Thursday 21 March 2024

Diversity is our Decay

 "Diversity is our strength" is a shibboleth parroted by our careerist and pusillanimous politicians and enforced by human resources departments throughout the West.  A whole legal framework of human rights, not so much codifying inherited civic rights as enforcing an ideology of diversity has binding power throughout the West.   Diversity and its corollary, inclusivity were cited as the justification for perpetuating the war in the Donbas (despite the key diverse idols of homosexuality and abortion being legal in the Russian Federation).  

In terms of the Post-War paradigm being predicated on anti-authoritarianism and imposed unity, this obsession with diversity makes some sense.  Of course, the contradiction is diversity of opinion is not permitted, because then the natural perspective embodied throughout the rest of the world and throughout the history of the whole world including the West, would contradict today's mantras of wokeism.

Indeed, the modern West's obsession with individualistic diversity is exceptional in the sense of being an aberration, with no historical equivalent.  It is contingent upon our Christian culture, while being a perversion and twisting of that inheritance.  For most of mankind's existence the question has not been how to enable and protect diversity, but how to return to holistic unity.  From Plato to Eastern spirituality, we have understood diversity and idiosyncrasy to be a fracturing of a holy unity to which we strive to return as the telos of Mankind.

The Russian philosopher who finally became an Orthodox monk, Konstantin Leontiev, known as the Christian Nietzsche provided a powerful symbol of the body politick's progress towards individual diversity as being akin to the decay of a corpse that fragments and breaks up into individual pieces.  This fragmentation can be contrasted with the ideal put forward by French Integralist Charles Maurras for whom a return to the Catholic Church and the Monarchy would re-integrate French society unifying it and overcoming the disintegration set in train by the Jacobin revolution.

Nonetheless, there is a connection between the disintegration into atomised individualism, where people celebrate their idiosyncratic enslavement to their passions and the Church.  It is though a connection between Orthodoxy and a derivative heresy.  Christian theology of the person and liberal individualism are linked in the same way as Orthodox teaching on the Word made flesh is to Arianism.

Diversity as an idea stems from  liberal individualism, itself a heretical derivative from Man as the image of God, the Imago Dei.  We must understand here that the Christian faith answered the dilemma of Greek philosophy - how to solve the problem of the One and the Many.  For most schools of classical thought the break up from unity into diverse particulars was seen as a fall and a disintegration.  The Church Fathers, in particular Saint Maximus the Confessor were able to provide the answer to this age-old dilemma and the answer lay in Christ.

In His Incarnation Christ joins the transcendent and the immanent, the universal and the particular, the One and the Many, God and Man.  As Saint Athanasius and Saint Irenaeus put it - God became man that Men might become gods.  This intertwining without loss of identity between Christ's two natures - divine and human - was further elucidated by Saint Gregory of Palamas's distinction between Divine Energies and Essence.  The essence of the divine and the human are not confused, but distinct for we are being joined in energies not substance or essence.  Thus identity is retained as in love and sexual union.

Furthermore, the Church revealed that God was not an impersonal One as the Neoplatonists held into which we would be absorbed and dissolved, losing out identity.  God is rather Three Persons in One God, three hypostases and one substance.  This then is the solution to the Greek problem of the One and the Many and it is found in personhood.  We are not simply reabsorbed into a Platonic One, but retain our identities in relationship with the Triune God.

That personhood is expressed through relationship, just as the Trinity is three divine Persons in One.  It is not the degraded atomisation into individualism. And that personhood in Man has a telos, to participate in the Divine, growing into the full stature of Christ.

The sanctity of personhood and freedom have been developed by contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Christos Yannaras.  Our telos is Christ, but it is manifested in our irreplaceability and importantly this irreplaceability of our personhood is expressed through freedom from the passions.

Yes it rests on freedom, because we can only authentically grow into Christ if we choose that path - but it is not freedom to be enslaved to the passions.  This is why Western churches have gone so awry - in their emphasis on inclusivity they say we accept you as you are, whatever passions have enslaved you.  God wants the best for us and will not leave us trapped in our passions.  True identity is unique and irreplaceable, but it is in the fulfilment of our telos to attain the likeness of the divine.  We all start as the imago Dei but having lost the likeness, but our fallen state is put right by attaining likeness though theosis or sanctification.  This is full freedom, not falling short through sin into enslavement to the passions, be that avarice and greed or promiscuity or homosexuality, so promoted by the Western elites.  

The modern West by contrast misunderstands freedom as licence and acquisition of wealth.  Avarice and sexual perversions that distort the image of God in us are celebrated as freedom.   

The Western idea of freedom and rights is a distorted degradation of Christian freedom and personhood.  Unlike the Church Fathers modern ideas are not derived from a high metaphysical principle such as the Trinity and the hypostases.  Enlightenment philosophers simply exaggerated the idea beyond what was justified by metaphysics.  Freedom and the sanctity of the person are indeed sacred principles, but there is no case for putting forward atomised individualism, enslavement to passions or diversity as principles.  They are heretical claims based on nothing more than thin air.  The Church made clear personhood was contingent on the Trinity and that personality could be retained in returning to our Creator as established through Christ's two natures.  The only reason these ideas were developed further into a fragmentary individualism was because of the development of a profound nihilism that ignored the transcendent justification for what we hold dear about mankind.    

