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. 

Christmas - returning home

 For many Christmas is a quite literal returning home for the break, to return to all those aspects of life so important but neglected - recreation, relatives and religion.  Sir Roger Scruton once pointed out that in our ultra-modern, individualistic and secular England, Christmas is still the time everyone returns home to honour the old religion again. 

Even in the most hedonistic and materialistic excesses of consumerism in the fast time of Advent, there is a kitsch attempt to answer that longing for the old home, the old beliefs and the old world again.  The answers provided might be hideously consumerist, but deep down aren't those insatiable consumers filling our shopping malls (but it should be remembered often buying for others) really seeking a return home?

That return home is of course in the context of a technological, change-orientated, atomistic and hedonistic age.  We live in a culture and world far removed from everything that the Feast of Christ symbolises.  And yet there remains that yearning for that other higher world.

We pride ourselves on our rationalism, we scoff at what we dismiss as sentimentality, we wish to appear cynical and worldly.  Our families are falling apart, our history and identity is erased, magic is extirpated from the world in the name of science.  And yet, once a year this is all set aside for a feast that celebrates, remembers and takes part in the Incarnation.  

Many will say they merely enjoy childhood memories or love the old rituals, that it is a time for relaxation and family.  All these things though are transformed and affirmed by the Incarnation, by the Word made flesh.  We live in a world where life can be blessed and even made magical, not simply mundane and profane.

That magic of Christmas is something particular to Christmas.  It is the magic of receiving, not the magic of manipulating the world around us.  In the chaos of our post-modern culture people are more and more looking to magic as a means of controlling and manipulating the world around them,  This is trying to reform the world rather than receiving it as gift.  Indeed, this approach to magic is a form of techne closely related to science and technology.  It is no coincidence the early empirical scientists were occultists and alchemists.  That is the magic of manipulation, unlike Christmas.

At Christmas the magic is a gift that blesses us.  Even for the children Father Christmas visits as a surprise bearing surprises for their stockings.  Children do not resort to spells or incantations to conjure and command Father Christmas.  They learn the magic of the gift as a blessing out of our control or power.

The magic can only be found if stiff-necked pride is put to one side. Then we can discover the mystical magic down "in yon forest" where the Grail is hidden.  We must be ready like little children trustingly to receive with faith.  We all know this in our hearts and much of our cynicism and rationalism is mere bravado because we are too proud to show our inner child.

From Dickens and Chesterton to Lewis and Tolkien, modern writers have, like the prophets of old, pointed us back to the childlike magic of Christ's birth.  And the magic starts to change people, just like Scrooge.  Even hard-nosed Protestants for one season of the year honour Christ's Virgin Mother, meek and mild.  Religion begins to recover its old mystical magic again and the rigidity of rational doctrine is replaced with the mystical tradition of the Church at its beginning.  And the world is re-enchanted.

Forces are ranged against this rediscovery, this return to our homeland.  Commercialism, greed, consumption, family resentments, all come to the surface to challenge the gentle power of the event on that silent and holy night. Mad buying has replaced the fasting of Advent before the feast.  Christmas can become nothing more than drunken snoozing in front of the telly, sensual pleasure of the flesh hiding the spirit of Christmas.  

Even so, as the parish churches are full again for one day of the year, as families reunite and the Gradgrind world of capitalist work and career is forgotten in favour of the magic of the season, we all know we are returning to something more true, more beautiful, something that is good for us and brings us back to who we are in our spirit.

 

Progress and Anomie

Anomie as a word is of course linked to French sociologist Emile Durkheim.  Modernity or progress brought with it an idea of self-realisation unconnected with inherited tradition - an atomisation most prevalent in Protestant cultures where individualism was stronger.  Shared norms being lost a consequent ennui, purposelessness and despair would develop.  Durkheim observed suicide was more prevalent in Protestant countries.  Deviance resulting from a lack of shared and cohesive communal values led to increased crime and other forms of disconnection.  Perhaps in contemporary times the most extreme example of the dangers of anomie is the teenaged American gun murderer - the murderous incel.  An individualistic culture where institutions lose authority and values are no longer shared and a sense of being part of a community and tradition have been lost are factors that lead to anomie.  It is furthermore the result of division of labour and rapid social change.  In other words - progress.

