The Madness of Rationalism - or why broken fences make for bad societies

 The American poet Robert Frost famously wrote that “good fences make good neighbours”.  We know fences have an important purpose in preventing violations of boundaries and thereby sustaining the common good.   There is another famous quotation about fences, this time by an Englishman, one much loved by many Americans and whose specific quotation on fences was much loved by President Kennedy.  G K Chesterton the conservative who would always deny he was a conservative wrote:

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”

This very Burkean sentiment gets to the essence of real conservatism, which is closely linked to what is termed “phenomenal conservatism”, the epistemological alternative to rationalism.  Here will be set out the problems and anti-conservative tendencies of rationalism. By rationalism here what is meant is the Cartestian idea that any truth has to be verified.  Generally in philosophical terms there is a distinction between rationalists, who verify a priori, in their minds by rationalism, and empiricists who regard only the data our senses encounter as verifiable.  Hume was to prove both forms of verification are impossible in terms of concluding any general or universal truth. He was a radical sceptic.  For the purposes of this article all these perspectives, rationalist, empiricist and sceptic are described as rationalist.  This is on the basis they all require absolute verification for something to be concluded as true or real.

In a recent youtube discussion ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNlAmRpLJGU ) between Roman Catholic Matt Fradd of Pints with Aquinas and Orthodox Jonathan Pageau of the Symbolic world, Fradd pointed to phenomenal conservatism as the way to understand our world as opposed to a sort of neurotic rationalism that has to verify something before we act.  In the discussion they point out reality is on the whole predictable and we can proceed without verifying whether, for example, the road will collapse as we walk along it.  In the same way, we do not need to verify religious faith inasmuch as it works.  This is not a blind leap, but rather a testing out of a prayerful life shows it works and we continue, we do not need to adopt a rigorous and unnecessary process of verification of the truth of religion, especially as God is surely beyond our fallible capacity for verification.

Fradd also made the interesting aside in an informal discussion that Descartes in his rationalist move was trying to save faith from the radical scepticism and new science of the times.  Nonetheless, he instead made an edifice of thought that collapsed.  Instead of rationalism, better is living according to what works, what makes your life better is a more useful methodology than trying obsessively to verify everything.  This works far better with the far-less individualistic Apostolic churches such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.  Indeed this tendency to have to verify everything yourself, that would make life impossible if we really lived that way, can be detected in Protestantism, where your own personal verification trumps tradition.  In Orthodoxy one interprets one’s encounters through the collective tradition.

This phenomenal conservatism is very analogous to Burke’s political philosophy that he put forward in opposition to revolutionary politics when most of England’s Whig elite was still celebrating the French Revolution as being in the vein of what they saw as the benign Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England.  Burke rather spotted the rationalism at the heart of Jacobinism, which rejected what he termed the “wisdom of the ancestors”.  By this he meant the great wealth of social and political collective wisdom by which a kingdom functions, which is impossible for any individual fallible rationalist to verify. 

A good example today of how this rationalist approach goes wrong is the Blairite reform of the House of Lords.  Removal of the hereditary peers and creating a house of political placemen and donors has rather discredited an institution that had previously had genuine independence  from partisanship and disinterested commitment for peers rooted in our history and outside of the Westminster bubble.  Applying a rationalist approach to the upper house has destroyed it in effect.  People often say about the English system of government “if you were starting from scratch you would not design it this way.”  From a Burkean perspective that is precisely its strength.  Put a system in the hands of the rationalists and their fallible individual intellects will design something with unforeseen and inefficacious at least or even deeply harmful consequences - like the bloody Terrors in both revolutionary France and the USSR.

Burke’s perspective that the prescriptive holds authority, that our systems and societies have emerged accumulating more than individual expertise, but instead a weighty collective wisdom beyond analysis and rational verification is pithily summed up by Chesterton’s fence analogy.  We do not know why everything works and if we try to unpick it we may well cause political disaster.  Chesterton not only illustrates Burke’s perspective, but also the phenomenal conservatism described by Fradd.  Dismantling fences without knowing why they are there can also apply to the madness of the rationalist neurosis in day-to-day life and indeed in the atheist’s approach to religion.  

If we think of the opposite to Chesterton’s warning, we are left with the rationalist approach, which can be reduced to - take down a fence unless you know why it is there.  This bold approach comes from hubris.  Rationalism unlike phenomenal conservatism is rooted in pride.  The approach of the Burkean or the phenomenal conservative by contrast is a manifestation of the spirit of humility - that I do not and cannot know it all.  Rather I trust in the world, trust in Being, trust in God.  

In the illustration we can imagine if a fence is removed when you do not know why it is there then carnage can result.  Carnage did result as a result of the French Revolution.  Carnage has resulted in social terms leading to anomie and despair when the atheists and agnostics started arguing that it mattered that you cannot “prove” God exists.

Removing fences lets the monsters in.  The Enlightenment, in removing the fences of the Church dogma and man as the imago Dei, let in the Marquis de Sade, who was a creature of the Enlightenment much as the philosophers believed they were ushering in a progressive and enlightened era.  Modernity itself culminated in the horrors of revolution, Nazism, the Holocaust and the Gulag.  If the fences are down then the monstrous will find a way in from the periphery to the centre.  Even the monstrousness of transgenderism and woke subversion can be understood as the continual progressive removal of fences without knowing why they are there in the first place.