And so we must rediscover that the true meaning of freedom is not in what is really the enslavement of "sodomy and usury" celebrated by our corrupt elites, but in the freedom to grow into the "full stature of Christ" through our unique irreplaceability when we are freed from the passions and sin.       


Thursday 29 February 2024

Alchemy or Theosis - different paths to different illuminations

 In the current time, despite the ever-increasing attractiveness of the New Age, the occult and the Eastern religions, we tend to have a materialist outlook.  Even our dabbling in the occult or other religions are seen  more as useful and about self-fufilment rather than worship.  This is to be contrasted with true religion, founded on humility before the Divine.  

It is somewhat counter-intuitive to link dry and objective science with anything mystical, but science originated in the esoteric worlds of alchemy and the occult.  Newton was fascinated by occult ideas and early chemistry sprang from esoteric alchemy.  Indeed, scratch the surface a little and we find the same underlying desire in both the occult and the scientific mindset - the grasping of power to manipulate the world.  Nature is then, in Heideggerian terms, standing reserve and we impose our will on it to exploit it from a position of Machenschaft.

Today we see a re-emergence of pseudo religious ideas in the manifestation of singularity and the technicians' belief in immortality through technology - the creation of own own hands that seems to be controlling us and that we worship.

In today's world of objective and rationalist science we see the reappearance of old and esoteric beliefs that are premised on attaining power, immortality and deification through our own manipulative efforts.  It might seem incongruous, but what manifests in both magic and science was there from the beginning, - the grasping at the fruit of knowledge, contrary to God's plan for his naive and immature creation, Man.

Such a spirit underpinned many of the pagan rites of initiation whether in the tradition of Mithras or Pythagoras.  The Neoplatonists made use of theurgy, which was a formulaic way of achieving deification.  By using certain incantations to invoke the divine, one is entering magical practice and thereby the manipulation of the divine or nature to achieve one's ends.  And these same processes as used in magic and theurgy, whether neoplatonic or alchemist, are in fact a form of techne - the manipulation of the world for own own ends and the attainment of power over God or the cosmos.

From the perspective of faithful humility the praxis of magic, theurgy, alchemy, science and technology are forms of  manipulation and domination, therefore being regarded to an extent as Luciferian.  Despite false dichotomies presented today, from the perspective that matters, one of humility, these different forms of praxis are all linked to the Fall - they are all grasping attempts at manipulation.

Humility is then the key distinction from these manipulative forms of praxis.  How we should have acted in the Garden was through a spirit of humility, not through pride attempting to seize power to achieve eternal life and knowledge disregarding our Creator.

There is a way to deification and it is not through the self realisation of alchemic or occult theurgies.  It is in a spirit of humility and faithful trust expressed in prayer.  Saint Seraphim of Sarov spoke of acquisition of the Holy Spirit as achieved by a life of Christian virtues.  Primarily the grace of the Holy Spirit is attained through prayer.  Prayer is the act of asking, not grasping and to ask is to act in the spirit of humility and trust.

To attain theosis the Fathers teach is to be deified.  And the means is a life of Christian virtue and prayer,  The possibility of acquiring the Holy Spirit is only possible because "God became Man that men might become gods" as both Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Saint Athanasius, the great opponent of Arianism, said.

What this means is that any dichotomy between technology and the occult or chemistry and alchemy is false if the scientific work is in the spirit of pride, defiance and acquisitiveness.  If we are grasping at power to be like gods, while bypassing God, be that through creating artificial intelligence, developing the atom bomb or engaging in New-Age meditation, we are replaying the story of the Fall from the Garden.  Furthermore, we are mistaken if we attempt to separate the cold rationalism of science from the esoteric world of magic and the occult.  These are different sides of the same coin when science becomes scientism and both have their origin in Luciferian pride, and are the ensnaring by Lucifer the beautiful evening star who distracts us from the Father of Lights and our salvation. 

   

Friday 23 February 2024

The Mean Old Scrooge of Philosophy

 Parsimony is not considered a virtue.  We look upon those who exhibit this trait as mean, grasping, miserly and lacking in generosity or the milk of human kindness.  And yet in the world of intellectual discourse we are encouraged to be mean and unrelenting.  The intellectual rule in question is quite explicit as to the sentiment that motivates it - I mean the rule of ontological parsimony.

William of Ockham, that medieval thinker who struck a blow against philosophical realism, contrived a methodology that allowed little to no room to explain much of what the human being intuits and indeed little room for that which gives life and the cosmos meaning.

William of Ockham is famous colloquially for Ockham's razor, by which is of course meant cutting away all complicated reasons and looking to the simplest explanation as the most likely.  As a rule of thumb through life it works fairly well in limiting overly speculative and unsupported claims about things we come across in life.  It is simple to regard crop circles as a consequence of something manmade, be that farm equipment or a hoax, rather than assuming the patterns in the field are the consequence of extra-terrestrial activity.