Prior to economic and political progress our aspirations were limited and manageable.  We belonged somewhere and had something like a predefined role.  Life was not an individualistic pursuit of my own subjective idea of happiness.  The world of guilds and family trades was replaced by economic and political progress through industrial revolution and division of labour.  As Durkheim put it:  " To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness."

Worse the idea of self realisation is therefore a myth.  Division of labour turned many into wage slaves and those who "make it" are in spiritual danger of a materialist and passion-driven existence.  

As religion became disorganised and splintered through the Reformation and a consequent sectarianism and spiritual individualism in belief so anomie grew.  Anomie is essentially a lack of social mores, standards or ethics.  These were provided by the Church, as Saint Vincent of Lerins put it:

" That faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."

As a functionalist Durkheim himself had a reductionist leaning - religion was there for the purposes of social cohesion from his reductive and functionalist perspective.  We do not need to accept this to be able to recognise that social progress leads to disintegration and anomie.

The so-called "Christian Nietzsche", the Russian aristocrat and later monk, Konstanin Leontiev was scathing about the notion of progress.  For  him it could be represented by the metaphor of a body suffering a progressive disease that led to disintegration of the biological form.  In the same way social progress led to the disintegration of the commonwealth into individualism.

Progress can be understood as a social force that detaches us from what is around us - community, below us - our roots, and most significantly, what is above - the divine.  These all hold the body together in a hierarchical coherence that connects us to the higher.  Modernity and progress are on the other hand all about deconstruction and reduction.

The self realisation of the progressive West that we see today leads to misery and despair.  Contrast this with the human being who was part of a spiritual hierarchy of Being.  He understood that while existence was a mystery he had his place and purpose.  He had meaning.

One might contrast the glorification of self realisation of the individual that results from progressive ideas with a more Aristotlean understanding.  Self realisation is unconnected with Aristotle's thoughts on character, virtue or a preordained telos.  Rather as progress breaks apart social, spiritual and historical links, individuals pursue their own subjective idea of fulfilment as subjective happiness and self realisation.

For Aristotle man like any other being had a purpose.  Just as the lyre was made to be played to make music, so a man's preordained purpose was virtue.  Virtue was attained by practice and establishing habits that formed one's character.  This is a totally alien way of thinking for a progressive Westerner, who believes his current and flawed passsions of his character must be fulfilled to achieve self realisation - that is his purpose/he thinks, rather than forming his character by practising virtues that at first might seem unappealing and not suited to his flawed desires.

With Aristotle's virtue ethics we find a formidable and uncompromising answer to anomie.  There are social norms and values that are preordained.  The virtues are known and understood - but we have to work and reform our character to attain them.  One can see how compatible this pagan philosopher's ideas were with the Church emerging a few centuries later into Greece from the Holy Land.  Conforming to the likeness of Christ was the telos of every human made in the image of God and who was striving through the gate of the Incarnation to achieve likeness of God as Saint Irenaeus of Lyons explained.  Later in the Middle Ages Christian Western Europe, in schism with Greek Orthodoxy would rediscover Aristotle and his thought was to be a major influence upon the thinking of Thomas Aquinas.

While progressive seeds of thinking were latent in Scholastism in the West, nonetheless this pursuit of virtue and character was again understood in a Christian sense.  

To pursue character and virtue is a rejection of the very notion of progress.  The progress of Western reductive thinking means breaking up social and religious traditions for the liberation of individual identity with no predetermined telos; just as much as it breaks up longstanding communities for economic progress.

Virtue ethics are in many ways the antidote to anomie.  We should strive for character and thereby achieve the happiness of eudaimonia, rather than subjective self realisations as the existentialists such as atheist Sartre argued.  For this reason Western philosophers, in Britain for example, such as Alasdair Macintyre are rediscovering Aristotle's theories of virtue and character as a way to counteract the harmful and individualistic traits of the Enlightenment paradigm.