How then to understand the motivation to pull down the fences?  Pride has already been mentioned.  It is a pride that we can link to Lucifer, to grasping the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the aim to be like God, with Promethean usurpation.  The rationalist will point to the technological progress resulting from the scientific method of verification.  But at what social, cultural and spiritual cost?  Indeed technological advances are an ambiguous good.  While they have made life easier they have also been a manifestation of our Luciferian desire to manipulate and control.  And technological progress gave us Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic invention.  So we are always one diplomatic blunder away from the eschaton.  This is where technology has led us.  It is no accident that technology in the Bible is linked to the line of the first murderer Cain.  

That being said, technology in itself clearly is not evil and is also a manifestation of Man’s creative capacity as the imago Dei, he imitates his creator.  It is though potentially dangerous, but not inevitably.

The priority is in what spirit we act.  Undoubtedly early scientists and the philosophical rationalists were too tempted by Promethean pride and fell into hubris.  We know that another and overlapping fascination of the New scientists was the occult and magic.  Strange as it seems at first, magic is closely linked to science.  Much like science it is about the manipulation and control of the world through special knowledge.  It is therefore again motivated by pride.  Figures such as Newton, the founders of the new rationalist and enlightened science were equally if not more preoccupied by the occult and magic.  They came from the same spirit.

And rationalism itself is entirely of that spirit.  I must verify, I must have access to the facts or they must be dismissed.  This is a hubristic desire for control as much as anything else and were men to live by it day by day they would go mad as they believed themselves becoming ever more powerful.  Whole kingdoms must fall to placate my desire to know and have power, as most notably Monarchist France and Tsarist Russia did fall and the hubris led to bloody terror.

How then must we live?  In a spirit of trusting humility.  Does that mean a return to plague, pestilence and war?  All those terrible inflictions we link to the Medieval world.  The Enlightenment needed its Dark Ages for its own propaganda.  Look at the Gothic cathedrals compared to modern architecture, built by generations with the divine and posterity, with the Good, the True and the Beautiful in mind.  There are few more tendentious and self serving terms than the “Dark Ages”.  Such an idea justifies the term “Enlightenment”.  But even in terms of medical science are we so sure we are better of?  Modern medicine and vaccines have side effects.  Big Pharma has vested interests.  One of the first social phenomena with early modernity was the persecution of witches.  More likely these were the village spinsters who were custodians of the medical and herbal knowledge of their ancestors.  The University of Nottingham discovered Anglo Saxons had a herbal remedy that could cure the superbugs spawned by our use of antibiotics.  As for vaccines, we are all aware of the prevalence of vaccine injures that the hubristic exhortation to “trust the science” would not allow to be considered during the covid crisis.  Covid itself in its likely emergence from a laboratory in Wuhan is more evidence of the hubris of the verification method and how it creates neurotic obsessions to access knowledge.

By contrast a spirit of humility is to be prepared for our death through repentance.  While the Silicon Valley tech billionaires strive to hide from death through singularity, we must rather prepare ourselves with humility to meet our Maker throughout our life.  If we adopt the neurotic rationalism of verifying before we can believe in anything we will find our way to Hell.  Instead, we humbly recognise the longevity of the Church and accept that our lives will make sense, that we will achieve eudaimonia and human flourishing if we follow our ancestors and believe as Saint Vincent of  Lerins put it:

“Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus”
[ that which has everywhere been believed in

the Church, always been believed, and

by all universally]

But not simply believe, but also to practise.  The revolutionary Jacobins paraded an idol of Madame Reason through the streets of Paris to supplant the veneration for the Mother of God.  Never has there been such a worship of the work of their own hands - they were making an idol to their own rationalism.

Instead of bowing to the idol, we should rather venerate in true humility, the Mother of God, the Holy Theotokos.  In such an act of supplication and humility we reject all of the hubris and Promethean spirit of the modern project and we will thereby save our souls.  And we will also be, metaphorically, re-erecting the fences that held Europe together and kept the monsters at bay.

        

Atheism as State Control

Since the French Revolution and its idol of Rationalism, atheism has been linked to State control and terror.  The Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union presented yet more evidence for the link.  For all the horrors the blame for which has been laid at the door of the Church over 2000 years, the short periods of atheistic power have led to terror unmitigated and harsh oppression.  And yet atheists continue to consider themselves to be the champions of freedom and progress.  Is this pattern linking atheism to state terror just a coincidence or is there an unavoidable link between the two?

Some might point to the secular West as an example of a liberal system that has enshrined freedom and secularism.  That is though, to misunderstand the concomitant destruction and decline of Western culture as being unrelated and unplanned.  Freedom is tolerated in the West precisely because it is really a “chosen” enslavement.

By looking at Western liberal democracy we can see how the atheism of the leaders of a society is the cause of terror and oppression.  The extreme violence of the Stalinist or Robespierre regimes was not merely a coincidence, it is directly related to its atheism, because atheism is about political control as much as it is about anything else.

There is no Terror in the West of today, many will argue no doubt.  This can be agreed, but the reason there is no Terror from the State is because the atheists in control of the West are subduing their people more subtly and craftily.

It is first and foremost enslavement to the passions.  The old slogan of bread and circuses applies to the culture of consumerism and entertainment promoted as a means of stupefying the voters and citizens of the West.  Then there are the carefully structured political systems, that ensure no ideas that really challenge the political system can gain any power.  The oligarchs remain in control and powerful.  The secret societies still determine the direction of the so-called open society.  Perhaps there is more of the occult and the Satanic amongst the powers that be in the West, but atheism is promulgated, because it disempowers people.