Importantly, and what is sometimes forgotten is that Ockham's razor is only claiming that the simpler explanation is more likely, not that a more complicated explanation is proved as impossible.  Ockham's razor is like a working solution until more is known and it cannot rule out conclusively a more complicated explanation.

The idea of ontological parsimony is closely related, but more specific to philosophy and theology.  It is a rule of  ontology that we are not justified in making speculative claims about ontology.  From Ockham's point of view as an example, Platonic forms violate ontological parsimony.  While Plato is logically coherent, he is for Ockham going too far ontologically in relying on forms outside space and time to account for the world of becoming and imperfection.  Essentially what is meant by ontological parsimony is that ontological entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.  Thus if the world can be explained materially, then it is not necessary to rely on immaterial explanations be that Platonic forms, God or anything from outside space and time.  The more ontological claims you make the more likely you are to make a slip.

Now in modern Western thought, right down to the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, this is considered a holy and inviolable law.  That though misses the point.  The rule cannot prove that more ontological layers to a theory are bound to be false, only that you require more justifications for more ontological layers and this need can be avoided by not making any extra ontological claims beyond those absolutely necessary.  A frugal and somewhat pusillanimous approach indeed that never actually proves or claims to prove new or speculative ontological claims are by necessity false; only that there is a greater need for justification.

As a result of the way this frugality of thought has seeped into our culture, atheism seems correct because it rules out all ontological claims.  There may though be justifications for metaphysical and theistic claims bar the need to be an ontological necessity.

This parsimonious way of thinking means there is an inherent bias towards a simpler theory such as Darwin's idea of evolution because it does not need to rely on any greater ontological claims.  But there may be very good reasons for giving credence to more ontological claims than those that are only strictly necessary.

This parsimony really is a frugal meanness of thought that impoverishes our intellectual realm in the West.  If there is no ontological realism, by which is meant that certain universal or metaphysical concepts are considered real, we lose much that enriches life - the Good, the True the Beautiful.

Relying on a purely material explanation of reality gives us a very simple philosophy, but it is impoverished and means we must omit much that we intuit is real and not simply real on the periphery of reality, but central - be that ethics, the soul, the divine, love, even logic..

And so by adopting a philosophically frugal methodology we are bound also to adopt an impoverished Weltanschauung.  We must rule out much of value, not because we have proved it as non-existent, but because we will only allow the most narrow of reasons to explain the world.  But while this approach means less risk and less need for complicated ontology, it is equally possible that the cosmos is not at all simple, but baroque and beautifully ornate.  The methodology is not proof in itself of a minimalist reality.

There are other reasons to think philosophical realism is justified.  Indeed it is the opposite thinking to Ockhamite parsimony.  A more generous way of thinking allows for us to give serious weight to immaterial but highly important ideas that we live by - love, God, beauty.  

Evolution is often referred to as a beautiful theory, but that is because of its simplicity.  There are other forms of beauty than minimalism and the human soul often craves a more intricate and ornate beauty.  Minimalism is not necessarily superior to the Gothic or the Baroque.

If we look at the Church Councils and the Fathers they used a different methodology.  For the Fathers it was what ensured theological concepts were coherent and non-contradictory that made up the methodology.  Again there was a form of minimalism, in that it was not thought wise to over-dogmatise.  Church Tradition was considered sufficient on the whole unless a heresy arose and only then would it be necessary to theologise on dogma.  This thought is in the opposite sprit to the mean frugality of Ockham.  Instead it gave liberal space to Tradition and personal spirituality unrestricted by dogma unless strictly necessary to avoid heresy.  And so Patristics is generous not mean.  

And Ockhamite parsimony really is mean spiritually.  There is an ethical question about adopting a methodology that dismisses and derides the most precious aspects of being human, cutting us off like a crusty old miser, a Gradgrind, from the Good, the True, the Beautiful - the Transcendent.

Despite the way ontological parsimony and Ockham's razor permeate our way of thinking in the West at every level of society, making us a materialistic culture facing a meaning crisis, there are other methodologies that are more humane and generous that give credibility to all that the human soul intuits, giving a philosophical and theological structure through Scripture, testimonies, Councils and canons that protect this intuition from solipsism on the one hand and from a reductive ontology on the other.



Monday 19 February 2024

Autocracy and Surrogate Imperators

With the recent death in prison of Alexey Navalny, the Russian politician opposed to President Putin, there has been much media attention given to what is happening; far more than that given to the late Gonzalo Lira, American citizen and critic of Zelensky, who died in similarly suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian gaol a few weeks before.  Russia is being contrasted as an autocratic regime in opposition to the enlightened democracies of the West.  This promotion of the West, predicated on human rights and liberalism is still assumed to be the better system, despite protesting farmers, the yellow vests and in America a political divide too deep to be able to envision an American common weal.

