The Tap Root of Western Civilisation

 Even new atheists now are beginning to recognise that the Christian ethos and tradition are what hold the West together and are also a bulwark against the forces of the barbarian and the alien.  It might be too late.  With the ongoing revolution in thought initiated by the Enlightenment, but with dark roots much further back, Western culture has become a vacuum into which forces such as Islamic belief are rushing.  Neither is the West any longer capable of protecting its physical borders.  

Some New Atheists want a cultural Christianity, whereby the transcendental truths of  the Church are mimicked and simulated while we pridefully maintain the claims of the Fall - Man actually neither believes or needs God.  A bit like marrying a person you do not love to have children, ending in divorce, faking religious faith does not work.  People will pick it up as phoney.  This perhaps has been the problem of the liberal Christianity of Western European churches.  And if you simply claim the ethos and the civilisational benefits, you have no justification for doing so, whereas Islam can point to its claimed transcendental justification.  Every culture and civilisation is based upon transcendental claims, albeit prior to the conversion of Rome these pagan metaphysical fundaments of cultures were parochial and culturally located.  With the conversion of the Empire the universal claims of the Church became the tap root of the world empire.

Therefore something changed with the Edict of Milan.  The very reason for persecuting the Church was its universal claim and rejection of local gods.  All of humanity is made in the image of the same God.  The particular and the universal, the problem of the One and the many is solved.  The solution is in the Incarnation.  Sin and death are defeated for all of humanity.  Each person has an eternal future and potential for theosis if they freely accept salvation.

This is the tap root of Western civilisation as well as being a true universal belief.  We can see political liberalism and philosophical humanism as being related to the Church teaching that man is free to choose (Mary's assent to the Incarnation and every free conversion and baptism since) and is made in the image of God and can be transformed into the likeness through Christ.  The problem with the West is that these beliefs rooted in the Church became detached from faith and led to the selfish individualism, the hubristic scientism and the secular vacuity of the modern and post-modern West.

The West has a tap root of the Church, but a cultural inclination to revolution.  Going back as far as the Schism, we see an assertion of rebellion and innovation in the seizure of power by the Papacy and the unliteral alteration of the Nicene Creed.  This seed of revolution would develop through nominalist rejection of universal truths, the fascination with magic and the occult, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and atheistic materialism, leading to the disconnection of Western thought from the transcendent spiralling into the madness of post modernism, deconstruction and existentialism - politically manifesting as wokeness and transgenderism and being further developed by the Silicon Valley demonic genii, trying to find everlasting mortal life in this world.

So we must understand the West as being disconnected from the tap root and this then growing into the deformed revolutionary spirit, promoted by secret societies and political ideologies from Jacobinism to Marxism and Fabianism,  so that the West now can neither defend its civilisation or really knows what its values are - equating them to the Jacobin revolutionary non-values of the revolutionary spirit. 

This tap root though did not only feed and nourish the West.  it nourished the Near East.  The Church emerged from the Middle East through the Greek world.  This is prophesied in John's Gospel, after the Jews reject Christ:

"The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing?  behold, the world is gone after him.  And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.  Philip cometh and telleth Andrew:  and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified."

John 12: 19-23

Just as the Jews reject the Messiah so the Greeks accept him through the preaching of Paul. And the Church Fathers were Greek speakers and educated as Greeks.  Culturally the Church's conquest of Latin Rome through the blood of Christian martyrs was the deep Greek theology winning the Roman Empire.  

That tap root, that first sprouted in Judea, Syria then Greece and also Egypt won the West spiritually.  And yet from 1054 incrementally the West has broken its link to its tap root.  Even the emphasis on Judaeo-Christian culture is a tacit dismissing of the Hellenistic root of the Church, because the Jews rejected Christ and chose political revolution against Rome leading to the destruction of the Temple and the end of Temple Judaism.  Rabbinic Judaism would then emerge defining itself in opposition to the Church.

The result of this revolutionary and political choice to move away from the Church is the secularism and disintegration of the West, making it unable to resist the coming demographic and cultural conquest by Islam.  This is not only demographic.  The West cannot resist the demographic change, but more seriously it has no answer to Islam's transcendental claims.  In the bizarre and topsy turvy world of woke liberalism, where we cannot define a woman and are starting to offer suicide on demand as a service, more people of European origin will find answers in the clear message of Islam.  A religion that offers a political answer without the personal transformation of repentance and theosis.  In the crazy world of the West in freefall from any transcendent sense, Islam will be something people can grab a hold on to save them from the vicious spiral of Western degeneration.  Andrew Tate is a warning.

The West's tap root though presents a very different understanding.  God is triune and the second Person of the Trinity is incarnate.  He only became incarnate through the willingness of Mary to consent, the Mother of God.  Following from this salvation lies not in conquest but a personal assent. Death is defeated and Man has the potential to be transformed into the likeness of God through grace - deification is the gift.  Islam rejects this entirely and cuts us off from the salvation offered.  If the second Person of the Trinity does not become fully man, then man cannot be saved.  It must be full incarnation.  As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus put it: "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved."

So if the West rejects its own degeneracy and begins to be transformed by Islam, thinking it has reached transcendental truth, it will be further cut off from salvation.   Liberalism, New Atheism, secularism might soon look more like a stage, clearing the ground for the final conquest of the West and the complete detachment from its tap root.  Through its revolutionary zeal the West will have brought about its end.  The Church remains, but Western civilisation, like the First Century Jews, has chosen political revolution over salvation. 

The Final Stage of the Revolution - technocrats, occultists, elites and sexual rights.

 

 

Western Churches in their rather ineffectual and half-hearted attempt to resist the sexualisation of our society (sometimes turning into their full abject surrender to the agenda) are often accused of being obsessed by sex.  Of course the real problem for the churches is they are trying to survive and perhaps even rescue the sinners in an age dominated by sexualisation.  It is becoming all the more apparent that in the 1960s there was not so much a social and sexual revolution as a major project in social engineering directed by elites in power.

