The realization that our supposedly secular rulers have imposed a tyrannical new religion on the masses has begun to go mainstream.
The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.
The year 2020 marked a convenient end to the cultural revolution, because of the vastly different nature of the protests that took place that summer, compared with 1968. In the late Sixties, student radicals were protesting against the system. American academia itself was politically mixed; there were around three Democrat professors for every Republican — it’s now about 15 to 1 — but the higher echelons of the Ivy League were quite conservative. The Boston Brahmin elite were still pretty traditional, as was big business (although, not coincidentally, far more egalitarian than it is now). The Army was obviously very Right-wing, and one of the causes of student protests was the prospect of being drafted into a war to defend the honour of a conservative American establishment.
In 2020, almost all the major institutions in the US, aside from the actual President, were loudly vocal along with corporations, charities and NGOs in their support for the BLM protests. Parts of the media were sympathetic to the point of actively playing down some of the violence, the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” becoming an example of American journalism’s Pravda-like bias.
West’s reference to the Reformation is relevant, if not for the reasons he may think. It was that essential rupture in the West’s previously unified dominant religion that kicked out the first leg of the tripod which once upheld Western morality. With Sacred Tradition toppled, Scripture and reason inevitably followed.
The resulting vacuum let moral relativism run riot. But as West correctly points out, relativism is never an end state.
Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.
Leftist rhetoric such as, “Who are you to impose your morality on me?” was always a Trojan horse intended to make Conservatives drop their guard. Being slower Liberals, Conservatives already accepted the core of their supposed opponents’ moral frame: individual liberty as an absolute good in and of itself. Therein lay the slippery slope from “It’s none of the government’s business what two consenting adults do in their bedroom” to George W. Bush’s solicitor general overturning Prop 8 to CPAC lauding a man who wears his ten-year-old daughter’s clothes.
This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.
West is right that the phenomenon of occupiers toppling their conquered subjects’ gods and installing new idols and rituals is nothing new. His own acceptance of the Liberal frame blinds him to the onrushing dark age.
Christianity and the European peoples were necessary pillars of Western civilization. When those two elements are sundered and trampled in the West, the new arrangement that succeeds it is more likely to occupy itself with staving off famine and once-conquered diseases than conquering the stars.
Revolutionaries who establish themselves in power inevitably start thinking about firming up that power. They have a vested interest in making the times before seems worse than they really were, which is why contemporary films or plays set before the Sixties must always show it as racially prejudiced or portray traditional marriages as unhappy. Revolutionaries also need to start thinking about public rituals that imitate faith, something the Soviets, Chinese Communists and Jacobins all imitated in various ways. Rituals in particular attract children and adolescents; just as young people across Europe once dressed up to celebrate Corpus Christi, run riot on Shrove Tuesday or flirt on St John’s Eve, now Pride month and the other new feasts of the calendar are increasingly popular with children, spread through TikTok and other social media.
The religious nature of the 2020 protest has been much commented on, with strange outpourings of hysteria and feet-washing, and with Floyd becoming an icon.
What products of Late Modern relativism like West miss is that there is one true religion which offers worship acceptable to the One True God. That God remains sovereign, despite His rebellious creatures’ conceits, and He will not be mocked.
The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.
“Christian England had blasphemy laws,” blather inveterate Liberals like West, “and the Death Cultists occupying the nation that used to be England have blasphemy laws, so they’re both the same!”
Anyone in England–and the West as a whole–who’s dense enough not to have noticed the decidedly different bent of Death Cult morality will become acquainted with it sooner than they expect.
Learn how to spot and stop Death Cultist attempts to impose morality. Read my #1 best seller now:
There was an atheist on YouTube—a physicist, perhaps—who called himself a weird name like “King Crockadick.” He poked fun at the notion that science was a religion by adding subtitles to a scene from THE TEMPLE OF DOOM that made it look like the man who had his heart ripped out was sacrificed to Charles Darwin.
Actual scientists like Crockadick missed a major opportunity. They knew that people were NPCs whom they could manipulate with propaganda, but they were more concerned with debating and sperging than they were with exploiting human nature. This is why you’re more likely to see the Rainbow Roger or the GRÜN-ROT-GELB flying around your town than the lithium atom.