These abstract human rights that the West sees as its foundation have become the only way to value human beings.  In contrast religious faith did not conceive of abstract rights to be able to live a certain way or do certain things, it thought rather that man's sanctity lay in being created in the image and likeness of God.  This view of human nature encompassed freedom, creativity and the sanctity of life, but remained categorically different from the abstract and individualistic idea of human rights.  It gave men a telos of virtue.  This perspective also honoured the Emperor, pagan as well as Christian, persecutor of the Church as well as the Christian Basileus.

In Dante's great work, Brutus as the betrayer of the emperor is in the very depths of Hell alongside Judas, the traitor to Christ.  The Emperor, as the Pauline epistles make clear, is to be honoured not for his individual virtues, but by dint of his role.  In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Chapter Two, verse six, Saint Paul gives a clear explanation of the role of the Emperor.  And this was written centuries before the Edict of Milan:

"And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time."

The Church Fathers understood that the Emperor withholds the coming antichrist who will subvert all order and seemliness.  It is impossible that Saint Paul regarded the dissolute personality of Caesar Nero as good, but his role as Emperor has a function in Christian eschatology.  It is for this reason that Saint John of Shanghai understood that the regicide of the Tsar, Passion Bearer and New Martyr Nichols II meant there was no one to hold back the coming antichrist in these last days.

What are we to understand from this?  We see in the West much that is promoted in the name of freedom and rights that is very much in the sprit of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We see that in Western democracies today all is subverted in a post-modern celebration of degeneracy, particularly unseemly sexual degeneracy.  

Meanwhile citizens from those countries deemed an alliance of evil often have not lost touch with religious faith, high literature and art, philosophical thinking and something even more significant - they, the citizens have not lost a certain decorous innocence. Whatever the accusations of corruption and oppression we in the West throw at Iran or Russia (and these are two very different countries), their people on the whole retain a dignity that people in the West have lost.  They have not lost their intelligence or virtue on the whole.  While we in the West see scenes of degradation of the human person celebrated as freedom, in other parts of the world they would still blush.  We are somehow degraded by the celebration of the sexual passions in particular.  it goes further though, there is disrespect for elders, for figures of authority, we mock that which is sacred and celebrate that which is degrading of the human body.  Saint Peter in his second Epistle wrote of such a type of person:

 "But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government.  Presumptious are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries"

Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans strongly affirms monarchical rule:

"For he is a minister of God to thee for good.  But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain:  for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."

And the Church held to this throughout the persecution by the Empire, only resisting the Emperor on matters of religious faith.  Putting to one side the virtues and sins of emperors throughout history for the moment, it is clear that to be a rebel against ordained authority one is stepping into a path that also entails moral dissolution.  Note that those who oppose Putin, go by names such as "Pussy Riot" and many wave the flag of Western sexual liberation - the six coloured flag of LGBT.  The concept of human rights often seems a cover for living by the passions and rejecting virtue.

Being an obedient and orderly subject is part of the virtuous life.  In the West, since the top-down revolution of the elites and their secret societies, overturning the order of Christendom and expressing oneself sexually is seen as liberation.  It is by such a subverted and revolutionary ethos that we now live.  The Jacobins run our political structure.

Elsewhere, in more autocratic countries, fallible men have taken absolute power to themselves.  In a 2009 Russian film by Pavel Lungin, entitled Tsar, this very problem is confronted.  The autocrat has become not dissolute but cruel and mad.  His close friend and companion and Metropolitan of Moscow, later to be canonised as Saint Philip of Moscow confronts and chastises this cruel Tsar, Ivan IV, known with the epithet Grozny or Terrible.  As a Christian Philip cannot stop by and watch the wanton cruelty meted out upon Tsar Ivan's innocent subjects.  In the end Philip himself is martyred, strangled to death by one of Ivan's henchmen.  He though witnessed against the Emperor, the vicar of God.  And mad as Tsar Ivan might have been, he began to build Moscow to be the Third Rome of Orthodox Christianity.

We therefore have a paradox - the Emperor there to safeguard the Christian world can himself become another Nero,  And yet Paul wrote those words as Nero, who would put him to death reigned and terrorised Rome.

There is something deep here.  If democracies subvert Tradition and order with their subversive human rights, the danger of arbitrary rule so despised by Anglo Saxon liberals still seems to hold as a criticism.  Do Christians turn a blind eye to abuse of power?

Perhaps one way to understand it is that the Emperor fulfils his role insofar as he does not fall into sin himself.  There is also a distinction between personal sin and being a public ruler, although usually private sins enter the public realm when an empire is ruled by a person rather than a constitution.

The Church though sees the bigger picture.  With Saint Philip, in the tradition of Saint John the Forerunner, the Church challenges the ungodly exercise of power, but like Saints Paul and Peter the church recognises the sacred role of the Emperor and that for all the personal faults a personal ruler is superior to a constitutional republic - the system of deists and freemasons.

It is something to do with Monarchy that keeps countries from going down the road of abstract rights and maintaining personal relationships at the core of the polity.  These personal relationships define the State as a family, rather than a constitutional system of rights and processes.  With a monarch at the heart of the nation, the polity is not a codified document, but a family.