The CIA now acknowledges its own involvement in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with the MK Ultra project encouraging drug usage and in other manipulation with the promotion of abstract art against traditional forms, by supporting artists such as Jackson Pollock, or in promoting radical politics such as backing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In terms of drug usage, sexualisation of society and feminism it seems highly likely the CIA was generally involved. Ostensibly this was to present a Western society as “free” and avante garde in contrast to the Soviet Union’s oppressive restrictions and its Soviet realism in art.  While the early USSR had been extreme in its social progressivism after the Revolution, this changed during the Great Patriotic War.  Stalin, party to the original social liberalisation, recognised to win the War and defeat the Nazi threat he needed to give people access to their churches again, bring a halt to abortions and homosexuality and restore some level of traditional values again.  For pragmatic reasons, the Soviet Union had dispensed with the path to moral degeneracy; in a couple of decades time, the West fully embarked upon moral degeneracy during the 1960s.

There was perhaps more to it than merely a good propaganda opportunity to present the United States as the land of the free.  On both sides of the Atlantic, elite intellectuals shared certain progressive ideals often meant to be achieved by sinister methods.  Eliminating religious faith, sexual liberation, feminism, eugenics and an all-powerful State were the ideals of the Transatlantic elites.  Important families -  the Rockafellas, the Rothschilds, the Huxleys, the Darwins were part of an elite linked to progressivism.  The Fabian idea of a slow technocratic revolution promoted by the Webbs, H G Wells’ vision of a new world, Betrand Russell’s dry atheism, all were complementary to each other in an overarching elite and anti-Christian idea of progress.  Valiant opponents spoke out such as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis via his novels, even George Orwell from a non-traditional perspective.  What is sometimes overlooked is the fascination with the occult sitting alongside commitment to atheism and a religious scientism amongst these elites.  Secret societies were popular.  There was undoubtedly an elite agenda following in the tradition of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, secret societies and the French and American Revolutions.

It is important to understand that atomisation and Socialist Revolution go hand in hand.  The real technocratic Socialism of Wells, Mr and Mrs Webb or Russell, rather than the small s socialism of a Schumacher.  And we should not be too distracted by Socialism, an ideology that has probably served its purposes – one of which was to violently destroy Holy Rus and another to achieve a type of Benthamite panoptican.  An obsession with free love, population control and elite power were the Babel preoccupations of the Western elites at the beginning of the last Century.  A brave new one- world government would be achieved by the elites managing the talking monkeys (a degraded view of Man and rejection of Man as the imago dei).

Combined with this were to come structural economic changes that created an opportunity to implement the final revolution.  As capitalism moved from its Fordist stage which had been aided by social engineering to replace the extended family by the nuclear family, the capitalists in the late Twentieth Century now needed dislocated individuals, they needed women in the workplace and a certain cosmopolitan rootlessness as capitalism in the West became global, factories moved abroad, migrants were brought in as labour.   In the Post War era manufacturing’s time in the West was limited.  It was not only militant unions that destroyed industry.

Throughout the sixties Governments still obviously dominated by liberal elites passed laws that “liberated” or atomised us.  Instead of living a life in a context of traditional values and responsibilities we were encouraged by legal changes and engineered popular culture to think what was good was what was pleasurable and aided my passions and appetites.  Homosexuality and abortion were legalised.  Divorce was made easy.  In America elite liberals had pushed for the creation of an effective contraceptive to break people from the responsibilities of child bearing (an early transhumanist move). This further facilitated the shifting of women out of the family home and into the workplace, usually into lowly jobs trying to find money for childcare.  Racial hatred laws were introduced for what would be the inevitable future multiculturalism of an increasingly global capitalism based on shifting cheap labour from poorer countries into richer countries.  They would be a means to prevent discontent boiling over in the face of mass migration.  Whatever the merits of such laws, they were drafted with an eye on the plans for the future.   

Most central to everything was the sexual relationship.  If the most personal and sacred encounter between two people, the act at once most intimately physical and spiritually unifying could be extracted from the sacramental union of marriage and taken out of the family home and was no longer between two spouses, but rather made casual, then alienation and atomisation would be achieved.  The powerful elites, with their occultist interests and their Darwinian reduction of men to mere intelligent apes saw the power of sexual desire.  If taken off the yoke of social taboos unrestrained sexual desire would create a new race who could never really connect, who were driven by their passions, which they felt it was their right to sate.  Harm between persons and distrust would turn us into the isolated individuals subject to anomie and self-loathing, but preoccupied with our rights, and the technocrats knew they would be able to control people thus demoralised.  We would become exactly the sort of alienated and isolated individuals that would be passive in the face of an ever encroaching progressive system.  Furthermore if deviant relationships could be promoted, the family would be undermined, the greatest bulwark as Chesterton pointed out against the oppressive State.

Another development was in the elite’s favour – the invention of television.  The visual image is far more powerful than the spoken word of radio (already a propaganda tool).  Serials with popular characters were written pulling at the heart strings to make radical changes in what was socially acceptable achievable.  The social revolutionary themes of freemason Mozart’s operas entered popular culture with narratives of oppressive patriarchs being ridiculed.  The propaganda would develop to actively promote what was once seen as taboo in sitting rooms across the country, via that glowing, talking box.  With the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s role television could be used to push boundaries of taboos until unwittingly a conservative society would become liberal.  In America former propagandist Edward Bernays had already utilised the social-engineering potential of advertising.

And so the elites who long planned this seem to have achieved their goal.  The bread and circuses of entertainment, sexual promiscuity, LGBT, and the impact of feminism have all helped towards Malthusian goals of population reduction.  People are unable to think as they focus on consumption.  Churches are in decline.  Marriage is in decline.  These are the very aims of those Occultist progressives at the start of the Century.    What is more they cannot tolerate the survival of any foreign government not fully on board with the revolution of “liberation”.  International tensions are therefore escalated to pressurise countries to abandon not only economic freedom from debt to globalist institutions, but also their traditional values.  Western NGOs are often focused not only on protecting human beings from oppressive regimes, but more on promoting the new subverted values of the revolutionary West.  So much so that the six-coloured banner of LGBTQ+ has come to be seen as a flag of globalist imperialism in many non-Western countries.