The virtues Aristotle believed it was the purpose of human life to attain included courage, generosity, justice, temperance and prudence - meaning a sort of practical wisdom.  The pagan philosopher cannot though have the last word, which would lead to a rather dry and restrictive purpose to living.  Orthodox Christian philosopher  Nicholas Berdyaev argued that to attain the likeness of our Divine Maker we were meant to attain freedom, freedom through our creativity.  This is not the Narcissistic self-realisation of the Western progressive, but a striving to participate in the divine through the freedom of being able to create as the imago dei.

Progress, the unquestioned good, has proved to lead to the breaking up of the community and the loss of tradition, virtue and purpose.  It has created a disintegrated world dominated by anomie and deviance.  If people do not simply fall into the trap of ennui, they are in danger of criminality and self-destructive tendencies.  That is the legacy of the Enlightenment.  Post modernism alone did not separate us from our telos, it is just the latest twist since the wrong turn of the Enlightenment and the new secular and individualist age.    

Progress and Power

A key characteristic of those who believe themselves to be progressives and to be on the right side of history is that they are sure they are good.  Progress as a notion though has done away with an idea of a Form of Goodness.  What is good is calculated and made sense of in a strictly temporal way.  Virtue has no real place and God is seen as a primitive idea. 

Progress as a concept is really based upon impoverished metaphysics.  The paradigm is predicated on meaning being reduced to power battles.  What is progress is really a debate as to how best to distribute, award or manage power.  There is no longer an understanding of Man's telos or purpose being participation in the Good through virtue and character, prayer and worship.

Of course some ideas of progress are somewhat unworldly with heterodox ideas of Heaven on Earth.  This in itself can lead to very dangerous places.  A large tendency in progressive thought though is essentially materialist with no focus on the transcendent or the life after death.  Indeed an orientation towards life after death can prove a distraction from the worldly and secular goals of the progressive.  The progressive is in reality a materialist, focused upon building a new Tower of Babel.  Man tries to be God without repentance, but with hubris.

With the English Medieval idea of nominalism we were consequently detached from the Good.  Instead of our telos being participation in The Good, with no universals all that was left was arbitrary power.

A key underlying theme of progressive thought is liberation from oppressive controls of authoritarian and "outdated" power structures.  This idea is revelatory of the underlying assumptions in progressive thought.    That is that history has a linear and benign direction ( a far greater leap of faith than that required by any of the world religions); thereby making anything old necessarily oppressive by definition.  Further, insofar as what came before was by definition benighted, so the freedom achieved is one of not being held back by tradition.  Self expression and self realisation are the inevitable liberation of breaking out of outdated power structures.  Power of course is the only way to make sense of any traditional structure, because higher meanings are discounted.    

We do live in a fallen world and that means that many of the traditions that held us together did fall short and were open to abuse.  The corollary of traditions being compromised by dint of existing in a fallen world is that revolution will also be subject to abuse and corruption, but without any participation in the transcendent that the earlier societies could depend upon to mitigate against abuses.

While Enlightenment thinking looked at inherited social forms to one degree or another as means of control, most powerfully expressed by Marx, but before by Rousseau's chains  - by overthrowing them all that was left was naked power.  

The only question now for Western Man, having cut himself off from the transcendent, was how to manage the raw power that was left.  The European intellectuals chose reductive power and cold abstract theories and rejected the opportunity of participation in the Good.  They rejected the gift of Easter - God becoming Man opening the way to us for men to become gods.  Instead, hubristically, with faith in their own powers of reason, the philosophers made themselves God through a revolutionary power grab, not repentance.  It was the old temptation of the serpent to become like God without God.

This liberation then has really meant negotiating mere and base power.  The only questions left were  who should dominate whom and how much I should be dominated by another?  Should the proletarian class seize power from its oppressor?  Should the strong man seize power?  Should I as an individual have full power over my own life through autonomy.

We think like this because we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of participation in The Good.  We no longer understand that true freedom lies in virtue and worship.  Freedom is to participate in the Good.

That means a kenotic self emptying that gives us access to love and community.  It means freedom from the passions that enslave our souls.

Instead progress has only offered us power over others or power over our own lives.

This reduction of all to power battles has meant inevitably that liberalism too, the great victor of the battles of modernity, has become power hungry.  Liberal societies that prided themselves on their supposedly self emptying granting of freedom of choice, freedom of lifestyle and freedom of speech have also descended into authoritarianism, albeit soft and subtle.  