Today the post Soviet republics are not hereditary monarchies. They are ruled by presidents, but to a certain extent these presidents from Putin to Lukashenko are more like autocrats and whatever their personal faults and however much these faults creep into their public roles, they are withholding forces, restraining as Saint Paul would put it, the diabolical forces that so torment the West today.

What though is it that they protect?  Is it really more precious than the West's human rights?  It is a different culture, one of more restraint, innocence, decorum and intelligence.  Each undemocratic regime can be held to account for abuses of power, for special favours to the members of the inner circle and to downright cruelty towards political prisoners.  What though keeps support for a Putin or Lukashenko is the deep fear of a return to the times of chaos and foreign exploitation.  In that sense what the West sees as an opposition leader can look more like a traitor, especially when funded by the very country that had engaged in the asset stripping in the nineties.

That though is not the most precious thing that is protected.  In the West our culture has been so dumbed down that we are kept placated and stupid under the power of modern-day bread and circuses, be that football or reality television.  We are detached from our high culture and our history.  We have lost our identity.  We have been manipulated so as not to be able to discern the most precious aspects of life.  Swearing, promiscuity, sexual deviancy, disrespect for sacred things, blasphemy, disregard for the elderly, rejection of our culture have been normalised.  However brutal some foreign despots their people still have access to their religion, their culture and their identity.  This is not something to be lightly dismissed.  It is striking that a Russian or Iranian is likely to be more cultured than a Westerner.

That though is not to mistake the image for the real thing.  The undemocratic and anti- Western regimes all have their roots in revolution.  They are not emperors in the real sense, the traditional sense of the hierarchical religious societies of Tradition.  Instead they mimic their pre-revolutionary predecessors and there is a strange overlap between this return to Tradition and roots in the Marxist revolutions of recent history.  

Nonetheless, it can be seen that those in authority in Orthodox countries particularly are resisting the cultural subversion that is turning the West mad, which is even becoming confused over gender.  In that sense today's autocrats are restrainers of the worst excesses of the revolutionary West that has fallen prey first to Jacobins and rationalists and now to postmodernists and LGBT.  In the East meanwhile there is an example of trusting in God to bless the people with a good king.


Sunday 28 January 2024

Singularity - Full Realisation of Man's Fall

The moment of singularity is when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence.  To some this means the end or extinction of man, the Imago Dei, by his own idol.  While Artificial Intelligence can only ever be complicated input and output and cannot possess consciousness in the of sense of Man as made with the divine spark of life, it can reach the ultimate stage of Gestell - humanity's enframement by the technology it created.

For a scientist such as Robert Kurzweil, captured by the work of his own mind and hands, this, like the Fruit in the Garden is the key to immortality.  Such an attitude is rife in the tech world.  It is no accident that Apple chose the symbol of a bitten fruit.  From this perspective that human desire, rooted in pride, to know and achieve immortality through dominating Nature, subjecting the world to its will, can be traced from the temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, through alchemy, occultism, Baconite science to splitting the atom, to Big Tech and now the push for singularity.  

According to the reductive narrative of atheism, in its Promethean spirit, this is healthy rebellion against the arbitrary Patriarch God.  We outwit the Divine decrees and achieve forbidden power, finally leading to immortality.

This is a misunderstanding of God and His love and benevolence.  Adam was forbidden the fruit because in his undeveloped and naive state such knowledge in Eden would have brought about terror and disaster to mankind.  Instead the Exile was to allow us to survive this disaster of our sin.  The Exile leads to Christ and our redemption and immortality.

The pride of Satan was the cause of his rebellion and he appealed to our pride in our transgressions to achieve immortal life and power over Nature.  We thereby in Heideggerian terms, treated Nature as standing reserve and became enframed by our technology - the work of our own artistry.

What is going wrong here in the vision of perpetual life in this realm of existence is what went wrong at the Fall,, whether you understand that story literally or symbolically.  And it leads to death not life, enslavement to decay, not freedom.  Our pride leads us to see Nature as something to manipulate whether by magic or science - the urge is the same to both practices.  

And so, even if singularity means we can avoid death in this temporal realm, we will not be attaining the richness of eternal life with God.  There is a fundamental and foundational mistake, indeed sin, in this attempt to seize the fruit of eternal life.  We are going about it by grasping, not letting go.

From Christ's death on the Cross we see eternal life is achieved by relinquishng our control and smashing the idols we create, be they Moloch or Big Tech.  That is not to say our creativity is wrong, for just as we are stewards of Creation, so we are made to be creative.  It is rather the spirit in which we create.  It is the Machenschaft Heidegger points to by falling into inauthenticity of Being and treating that over which we are stewards as standing reserve.

The spirit in which artificial intelligence is created is paradoxically both our own grasping at control and a surrender to the work of our own hands as a new god.  Impatient for Moses to return from the mountain, we are building our golden calf.

