Category Archives: History

Loss of Faith: The Coming Break-Up of the Nation-State

Article by Gary North from 23rd September 2011.

Excerpts:

In 1953, his [Robert Nisbet’s] book, The Quest for Community, was published by Oxford University Press. It received some attention, mostly favorable, but it was hardly a bestseller. He asked these questions: “Why was it that the modern world had turned to totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century? What had taken place in the societies that gave birth to totalitarianism?” He concluded that it had to do with the breakdown of social order. Those institutions to which men had given allegiance throughout history, such as the family, the church, the guild, the fraternal order, and similar voluntary institutions, had faded in importance in the twentieth century. This left only the isolated individual and the modern nation-state. Men gained a sense of belonging through their participation in mass-movement politics. Totalitarian leaders began to attract individuals who were isolated, even though they were living in large cities. These leaders were able to offer a sense of brotherhood to millions of people who felt alone in the midst of cities. The modern totalitarian state functioned as a substitute for the family, church, and voluntary associations that for millennia had given people a sense of purpose and participation. So, totalitarianism was born out of radical individualism, institutionally speaking, even though as a philosophy, totalitarianism is completely opposed to individualism.

Man is cut off from any source of positive or negative sanctions in response to a transcendent system of morals. So, with the triumph of Darwinism and secularism, faith in transcendental morality has disappeared among the intellectuals. This in turn has undermined their faith in progress. There is no way to define progress unless there is a universal scale of values, meaning good, bad, and worst: the guides for mankind. The god of any society is the source of its laws and the enforcer of these laws. In the Darwinian universe, this means collective mankind. The trouble is, mankind cannot be trusted, precisely because mankind is afflicted with moral perversity.

Then he raises a crucial issue. This is the issue of what he calls religious renewal. “Whatever their future, the signs are present — visible in the currents of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, even millennialism found in certain sectors of Judaism and Christianity. Even the spread of the occult and the cult of the West could well be one of the signs of a religious renascence, for, as it is well known, the birth of Christianity or rather its genesis as a world religion in Rome during and after the preaching of Paul was surrounded by a myriad of bizarre face and devotions.” There are also other signs. “By every serious reckoning the spell of politics and the political, strong since at least the seventeenth century, is fading. It is not simply a matter of growing disillusionment with government bureaucracy; fundamentally, it is declining faith in politics as a way of mind and life” (p. 356). With politics fading as a religion, there could be a revival of supernatural religion. That, too, was basic to the replacement of Roman empire by Christendom, although Nisbet never said this explicitly.

Where did wokeness come from?

Article by Patrick West, a review of a new book (Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution), by Eric Kaufmann.

Excerpts:

Important, too, was the language and thinking of psychology and therapy. These helped shape the idea that minorities need protection from hurtful words that might cause trauma and damage to people’s self-esteem. Kaufmann calls this shift in the mid-1960s, from cultural liberalism to cultural socialism, ‘the big bang of our moral universe, from which taboos around sexism, homophobia, and transphobia were to later spring’. He continues: ‘While radical ideas like critical race theory or gender ideology have gained ground, they only succeeded because they resonated with an established left-liberal hypersensitivity around identity issues.’

It’s here to stay, too, he says. As I write these words, two news stories suggest Kaufmann is right. In one, a British university is decolonising its course on Medieval history to excise the word ‘Anglo-Saxon’; in the other, the Bank of England is telling its staff to use ‘gender neutral’ pronouns when addressing colleagues.

There may have been some pushback against this ideology in recent years, especially when it comes to trans. But Kaufmann is not persuaded that we are approaching the ‘end of woke’. He believes woke tenets are now firmly entrenched in our society, particularly in the minds of tomorrow’s rulers, educators, policymakers, advertising executives and so on. As a middle-aged man, Kaufmann seeks to put it as delicately as possible, but he cannot refrain ultimately from calling out those who he deemed to be the most fervent custodians of our new morality: namely, young, middle-class, highly educated women.

Some might see a contradiction here: is woke imposed on people, or do converts embrace it willingly? Yet it needn’t be an ‘either / or’ matter. Undoubtedly, it spreads through both force and people’s own volition. Those who embrace it think they are being virtuous. Those who would resist often acquiesce, fearing the consequences of doing or saying the wrong thing.