The “rights” of sexual freedom, from heterosexual promiscuity to LGBT are now being used to increase the reach of the Panoptican, so that speech is suppressed if it makes a case for a return to traditional values.  The surveillance system via the State and Big Tech is the other side of the revolutionary coin to the “rights” rhetoric.  And so in the name of freedom not only have we been enslaved to our passions and appetites, isolated and atomised, but we have lost the freedom to speak out and question the agenda imposed by long-established families and secret societies that are in their deepest beliefs hostile to God, the Church and Tradition.

Anointed Monarchs versus the veiled republic of oligarchs

 This weblog began some years ago with an article on the importance of anointing in the English Coronation service.  The precedent is Biblical – just as the kings of Israel of times yore were anointed with oil, so too our kings and queens.  Soon another coronation will be upon us with the crowning of King Charles III.  This great celebration inevitably following upon the sad loss and national bereavement of our longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation service formed the subject of the very first article on “A Voice From the Shires”.

With the falling asleep of Queen Elizabeth II and the imminent anointing and crowning of King Charles, it seemed a fitting moment to revisit the topic of monarchy.  One can see from the public reaction to the falling asleep of the abdicated king of Greece that monarchy holds a deep meaning for peoples even after official abolition – however much on paper the correct processes were followed to create a republic.

Monarchy is the most human of governmental institutions.  It is based both upon a connection with the transcendent and personal relationship.  It is the retold and accepted story of modern history that we shifted from monarchy, rule of the one, to democracy, rule of the people.  This is considered within our current paradigm to be a story of benign progress.  What our paradigm of thought fails to consider is that all that Weber categorised as the irrational and inexplicable is actually the most human aspect of our civilisation.  Within that seemingly irrational realm is faith, loyalty to an anointed monarch, folk culture, high culture – all that is not procedural or bureaucratic.  Most significantly a bureaucratic society cannot reach to or aspire to the transcendent.  The Transcendent is that which is beyond analysis and categorisation.  It is understood rather through tradition and revelation, without being contrary to logic – it is super-logical or over and above the rational.

History is only going in one direction because the oligarchies of the globe ensure it.  There is no natural law that means a breaking down of tradition and “modernisation” of systems is inevitable or better.  Only because he thinks within a limited paradigm can Sir (knighted by a monarch) Keir Starmer describe the House of Lords as “indefensible”.  What if we had permitted the restoration of the monarchy in Yugoslavia or Afghanistan?  Perhaps much bloodshed might have been averted because of the inspirational and unifying charism of monarchy.

In trying to get around this conundrum, this loss of the higher by reducing to the procedural, the English utilitarians thought they had an answer.  The liberal English journalist Walter Bagehot who wrote in the Nineteenth century for what today remains the voice of liberalism, the Economist newspaper, suggested the concept of the “veiled republic”.  He divided government into its efficient and dignified functions.  The efficient side of the constitution was the functional and bureaucratic part, which actually ran the country.  On the other side was the dignified part of the constitution, which included the monarchy, the ceremony, the ritual.  From his secular liberal perspective the dignified also had a function – to veil the English republic and to instil affection in British citizens for the apparent kingdom to which they felt they belonged.  While Bagehot believed utilitarianism worked, he acknowledged that it did not inspire or create affection in men’s hearts.

What though if we step outside the secular liberal paradigm and instead ask the question what if the coronation as a sacrament were a true sacrament?  And what if, instead of adopting a Protestant reductionism, we recognised the existence of an anointed monarch as an iconic participation in the divine rather than an idolatrous distraction from God?  Everything if perceived incorrectly can become an idol, but everything when viewed correctly points to God.

We would then be able to understand the power of Royalty as something real, not a deceptive veil pulled across the drab reality.  Ever since the Enlightenment the Western mind has been trained to imagine that there is something behind the tradition, something base and mechanical or an abuse of power.  We have become incapable of recognising that many parts of life are not a base trick, but instead point to a higher reality, something better, something even more true and something even more beautiful.

Of course the man who is crowned is a mere fallen mortal, but he participates through his holy and sacramental anointing in something higher than himself.  He is a bridge to the eternal.  This is why from the British monarch to the Emperors of the Byzantine Empire, there was something sacred about monarchy.  Before too in pagan times the Roman Emperor was actually recognised as a deity.  Christian faith put this right, placing the monarch in an anointed role, but no longer divine himself.

This is the reason for the Royal “we” as the monarch refers both to himself and the higher entity to which he belongs not from merit but through a sacrament of anointing.

From Weber to Bagehot an unremitting message is enforced.  Reality is reduced to the processes, the bureaucracy, but on the other side, everything that seems to participate in the good, the true and the beautiful is irrational and merely a veil across the base facts.

This though is not convincing if we step outside of the secular-liberal paradigm.  Anointed monarchy is personal not a rigid system.  Monarchy is a living and breathing institution, based not on abstract rules and processes, but personal relationship and history.  The Monarch is the father of the people, the government is based upon bloodline and the realm thereby is a family.

Such a system raises alarm bells for the modern secularist.  Comes to mind the arbitrary rule of a James II or Ivan Grozny.  And yet historians now seriously question the Whig account of James Stuart’s rule.  Religious toleration and resistance to a narrow-minded and Protestant oligarchy is perhaps a more accurate understanding.  Even in Russia there are moves afoot to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible’s memory and some even call for his canonisation.  Unlike Henry VIII who stripped religion bare (to whom he is often compared) he was of real significance in achieving Moscow’s status as the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople.

We must remember as the cliché goes, the victors write the history.  And those victors of the “Glorious Revolution” in England could have just as easily been the corrupt oligarchs of the Seventeenth Century, just as today traditional institutions are attacked by the men of Davos.

Two of the most arbitrary rulers were of course the first two Tudor kings, who attacked commonweal and Church.  While they were anointed and crowned correctly, Henry Tudor was an usurper and not only did he exhibit miserliness, but his line under his son and Thomas Cromwell would bring forward a modern and more bureaucratic system eliminating the age of chivalry last symbolised by Richard III and his gallant and brave falling at Bosworth.