One way atheism is such a useful tool in the hands of the elites is that it is used to destroy the family in the name of “freedom”.  As Chesterton has pointed out:

“Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticise the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.”

The family is the unit of stability and autonomy that stands in the way of the absolute power of the totalitarian.  And atheist ideology is therefore used to undermine and challenge the family.

All that upon which the family is succoured is attacked by atheist dogma - no sex before marriage, the headship of the husband, the unbreakability of marriage.  All these are undermined by atheist ideas and dressed up as liberation.  As a result families are weakened, often fracture and split.

Most of the establishment’s favourite causes - feminism, LGBT, promiscuity, abortion - are promoted as a means to weaken that which stands in its way - the loving family.  The totalitarian state needs us to be atomised, trapped by anomie and easily manipulated by a popular culture that reaffirms and promulgates the atheist dogmas.

Atheism is a means to power for the corrupt and the totalitarian.  The State becomes the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong and cannot be measured by a higher standard.  All the rhetoric of freeing us from enslavement is used by those promoters in the “noble lie” to deceive us into the servitude that we are only fit for, if we are permitted to exist at all.  The atheistic interest in depopulation and eugenics is another way in which this evil perspective is a means of cruel control.

We can see, without any use of the jack boot or the secret police, that Western democracy uses all these means to set up a future totalitarian state.  And it can only do this by cutting a people off from God.  Atheism is the key weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor.  

We must therefore come to understand that when atheism is promoted by the powerful it is as a means of oppression and power.  Our degenerate lives in the West are not about our own personal mismanaged freedom so much as the State deliberately putting us into a situation where meaning and purpose disappear and only the passions are left to enslave us and make us into easily-controllable masses.  The atheism of the West is a more subtle application of the same mechanism in the USSR with the same goals.  Terror itself nowadays is somewhat too obvious.  Now instead the manipulation is far more subtle, but the purpose of atheism remains the same - the enslavement of the imago dei by those Faustian elites with their Luciferian pride and ambition

The Victory of Liberalism

 It is a common theme in internet memes to contrast the degenerate world of postmodernity with what the young men on the Normandy beaches believed they were giving their lives for.  From the end of ethnic homogeneity to sexual degeneracy, the "values" of the contemporary West seem in stark contrast to the shared values of the Christian West of the thirties and forties.  Many believed they were dying for Christian civilisation.  We have ended up emerging from the two world wars and the Cold War with a society far removed, whose shibboleth might be "sodomy and usury", whose symbol is the six-coloured flag of the LGBT movement and whose geopolitical and domestic political power is exercised through debt.  A far contrast from Christendom where both charging interest and homosexuality were forbidden.

The victory in the Second World War was achieved by the joint forces of liberal democracy and Stalinist Socialism.  The Cold War sorted out whether the future lay in Stalinist Socialism or Liberal Democracy.  The liberal democratic forces won bringing in a new world order of globalism expressed through social and economic liberalism.

National Socialism, with its pagan and occult leanings, its fetishisation of power and its brutal suppression  and mass murder of those considered degenerate was not a continuation of Christian civilisation.  But neither was the Weimar Republic it overthrew.  There has been some comment recently about the fact that the first books the Nazis burnt were promoting transgenderism.  Weimar was not a Christian state, it was a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.  The Nazis provided a pagan answer, mixed up with Darwinian science, to attack the indisputable degeneracy of Weimar.  That solution comes not from Christian inheritance; by contrast, based on power and violence it is another contradiction.  As Jewish convert to Catholicism Max Picard pointed out, Nazism was an avant garde and profoundly modern and post-Enlightenment phenomenon.  It does not follow either that liberalism is the alternative answer that should be chosen, or communism for that matter.

The victors of the Cold War were the liberals, who provided bureaucratic human rights, but killed the soul of Man.  Even Soviet atheism was unable to kill the soul in the way consumer capitalism and human rights have killed the soul of Man.

While it was the liberals who won the conflicts, hot and frozen, of the Twentieth Century, this was not simply an organic process.  Geopolitically the use of colour revolutions and NGOs as a tool of Western foreign policy worked to undermine the Soviet Empire.  No ally was unacceptable.  In the Cold War we saw the development of an unholy alliance between the capitalist and secular West and Islamic extremism, beginning in Afghanistan, much as Israel uses Islamists as an asset against Arab regimes in the Middle East.

Domestically it was also important to turn the West from a conservative and traditional Christian culture into a liberal, amoral and culturally permissive place.  This actually involved the Central Intelligence Agency in promoting a cultural revolution in the sixties, including the promotion of modern art figures such as Jackson Pollock, to contrast with the more conservative genre of Soviet Realism in art.

Combined with this promotion of popular culture, psychological theories were put into practice through therapy and mainstream education.  Ideas of sexual suppression leading to Fascism as argued by Adorno in his "Authoritarian Personality" gave a political reason to stop teaching virtues and instead to create a permissive society that made people slaves to their sexual passions as much as they were slaves to avarice and greed through the economic system.  Freud's earlier work also provided a framework for this.  Meanwhile the theories of Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl were ignored.

In politics the political class also ensured the permissiveness society was promoted through changes to the law on divorce, homosexuality and abortion.  It is no surprise we have now reached a place where we are even confused about gender.  But confusion, lack of order and permissiveness were always the goal.   