That said, they aren’t exclusive from each other.
The most tantalizing statement in the article is that the right has returned to relativism in response to its weaker position. But this is not expanded upon, instead it is only said how the left is abandoning relativism (which is the more obvious claim.)
There is a hint in the allusion to “trust the science.” Is this meant to indicate the right’s rejection truth by decree and manufactured “consensus,” instead preferring things that can be verified by each individual? Certainly that’s how the conflict in science has shaken up.
But it could also refer to the wishy-washy morals of the establishment cons. Ex. the way that their position on transgenderism has morphed into “what you think you are is something for you personally to decide, just as long as you don’t force me into it.” Though even that last part they aren’t strong on, considering the number of people on the right who call Bruce Jenner a “she.”
The causality given in the article is also backwards. It treats the situation as “when you are weak you are a relativist, use this to gain power, and then become an absolutist” when the truth is “you make your ENEMY a relativist to make him weak, and once he is weak you don’t need to care about what he thinks of you.”
Frank Herbert said it best: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”
“And God smote shitty art…”
The times we are in are far less unusual than people like to think. Over time, again and again, despite ructions as violent or as pervasive as the fall of Rome, the Reformation, you name it – traditional culture survives.
Because it is in accordance with natural law, per Edward Feser. The squirrel that eats toothpaste and loves cats is not long for this world.
I respect you Brian but I am skeptical of “The Reformation Ruined Everything It Just Took Over 500 Years to Kick In” in the same way I am skeptical of “The Catholics Ruined Everything It Just Took Over 1500 Years to Kick In”.
Wreckage
What arguments do you advance to highlight the Reformation didn’t ruined everything.
One of my arguement is to just look at the Calvin’s Geneva with its insufferable muttawa. Or the near constant French civil wars which nearly ruined the country.
xavier
My reason is as I said; there is no substantial change in the trend of ruin.
I understand some of you have a particular and firm view on this and I have no reason to want to change your view, because it would dishonour your faith, so that’s that.
However, consider that you’re saying that the Church against whom the gates of Hell would not prevail, got scotched by a dyspeptic German.
Protestants , I am increasingly convinced (as a Protestant) are just an extremely odd subset of Catholicism. Socially we’re very close to behaviorally indistinguishable, economically and politically likewise. Now, we didn’t ride to your defense at Vienna, but at the same time we didn’t sack Constantinople either. The warfare in France and other places almost always ends up being just as intelligible as regional and class dominance struggles as religious, and I would argue that blindly labeling all inter-Christian warfare as coincidentally religious, while obviously a poor heuristic, is more often correct than blindly labeling all such warfare as strictly religious.
What I would accept wholeheartedly is that the Reformation turned out to lend far too much intellectual prestige to Modernism, but comparing nearby Catholic and Protestant states – let’s say France and England – shows poor or reversed correlation for strength of Catholicism as a resistant force to Modernism. That could be because Modernism first co-opted the Church, then split it, as an example counter-argument, but that counter-argument again portrays Catholicism as helpless to prevent the ravaging of itself by an alien philosophy.
My argument is that if the Church is undefeated, and its teachings faithful and good, then it is reasonable, contrary to centuries of rhetoric from both sides, to believe that the damage is either lesser than thought, or possibly that the present reality may be the less terrible of the options inherent in a causality far predating the obvious schism.
My final thought is that in everyday observation the poor Catholic and the poor Protestant have their vices in common, while the devout and thoughtful have their virtues in common. You may reject that, but it is an opinion I have formed by the influence of reading Feser and Mr Niemeier here, and applying reason and moral sense to what I have learned, in order to understand it.
Again, I don’t think anything I present here is of such force that you are morally or intellectually obliged to accept it, and nor do I have any desire – quite the opposite – to convince you to in even slight amount to diverge from your faith and that of your fathers in any respect or any component of your conception of it.