The anointing might have taken place, but it was based upon lies and thereby we see the danger of illegitimate power.  Monarchy works because the fallen man participates in the meaning of his anointing and is able thereby to transcend his compromised nature.  He then rules as a father of his nation, just as Nicholas II was determined to do, even abdicating to protect his subjects and finally achieving martyrdom at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

And France too is evidence of what the removal of a Christian Monarch can unleash.  The horror of the guillotine and the cruel and inhuman suppression of the Royalist-peasant uprising in the Vendee are the result of revolution in the name of progress and reason.  The successful revolutionaries, it must be remembered, first attacked faith and even paraded a statue of the female personification of Reason in a horrible parody of the Mother of God.

From the Vendee to the modern Greek public there is a supra-rational recognition of a truth of the link between them and a ruler anointed through Christian ritual as part of a family that has a right to rule.  And very powerfully was this demonstrated by the many who filed past the coffin of the late Queen Elizabeth, lying in state in Westminster Hall.  This was of course inexplicable to the new elites in this country who are cosmopolitan people of nowhere.

Faith in the transcendental God is vital to good monarchy.  To go further faith in an Incarnate God facilitates and promotes true and good Monarchy  There is always the risk of a fallen monarch who no longer fulfils his telos.  The alternative though is a compromise with man’s fallenness – a bureaucratic system that always plans for the worst in human nature.  It protects us, but prevents us reaching the heights.  It no longer allows for aspiring to virtue, only mediocrity.

Fear of arbitrary government has led to a procedural and bureaucratic existence where Reason remains an idol hostile to loyalty, faith and a Christian teleology for the people.  Or perhaps a certain narrative of the dangers of arbitrary personal rule has been used and exploited for a power grab by the oligarchs from whom monarchs were supposed to protect their subjects.

PROGRESS - THE MODERN IDOLATRY

What is very interesting about the typical progressive is their dismissal of religious faith based upon personal revelation and inherited tradition as blind. The ideology of the progressive does not stand up to the sort of scrutiny to which traditional Christianity is continually subjected.  By that ideology I mean the unquestioned premise that the direction of history is towards a positive state and that the new is good by dint of being new.

Such an ideology can be traced back to the Victorian Positivists and further back to the Whiggery of Eighteenth Century England.  The Whigs won the battle of history and wrote history as though it had a providential direction towards the Hanoverian state.  This was taken up as a sort of pseudo-science and spawned the social Darwinism of Spencer, the Dialectical Materialism of Marx and Engels and the liberal assumption that society will become ever-more liberal and ever-more free.  The irony is that such philosophies of blind faith in blind progress have led to persecution, eugenics, concentration camps, class war, the GUlag and the destruction of freedom under the heel of the jack boot of the modern state.

It is to these dangerous roots that the modern Progressive consciously or unconsciously receives the succour for his ideology.  And the key point is that while religious faith is rejected as superstitious and as contradicted by empirical evidence, the Progressive himself places a blind faith in an ever-improving society as state power, censorship and bureaucracy increase, despite the overwhelming lesson of history that from Oliver Cromwell, through to Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler, the radical rejection of inherited society in favour of state-enforced progress has led to misery for countless millions.  From the French Terror to the millions dead in Ukraine from the collectivisation of farms, this blind and superstitious faith in progress has led to misery.

At root is the heresy often criticised by the late Seraphim Rose, the American convert from atheism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity - the heresy of Chiliasm.  That heresy was the belief that God's Kingdom could be created on earth, by political action.  Like so many heresies it moves away from orthodoxy by only the slightest degree, yet the consequences of the original error increase exponentially, so the last state is far worse than the first.  The second commandment of loving one's neighbour is distorted to create an ultimate solution for all our neighbours even at the expense of love of God.  The result has always been and always will be misery.  Utopia on this earth is impossible and to achieve it shows a lack of genuine faith and instead a dangerous blind faith in the inevitability of progress resulting from political action.

The answer to this serious error in Western thinking is to view society as being better or worse depending upon how much it participates in Truth.  This then removes the philosophical error of assuming history is going in one direction.  Further, rejecting this premise makes us aware of the danger of decline and decadence, and helps us to look for ways to maintain and achieve human flourishing through inherited wisdom.

Man lives a more flourishing life the closer he conforms to Truth, not as a result of being more modern or forward thinking.  This living life in a full and flourishing way can appear reactionary or old-fashioned - for example living life in the vocation of a husband and father or housewife and mother.  It can also be progressive, but not for the sake of being progressive.  William Wilberforce did not fight slavery through an appeal to abstract theory or the demands of progress; he fought and defeated slavery by an appeal to the internal and inherited traditions of Western civilisation - Christian values.  One might say Judaeo-Christian values when one thinks of the emphasis in the Old Testament on God freeing His people from slavery to a human master in the form of Pharaoh.

It is quite simply shallow to place one's faith in an ill-defined concept of progress.  We need to ask rather, does this social or political reform bring us closer to or further from the Truth?  An idea of progress for the sake of progress cannot help here.  We cannot know whether a change is for good or bad unless we turn to inherited tradition and personal faith (if these two work against each other something is very wrong with a civilisation and culture).

To give a specific example, there is a lot now said about the role of the male gender in a society.  The aggressive assaults upon our cultural understanding of what it is to be a male role model by the feminist ideologues has confused many.  They have conflated men when they fail, are violent, drunk or purposeless with the Gentleman.  The Gentleman is close to the Truth, tracing his antecedents in the idea of the Christian Knight, that civilised savage, courteous and true, yet strong and brave. To be fully-developed as a man is to look back to that inherited wisdom, which taught men to use their superior physical strength to defend the weak.  To avoid degenerating into a brute men should not be emasculated, but fulfil their potential as Gentlemen.  Here then we see that looking back enables us to reach closer to the Truth, as opposed to the confused situation resulting from progressive ideologies such as feminism.  When men behave as gentlemen it will be far more difficult for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world to misbehave - their behaviour would reveal them as cads because of the stark contrast with a social norm of chivalry. Our current progressive and socially-liberal milieu allowed cads and scoundrels to pass unnoticed for many years.

