governed by a divine Logos rather than chaos.

The spaghetti monster is propaganda for the case that religious faith is arbitrary and a random belief.  In one sense the Bishop Fish is both absurd and arbitrary.  He emerges just as the world of Medieval symbolism is breaking down and nominalism is about to gain a hold over the European mind.  Nominalism being that theological perspective that asserted God as free and therefore arbitrary.  America is about to be discovered and the world proved to be round.

We can better understand this seemingly arbitrary figure through the work of the Pageau brothers, who make the case for the meaning and coherence of Medieval and Ancient symbolism.  The marginal figure is indeed absurd because he represents the edge of and the limit of order.  Jonathan Pageau has pointed to the gargoyles on the edge and outskirts of the church building, otherwise designed to follow a very exact and non-arbitrary hierarchical order, from the chancel to the nave.  It is on the edge that symbolism breaks down.  The monsters are found on the edge of the world.

From a traditional religious standpoint a character as arbitrary as the spaghetti monster would only be found in the liminal space - the edge of the world, the ocean.  It points to the new atheist misunderstanding of religious faith in that traditional religion is an assertion of the order and structure of reality and the claim that reality is not arbitrary.  Indeedin our postmodern times,  the materialist’s world quickly breaks down into flux, with nothing transcendent to hold its structure together.

But the Bishop Fish is not simply liminal.  He has the authority to give a blessing.  In this sense he is more like the strange Orthodox icons of Saint Christopher depicted with a dog’s head (a favourite figure of Jonathan Pageau).

Surely what we see in the figure of the Bishop Fish is the order of the Logos through the Church giving meaning and structure even to the chaotic realm of the sea - formless and churning.  One is reminded of the beginning of Genesis - And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The Logos speaks order and form into the dark void of the deep.  And a bishop who is also a fish might just symbolise the domain of the Logos over the watery chaos.  And the Logos operates upon the world through His Apostolic Church.  A bishop is an authority of the Church, a fish is a strange and monstrous creature, living under water, without legs or arms, existing in a dark and uninhabitable place.  The combination has meaning, it is not arbitrary.

Is this just a story to illustrate the invisible God’s authority over the void?  Perhaps, on the cusp of modernity, there is even more to this strange figure.  And here one risks inviting the ridicule of the New Atheist.  It is about perception.  In the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Century we are at the final waning of the Medieval mind that was able to perceive differently, perhaps perceive more holistically than our nominalist and empirical senses of modernity.

The Medieval man, much like the ancient and classical man existed in a more full world, symbolic and rich with meaning.  Everything pointed to God, as we find in the work of the last great Medieval voice as modernity corroded all around him - Dante Alighieri and his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy.  Nothing was random or arbitrary; nothing represented the meaningless and random combination of the Spaghetti Monster’s characteristics.  

In this symbolic world there was a heightened perception of reality and that which is not palpable.  The highest faculty was the mind or the nous - itself invisible and intangible.  The ultimate aspiration was the heavenly realm.  At the same time the immaterial soul was entirely embodied in physical Creation that was good and, though fallen, pointed to God.  There was nothing at all arbitrary about the ancient or Medieval worlds.  And we still hold onto much of that immaterial realm, bar the transcendental principle of God upon which these aspects depend - logic, morality, that the cosmos is governed by consistent principles (the Christian idea at the root of science, because empiricism would be meaningless unless rules discovered held and did not change the next day).

Everything in the cosmos pointed to the glory of its immaterial and spiritual Creator.  The chasm between Creator and creature was bridged by the Incarnation of the Godhead in the physical reality of Jesus Christ in First-Century Palestine.

It was therefore possible to perceive the world and the particular creatures making it up more holistically and see their spiritual meaning.  In that sense it is entirely credible that a strange and exotic deep sea creature might point very clearly to the glory of God.  We now would not be capable of perceiving this, existing in a materialist paradigm.  The fish is described as looking as though it wore bishop’s vestments, not actually wearing vestments.  And in this almost-modern world those who reference this folk tale express some scepticism.  Nonetheless, when creatures point to their and our Creator they will do so in the realm of mystery.  It will be subtle and only perceived by the spiritually-attuned.

This bizarre story, in which the fluid realm of the unknown, the liminal, the monstrous and the chaotic is shown to have in some sense ecclesiastical orders is an affirmation of order and structure even in the deep.  It is an affirmation of the universal governance of God through His Logos.

In that sense this strange Bishop Fish is not an assertion of the bizarre, freakish, and laughably superstitious.  No it is an affirmation of the ordering principle of the Logos and the preeminence of the Church as Christ’s body on earth.  In that sense it is the very opposite of not only the Spaghetti Monster, but our world of flux, chaos and nihilism - the world of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin.  A world with no boundaries and no meaning.  And yet we moderns and post-moderns have the temerity and lack of self awareness to mock the Bishop Fish.  Indeed it seems that the Spaghetti Monster is a far more fitting deity for our post-modern world than it would ever have been for Christendom.

The Person or the Individual - conservatism versus liberalism

 The great contradiction within Western conservatism is its focus on individualism.  True and unadulterated conservatism is a collectivist philosophy, not an individualist philosophy.  It is differentiated from Leftist collectivism not through individualism but first in having multiple layers of relational identity rather than reducing identity to one level, such as class or race and secondly in the voluntary element of the collectivist identities, which are based on love, not upon compulsion.