Nonetheless, however far artificial intelligence develops as an input and output system, it remains only that.  Only God breathes life into beings and only God creates consciousness.  That is not to say that a level of sophistication and complexity that will exceed human rationality is impossible.  Simply by dint of the complexity and the likely general nature of A.I.'s ability to process, in that level of intelligence it could exceed humanity and become more powerful in a technical sense.  It could well be the Beast we must bear the mark of and bow down to worship.  What A.I. will not have is the nous of which the Fathers speak, that enables us to participate in the Divine Energy of God and to be transformed from glory into glory as we participate in the divine - the Imago Dei recovering the likeness of God given at Creation and forfeited by Adam's attempt to force immortality by his own will and grasping.  It is only by love and worship of the Divine source of love and goodness that eternal life is found.  Eternal life is categorically and fundamentally different from the never-ending temporal existence the promoters of singularity lust after.

We may find ourselves ruled over by a diabolical Beast that makes its own image for us to bow down and worship, but we can resist the Mark, like the first martyrs in Rome.  The never-ending life the singularists crave is that referred to in Revelation most likely:

"In those days men will seek death and will not find it."

If this sort of singularity is achieved by our mad scientists, it will be founded on something rotten that is the desire and lust to grasp at forbidden fruit and to usurp the natural order by defying God to achieve immortality.

Such an urge has been in us since the Fall.  It is not the defiance of some arbitrary rule that we are demonstrating.  There was nothing arbitrary about being forbidden to eat of the fruit.  Instead the only way to reach eternal life is as the monks say- by dying ourselves.  In that sense we must rather surrender our selfish and individualistic urge to self preservation and instead be moved by love - love of God and love of Man.

We are perhaps approaching another time of martyrdom where we will be called upon to give up on material life for God.  If we can be merged into some Frankenstein abomination through singularity, it will be the decision we must make to turn away from this fake eternal life, just as the martyrs had to choose the lions of the Coliseum rather than deny Christ for their self preservation of this temporal existence.  



Saturday 20 January 2024

Good Authoritarianism

 What links the housing crisis in the UK to the Zionist bombing of civilians in Gaza?  One might say it is because Western governments are under the control of global interests with their own agenda.  Israel is an outpost of the global- liberal empire in the authoritarian and traditional Middle East.  House prices in the UK are out of control, because homes in London have been turned into assets for foreign money (global interests again), thereby pricing people out of the market across the whole country as Londoners are forced out.

That may well be the case,  but there is also an ideology that lies behind many of the crazy and inhumane policies implemented across what now seems a misnomer of the "free world".  That ideology is not simply liberalism, but it is rather anti-authoritarianism.  It is a belief that any measures that require the exercise of legitimate and moral authority or making judgments, is tantamount to Fascism.  And closely linked to this anti-authoritarianism is the never-again human reaction to the horror of concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe.  This though seems to have been interpreted to give licence to Israel to enact slaughter on civilians in a horrifying way.  This seems to be learning the wrong lesson from the Holocaust.  What we can understand is that we are living in a post-war paradigm in which Israel, because of what happened under the Nazis, must always be protected and no policy domestically can be implemented that might uphold traditional values.  It is a reaction manifesting as a paradigm of thought resulting from the narrative of the Second World War and what it was about.

The situation in Israel and Palestine is not the main focus of the 'blog, but like the preoccupation with liberal progressivism, it is indicative of how we only understand political problems through the lens of the Second World War, while giving no real weight to any other part of European history.  It is of course understandable emotionally, given the proximity in time.  The lesson of the Holocaust though is surely that mass slaughter of civilians is wrong, not that Israel must act with impunity.  That though is another discussion.  Here the focus is the narrowness of the Overton Window in terms of only liberal and progressive perspectives being permissible, despite such political views clearly leading us to moral and social disintegration.  World War Two cannot explain the totality of politics or society.

Even the understanding of the Second World War is anachronistic and imposed retrospectively.  The United Kingdom, at least in the understanding of the man on the Clapham Omnibus was a battle for national sovereignty not global liberal values.  And the war was not so much a victory for the liberal democracies as it was a hard-won and bloody victory by the Stalinist  USSR.  The United Kingdom's sacrifice was real, but it turned us into a vassal of the United States, as the Suez Crisis was to demonstrate in our national humiliation.

We saw this post-war  triumph of anti-authoritarianism in other fields of life than geopolitics.  In the West's conservative movements, true conservatism and maintenance of traditional values and society were overthrown by the liberal ideology of the market and the atomistic individual.  In fields such as psychology, which gained greatly in importance, there has been a clear anti-authoritarian and anti-traditional agenda - from Adorno's the Authoritarian Personality to the dominance of Freud's sex-obsessed reductionism.   

Of great importance is the way that Adorno linked the traditional understanding of self restraint and virtues to Fascism.  Much of the destruction of the innocence of youth is a result of his poisonous idea that sexual restraint led to the Fascist ideology.  All of this was part of a pattern as the reaction against "third way" ideology, whether Fascism, Falange, or Nazi and its replacement with valueless and anti-tradition liberalism.  Hence the destructive sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s, the cancer of which has gradually worked its way through all levels of Western society and culture.  In art too we see the rejection of an authoritative standpoint of beauty to an abstracted modern art often simply trying to shock traditional attitudes long vanquished anyway.  Even in post-war architecture we saw this revolution.  People's living space was turned into the liberal onanism of destroying "authoritarian" values of architectural beauty and traditional civic space.