Progress as an idea is a false and shallow chimera.  It is superstition and nothingness.  It is far more irrational than faith placed in a personal God, discovered in personal revelation through the institution and inherited traditions of the Church. The progressive really should stop projecting their own flimsiness in their faith upon those who follow a deep, prescriptive and traditional religion.  The empirical evidence is clear, a belief in Utopia rather than Heaven has caused the greatest levels of misery in history, while those social reforms that have endured - equality under the law, the abolition of slavery, political freedom all rest upon an ancient and inherited notion of each man being made in the image of God.

ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEFT

One of the blind spots for the Left is that it is unable to accept it could be a source of bigotry or racism.  The Left is founded on the idea that it not only has different pragmatic and economic solutions, but that to subscribe to certain economic theories makes one morally superior.  The converse is also assumed, that however hard-working or diligent for the country a conservative is, he is morally bad perhaps even evil.  When coming into contact with decent conservatives, to keep their world-view of their moral superiority holding together, the Leftist will create some explanation, such as that this decent person has been fooled into being a conservative and is really Left wing under the surface.

Yet a perusal of history clearly shows that ideas put forward as progressive in every era have been responsible for more deaths, suffering, hatred and poverty than conservatism ever has been.  From 

Robespierre’s Terror to the Stalinist Gulags, to the economic catastrophe that is Socialist Venezuela (so admired by the current leader of the British Labour Party) it is the Left that has been the political movement most responsible for human suffering.  Nonetheless, when self-righteousness is the key foundation of one’s political involvement, it is an unthinkable thought that one’s beliefs might be the cause of suffering for the people you claim to help.  Thus begins the search for a scapegoat.  It is impossible for the average Leftist to take moral responsibility without his whole Weltanschauung and idea of himself as morally superior to his contemporaries being fatally undermined.

In the Twentieth Century anti-semitism was more associated with the Right and Jewish involvement in politics tended to be participation in Left wing Marxism.  If Nazism can be regarded as right wing, which is debatable given its anti-conservative, revolutionary and avante garde tendencies, that was of course the most egregious example of right-wing anti-semitism.  On the other hand, as Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the high level of Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik movement was disproportionate in comparison to the number of Jewish Russians.  It is also worth mentioning that the involvement of White Russian emigres seeking revenge through the National Socialist movement in Germany is often overlooked.

Nonetheless, anti-semitism has a far more natural home with the Left.  Despite the terrible suffering of the Jewish people most have refused to give in to a victim status that would seem a natural default position given the extent of persecution.  They have not become passive clients of a Leftist narrative that feeds off resentment.  Of course many black people or other ethnic minorities refuse the resentment narrative fed to the them by White Leftists, but the Jewish refusal to give in to victimhood has been phenomenal and brave.  They have succeeded as a community in keeping their traditions alive (something intolerable to the anti-traditionalist Left) and individual Jews have often reached the very top of Western society, giving the lie to the Leftist narrative that our society is based on oppression, rather than the hierarchies of competence identified by Jordan Peterson.

Therefore there are twofold reasons to choose the Jews as scapegoats for the Left:  first they have refused to be compliant with the Marxist post-modern narrative of oppression by a white Anglo-Saxon protestant-establishment.  Secondly, by succeeding in a capitalist system they have become part of the oppressive conspiracy as set out in Left wing narrative.  The irony is of course that not only Karl Marx, but the founders of post-modernism or cultural Marxism were largely Jewish.  This Left wing involvement by some Jews says more about the experience of lacking roots in a society than it does about Western society itself.  This was of course a very important point for the Jewish Catholic writer and philosopher Simone Weil.

Western culture is fundamentally Christian and that means the Jewish religion and Scripture is a core part of our culture and values.  We are a Judaeo Christian culture and it is that culture that the cultural Marxists, post-moderns and Leftists seek to destroy. 

If Western culture is a conspiracy of the capitalist class against the proletariat, it is a very fine line between making that claim and stepping into a dark conspiracy theory about a certain race that is successful in capitalism being behind globalist neoliberal economics. 

Being anti-conservative, whether as an international or national socialist or a post-modern, is about attacking the fundamental values and the fabric of our Christian culture.  That is why Leftists can make common cause with those attacking traditional gender roles and hard-line Islamists who believe in traditional gender roles.  It is not that these different groups have a shared positive cause, they are simply enemies of the Western inheritance.  The Jews are different – their great sin is to succeed as an ethnic minority in this allegedly oppressive society.  The Left has not achieved a claim over their loyalty necessarily – they are not supplicants to the morally-virtuous Left-wing politicians.  Of course this is a gross generalisation, but we must understand that the Left thinks in gross generalisations.  All the way back to Marx, people are not individual persons, but members of a class.  They are reduced to being part of an oppressor or victim class with their personal attributes erased in the eyes of the ideologue.  That of course is very similar to racism.     

It is therefore a very thin line between accepting the Marxist narrative and slipping into anti-semitism.  In the United States the dominance of intersectional theories of oppression places Muslims as a group above Jews.  The problem of anti-semitism in political Islam is therefore being overlooked.  In the United Kingdom the main Left-of-centre parliamentary party has been taken over by Hard-Left anti-parliamentary economic Marxists.  If you believe capitalism is a conspiracy against the poor, it is a very small step to believing Jews are oppressing the people.  We are already seeing serious problems with anti-semitism in the British Labour Party.  The willingness of the American Democratic party to see and hear no evil with regard to political Islam means they too are starting to turn a blind eye to anti-semitism, despite the party’s strong connections with the Jewish community in the United States.

What all this tells us is that the Left cannot reform or be self-reflective or critical unless it accepts being Left wing is not an infallible sign of moral righteousness.  Most politics is just about the mechanics of achieving economic growth for as many people as possible and ensuring civil society survives.  There are different theories as to how this might be done – from wealth creation and trickle-down economics to redistributive taxation.  The moral choice is not whether one is Left or Right, but whether one participates at all.  As long as there is this blindness about its own moral fallibility, the Left will fail to confront its own festering demons of anti-semitism and bigotry.

WHY MONARCHIES FALL

Today is the anniversary of the brutal regicide of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and the bloody murder of his wife Empress Alexandra (Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter), their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (collectively referred to as OTMA by themselves in family correspondence) and the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexey.  Their murders were brutal, clumsy and bloody.

