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.