We must understand therefore that because of the Post-War paradigm, legitimate alternatives to the liberal degeneracy are always placed outside of the Overton Window, however legitimate the solutions presented might be.  It is also telling that after decades of Cold War, still in the West "Fascist" is the political insult of choice.

The argument here is that paradigms though can be flawed and be based upon distorted understandings.  For example, anyone who has read Max Picard's contemporary writings from the Third Reich can see that Nazism was not conservatism, but an avante garde movement, relying on practical methods of cutting edge technology to put forward a demotic and anti-traditional campaign.  The ideology had its roots in radical German thought, not conservatism. Atheist Nietzsche, vegetarian Wagner and artistic Futurism were important influences on the European Radical Right of the twenties and thirties.    Nazism was rejected by the revolutionary conservative movement, which also opposed the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.   

Today with economic crises, sexual libertinism and radical individualism we again seem to be in a Weimar situation.  Ideas of personal virtue and collective tradition are considered Fascist.  Meanwhile global finance seems to have captured the liberal democracies.  It looks more like we are ruled from Davos not our own parliaments.

Western intellectuals so wedded to the post-War paradigm will have to accept that unless politics is to enter a downward spiral, that some authoritarian values are not only right in principle, but necessary for a functioning and healthy society.  There are vested interests that would oppose a reassertion of traditional values.  We see this every time any form of genuine conservatism gains traction.  It has to be censored, proscribed and cancelled.

Nonetheless traditional values are vital and fundamental for a healthy commonwealth.  We cannot continue to function as a random collection of atomistic individuals driven by our evermore degenerate passions.  The consumer society only encourages people to be slaves to their appetites.  This suits global capital and the corruptors of our society, but it will eventually destroy us.

Only a reassertion of collective traditional values can save us.  Ideas of virtue-ethics, already being revived in philosophy, must enter the mainstream discourse.  According to the corrupted language of our liberal politics any such solution will be dismissed as "fascist".  The authority of parents, the Church, traditional and patriarchal figures are necessary to hold together our societies - but these are the very figures most attacked and maligned.  We need an idea of the transcendent Telos of Man again, particularly in terms of personal virtues, stoicism and traditional gender roles.  The paradigm within which currently we exist is not sustainable.  To some it feels that our atomistic, avaricious and democratic system has already run its course, its fractures and frailties clearly exposed.

For millennia, European culture understood a higher and transcendent purpose for mankind.  From Stoics to the early Christians civilisation was understood in terms of higher meaning.  To reduce and to caricature human civilisation to the Nazism of the Third Reich is both ignorant and anarchic.

Unless the purpose of human nature and society is rediscovered, in terms of living for something more than appetites, having a clear identity nationally, in terms of building a traditional family to give purpose, having roots and a transcendent telos, then darker solutions will beckon.  Just as the dissoluteness of the Weimar Republic was fertile ground for the dark paganism of Nazism, we too may be at risk unless we start to serve the interests of human beings rather than the interests of global finance that lead us to ever increased atomisation. 

There is then a lesson from World War Two after all.  It is not the one usually drawn and repeated almost like propaganda.  A lesson that can be drawn is that unless the moral degeneracy of today's Weimars and the impact on ordinary people of the global financial elites are not mitigated then we risk an extreme reaction.  Better to have a restoration of traditional authority before something more radical emerges in reaction unconstrained by our Christian heritage and ethos.



     

Monday 8 January 2024

Consequences of Conquest

 All countries have their fault-lines, but there is perhaps something unique about the tensions in English society.  The higher society, the elite, has a contempt for its culture and heritage.  So much so that to prove one's high status it makes sense to treat one's national identity with contempt.  It is almost the test for belonging to the higher status class to demonstrate what would now be termed "woke" opinions.  Nonetheless, this is a longstanding trait in the English national character.  Nowhere was this unique aspect of our character more clearly illustrated in contemporary times than during and in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum.  A referendum on national sovereignty in large part split down lines of class.  The less-educated, the more poorly paid, those who often would have voted for the Left, backed national independence, demonstrating a belief in their country.  Meanwhile, as if to show their social status the upper middle-classes on the whole, in attempting to demonstrate their lack of attachment to national identity, voted against national sovereignty and looked with contempt upon the honest patriotism of those they saw as being of a lower social status.  Being unpatriotic and regarding one's compatriots with contempt was a way to indicate high social status.

The Brexit referendum merely highlighted in sharp relief a longstanding national tension.  And where did it originate?  So deep in the metaphorical DNA is this trait and tension that we must look far back.  Perhaps Sir Walter Scott, highlighting the deep division in his novel Ivanhoe, with the outside perspective of a Scot reached the heart of the matter - the divisions left by the Conquest.  He pointed to how words to describe livestock are English, while words describing the meat itself are French - demonstrating the way the conquered English serve the invading French.  