Another anniversary occurred a couple of days before - the celebration of the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789 - which led to the state murders of King Louis XVI and his Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette.  Burke famously lamented the treatment of the Queen with the following words in his famous Reflections: 

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

Marx despised this passage, which is reason enough for us to take it to heart.  For Marx was the inspiration behind the brutal crime against the Romanovs.  They were killed in the name of his ideology in a basement of their prison in Ekaterinburg and their bodies dumped and an attempt made to dissolve them with acid.  Thus modern regicide hit a new low of depravity.

Solzhenitsyn, the Russian intellectual, saw a direct link between the horrors of the French Revolution and its reign of Terror and the Bolshevik Revolution that tore down his own country's social fabric and hierarchy.

In our own island the British Monarchy remains and continues to hold the respect and love of its subjects.  It survived where others did not and it is often assumed that is because of the pragmatism of British institutions.  The British Monarchy unlike the Russian Autocrat adapted to a constitutional role in a parliamentary-representative democracy.

Yet such an understanding suggests a shallow and positivist perspective of history.  The British Monarchy has not simply survived because it adapted to the Whigs' Glorious Revolution.  Just like the Russian and French Monarchies it is closely associated with the Church and Tradition.  And if Monarchy is to be what it should be, it must retain a connection with transcendental Tradition.

Nonetheless it is true that while that transcendental aspect of Monarchy inspires loyalty and sacrifice, it also makes it a target of those who would flatten out our society with the aim of breaking any connection with the Transcendent.  Yet our own Monarchy is closely linked to the idea of transcendent Tradition and the power of this idea was demonstrated by the impact of the traditional Coronation service upon Queen Elizabeth II.  The anointing with oil within a tabernacle was a sacramental experience for Her Majesty, which has continued to sustain her through the many trials of her reign.

This claim to a divine connection led to attacks upon our own Monarchy.  It faced revolution and suffered regicide as a result of the Civil War.  Charles I approached his death with the stoicism of his Christian faith so that he is still regarded (albeit quietly) as a Martyr of the Anglican Church.  The same progressive and regicidal forces, somewhat moderated later in the Century, ensured after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the Monarchy's powers were curtailed by Parliament, and its survival would be conditional on popular assent, as demonstrated by the lines in our national anthem:

"May she defends our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the Queen"

Yet the Monarchy itself has a place in our hearts and moves us because of its sacred and traditional elements.  This power of Tradition has also shaped Prince Charles' values and idea of vocation.  His Royal Highness has associated himself with perennial and Traditionalist ideas of religion, which has clearly drawn him to orthodox religion of many forms, from his own Greek Orthodox heritage on Mount Athos to traditionalist Islam (which should be distinguished sharply from the revolutionary Islam of the Salafists - unfortunately often misleadingly described as "conservative").

So the British Monarchy does not really fit the Whiggish mould and retains its connection to the transcendent Tradition, albeit less obviously than the Romanovs.  And it was that connection with the transcendent Tradition that meant the Bolsheviks needed to eliminate the Romanovs.  For the revolutionaries believed the Transcendental to be fake and that all could be explained by economics and materialism.  They wanted to break the connection with the Transcendent.

For Tsar Nicholas and his family however, their Orthodox faith was of central importance.  It was for this reason the kindly father and reluctant monarch Nicholas, resisted calls for a full parliamentary-democracy and remained the autocrat.  It was Empress Alexandra's Orthodox faith (combined with her Victorian and Protestant upbringing) that led her to bring up their children un-spoilt and un-corrupted by the decadence of the Russian Court, leading to resentment from the aristocracy.

Often the involvement of Rasputin in the Romanov family is used by secularist historians to point to the superstition of their religious faith and paint it as one of the causes of their tragic overthrow.  Yet this is to take the Bolshevik propaganda at face value and to fail to understand certain important elements of Russian Orthodoxy.

Empress Alexandra was a sincere convert (after initial reluctance) from Lutheranism to the highly Traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church.  A central sacred figure of Orthodoxy is the fool for Christ or yurodivy.  Alexandra became convinced Rasputin was such a figure and furthermore she depended on him because of the love she had for her family.  Only Rasputin had the power to heal her precious son of his haemophilia when the medical doctors could do nothing.  Is the Empress to be found at fault for this?  Rasputin (unlike the Romanovs -declared martyrs by ROCOR and Passion Bearers by the Russian Church) has never been acknowledged by the Orthodox Church, but it is our modern post-Enlightenment mindset that prevents us understanding his importance to the Royal Family.

Just as with the French Monarchy, the Russian Monarchy had to be eliminated in the opinion of those forces that emerged from the Enlightenment.  Monarchy maintained the connection between man and the Transcendent, right back to the early beginnings of our human story.  A Monarchy that has lost this connection, as it can do by becoming secularised or modernised, is no longer a threat to the materialist and anti-sacred agenda of the revolutionaries.  It is no longer a target.  It is therefore of great credit to the the Stuarts, the Bourbons and the Romanovs that they were considered such a threat as to be necessary to murder.  They courageously went to their deaths believing in the divine aspect of the kingly vocation.  To lose this sense is to lose the point of Monarchy.

While our own Royal Family has accommodated itself to modernism in the mixed economy of the British constitution, made up of representative democracy and monarchy as it is, our Queen has maintained the sacred nature of her vocation and this sense of the Transcendent has shaped her reign.  Albeit with his own personal perspective, Prince Charles too is clearly a believer in the Transcendent Tradition.  Yes such an aspect to Monarchy will always provoke the hostility of those who wish to break the connection with the Transcendent in the name of progress, but to lose that Tradition would make the Monarchy purposeless, causing it to degenerate into mere celebrity.

     

The Curious Case of Western Foreign Policy

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been renowned for its expertise on foreign climes and cultures so it really is mysterious why British foreign policy seems currently to be focused on destabilising areas where its interests require stability.  Perhaps the more pertinent question is why American foreign policy is all about making the world more uncertain, when its interests seem to depend on a certain world.  That must be the more pertinent question because to a large extent British foreign policy is a shadowing of American policy.