The perpetual collapse of civilizations does not diminish the damage of Protestantism. Protestantism teaches about an inherently depraved humanity whose sins are only “covered” by Christ, which makes Jesus seem lame and humanity seem like a mistake.
I am not sure I even understand your characterization. Is there a Christianity where man is not fallen? How would you characterize salvation?
I feel that (in both cases though I detail only the one) you’ve unwittingly laid a logic trap whereby I must either claim salvation is fake or commit to a strong form of Calvinism, upon either of which I will be proven to be foolish and wrong, with the only worse answer being if I’d said the other instead.
That’s because I went full rhetoric, so here’s a friendlier paraphrase:
The Catholic belief is that because human nature is wounded and inclined toward sin, but not destroyed, Jesus can pardon our sins and restore human nature to holiness. Even as a literal member of Christ’s body, God the Father can look at me and see me, D Cal, without casting me into Hell.
A common Protestant belief is that Jesus has to abolish human nature or at least cover its sins so that when God the Father looks at us, he only sees Jesus. Even without the belief that God created humans to be evil, and even with an awareness that Protestant beliefs are diverse and nuanced, it’s how Protestantism makes Jesus look lame.
Most Christians are pretty fuzzy on the difference between salvation and sanctification, and Protestants in my experience are very inclined towards preaching the same initial outreach sermon every week until the heat-death of the universe, and never getting into any depth as to what the Christian walk actually entails, either as a process or as a spiritual reality. This is not inherent to a learned Protestantism, but you are entirely fair to point out just how miserable Protestants have become at preserving and promulgating the deeper knowledge of the faith.
With respect to my separated brethren, the historical chain of causality is the same as the first time I explained it on this blog. In the interest of new readers, I’ll honor the eminently reasonable request to explain it again.
Upwards of 80% of people are NPCs who think and act according to the programming they receive from major social institutions. That is how support for butt marriage can flip from 30% to 70% in 25 years.
Ed West’s OP correctly pointed out that the Death Cult now exerts a level of dominance over every social institution unrivaled since the Catholic Church presided over the High Middle Ages. The era we’re hurtling toward resembles the Death Cult’s most lurid exaggerations of the Inquisitions and witch trials, only satanically inverted, with the Cultists in charge.
Remember, they always project. And they have the power to make a majority of the public accept those projections because the Cult is a united front.
The Church once wielded the cultural influence to inform the masses with her unified moral vision. The Protestant Revolt shattered that necessary unity. That it took 200 years for NPC programming to degrade from “I can interpret Scripture myself” to “I can define truth for myself” testifies to how strong the Church’s influence was.
TL; DR: the printing press was a mistake.
Let’s not forget that before Protestantism came around, there was the heresy of Nominalism spawned by William of Ockham. Yes, THAT guy who invented “Ockham’s Razor”.
His nonsense infected and infested universities long ago as Cultural Marxism and “Wokeism” infect and infest them now. When Luther was being taught, his instructors either supported it or dabbled with it. It aided in his moral and intellectual demise and probably did the same with Calvin. And we’re still dealing with the damage it caused over eight centuries later.
God save us all!
This video remains one of the best ways to understand how NPCs work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoP8cmuFU0
For the context, since many have probably forgotten it, at this point in time the media had vilified James Comey constantly because (as Colbert alludes to) they were following a narrative that by daring to mention Hillary Clinton’s improperly handled e-mails he handed the Orange Man the election. Thus the crowd cheers when they hear that Comey was fired: they were primed to think of him as a bad man and thus are glad to hear that he got hurt. Less than a minute later they also boo the statement that Comey was fired under the recommendation of Jeff Sessions, because they were also primed to think of Sessions as a villain, and thus whatever he did was bad. Even though they literally just got done cheering what he recommended. The rest of the video is basically Colbert reprograming the audience to the position of Comey being a hero.
But as you say it’s not as if NPCs are limited to the left or that there is anything inherently bad in being an NPC. If the vast majority of people instinctively react to the name of Satan with the thought “he is evil” and react to the name of Jesus with the thought “He is good,” then that’s great. It doesn’t really matter if they understand the complex theology behind those statements.