Has anything really changed?  Many of the most powerful families in the country tend to be from the Conquest and many of these elite have contempt for our national identity, focusing instead upon cosmopolitanism, open borders, and destructive liberal social reforms that are killing the country demographically.  Many of the powerful must have a deep sense of being from elsewhere and having an identity above the native identity of the serfs and peasants.  As middle class families go through universities they learn the best way to indicate their new social status is to hold their heritage in contempt and adopt so-called "woke" opinions.

Perhaps we might develop this point further to understand the different characteristics of Anglo Saxon and Norman.  The Anglo Saxons were focused upon the homestead, their faith and their farms.  There was no standing army.  Alfred the Great organised the translation of the Bible into English.  Monks, peaceful and spiritual were subject to the raids by the cousins of the Normans, the Vikings.

And that is where we also can find the root of the Norman character - Vikings settled in the North of France after raiding and piracy succeeded.  Just as in Sicily, where the Catholic Normans plagued the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, in the North of Europe too on the stormy waters of the North Sea, in their own world, the Normans were pirates.

It is not in the insularity and conservatism of our Anglo Saxon forebears and fathers that we find the character enthused by so-called Anglo Saxon economics that uproots communities and focuses on international trade.  The Normans brought to this island the spirit of piracy.  Even on the side of Brexit there are the Normans, wanting to turn this ancient homeland into a Singapore of the West, rootless and cosmopolitan, preoccupied with treasure and lucre.  Whereas the Anglo Saxon yeomanry of England voted leave to secure their borders out of concern for loss of identity through out of control immigration.

Perhaps in the enthusiasm amongst our political class for foreign wars we see again that pirate Norman spirit.  And it is our Norman blood that leads us to try to destroy Russia, with our addiction to the geopolitical Great Game.  Here we inevitably think of a Russian thinker so critical of Anglo Saxon geopolitics, Aleksandr Dugin.  He has resurrected interest in British geographer Mackinder, who saw geopolitics as a clash between liberal, free-trading sea powers and the heartland of Eurasia, focused on tradition and roots - the large empire based on God and Monarchy, not filthy lucre and trade.

Surely our island is in itself a microcosm of this geographical division.  There is real conservatism in England and a rootedness to the land and our heritage.  Contrast this with the enthusiasm of our elite for liberalism both socially and economically.  The elite pushed the sexual revolution.  The elite pushed the economic revolution.  Sharks and bullies from lower status exploited the opportunities in making money and the working class has been destroyed by social liberalism and the sexual revolution.  These revolutions were led by the elite with its Norman blood, with no real sense of rootedness or the ethics of the ethnos.

Another tragic trait of being conquered is a sort of obsequiousness of the subjugated as elites send our young men to die, exploiting our lionhearted bravery, or send their jobs abroad.  Patriotic as we are, our trust in the elite has meant we have allowed agendas that destroy our identity and past to be pursued, from mass immigration and multiculturalism to sending jobs abroad.   We are forced to abandon our history, our traditions, our faith to accommodate the multicultural society that suits the powerful.

That surrender to our current masters goes back to a pacific Anglo Saxon attitude post-1066 to accept the new masters.  Nonetheless, the picture is nuanced.  The Norman Royals ensured they married into the Anglo Saxon House of Wessex.  The monarchy is the institution supported by the ordinary people even today and mocked by the shallow elites, who being alienated from the beginning have no affection for our history.

Not all the Anglo Saxons accepted the Conquest.  Men of deep Christian faith they sought refuge, not in Papal Rome with the Great Schism still echoing through Europe, but in Orthodox Constantinople, joining the Orthodox Emperor's Varangian Guard and taking the fight to the Normans in Sicily, only to be slaughtered by their old enemy.  It is said though that many Anglo Saxons were settled by the Emperor by the Black Sea as a "new" England.

The matter of the Great Schism is also of import here.  Today's Russian Church recognises pre-Conquest Anglo Saxon saints as Orthodox.  As an island England was untouched by many of the Papal innovations.  From the point of view of the Orthodox the Anglo Saxons remained Orthodox.  The schism only occurred a dozen years before the Norman Conquest.  It seems, given their choice of refuge the Anglo Saxons also saw themselves as Orthodox at the time, not Roman Catholic.

In England post Conquest, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, was to redefine the understanding of salvation as satisfaction by Christ's death to God, pictured as some feudal Lord.  Anselm was canonised by Rome, but this theological innovation separated Roman Catholicism further from the Orthodox Church.  

And what does this tell us about how we as the English should live today?  The Anglo Saxons were a peaceful and deeply Christian people, an Orthodox people it seems.  We can either metaphorically look to Constantinople or accept the settlement of the Norman Conquest.  This does not mean political schemes, but rather a spiritual change - rediscovering our lost spiritual heritage.  To some extent that would put us in the tradition of the English reformers such as Tyndale who reverted to the Greek rather than the Latin to try to rediscover a less legalistic faith.  Of course that English reformation was seized control of by the elites and became instead an orgy of iconoclasm, very contrary to the spirit of Orthodoxy.

We need to rediscover the Grail of the faith.  We need to return to English Christian spirituality prior to the Conquest and no longer accept the co-option into the Papal institution by our Norman conquerors.  We must return to the faith of our fathers.