It is in liberal countries now that speech must be managed and core beliefs about what it means to be human in religious terms must be extirpated from the public square.  Secular liberalism softly, softly is using overweening power.  Unlike the Church when believers got it wrong or failed, this is not a human failing corrupting and tarnishing a transcendent truth.  This is because when you scratch the secular-liberal surface all there actually is in progressive thought is not the Good, the True or the Beautiful, but bare power.  And so liberalism, like its modern ideological cousins, Fascism and Communism, (that seem so different but are really all offspring of post Enlightenment modernity) really boils down to one more interpretation of life as power.  The individual does not participate in a telos of seeking The Good, he is simply an absolutist tyrant in his own life, living an arbitrary existence in a freedom that is really just slavery to the passions.  

 

Progress and Death

 When people bemoan our modern world the usual retort is an instruction not to romanticise the past and to consider the lifesaving utility of medical science.  The merit of medical science, in the hands of pharmaceutical oligarchs, is itself questionable.  Modernity from the dissolution of the monasteries to the categorisation of the wise woman of the village with herbal knowledge as a witch cut us off from inherited collective knowledge.  This indicates that today large corporations simply have to rediscover ancient knowledge never analysed and then they patent it.  That aside, progress in large part justifies itself as a successful flight from death.

Through the technological advances of progress we are cossetted from the severity of our mortality.  Death is made hygienic in a place of face masks and medication.  Coffins are not open at funerals, people generally die in a sterile environment amongst medical experts.

The argument here is not that the advances of medical science should be rejected.  The human being was endowed by his Creator with the talent to solve the problems presented by a hostile fallen Nature, outside of Eden.  Nonetheless this ability is ambiguous, it also leads to a subtle Luciferianism.  This is most strongly demonstrated in the idea of Singularity from the dark technical minds of Silicon Valley, in the idea an imitation of our personality recorded on technology is a means of immortality.

Most  human beings with any consciousness of their soul understand that this method of denying death is by no means immortality.  Nonetheless, we all seek to avoid death and prolong at least a healthy existence if not an unhealthy one.  The other side of this idea latent in progress that the future will be hygienically healthy cannot really tolerate to look at the physical decline of illness and old age.  Even though the technology progress itself produced can prolong people in a sort of nether region of half-life. this is not considered hygienic and as much as the body of the deceased must be concealed, the infirm are considered to have no dignity and we take upon ourselves the right to choose when we live and die or even when others should die (as soon as their scientifically prolonged existence tarnishes the bright and clean future).

Without wishing back a time of pestilence, plague and violence, we must also recognise in the hygienic world of progress a spiritual aspect of human nature has been somewhat curtailed.  We have not and will not conquer death, but we have hidden it.  It is no longer really considered necessary to find a spiritual answer to our mortality, instead our mortality is hidden, because science will solve that question before our turn comes.

A spiritual answer to death does not require some morbid and macabre focus, as though we need to dig up our relatives' decomposing cadavers to take part in a grotesque theatre of afternoon tea.  Somehow that seems reminiscent of the frozen corpses of Americans committed only to life in this temporal world.

Pestilence, famine and war asked us serious questions about the meaning of life that a life of medical care and shopping malls somehow conceals.  We should therefore along with serious thinkers such as Martin Heidegger or Aleksandr Dugin, continue to think seriously about death and how it actually imparts meaning upon our lives.  Without death there is certainly no sense of eternity.  Only with limitation can life choices be meaningful.  Only when we think of our frailty in the face of time can we gain a sense of the eternal.

Modern man might mock the apparent "superstitions" of his ancestors who faced death day in day out, but is that not only because he hides from the question of his mortality? And in hiding from his mortality he is also hiding from the eternal.  Consumption is the answer to ignore the pressing and creeping sense of limitation.  Phrases such as "you only live once" as a justification for existential curiosity that Heidegger saw as inauthentic, are really ways to evade death not to acknowledge it.  In hiding from our mortality, in living for our passions, we are also denying the demands of eternity upon us. 