Indeed the foreign policy of “Old Europe” when independent from the United States, can be best represented by the Congress of Vienna, where British statesman, Lord Castlereagh, was instrumental in ensuring an agreement that secured the existing political establishment and prevented a major European war for a century.  This was an anti-revolutionary and anti-nationalist treaty, which worked in its goal of achieving peace. 

Today the United States take the lead in Western foreign policy and have adopted policies in recent years that have destabilised the Middle East (particularly through the invasion of Iraq) and thereby allowed Islamist extremism to gain a foothold in the region and also given Iran the opportunity to fill the new vacuum.   It was apparent to the most naïve of foreign-policy observers that remove the strongman Saddam Hussein (hideous as he was) and a factional and internecine power struggle between religious groups would result. 

Despite the example of that consequent bloody civil-war, the United States have recently abandoned their ally Hosni Mubarak to a revolution.  This has sent two messages to the world – that the West does not object to revolution as a means of seizing political power and secondly, that it will not stand by those who take the political risk of allying themselves to the West.

This is not to defend the two dictators, Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak; rather, it is to point out that being rid of brutal strongmen at all costs, even bloody revolution and civil war, is not always right or justifiable.  In Iraq and Egypt, not only were there all the usual risks of revolution – bloody civil war, persecution of minorities, a far worse dictator arising – but, there was also the looming threat of political Islam just waiting for an opportunity, with all its hostility to our interests.

The latest manifestation of the failure of the West to speak out against revolution was the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine.  No doubt the deposed government was especially corrupt and toadied to Russia, but it was elected for a term and there was a mechanism of a general election, when voters would have had the opportunity to throw out the crooks.  Even when there was a possibility of political compromise, the West seemed to pull the rug from under the negotiations.  On the face of it, supporting the Pro-Western revolutionaries seemed more coherent than Middle Eastern policy, but the unintended outcome – a more dominant Russia in the region – shows again that supporting destabilisation is always the high-risk strategy.

This strange foreign policy emanates from the United States and the only explanation (given Western interests have been harmed so much in the Middle East as a result) is a romantic attachment to the idea of revolution.  It is here argued that through a misunderstanding of its own history, perhaps even the “Hollywoodisation” of its own history, in the eyes of a section of America, the revolutionary’s cause is always just.  Well, one only needs to look at real history to see that real revolutions are bloody and destroy custom and morals.  They mean a nation state suffers a sort of ontological violence, because its genesis as a revolutionary state was through violence.  The French Revolution led to the Terror and then to Bonaparte.  The Russian Revolution led to the Bolsheviks and then the terror of Stalinism. Revolution is rarely the way to achieve stable government. 

Dominant American thought imagines their own creation as a state and concludes that throwing aside of custom, law and convention leads to a sort of secular freedom.  Well, there was not an “American Revolution”, there was only an American War of Independence.  That is why the United States emerged as stable and democratic.  The American, slave-owning establishment broke away from the rule of an island across an ocean, but it took with it a political and legal heritage – representative democracy (as opposed to direct democracy) and the common law.  It continued as a functioning state after a war of independence.  There was no one to terrorise as the remote oppressors were the other side of the ocean.  The American establishment continued with the reins of power, but independent of that remote, previous rule.

Indeed where American politics breaks down, such as in the gridlock between President and Congress, is down to those elements of the constitution based upon abstract, French theory of separation of powers, rather than reliance on inherited precedent.

Where the United States are weak is not through their relative newness as a state, but through the fact that they came into existence at just the time when Europe was smashing its table of values.  It therefore took on board the new enlightenment secularism, writing a constitution that set in stone a valueless or neutral society.  Perhaps it is these origins that explain why the United States continue with an apparently overly-optimistic and simplistic view of other cultures, despite the experience of their own bloody civil war. 

This is not to suggest American people (as opposed to the Washington establishment) are in any way naïve.  Many on the American Right recognise the danger of existing under a secular or neutral constitution.  That is why there are campaigns for the Ten Commandments to be placed in schools, despite the historic exclusion of religion from the public square.  Meanwhile in Europe, with our heritage of values that have shaped our own constitutions, we are far more complacent and arrogant than many Americans about the encroaching of secularism. 

It was an American, T S Eliot who warned of the dangers of a neutral society and made the positive case for a Christian society.  It is American Catholics today who are campaigning for one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest Christian apologists, G K Chesterton, to be canonised. 

It is of course difficult to fully understand the history of another state, but it is easier for us as British to understand the United States because they were once legally connected with this polity and they adapted this nation’s institutions and laws to a new continent.  If it is accepted that the United States have misunderstood their own genesis, this would explain its seemingly irrational belief that revolution will lead to pro-Western democracies, as opposed to extremist states bent on hostility to its and our interests.  One can only hope American schools start to teach their children about the War of Independence instead of the American Revolution and that we will see a different, more historically aware foreign policy from a future generation.   

A Tale of Two Revolutions

In January 1649 the House of Commons’ High Court of Justice convicted the nation’s King, Charles I of High Treason and sentenced him to death.  Around forty years later Charles’ son, James II was chased out of Britain and replaced by a new King, Willliam of Orange.  These two different revolutions speak volumes about what works in terms of political reform and what makes matters worse.

The excesses of Charles I were to be supplanted by the far-worse sanctimonious-oppression that was the Commonwealth.  A judgemental, puritanical view had been taken of the real world and found it wanting.  Its solution was to tear down institutions and attempt to replace them.  The experiment did not work because it failed to follow the grain of human nature and relied on ideology.

This nation’s second revolution four decades later was pragmatic and worked with the grain of human nature.  It maintained the institutions of state, but reformed them and rearranged them to be more in balance with each other.  In the first revolution of Oliver Cromwell, Parliament and the New Model Army, Monarchy and House of Lords were abolished.  Anglicans and Baptists persecuted.  Folk traditions were stamped out.  Rather than recognise that all human institutions are maintained by flawed humans, the Roundheads seemed to believe abolition of institutions would mean human flaws could be overcome.

Parliament had learnt the second time around in 1688 that the flaws lay with the men who held these institutions on trust, not the institutions themselves.  They therefore kept the monarchy but constrained the power of the individual who filled the office. 

