Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Nov 29, 2021 8:01 pm
I used the term 'modernity' as a simple way to express the condition of having been removed.
An unusual use of the term. I didn't recognize what you meant.
I don't ordinarily think of Modernity as "removing" anybody from anything. And it seems to me that it's essentially a defunct term, by way of having been relegated to history, like "Edwardian" or "Medieval." I don't really think anybody's "Modern" today.
This process, reflecting an inner need, or evolution, arrived at organically, was stimulated by my reading of Richard Weaver and Robert Bork.
I've read both Weaver and Bork, and enjoyed both. But for some reason, they did not have quite the same effect on me. They didn't make me "evolve" out of anything. Was it because I was already "there"? Maybe. I found myself agreeing with them often.
...realizing that our culture had gone off its rails and was rejecting the core elements that made it what it was. And if this was so (and I am convinced it is so) it therefore was necessary to rediscover, to reencounter, to reanimate my own relationship with the 'fundamental categories'.
Well, I think there's a lot to that critique. The West is indeed presently "eating its own flesh" by undermining all the fundamental values that made the West and "Modernity" possible in the first place.
But here's a thought: what is it that allowed that to happen? I ask, because if we don't know the answer to that question, and if we just campaign for some sort of resetting-to-the-Western-past, then what is there to prevent the same cycle from happening again? Something, apparently, in that worldview opened up the possibility of us getting to where we are now, eating our own flesh. How do we make sure that that never happens again, if we don't know what made it happen in the first place?
Or to put it another way, "Postmodernism" is sometimes called "Late Modernism." And there is truth to both names. Something was terribly wrong with Modernity, and Postmodernism tries to pick out what that was, critique it, suspect it, and reject it. But in a very real sense, Postmodernism is
insufficiently different from Modernity: it's really the fruit of the Modern "tree" rotting and falling off, at the end of the withering of Modernist optimisms, one might say. It's the "late" form of dysfunctional "Modernity."
This raises the essential problem: what are we going back TO? If it's to the way things were at the turn of the previous century, then what's to keep us from sliding into a similar, or worse, place than we find ourselves in now?
So through this process I thought: "Our culture has rejected Christianity",
Well, it's not really "Christianity." What our culture has really rejected is a pseudo-Christian posture, one that was uncommitted to Christianity at a ground level of commitment, but was happy to be nominal in its allegiances and to milk the benefits of maintaining a vaguely "Judeo-Christian" style of moralizing.
I don't think the evidence is good that this society, this culture in the West, has every really understood or responded to Christianity at all. And as soon as anybody starts talking about "a Christian culture," I know they're speaking about that. So far, the West has only been willing to go along with the demands of Christ to the point that they became inconvenient -- unhelpful to things like trade, or desire, or ambition, or comfort -- and then no farther.
As Chesterton once so pithily put it,
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
Overall, the project I have stumbled into is one of recovering and protecting *Europe*. In this sense (I assume this is obvious and was when I was writing under the name Gustav Bjornstrand) I have been exploring a very defined and strong Conservatism but one that borders into Traditionalism. I am not any less convinced that this is necessary. While I agree that Christianity should be -- as you describe it -- a path of inner rebirth in relation to a transformative divinity, I also feel that there are related, though lesser, octaves of this that are expressed by people who cannot or will not submit themselves to the processes you outline. And yet in my view they must be rallied, they must be worked with and also respected for their difference of emphasis.
It would seem to me you're realizing what I said above, but in other words, and perhaps less bluntly. You speak of "people who cannot or will not submit themselves to the processes you outline," i.e. nominal "Christians" who are not willing to pay the price of actually being Christians.
Christ Himself speaks of the existence of such people, and he says,
"I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth. Because you say, “I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have no need of anything,” and you do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked..." (Rev. 3:15-17)
Can you mobilize such people? Can you "rally" them, "work with" them, and "respect" their luke-warmness? Should any real Christian want to do so, since Christ finds such people so viscerally revolting?
I submit to you that such people are not likely to be reliable allies for anything. They are both too earth-bound to be any use for Heaven, and too nominall religious to be any good for Earth. They'd be better off as Atheists...at least then they would be something definite, rather than mere corrupters of truth.
In fact, nominalism among those professing to be "Christian" is the very reason why Christianity was so easy for the West to dismiss in the first place, I think.
The inner relationship is something distinct, different, and personal.
It is. But without it, one is not a Christian at all. One is merely one of the nominalists.
But the most important things, that is according to the way I see things, is to recognize the need to protect Occidental cultures (the West, Europe, term it as you wish) from those forces that eat away at it. I think that a person could respect and even *love* Christian Europe, and seek to work with those who are religiously oriented (where the sole motor of protection and renovation resides), while not being oneself a 'person of faith' and possibly even not a 'believer'.
That's actually a very "Modern" kind of optimism. Dewey, among others, was fond of that view. The idea of the "Judeo-Christian consensus" was of a race to the lowest common moral denominators, supposed to allow Jews, Christians and Catholics to get along, and their morality to dominate society, while the particulars of faith were left to the private sphere. What eventually brought that project to grief was the arrival of groups harder to assimilate into the "Judeo-Christian" minimum: the Orthodox first, but also Free Thinkers and secularists, and Animists, Materialists, Egoists, Hedonists, and then Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, etc., etc.
It got too hard to reconcile it all. The lowest common moral denominator turned out to be so low that any sense of common moral orientation failed completely. It turned out that there was no "Judeo-Christian consensus" at all; that the whole project had been a mere temporary compromise, but one that failed the first test of multiculturalism.
I don't think a return to that makes any sense today. And I know it makes no sense for real Christians. The nominalists...I think even they have given up that hope.
So I have to be far more open and far more forgiving, let's say, than you appear to be. But I do not disrespect your adamancy. Defending the *cores* is crucial work. There is no way around it.
I see what you're saying. Like Dewey, you're hoping to revive some common minimum, and thus save society. I just don't think you're going to find many buyers anymore.
no.