There is a political question here.  It is with GDP, more consumer choice and liberalisation of laws to "free" us to engage our passions that a global political class can keep us passive.  It means no really difficult questions are asked about what is happening and why it is happening.  Arguably a citizen of Russia or Iran is far less politically-naive than those living in Western democracies where we can sate ourselves and hide from our mortality.

There is also, more obviously a religious question.  For the Westerner death can be regarded as some sort of Malthusian solution that does not necessarily touch me.  Pestilence and famine keep the numbers down and resist the Malthusian bogeyman of overpopulation.  In reality, if we truly recognise each person as more than a mere avatar of their passions, more than a consumer whose identity is defined by his career, by what football team he supports or what genre of popular music he enjoys, more even than which political party he supports, - if we actually see the human person as the imago dei, then his annihilation through physical decomposition is an affront to all that holds real value.

If we finally look at what death really means - the seeming annihilation of the personality, we can see it as the reductive and unnatural force that it really is and therefore reject its right over us.  That though is not in terms of some artificial download onto a computer.  It is instead a theological question, a cosmological question.  How can death exist in contrast to the human person?  It is only then we can recognise that for all our technological and medical progress, the real question is spiritual.  It is only then we can see the real answer is that this fallen world, following the laws of Darwin, is not natural.  It must be the consequence of sin, of a fundamental primary distortion of reality.  That means it cannot be solved by all the cunning techne of human ingenuity.  It is instead solved not by technological or political solutions, but by personal repentance.  We should not let technological, medical or political progress distract us from this. 

 

  

Progress and Alienation

 Hegel wrote of alienation from modernity and Marx wrote about it in terms of alienation from what we create through work.  Neither with Hegel should we agree to strive to  reconcile with modernity, nor with Marx should we simply diagnose alienation as a primarily economic problem linked to  a specific economic system - capitalism.  Marxist economics were equally alienating because it was a radical Enlightenment system.  Nietzsche saw through the shallowness of modernity and advocated the Ubermensch.  Traditionalists such as Evola and Guenon were important in diagnosing this spiritual alienation as a consequence of the whole project of modernity, the reign of Quantity.  Today Dugin advocates the Radical Subject as the way forward for the traditionalist and sacred spirit.

Modernity is a project beginning before the Enlightenment, back to the Renaissance, developing through Baconite science, Newtonian Physics and then of course the  Enlightenment itself.  Its ideology is in a very broad sense liberalism. Its economics are also revolutionary and disruptive of communal life, whether as revolutionary industrial Soviet Communism,  global capitalism or the Technocratic Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Heidegger in particular was able to present an alternative view of being open again to Being, rather than trying to capture it and as a consequence being enframed by our own metaphysics and technology, cut off from Being as the concealed.

The project of modernity, with its blind faith in Progress, what the man on the Clapham Omnibus might term "change for change's sake" (the ideology really is that crude and shallow), was intentional.  The interest in the Occult and magic of the early scientists, their receptivity to the demonic, "progressed" into the ideology of the secret societies, such as the Illuminati and the Free Masons.  Whether the Freemasons today adhere to this ideology no longer matters, but there was a time in history when the secret societes including freemasonry were committed to the revolution which ultimately meant pulling down the ancien regime - Crown and Altar.  (Even if monarchs could for a time serve as vessels of modernisation and religion could be recapitulated as deism or a proto theosophy).

What was the utopia with which they planned to replace the ordained structure of human society?  Well it encompassed liberation through atomisation, technological development and universalism.  Indeed those revolutionaries who paraded the Goddess of Reason through the streets of Paris coined the shibboleth that became the cry of all subsequent revolutions - liberty, equality, fraternity.  This was not the prescriptive liberty rooted in ancient rights under the King that Burke referred to when talking of the liberties of Americans and Englishmen under the English Common Law founded upon precedent.  No this was formed by the theories of  elite thinkers such as Rousseau, whose ideas led to the formation of secret societies amongst the elites.   The Enlightenment itself was fundamental to the shift in thinking, but the very Enlightenment itself was part of the revolutionary fervour of rejecting inherited wisdom, as can be seen in Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?"

The so-called Enlightenment was a philosophical project working in tandem with the sciences to dislocate Western Man from his traditions, his history and his religion.  It was the zeitgeist of the Eighteenth Century, conceived in earlier centuries in Renaissance Humanism and the alchemy of the early occultist sciences.  It was a rising up against the Divine.  And universalism, which meant in reality complete atomisation and dislocation in effect, was its creed.