The argument of this blog is that the institutions themselves are natural, right and indeed Providential.  The blogger argues further that all institutions of Western, Christian Europe that are prescriptive and longstanding are legitimate in their own right.  Monarchy, Parliament, Church, nation and family are gifts handed down to us.  If we attempt to straighten out Kant’s crooked timber of humanity by stripping away these institutions we will cause that timber to splinter and shatter.  Because of the crookedness of the timber the answer is piecemeal not radical reform.  That is the lesson of our nation’s two revolutions.

This principle can be applied to the local and the domestic too.  Many families have their problems undoubtedly, but the family itself is a valuable gift to be treasured.  It is completely mad to say that because some individuals are bad and ruin family life that this means family life is itself bad.  No, it is our own flawed nature that can prevent us from living family life to the full.

Because some men are bad husbands to their wives or are unfaithful, it does not follow that the tradition of Man and Wife should be abolished, as some radical feminists might argue.  The problems are specific to the individuals and do not lie in the institution of family itself.

The answer from government and law should be to protect the wife from being disadvantaged, but not to downgrade marriage itself.  The specific mischief should be addressed not the institution attacked.  In the same way our longstanding institutions such as the Monarchy should be valued not abolished.  Our current constitutional set up means no individual could now abuse the office for the purposes of arbitrary government as James II did.

This is the lesson of our history:  When we attempted to abolish the institutions in an attempt to create a utopia we were confronted with a dystopia, where the institutions that bind us together were no longer there to hold our society together.  When we instead reformed specific parts of the mechanism of government in the Glorious Revolution we created a lasting settlement centred on the continuing institutions of constitutional monarchy and the established church.  That is the tale of our two revolutions and it is unfortunate that the French copied and took to its extreme of terror our first revolution rather than our second revolution. 

  

Nostalgia is good - Progressives might not like it, but there was a lost golden age

The current political class is dominated by the ethics of vanity identified by Jesse Norman MP in his book on Edmund Burke MP as liberal individualism.  This liberal individualism permeates the thinking of the metropolitan class that has the time and money to govern the rest of us.  It is the nadir of a gradual decline in Western thinking that puts the material before the spiritual, the modern and novel before tradition, the atomised individual before society and science before religion.

On the Left we see this reductionist outlook represented in its disparaging of institutions that make up the fabric of our society, sneering at valuable institutions from monarchy to marriage.  If we are all individuals the Left says we should not be oppressed by conjugal vows or subject to a Queen.

Meanwhile the Right has forgotten its duty to conserve our institutions and has turned a legitimate institution, the market, into an idol. It regards market economics rather than values and norms of behaviour as explaining human actions.  Patriotism and faith are replaced by rational choice theory.

Things really seemed to go wrong after the wonderful scientific discoveries of men of faith such as Isaac Newton.  This great deepening of our understanding of the material world, which began as a wonder at Creation was turned into idolatry of science, where science was claimed as the explanation of all things and our institutions and traditions were only seen as valuable if they could be justified by scientific tests.

Not only was this so-called Enlightenment anti-religious it was also in a sense anti- human.  The one man who did most to pervert our new scientific understanding was that serpent in the garden of philosophy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  At university the blogger undertook a whole module on this leading thinker of the Enlightenment and discovered a misanthrope.  He seemed to regard human interaction as leading to a destructive amour propre.  For him the human institutions that bind generations together with their accumulated wisdom were forces of oppression.  He therefore detested the society Man had built up in the light of religious faith. 

The French revolution with its belief that Rationalism independent of tradition could explain everything followed, with Rousseau as its hero.  Since then this rationalist and materialistic outlook has continued to attack tradition and faith.  It has chipped away at our social bonds, questioned the norms of behaviour that make living together possible and indeed life enhancing.

Much is attributed to the Enlightenment from individual freedom to parliamentary democracy.  England gives the lie to this.  Much of what people give the Enlightenment credit for was already underway in these Islands before Rousseau and the others put pen to paper.  Religious pluralism came about following the new settlement of the Glorious Revolution (one hundred years before France committed regicide), but this was only implementing ideas that were gradually developing following the Restoration in 1660.  Charles II’s reign might have seen reversals in the journey towards religious pluralism, but a compromise was being worked out.  It was finally achieved with the accession of William III, but not by reverting to the narrow Puritanism of Cromwell and the Regicides.

A middle of the road solution was reached without reference to abstract theory.  In good Anglo-Saxon fashion a compromise was cobbled together that allowed people to worship God true to their own interpretation of the Bible, Parliament was given freedom from Royal Prerogative and the Whigs therefore got what they wanted.  It was a compromise that worked however because it realised men live by tradition and affections not rationalist theory.  So the settlement preserved the monarchy and indeed the pageantry of monarchy.  It preserved the House of Lords and it continued with the Church of England as an established church – so the Tory affection for tradition was acknowledged too.  It recognised that while we must be free we are also social creatures who need institutions and traditions.

 Over the Channel, when abstract principles were followed rather than the lessons from history, the Terror and the guillotine resulted.  That is not to say that only the French make such a mistake.   While atheism and materialism took power by force in 1789, in the United Kingdom its growing strength has been more insidious and by stealth.  “Clever” people no longer respect our traditions.  They act as though our institutions survive by some strange accident, some oversight when we were embarked on dismantling the structure of oppression while on the road to liberty.  What they do not realise is that true liberty depends on these institutions rather than the false freedom of liberal individualism which is to be lonely and weighed down by the material world.

So people are right when they look back nostalgically to better times, because as these abstract, rationalist ideas have gradually permeated our nation more and more we are constantly losing what is life enriching. 

As we approach Christmas however the whole country returns home, casting off abstract rationalism.  Family, tradition and the Christ Child are seen again for how central they really are to our lives.  It is a return to the Merry England of carolling and wassailing, Christmas pudding (banned by the Puritans), Father Christmas, hunting (banned by New Labour), hawking and feasting.

So our resistance to the liberal individualists with their economic theories and their scientific explanations of religion begins when we wish each other “Merry Christmas”.  Certainly if we start to wish each other “happy holidays” instead, we have given up the fight.