A veneer of propaganda that the West was still Christian in opposition to atheist Soviet Republics was also sustained to keep malleable and slow-witted conservatives on side.  Now many conservatives are worried about globalism, the WEF, no borders, the Great Reset - but this was always the goal.  The post-war West was run by an establishment that found its ideology in the liberal philosophers of the Open Society.  And as Karl Popper pointed out, the open society has enemies.  He singled out Plato and Platonic thinking for attack.  He was hostile to any idea of transcendent values, but in something of a contradiction the tolerance and open-mindedness of liberalism should be enforced, not tolerating the "platonic" mindset. This is where cancel culture stems from - certain ideas must be eliminated for the survival of the open society.  Popper's close student George Soros, uses the idea of enemies for undermining democracy, from Brexit to the Ukraine.

The problem is that liberals, whose ideology really developed in the Anglo Saxon countries such as Great Britain and the United States, have fooled conservatives in such countries to believe that liberalism is conservatism.  Whether it be laissez faire capitalism at home or support for Zionism abroad, conservatives have been fooled and are the useful idiots of globalist liberalism. 

There was an alternative to liberalism in Britain.  From Disraeli to Chesterton there was a case made for an organic conservatism that held the country together.  One Nation conservatism is a much debased term that now means "remainer" Conservative MPs who are usually socially liberal.  Rather like the word conservative, one nation once meant what it sounds like.  It meant holding the nation together through the values of shared heritage, land and ethnicity.  We are one nation, not to be divided by the class warriors of socialism or the atomising individualists of liberalism.

What today passes for a "right-wing" British conservative whether on the Right of the Conservative Party or a supporter of Reform will usually be an ardent supporter of liberal economics, a close alliance with the States and with Israel.  Contrary to the implications of liberal economics British conservatives do tend to oppose mass immigration and do oppose the woke culture that emanates from the USA they so love.  These contradictions are overlooked, because the British Right remains a useful tool for the liberals.

In the States where the evils are spreading from there is a resistance that is much more aware than the likes of GB News.  From Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens there are genuine conservative voices appearing in a country predicated on liberal secularism.  This is enabling some American conservatives to break free from the post-war paradigm that defines politics in the West and defines it favourably to the liberal agenda.

There is a genuine voice of opposition emerging.  It places emphasis on conservative social values, upon Christian faith and upon protecting our own people from the ravages of global capitalism.  In global politics it questions the support for Zionism and support for the Ukraine.  It has noticed the re-emergence of the Church in Russia and that our supposed allies of Israel and Ukraine persecute Christians.  A Trump victory will not only save us from escalation to a third world war, but will give space to genuine conservative voices to reassess our knee-jerk Cold War attitudes on Israel and the Russia-Ukraine question.

There is also a healthy scepticism these new conservatives have towards the Western establishment.  They are sniffing out the vested interests from Blackrock to AIPAC.  They are ready to ask questions that baby-boomer conservatives never did.  They recognise that while patriotism is a virtue, it can be used by scoundrels to further nefarious agendas, such as global liberalism. 

There seems to be a realisation from a generation less overshadowed by the Second World War and even the Cold War, that the shibboleths and stereotypes our parents fell for were really about pushing a liberal and globalist agenda.  There is not a binary choice between Left and Right.  There is another perspective, from voices of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, voices excluded from academia and political debate.  These voices put a Christian perspective forward that transcended liberalism, Communism, and Fascism.  There are signs that finally the Overton Window will be expanded.  Whether Donald Trump himself understands this movement, there are signs he does so intuitively if not intellectually, his victory will open up the space for new perspectives that can break free of the post- World-War, post- Cold-War perspectives that limit our vision from seeing the truth.            

 

       

 

Person-centred economics

 The word economy is etymologically related to the word Oeconomia in the Orthodox Church.  Oeconomia refers to the Church avoiding legalism out of love.  It is an allowance without compromising dogma.  Such an approach is very much in line with how Christ would school the Pharisees and Sadducees against their rigid legalism.  It seems strange then that this word should be related to the "dismal science" of economics, as Carlyle described it,  in the sense of theory about the wealth of nations.

What has happened to economics as a theory, all the way back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, was that it became about the generation of material wealth rather than the management of the household of the nation in which the person was placed at the centre.  In England and the rest of Great Britain industrialisation, free trade, division of labour did indeed lead to increasing wealth, but a diminished existence for many human beings.  While technology and wealth improved living standards in material terms, the spiritual life of the nation's families were much diminished.  

Theoretically the Marxist revolutions in the Russian and Chinese Empires were a reaction against capitalist industrialisation, but these countries' economies were only beginning down that road as they remained largely agrarian.  Marx's positivist dialectical materialism was proved false.  Nonetheless the Communist regimes were just as much about industrialisation and economic growth as capitalism.  

A crisis of capitalism occurred with the Wall Street crash in 1929  and the Great Depression of the thirties.  An alternative economics emerged with the so-called "Third Way", led in political terms by former Marxist Mussolini.  This was about freeing countries from the power of the banking sector and promoting the national interests rather than the interests of global capital.  With the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust this alternative was seriously tarnished.  The Post-War Bretton Woods settlement saw the re-emergence of the power of the international banking sector, but tempered to allow a level of socialist mitigation of the full force of the market.  This system itself led to government debt causing inflation that soon seemed unsustainable,  A return to the economic orthodoxies of liberalism in the West re-emerged with President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher - paying off government debt, selling off state industries, free trade and de-regulated stock markets.