This is what has led to transgenderism and will in turn lead to transhumanism in this quest for supremacy over reality.

As technology, metaphysics and ideology have worked together, the human being has been reduced to homo economicus, a mere unit of production whether that was in the English Industrial Revolution, Soviet Russia or Capitalist-Fordist America.  This is the real alienation and it is not simply the Marxist account of losing the control of what one's own labour produces.  This is only one possible symptom of the shift to materialism that is fundamental to the idea of Progress.  A strange and irrational faith emerged that the Greeks would not have accepted - history is evolving progressively.  A new thought indeed!  Instead of a fallen post-Edenic, post Golden-Age world, we were to believe Man could again construct Babel.  The real effect was a deep spiritual alienation that manifested in destruction of home and hearth, disconnection from the home gods, the ancestors, the transcendent.

The irrational faith in Progress then, bolstered and supported by theories such as Darwin's evolution, was what really alienates us.  From ugly architecture to grotesque art in aesthetics, to dislocation and insecurity in employment and in economics we are always more and more alienated and torn away from our embeddedness.  Furthermore in a materialist paradigm we are unable to find the words to forge an argument against this pressure to move further and further, deeper and deeper into this mistake, this putting our own technological advances and liberation above the sacred and the human.

it is no accident that culture has decomposed and decayed.  In a world of alienation atomisation and ennui are the result.  This is expressed in our artwork.  It manifests in terrible and senseless crimes, in sexual promiscuity, in deviance.  There is no longer a Higher Authority, there is no longer a purpose, a telos, outside of and above this fallen world.  The only purpose is more liberation from authority and tradition.  Technology is intimately connected to cultural change and adds to our pride that we can create a new Luciferian world in defiance of cosmic law.   In the end they plan to defy death itself with their Singularity concept, bypassing the need for the Cross or so they think in their pride.

"And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."      

Of course technology in itself is not an evil.  It is to an extent of course a consequence of the Fall and linked to Cain.  Nonetheless, the Empire became Christian.  Art was created to glorify and venerate the Divine and the Saints.  Freedom is neither a moral evil.  The trouble is that by dislocating us from our cosmic position we have misunderstood freedom.  From the Greeks onwards,  Plato and Aristotle, through to the Stoics and culminating in the Church Fathers, freedom was understood as freedom from the passions and the potential to participate in the Divine.  The debased view of Man that emerged from the Enlightenment misunderstood freedom as a shallow lack of constraint by authority to be able to indulge the very passions that the ancients understood enslaved us.

The whole driving force of Progress is the passion of pride and it is pride that separates us from God and will as a consequence alienate us from our neighbour, our culture, our very purpose of existence.

Philosophers on the Right turn to the Ubermensch or the Radical Subject.  That though is still a modern response.  In "riding the tiger" of modernity the Traditionalist has already accepted the inevitability of Modernity.  There is no inevitability about it.  Man might build in pride, but Babel was destroyed.  This ideology of a universal system that now manifests in the dogmas of the WEF and the other globalist institutions, is nothing more than men of clay trying to replace God.  No paradigm is inescapable.  One simply has to look at the premise.  And the premise of modernity is Promethean.  It is an attempt to usurp the Divine.  It was the presumption that led to the downfall of Nebuchadnezzar.  However high we build we still have feet of clay.  And by attempting to usurp the Divine we have simply been degraded to slaves of the passion of Pride.  It is indeed Luciferian.  This is the dogma of Lucifer's revolution in the heavens replicated here in earth.  It is no accident that the supposedly secular advocates of Progress have always been fascinated by the occult and drawn to Lucifer as the progressive figure of Light.  It is why the Lucis Trust is so deeply entwined with the United Nations.

If we have faith though and have not given in to the materialist ideology of the Revolution then we know how this ends.  Indeed we know the victory is already won and this is simply the intermediate stage before the consummation of that victory and the building of the new Celestial City - not Babel, but the heavenly Jerusalem.