Well I’ve argued before that Protestantism’s apparent prominence as an event within Christianity is wholly derived from coincidence with the printing press, so I’m fondly inclined towards a similar idea, even without the use of “apparent”.
My beef with the “united front” hypothesis is that even NPCs who wholly reject Protestantism as a competing authority are still NPCs, nor is there a notable difference in distribution of NPCs according to the schismatic divide.
But I COULD be persuaded that my own observation that “devout is devout, and the devout display less NPCishness” would imply that an erosion in devoutness per se was damaging in itself. I’ll chew on that.
Brian, thanks for your patience as always. My specific reference to chain of causality was along a different line, that being the origins of schism and the spread of outcomes of schism. I’d argue that if you want to see a Christian heresy that truly abandoned its roots and became something Other, Islam is a good example. By comparison, the ability of Protestants and Catholics to co-exist is downright eerie. But that’s a tangent.
I’d say that Conservatives handed over the keys to the culture wholesale somewhere in the 60’s, and did so as a direct result of deliberate social and political infiltration by the enemies of God and Man – largely Communists.
This wasn’t a gradual decline. Every institution prostituted itself to Boomer era popularity. In some the incubation period was a bit longer. In all cases the Boomer-born commies are expending all of their resources trying to get to the eschaton before they die of old age. As the die-off commences, the inevitable adaptive outcome of behaviour, that individuals die but families live, will return to prominence.
It might not fix everything, but it is going to happen.
Recently I saw an SJW video game reviewer called Jim Sterling launch a tired against organized religion, taking a second to preface his rant with a statement that he “has no morality” and thus cannot be held to any standards. Of course then he launches into a tirade about how horrible X, Y, and Z are, all the while entirely oblivious to his own moral tyranny. This tends to be an issue for secular atheists, the more they rant and rave, the less their “objective, rational worldview” is either of those things. The denial of having any morality being the icing on the cake, atheists just want to avoid any personal responsibility, while holding others accountable to a moral compass they don’t even accept. Ironically enough as the secularists kept pressing for worldly “Justice” it has driven lapsed Christians like me into questioning my own beliefs and rediscovering that kernel of eternal truth. Indeed the secular fantasy that religion is “in the past” needs to be entirely dismissed. Even a godless anti human society will quickly rush to the nearest savior to fill the spiritual void that they aren’t even claiming doesn’t exist anymore. Masks are fully off, it’s pick a side time.
“…he ‘has no morality’ and thus cannot be held to any standards.”
This level of High Retard was likely fallout from Dungeons & Dragons DMs who promoted or allowed the argument that “True Neutral is the epitome of Alignments because you can ‘do anything to anyone’ and no one can hold you to account”.
Science is a tool that Moderns worship as a god.
SCIENCE is a fallacy that Death Cultists wield like a club.
The passage of time has revealed just how full of it these edgy atheists really were. Every single one of them has imploded since their highwater days into a mire of perversion, greed, and emptiness. All they ever wanted was to be free of morality to revel in their baser selves. Well, they got that, and it isn’t so great. Now they all shill for the new secular order their high priests in the Good Guy political party advocate for. They don’t question anything, they just want to consume mindlessly.
This is how I don’t know how there can possibly be any honest western atheists left outside of this depraved and rapidly shrinking camp. Surely we can all see this game for what it actually was now, can’t we?
It honestly amazes me that anyone still pays attention to these people, as if the last seven years didn’t happen.
Note that Sterling had to claim to be “non-binary” in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. (Or maybe he went full on transgender by now, I haven’t kept close attention.) If he was merely an edgy atheist even his left-wing audience wouldn’t care about him.
Sterling has been trying horribly hard to be Special and Distinct since forever, hence the visibly synthetic persona and over-engineered visual “style”, if it can be called that. He is not witty, insightful, or particularly capable in any field or respect, and a truly utilitarian society would have rendered him down for fuel oil long since.
People change what they worship, but they never stop worshiping. They just want a God so badly defined that they can plausibly deny ever offending against Him, while hurling His vicious and capricious judgement on the various infidel.
In the end, Christ is King, or Satan is.