The neoliberal revolution led to a global economics, the strengthening of global corporations over sovereign nations, and open borders in terms of both trade and free movement of peoples.  An alternative form of liberal capitalism, aiming to ensure its long term survival emerged with the Clintons, Blair and the global institutions of the post war years and a newly invigorated World Economic Forum with the concept of stakeholder capitalism.  In domestic politics New Labour even adopted the name of the Fascists' economics - the Third Way,

Along with open borders, nudge manipulation, the political monitoring via ever-more sophisticated technology, a deep suspicion has emerged on the eclectic politics of the so-called Right, from libertarians to traditionalists.  This led to the election of Trump in the States and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union.  The vote from the people was for a more communitarian politics that protected national sovereignty, identity, culture and traditions.  In Britain the neoliberal Right has seized control of the meaning of Brexit as the UK becoming a Singapore of the West, with open borders, no national identity. and uprooting of community -  Britannia not a rescued maiden, but a whore open to all-comers.

In a sense we are no further on than we were with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the agrarian culture of our country.  There is a very simple reason for this - it is that economics for centuries has been centred on ideas other than the human person.  Economics has been about free trade, individualism, industrialisation, class conflict, economic growth; never has it considered the human person and his flourishing to be the key goal of economics.  Instead the person must be sacrificed for the cause of economic growth, whether in the free economy or the command economy.

Today as a result, we find people are replaced by artificial intelligence, economic demands cause brain drains in poor countries and the dilution and loss of cultural identity in first world countries through mass economic migration.  Everything follows the principle of economic growth, compound growth in fact.  As a result the person gets lost.

The person is not the same as an individual.  From the Latin for indivisible the individual is the unit of liberal economics and rational choice theory.  The person is by contrast relational and embedded and spiritual. Compound growth and open borders take no account of the meaning of what it is to be a person.  Industries disappear destabilising communities.  And most of all the all-pervasive focus on filthy lucre kills spirituality and rooted community.

 In 2016 both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, ironically capitalists through and through, seemed to touch on this.  Trump recognised that jobs flowing abroad and migrants flowing in was destabilising the identity of the nation necessary for the embeddedness of the human person.  Nigel Farage raised immigration frequently in the Brexit referendum because as he made clear identity is about more than economic growth.

Nonetheless, without the intellectual tradition you can only expect political leaders to go so far.  Yes Steve Bannon read Evola and Guenon, but there is a deeper and more Christian "Third Way".  It can be found in the writings of an economist like E F Schumacher, with his "Small is Beautiful" and " A Guide for the Perplexed" and even in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" -1891.  It can also be found in the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who worked out the implications of the Papal encyclical.

Distributism was the theory and it was based around the idea of private ownership of small property, of a large enough size to ensure self reliance and independence.  Such an idea would terrify the banks and the capitalists of course, just as much as those socialists wanting to abolish private property and make everyone equal i.e. the same.

The point here is that, not being financed by big money, a good idea went to waste.  Distributism might not be the total answer, but the point was that it proposed making the human person, made in the image of God the centre of the economy, rather than growth, capital or even the proletariat.  

The idea did not fail because it was tried and failed, it was never tried, to misquote Chesterton himself.  The powerful banking interests in the West did not want such an idea to develop and had it ever reached Soviet Russia it would have been squashed.  That is because for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Communism are creatures of the Enlightenment and they have forgotten that Man is made in the image of God and that Man not some other concept should be at the centre.

The Enlightenment itself was a project of vested interest.  Its hatred of the ancien regime was largely because the wealth on which the new thinkers lived was stolen from the Church during the Reformation.  There was a guilt that required them to destroy the ancien regime altogether and paint what had come before as benighted and savage.  Hence the name Enlightenment of course.

The core intellectual goal of the Enlightenment was to break Man down and disconnect him from his God.  Man became a unit for the liberal order that the Enlightenment led to.  For all its talk of the sanctity of the individual, he was an atomised thing and was to become the very victim of anomie that   Durkheim described.  When we lost our sense of the person as the image of God, we lost a sense of Man as relational, embedded with roots and looking up to the heavenly realm.  Without roots or telos men became mere workers, mere consumers, living under the enslavement not only of the boss or the bureaucrat, but his passions that the economic system fosters.

There is much talk of re-enchantment currently.  Hand in hand with that, if it succeeds, must come a new understanding of the economy as a person-centred system, not waylaid by other targets that diminish the human being who is a person and is made in the image of God.   

      

Man and the Mythos

 What perspective brings together such an eclectic mix of writers as T. S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien and Aleksandr Dugin?  What ontology can find justification in the different perspectives of Plato and Heidegger?  At this time of year it is a perspective that we can and do encounter.  It is a recognition of the mystical encounter we often find at Christmas time.  The Virgin kneeling before the manger with the ox and ass nearby is a unity of the gritty realism of a hard birth without domestic shelter and the presence of the Divine Logos.  A thousand magical stars shoot from this one event forever relived in our various customs and traditions.  In our celebration of Christmas we rediscover the encounter with myth and meaning.

So writers as disparate as Tolkien and Chesterton on the one hand and Berdyaev and Dugin on the other recognise the truth of myth in contrast to the flattening out of the world that is the modern project - the Enlightenment deception.

As Orthodox icon carver, essayist and youtuber Jonathan Pageau has often explained - myth is where truth is to be found.  It is how we apply our attention to understand the meaning of seemingly random and material existence.  Not all truths are at the same level he argues, rather the higher level is at the level of myth.