The overlap between classical liberalism and conservatism is not ideological, but pragmatic.  It is best represented by Dr. Jordan Peterson in popular culture, but goes back as far as Edmund Burke the Whiggish father of British conservatism and was politically most effectively implemented by President Reagan and Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher.

Individualism became the shibboleth of conservatism during the Post-war period, under the influence of Friedrich Hayek, a liberal political philosopher, who clearly spelt out his rejection of conservatism in his magnum opus, the Constitution of Liberty, in which he identified himself as a Whig and not a Tory.

At root conservatives and liberals have a different anthropology.  For liberals the human being is an atomistic individual motivated by self interest, for the conservative the human being is a person, defined by his relationships with other people, with traditions and identity.

This fundamentally different starting point explains some of the confusion in the position of the highly popular and influential Dr. Jordan Peterson.  In Thatcherite wording he talks of individual responsibility as being the cornerstone of civilisation.  This fails to grasp that to be in relationships one must be more than a self -interested individual as per Adam Smith or Herbert Spencer.

In misidentifying conservatism Peterson then misidentifies the Left, regarding the modern woke movement as a sort of cultural Marxism, rooted in collectivist identity.  He does not understand that breaking all familial, cultural and historical ties to assert one’s identity is the supremely individualist move.  Yes there are superficial groupings in the world of intersectionality. But these have no collectivist depth and are so superficial as to be a mere coming together of deeply atomised people alienated from all the collective identities they have inherited.

In misdiagnosing the problem, liberal individualists such as Peterson also misdiagnose the solution - it is not more individualism, but a reassertion of all the collective and traditional ties that bind human beings together.  Such ties are the Church, the family, national and ethnic identity, one’s local community, be it town or village.  These are collective identities, although they do not compel via bureaucracy like a Marxist system.

Marx is held up as the arch collectivist and yet much of his philosophy was devoted to the destruction of collective ties as false consciousness leaving only class identity - which would be overcome when everyone would live as liberal individuals in the communist utopia after the temporary collectivism of Socialism.

A conservative solution is not to reduce us to individuals, but to re-establish the hierarchy of the ties that bind.  Individualism emphasises the revolutionary, the atypical, the innovative, but also alienation and selfishness.  Individualism is a threat to conservatism.

If we turn to Greek philosopher theologian Yannaras we can understand that the human being is more than an atomised individual - individual from the Latin for indivisible, essentially a unit - and is rather a person, from the Greek prosopon, which is again related to hypostasis (from the theology of the Greek Fathers).  Just as the Trinity is relational so we in its image are relational and the word prosopon brings with it an emphasis on looking towards others.

Thus who we are is defined by a complex network of identities, not a reduction to an atomised individual.  The individual is the person abstracted from the organic and spiritual reality of life and this concept led to such contractual and reductive understandings of politics such as the social contract following an imagined state of nature and the emphasis on a progress that moves away from that which roots that ground us.

This deep contradiction, which is not a synthesis, can be found in the policies of the Conservative Government of the 1980s, which undertook radical economic reforms that atomised people and alienated them from communities built around the imperfect world of the industrial economy.  The Conservative Government was in part fighting the revolutionary Marxist movement that was controlling the working class through the trade union movement, but used the weapon of liberalism not conservatism to fight that war.  

Margaret Thatcher herself famously said that there is no such thing as society.  In a seeming paradox she went on to contradict herself by caveating that there did exist the social fact of the family, which surely transcends the atomised individual and is the foundation of a cohesive society.  Nonetheless her neoliberal economic policies turned Britain into a country not of communities, but of individuals seeking wealth and material advancement.  This was then to be further progressed by the Blairite Labour Governments that undertook a radical policy of social liberalism thereby further alienating and atomising us, to be taken to the furthest extreme with same-sex marriage under Cameron’s Conservatives - in which marriage became not a social good but a contract of disconnected individuals manifesting their non-communal and non-familial emotions and desires.  Marriage as the complementarity of the genders for social cohesion and the procreation of children was redefined.

The intellectual surrender of conservatism to liberalism, so that the modern Conservative Party is a classical liberal party today has meant the dismantling of British society.  The Left has continued to push not for collectivism, but rather a consumer social society to match consumer economics.  Through a Leftist philosophy of self realisation and autonomy people have alienated themselves from a collective identity seen as oppressive in favour of autonomy and irregular and ad hoc identities.  Such a social trend and such reductive cultural values cannot be resisted by classical liberalism, which has a very weak idea of society.  Now even gender is a consumer choice.

What needs to happen instead is a smashing of the idol of free market economics as an end in itself and the replacement of an anthropology of individualism with a Christian idea of the person - relational, communal and not defined by autonomy but by his traditional society.  In this we should look more to the Church Fathers than the reductive thinkers of liberalism from Locke to Mill.  

What differentiates conservative collectivism from Leftist collectivism is the emphasis on love rather than statist compulsion.  We love our families, we love our countries, we love our God.  This is not a system either of bureaucratic or commercial corporate compulsions. Individuals bereft of collective identities other than the State will find themselves compelled by State and Multinational Employer in a way that the person of enriched and traditional identities cannot be.  

We need a rich understanding of the human being and human culture, not a deracinated and reductive ontology of random and autonomous individuals for whom the demands of relationships and hierarchies are seen as a compromise of identity, whereas they are of course the very framework of our identities - they make us human.

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.