Liberalism Rests on Fantasy

It was good timing that Ron Unz chose to share with us this bit of clear reasoning about individualism and the collapse of society in the West.

Not that we agree with the answers suggested by the author (Jef Costello) nor the book from which he draws his thesis, but that they ask the right questions. That book is by Alain de Benoist, Against Liberalism: Society Is Not a Market, trans. F. Roger Devlin, Middle Europe Books, 312 pp. (found here). I will trust Costello’s summary.

The reason this is worth pursuing is the clear argument of what western individualism is. Somewhat less useful is the explanation of whence it comes. If you accept the self-declaration of western church doctrine as biblical, then the accusation is accurate. However, we hold that such a declaration is false, that western church traditions very early left the biblical outlook and substituted something false, reading it back into the Bible. We’ve been saying this for decades.

The blame rests with Hellenized minds seizing the teachings of Christ as translated into Greek and failing to search the Hebraic background of Christ. Thus, the claims of western church religion are false from the start. The real blame falls on Hellenism, not the actual teachings of Jesus.

Thus, Costello tells us that modern secularism is the logical outcome of western religious traditions:

All that then remained was for the educated, urban classes to discard entirely the individual’s relation to God. What we were left with was a secularization of Christian religious individualism: The individual is what he is prior to and independent of family, nation, race, and social role and is not fundamentally defined by these. But with the individual’s relation to God discarded, he is now nothing more than a social atom who is nevertheless still supposed somehow to possess intrinsic worth and dignity. And this worth is exactly the same in all individuals. In other words, all men are equal.

In his words, the entire human race is individually interchangeable before God. It makes no difference to Him who claims their ticket to Heaven. This is about as far from the truth as can be. I agree with his assessment of Calvinist doctrine, but we aren’t Calvinists. We do hold to the Doctrine of Divine Election, which apparently Calvin himself didn’t understand properly, as you can tell from reading his Institutes.

We look at the Two Realms in Scripture. Your value to God in the Covenant of Christ here in this world is based on how well you embrace and fit yourself into that Covenant. Your place in Heaven is not your choice at all. While there is a connection between your Covenant obedience and your place in Heaven, Scripture carefully avoids trying to explain that link in terms we can understand intellectually. It’s a mystery, something understood in the heart without words. It is ineffable, cannot be declared.

While God recognizes your individuality, it is from within His domain, His family household of faith. Your flesh cannot shed your tribal identity (race, ethnicity, culture, etc.) and we are advised to be careful about mixing cultures in our churches today. It can be done, but we cannot forget the sorrows Paul suffered so greatly from dealing with mixed churches.

There were several factors that made things so hard on Paul. The Jews were not Hebraic, but insisted they were. They constantly provoked Gentiles by their arrogance, while the Gentiles with good educations countered with their own prejudices. The early disciples had not studied the problem of mixing cultures, but simply assumed it was supposed to work. The power of the Holy Spirit is more than sufficient, but the path to changing one’s tribal identity was not clear to them. There is still a lot of work to do in bending the fleshly nature to the Spirit’s will. It’s not automatic; you must nail your flesh to the Cross repeatedly. Further, the early disciples had too much work to do just pulling away from the false doctrines of Judaism, while keeping the treasures that had not been lost.

No one had bothered to study the ancient Hebrew outlook in terms that could be offered to Hellenists. Paul had just barely begun to approach the task. It’s not that God could not commission someone to take up that job, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen in the records of church history that we have. Instead, the Hebrew outlook was abandoned and became increasingly remote as time went on. We can only conclude that someone dropped the ball. God wasn’t caught off guard, but had His own ineffable reasons for letting this problem fester.

All I can say is that it seems to have fallen to recent generations to begin this work. The problem is that there is no possible way to stand up a body of work that can be absorbed by any and all cultures. Each human culture must make its own study of Hebrew epistemology and explain it in their own terms. Unless you can see the differences, you are in no position to meaningfully renounce your fleshly identity in favor of a spiritual one.

This is the one thing that the article linked above misses: Genuine Christian faith does not atomize humans, but demands they yield to an identity that is alien to this world, yet does have a very clear image of what it should look like in this world. We have no interest in rights, nor liberty (whatever that means), and we certainly denounce individualism. The Covenant of Christ is feudal and tribal. But Mr. Benoist is quite right that we are dealing with a monster in western liberalism:

Such forms of belonging are regarded with suspicion by liberalism because they make the individual less free in his choices — especially when they are not voluntarily chosen. This means that, effectively, liberalism sets itself against history, tradition, and nature. It becomes a denial of everything that transcends the atomic individual and his personal autonomy[…] To liberate or emancipate individuals meant breaking the bonds of community and freeing individuals from the circumstances into which they were born. “A radical devaluing of the past in the name of an optimistic vision of the future.”

The ability of the human subject to separate himself, even if only in his imagination, from all bonds and all historical context is regarded, moreover, as what makes him truly human[…] While for the ancients the ideal was conforming ourselves to the natural order, for the moderns the ideal is freeing ourselves from it. Human self-actualization is thus understood to be a process of liberating oneself from all unchosen connections or attachments.

These are the basic assumptions of almost all western church folks. We have an awful lot of work to do.