There is another important aspect to the meaning of myth.  It is about participation in Truth.  Yes there is a flat and material meaning that can be found in the world of science, mechanical cause and effect and reduction to basic material explanations.  This though is how an alternative in Heidegger, the great anti-Platonist, and Plato himself can be found.

As Heidegger taught, meaning is found in the realm of encounter, rather than the alienated and dry picking apart of things by empirical science.  On the other hand Plato always points to material reality having a correspondence to the metaphysical Idea, in the realm of Being - where Truth is whole and not partial as in the world of becoming, always in a state of flux.  These very different perspectives can be united in the sense that our encounters can be mystical if we free ourselves from the Enlightenment paradigm.

Of course all our most important encounters and the stories by which we understand the world are far removed from the reduction to parts of empirical science.  The souls and personalities of our loved ones are at a higher level of reality and meaning, than reducing a human being to a talking ape determined by the mechanical laws of cause and effect.  And so while the Platonist attributes the reality we experience through personal encounter as revealing the higher meaning of the Forms, Heidegger might define this as the authentic encounter of beings prior to any abstract scientific theory.  The unity of the perspectives is a rejection of a reductive and abstracted approach as found in the Cartesian move towards subjects dissecting an objective and neutral reality.

Of course Heidegger and Plato have seemingly irreconcilable ontologies.  This is where Christmas provides the unity and the answer.  For Christmas is when the Word becomes flesh, when that outside the realm of beings enters our world of becoming.  By the miracle of Christmas, through a virgin birth, the universal and the particular, the immortal and the mortal, the world of becoming and the world of Being are joined and reconciled.

This also reveals further that as Saint Basil put it we like Moses have licence to plunder the Egyptians.  We can indeed take from and Christianise the pagan ideas and beliefs.  Paganism as a religion participated in a lower level of reality, worshipping angels and demons, rather than the Living God. 

Every level of meaning and belief participates to an extent in the Truth, insofar as it does it is good.  If it is taken as the complete Truth it becomes idolatry.  Everything is made new by the Incarnation.  pagan deities become the characters of fairy tale, the Wild Hunt of Woden is turned into the chivalric hunt of the Christian knight and the slaying of the dragon by Saint George.  All reality is transfigured by the Incarnation at Christmas and its fulfilment on Easter Day.  Death itself is revealed as an absence consequent upon the Fall.

And so, we look for completion not in a political, technological or economic progress to worldly utopia - for that will always lead to reductive ugliness, but instead we look to be transfigured by the Divine.  From Cromwell to Marx, the attempts to create heaven on earth have cut us off from Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

The whole Enlightenment project, with roots in the Reformation and earlier the nominalism of the Ockhamites, has alienated us and disenchanted the world.  Instead of finding in the beautiful a link to the Transcendent we have come to regard it with cynicism - the famous hermeneutics of suspicion, which kill our souls.  And it is these hermeneutics of suspicion that are the reason the powerful who dictate our narratives have taught us to abandon our myths, our stories and instead seek for utopia through political progress.  

While the Church has always understood the myths and customs of the world are imperfect and tarnished by sin, that is not the same as hiding an evil reality.  This though is the premise of the Enlightenment and has its roots in a Protestant rejection of Church ritual.  This pathological cynicism is the justification for Western progressivism that turns against its own myths that help us to access the mystical truth and instead forges a Faustian and Promethean world of hubristic ugliness.  It is also the reason why Christmas is so important in terms of re-enchanting the world and rediscovering the myths that help us to understand the deeper and higher realities of being human in a Fallen world that was created fundamentally as Good. 

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.

An Orthodox Englishman

 When this blog was commenced, the name chosen for it was “ a voice from the shires”.  This seemed most apposite given the focus of the blog was to promote a rural, royalist and sacramental, spiritual argument for English, even British, culture and tradition.

The mystical and Christian meaning of the Monarchy, the spiritual aspect of tradition, the sacred value of English countryside in our identity were of central importance and of concern to the blog in terms of arguing for their protection. There was an underlying Burkean perspective that set the paradigm and perspective of the blog.  This was the more neoplatonic and mystical side of Burke combined with his practical conservatism, as opposed to his more Whiggish elements.  The Burke who won over Wordsworth to conservatism, not the Burke who was himself won over by Adam Smith’s liberal economics.

A key turning point in my thinking was expressed in a blog I entitled A Orthodox Voice in a Western Wildnerness.  https://avoicefromtheshires.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-orthodox-voice-in-western-wilderness.html

Having been an advocate of the West, concerned about the encroachment of political Islam, arguing for the open society, as per the content of many of my early blogs, I was becoming increasingly alienated from the secularising and reductive spirit of Western liberalism very evident as imposed on other countries via our foreign policy and direct violence.  I began to notice that much of our foreign policy was a manifestation of this reductive universalism that wants to flatten out the world as a bleak wasteland of secularism and rational choice theory.  People will be nothing more than individuals, voters and consumers determined by their most petty passions.

In the particular blog mentioned above I applied Burke’s concept of wisdom of the ancestors to Church dogma and the role of the Church Fathers.  This inevitably put me in the camp of Orthodox theology, as contrasted against the individualism of Protestant interpretation of Scripture and the Roman Catholic idea of unilateral Papal infallibility unrestrained by Patristic Tradition.  Of course there was still a long way for me to go, especially in a spritiual rather than cerebral sense.