That’s why overcoming woke will take far more than a few laws or a change of government. It will involve rethinking what we mean by ‘caring’ and ‘uncaring’. It will involve daring to be regarded in public as ‘bad people’. It will mean we cannot shy away from the culture war.

Reappropriating Feminism, Maternity, and the Woman’s Role

In this video, “Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with author and columnist Mary Harrington. They discuss how women contributed to civil society before joining the workforce, the fatal flaw of a male-dominated system, the two fundamental reproductive strategies, the commodification of female sexuality, and the utility of radical loyalty and solidarity between partners.

Mary Harrington is an editor for UnHerd and the author of “Feminism Against Progress.” Harrington also runs a weekly Substack, “Reactionary Feminist.”

This episode was recorded on July 3rd, 2024.”

The importance of the language of theology and millenarianism for the Marxist revolutions

In 1988, Dr. Gary North gave a speech on Karl Marx and Marxism. The portion relevant here starts at this point and extends to the end about 12 minutes later.

Here’s what he says: In 1660, when Charles II acceded the English throne, it was clear the Puritan revolution had failed. From then on, the language, but not the system, of political tracts was secularised. For example, prior to 1660 there was regularly talk of the three ages of man being the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the age of the Holy Spirit. After that date, especially in the 19th century, there was often talk of the age of religion, the age of metaphysics and the age of reason.

This fed into the Marxian belief in an atheist millennium that was about to be ushered in, in fact that it was assumed to be “inevitable”.

However, the professional revolutionaries hit a brick wall in 1965, North says. And that was the undeniability of the failure of a socialist revolution in Indonesia. In a strong counter-revolution, 100.000 ethnic Chinese were killed by “racial anti-communists”. These, I assume, were Muslims (North doesn’t say).

North goes on to say that from then on, communists realised they couldn’t take over a country with deep religious roots. They would have to restructure their ideology and pitch and re-write their pamphlets.

They realised that they have to have a religious and theological foundation if they wanted to capture the minds of the people.

Out of these thoughts was born the “liberation theology”, which was, or is, particularly active in Latin America.

North finishes by saying that recruitment for revolutionary movements is based on a vision of world transformation and whose side you need to get on to drive progress toward a “new world order”.

My interpretation of North’s words here: From 1965, “Stalinist” communists implicitly agreed with the early “cultural Marxist” Antonio Gramsci, whom they had up until then treated as a heretic. The Italian Gramsci had in the 1920s written essentially that in Europe a Bolshevik revolution would not succeed because of the “cultural hegemony” of the Catholic church. It was these writings that inspired the Frankfurt School a generation later to their – largely successful – cultural revolution which has totally marginalised the church, where it has not been co-opted.

The Glue Binding Democracy and a Free Economy Has Melted

Writes Charles Hugh Smith in an article with that title on the blog “Of Two Minds”.

Quote:

The single-minded pursuit of greed does not magically organize the economy or society to serve everyone’s interests equally. As Adam Smith explained, capitalism and the social order both require a moral foundation, which in a free society takes the form of civic virtue: it is the responsibility of every citizen who is able to contribute to the social capital that serves us all to do so not in response to an oppressive state but of their own free will.

Here’s the problem though: What if the citizen opts to use his free will to not contribute to the social capital? What if, instead, he opts to use his free will to exploit the social capital without giving anything back, ever? Who’s to stop him, and how and why?

This is where the force of religion comes in. Wherever we use the word “responsibility” we need to examine this: “To whom are we responsible”? In a society where we can assume the vast majority of members believe in a God to whom they feel “responsible”, we can assume that they will behave largely along the lines of the commandments handed down from on high.

This can no longer be taken for granted in erstwhile Christian societies. This general presupposition began to be eroded to a large extent during the (pre-French Revolution) Enlightenment (with precursors of this trend beginning in the Renaissance). The French Revolution massively strengthened and accelerated this trend. The logical end points of this trend were the concentration and death camps of the 20th century.

We have since taken one (!) step back from that abyss. But we haven’t “turned around” yet and walked away from it.