The Hideous Strength of Green Technocracy

 One way in which the Green lobby captures people's loyalty is by dressing itself up as conservationist.  We all love our natural environment and are distressed to hear of other distant environments being destroyed by Man's exploitative greed and destructive avarice.  Nonetheless, the actual specific proposals made by those using the Green agenda for their own purposes, such as the WEF, have produced a programme that really means the destruction of our actual local environment.  The technocrats have turned to intensive technology to resist the alleged dangers that so often over the years have not materialised.  From over-population to the disappearance of the ice caps, the dire prophecies never materialised at the time claimed and a new terror is then invoked. 

Ever since Climategate the alert and aware have been more sceptical about the claims of the climate fanatics.  It is notable that as global warming does not occur, the terminology has been subtly changed to "climate change", an untestable and unfalsifiable concept.

The measures imposed by global bodies and those being imposed by national governments in effect under the control of the WEF have the convenient consequence of the creation of a social credit system by stealth.  From fifteen minute cities to smart meters that can be switched off to planning to imprison those who cannot afford to turn their homes into ugly eco-compliant blocks, we are entering a level of control for which the Covid lockdowns set a precedent.  And at the very time the Globalists have caused a spike in cost of living with their proxy war against Russia in the breadbasket of Europe, the Ukraine, the high costs of Net Zero are being imposed over and above this upon ordinary people.

The most important aspect of this Globalist programme of Net Zero is though often overlooked.  It is not that wind turbines still need coal-powered energy or that electric cars are causing localised environmental and human catastrophes with lithium mining hidden from the view of the virtue-signalling Westerner.  No, it is rather that the whole programme of Net Zero is based upon a false premise and deeply misunderstands Nature.  With its pristine view of Mother Nature uncontaminated by Man there is a profound theological mistake - an outright heresy.  Ironically, in that heretical premise technology is turned to to eradicate Man from the Environment he shaped as co-creator with the Deity.  It was indeed Man's original Edenic vocation to be the gardener - the imago dei.

Yes, we understand that brutal exploitation of Nature, treating it in Heideggerian terms, as "standing reserve" is very harmful.  The environment though has its value and beauty in the way Man has worked with Nature.  Grazing livestock allow the wild flowers rather than scrubland and wilderness to flourish.  Even hunting led to the maintenance of hedgerows as fences for jumping, which are so much more beneficial for bird life and local ecology.  It is Man in community that makes the environment beautiful. That is not the same as dehumanised agri-business and developers building all over our green fields.

In their deep misanthropy and Gaia worship,  the environmentalists and the control-obsessed globalists are more than happy to eradicate Man from the environment.  Livestock farming that shaped our countryside must be destroyed in place of mono-crops for the new vegan diet.  This will be as bad, if not worse, than the much-hated large agri-businiesses rightly abhorred.  

To do away with coal fires in factories and indeed to destroy the family hearth, wind turbines will march across the green fields and rolling hills .  Dark Satanic mills again polluting our green and pleasant land.  In its hatred of the mining of coal this establishment-backed movement will turn our green and pleasant land into a horrific machine.  This technology though is alienated from Man.  Man is removed from Nature, but Nature is subjected to inhuman technology that silences the dawn chorus as migrating birds are decimated.

The home, the Englishman's castle, will be uglified by uPVC windows and doors and its heart torn out - the family hearth.  This worship of Gaia and hatred of anthropomorphic and patriarchal traditional religion has manifested in an attack on beauty and Nature in the name of Nature.

No longer can something be enjoyed for its beauty.  Now everything is standing reserve to be used for other sources of energy.  It is as though in the very pagan and heretical obsession with Gaia untouched by the stewards of Nature - Man - they are destroying Nature to eradicate that biological source of carbon, mankind.

Of course Providence ensured we would be protected from the risks of carbon.  Just as we produce carbon, so vegetation consumes carbon.  For this reason the planet is greenifying and demonstrating that written into Creation itself is the corrective for global warming.  

And the deep irony is that people are deceived  to destroy by this ideology because they do love their environment and what surrounds them.  That environment is not a wilderness.  Its beauty, what makes it sublime is Man in Nature.  That is not Man treating Nature as standing reserve, but from the chaos of the wilderness revealing, unconcealing the full beauty of Nature.