My interest in the mystical and spiritual aspect of our Monarchist and Christian constitution inevitably led to the recognition of a type of Byzantine idea of Symphonia that the British constitution strove for, in opposition to all the Victorian liberal constitutionalists from Bagehot to Dicey.  The sacramental nature of the mystery of the Coronation is of course rooted in Orthodox belief that is still there, hidden in the mists of our Orthodox past.  Encounters with British Orthodoxy helped me to understand that a rediscovery of our Orthodox past reconnects us with our mystical monarchy and our mystical countryside – but this is long-forgotten, written out of the Whig history.  Now forgotten it was  connected to our woods and sacred shrines long before 1066 and the arrival of schismatic Roman Catholicism with the Norman conquerors.

It was Constantinople not Rome that the Anglo Saxon aristocracy sort refuge.

With the Normans came  Anselm’s  theory of atonement that drastically distorted Christian understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection, further solidifying the Great Schism.  This bargaining for eternal life and appeasing a vengeful God sank deep into the Western consciousness, combined unhealthily with Saint Augustine’s emphasis on Original Sin.

The Normans, those rootless marauders, who in Southern Europe would fight the Christian Empire in Sicily were content with a feudal God and a rationalistic faith.   

With our ancient Monarchy, preceding the Conquest, there has been an ongoing sense that there is something deeply rooted in the English past that is very different from the theologies and philosophies imposed by the post-Conquest aristocracy.  Not only did Norman England give Anselm a platform for his heresies, but it was also the home for the most damaging philosophy arguably in the West – the reductive nominalism of William of Ockham.  Somehow though the sense has remained that England contains a deep spiritual mystery far removed from Occamite nominalism, naïve empiricism, Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism and reductive and dehumanising utilitarianism.  That mystery is symbolised in our Monarchy in a very Orthodox sense and yet the Monarchy has also become a weapon of the veiled republic of the liberal secularists and nominalists.  This conflict is reaching its height with the coming coronation of a personally spiritual King linked to Orthodoxy, but also ideologically under the influence of the Globalist WEF.

There is a deep contradiction in England and it is contended here that it is because of the spiritual alienation from the Orthodox Church after the Conquest.  We have lived with a continuous tension between a knowing and worldly “realism” that reduces all to a worldly common-sense alienating us further from the spiritual life, tradition in a mystical sense, and from holistic existence and on the other hand authentic Christian tradition.  In accepting the Conquest perhaps the English have adopted a certain fatalism to a materialistic existence where the paradigm is essentially reductive.  In accepting their subjugation a deep cynicism has resulted.  But we know there was something more in our past, when we were still part of the Orthodox communion.

The Sixteenth Century break with Rome might have seemed like an attempt to rediscover the past – but the sacred objects of England were systematically destroyed, the shrines desecrated and an even more barren and reductive theology came to dominate, finally manifesting in regicide after a hundred years.  As the Pilgrimage of Grace showed, the ordinary people still placed value on the old faith.  While that faith came to be identified with Roman Catholicism, this was a striving back towards something yet more ancient.

We see this authentic striving in our country misdirected due to lack of knowledge.  People seek not Orthodoxy, but a pre-Christian paganism linked to our woods and fields.  Everyone knows there is something amiss, but not what is missing and instead people fall into a shallow and sentimental new -age paganism as an alternative to the continued propaganda of the world now promoted by the likes of Richard Dawkins, a man rooted in the world and establishment of the power of the Conquest.

It is in figures such as C S Lewis, in his Anglicanism, even Tolkien and Chesterton in their English Catholicism, Philip Sherrard, who perhaps like our new King flirted a little too much with Perennialism, and of course Kallistos Ware, that Oxford convert, author and bishop who embodies a certain familiar Englishness, and yet is valued and held in the highest regard throughout the Orthodox world – so that at his funeral in England, Moscow and Constantinople were united again despite the geopolitical crisis over Ukraine.

We all have a sense that there is something in our English past we have lost contact with.  While the Sophists, economists and calculators along with neocon warmongers and Atlanticists, the economic and social neoliberals are the voice of the British State, we know intuitively that the English spirit is something far contrary to this. 

It was in part through applying Burke in a way he could not have imagined that it was possible for me to understand the coherence and power of the ancient faith, the apostolic faith from Christ’s disciples in an unbroken line through the Fathers to the Church of today.  There was much more to discover in a spiritual rather than rationalist way.  While discovering the Orthodox faith has opened the doors of Russian and Greek culture, it has also meant a deeper and fuller understanding of what it really means to be English and to belong to “this sceptred isle”, this truly Christian country underneath all the economic and social liberalism, the materialism, the secularisation, the bureaucracy and the love of Mammon.  The spirit of Orthodoxy is still here, if we only look for it and that starts with a recognition that Englishness is not to be found in the utilitarians, the free-marketeers, the liberals, the atheists, the nominalists, those who have accommodated themselves to the catastrophe of the Conquest and the consequent cynicism in high places that results from authority being seized a thousand years ago with a Nietzschean will to power, against the spirit of the Beatitudes and in alienation from the Church, the authentic Church – the Orthodox Church.  The real counter-revolution is not in political activity, it is in rediscovering our own ancient connection to the Orthodox Church.  I have done so by joining the Orthodox Church and specifically the Moscow Patriarchate, which has recently recognised the ancient saints of this island before the Great Schism.  It will seem strange to many, but I have rediscovered the faith of my forefathers through Russia.

Liberalism and Disintegration

 

What is meant by liberalism?  In every day language to be liberal means to be open minded and easy going.  In politics there is a link and that link is not necessarily positive.  As G K Chesterton pointed out, one’s mind, like one’s mouth, should on the whole be closed unless receiving something nutritious.  To be open to everything is in a sense to be willing to undergo disintegration.  It is to lose integrity.

The great proponent of open-ness, the French-Jewish philosopher Derrida referred to the Old Testament story of Rahab the whore who aided the Hebrew spies in the taking of Jericho with its supposedly impregnable walls (as pointed out by Jonathan Pageau).   Here we have two key symbols – the whore who loses her integrity of her body for money and the walls, which, when they fall end the integrity of the city.  Derrida promoted a radical open-ness, but for us we can see the fundamental attack upon integrity of  a radical open-ness.

The reactionary Russian thinker Konstantin Leontiev regarded Western liberalism as something like a progressive disease that destroyed the integrity of the body politick.  His use of “progressive” is interesting given its adoption by the most radical wing of liberalism.  If our concern and priority is integrity rather than open-ness, then progressivism does seem to lead to disintegration.

Liberalism’s roots can be found in the disintegration of metaphysics.  With the Franciscan thinkers Duns Scotus and William of Ockham we saw the development of two new ideas that caused a schism with the classical world of thought.  With Duns Scotus we find the development of the “thisness” of things or their haecceity.  What the essence of this new philosophical outlook entailed was that the classical idea of participation  in the metaphysical was lost.  It meant this because Duns Scotus believed that particular things are irreducible and individual (indivisible).  On the face of it that might suggest support for integrity, but the problem is that it works both ways.  In reducing everything to the particular, the integrity of universals is undermined.  By atomising everything it becomes impossible to participate meaningfully in general identities or the transcendental; or at least as the centuries unfolded such a problem was to be revealed.

When the Franciscan Duns Scotus is linked to the other revolutionary Franciscan thinker, William of Ockham, the momentum towards disintegration is further intensified.   With his nominalism Ockham denied the existence of universals.  Forms were merely names given to link disparate things (hence nominalism).

Such a philosophical paradigm can clearly be contrasted with Platonism, with its mystical and otherworldly intellectual forms; but it also breaches withAristotle with his empirically-derived forms and for our purposes, most importantly Aristotle’s telos or the goal towards which all things that exist are oriented (Man’s telos being virtue).

When this reductionist philosophy was applied to the world of Man it eventually became impossible to sustain the idea of the telos – that Man had an overarching purpose that he might fulfil or of which he might fall short.  We can see here the foundations of liberalism, which denies some overarching purpose such as virtue as oppressive and from which we are to be liberated.

Alasdair MacIntyre has identified this lack of telos as the key reason why liberalism cannot give an account of virtue and why liberal societies are falling apart.  It is not surprising that once Western theology and philosophy had taken such a reductionist turn, the philosophy of John Locke became intellectually possible.  The very hierarchy of the State no longer had any claim to universals over the particular.  The anointed Monarch no longer could rely on his participation in the transcendental, but must strike up a contract like a merchant to bring men out of the Lockean ahistorical fiction of a state of nature.

Combined with this disintegration is the influence of England’s religious internecine struggles.  The Protestants saw themselves as being liberated from Rome.  A narrative of liberation fed into popular consciousness and was very compatible with this new ontology of nominalism, where the hierarchies could no longer appeal to universals.

Here we find the moralistic tone of liberalism’s project of demolition.  To destroy general identity and any  chance of participation in higher meaning is narrated as “liberation”.  If we no longer participate in higher meaning or any collective identity then we are free to be the reduced and directionless atoms we really are, driven by our passions.  That in essence is the liberal project.

Contrast that with the more elevated vision of human nature – one that sees us as having a telos and belonging to more general categories.  We are not simply atoms, but are peoples, we participate in religious tradition, we are gendered. 

It is no accident, however uncomfortable classical liberals feel, that the activists at the extreme fringe of liberalism – wrongly termed cultural Marxists – are pushing to dissolve the most fundamental aspects of general human identity, including even gender.  This is simply the narrative of liberation from meaning and belonging being followed through to its nihilistic goal.

What is attacked by liberalism is the integrity of categories and the possibility of participating in higher meaning.  That is not to say any collective identity or means of achieving collective identity is right.  There is a Royal Path between liberalism and the worldly-focused totalitarian agendas (themselves bastard offspring of the Enlightenment).  A cultural and political environment that fosters participation in higher meaning and collective identities is that for which conservatives should strive.

The misleading rhetoric of liberalism suggests that it can provide such an environment, where all can pursue meaning in their own way.  The reality is that liberalism like all ideologies has its own totalising narrative.  The narrative of liberation means that all general and higher identities become categorised as oppressive and as a result must be abolished.  This means that in practice liberalism cannot stop at a compromise between conflicting higher identities, but must wage a campaign against them all.  This is exactly how the Western cultural journey of progressive decline is being played out.  First a collective telos of society, usually religious, is undermined.  In trade, barriers to influx of imports are torn down.  The integrity of the nation state ( once the liberal successor to the conservative empire) is undermined.  Even normative sexuality and then gender are overturned in the name of liberation.  As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has argued, the final stage of liberation will be from human nature itself and it is likely that such a “liberation” will be played out with technology, artificial intelligence and even, at the risk of sounding melodramatic (which is difficult in a culture where gender is no longer considered a real general category) – the cyborg.

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.