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Liberalism isn't woke enough

By Mark Christensen - posted Thursday, 15 March 2018


Post-Christian man and the Passion

The cul-de-sac into which the Western mind has wandered is of its own making. Efforts to bring militant religiosity to heel were, of necessity, counter-ideological. When the Latin priesthood lost patience and relinquished its final remnants of epistemic humility, the new liberal hegemony was obliged to respond with matching intellectual fervor. We were told religion is ignorant, with nothing to offer humanity. Based on reason and evidence, not myth and superstition, it's obvious Man is a biological accident. God is dead and so too his tortuous Plan.An anthropocentric Biblical cosmology undermined, historian Will Durant spells out the implications of rejecting the old certainties:

Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe. Man was no longer the son of God; he was the son of strife, and his wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of their amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape, which the fortunes of variation and selection had raised to a precarious dignity, and which in turn was destined to be surpassed and to disappear.

Man was not immortal; he was condemned to death from the hour of his birth.
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But here's the thing: the conflict between rival dogmas has obscured a compelling metanarrative.

Interpreted allegorically, with a touch of humor, modern science actually dovetails nicely with the figure of Jesus, properly understood as an existential monotheist. The universe is literally meaningless, human beings devoid of verifiable significance. We are, in effect, animals. There are no guarantees, no plans to obey or to be imposed. Control is not only impossible, wanting to achieve it in a deathly cold cosmos founded on randomness, is irrational.

Which all points to Gospel-style irony. Lose the self-important self, the mere idea of a finite, physical existence, in order to find your true self, that divine spark, eternal and fearless, receptive to whatever life has install. In fact, modernity is an unsentimental, up-the-ante adjunct to the Passion. Post-Christian Man, has no need of a reassuring, miracle-inspired covenant with attendant sacred text, ideology and institutional power. The answers lie within, inscribed upon our mutual hearts. Further, the by-design absence of "intelligent design" serves as an antidote to idolatry. Darwin and quantum physics represent a justified empirical basis to let go and trust in the unseen forces of providence. Better still, a rational commitment to amor fati, to live care-free in the moment, makes redundant all the angst-ridden metaphysical speculation concerning the maker of the universe and who he does and doesn't side with. A vertical orientation towards a common transcendent order can become second nature, social comity an organic outcome of authentic encounters between neighbors in the here-and-now, building a community of peace and justice.

Alas, as G K Chesterton found with the Christian ideal, its secularized successor has not been tried and found wanting – it has been found even more difficult and abandoned. Rather than shore up humanity's precarious dignity, modern liberalism has gone on to impose new certainties using a democratic punitive system that leverages the supposed infallibility of science and reason to redeem a broken and disordered world on behalf a non-existent God. John Steinbeck aptly describes our plight upon receiving his 1962 Nobel Prize for literature:

Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.

The test of his perfectibility is at hand.

Liberalism is the final test

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Cutting down an objectified Christian God and arrogating the church's salvific functions to the state, wasn't a step toward a shared spiritual life. It was about winning and control. As such, the rationalistic hubris that helped to marginalize religion and deliver remarkable material success, now extracts an immense human toll. We are technically free, but lacking in meaning and purpose. A narcissistic anti-culture attempts to engineer horizontal success, a caring and sharing society, without the individual having to first do the hard emotional and psychological work required to tap into Something Greater. With the notion of a higher realm banished from the public square – what is inaccessible to reason is automatically heretical – it's a struggle to gain a foothold beyond the fleeting comforts of consumerism or some New Age spirituality. Worse, the more confused and wretched things get, the more inclined we are to either give up entirely or put our faith in an external fix, one that typically vows to correct the plank in your brother's eye, not your own.

It shouldn't be a shock that our corrupt political establishment, insulated by a groupthink that is at once fainthearted and incredibly arrogant, cannot define something better than the status quo.

Bannon is right about everything being in play, though not for the reasons he thinks. Taking the sword to the current liberal order does not mean burning everything to the ground. It's exciting because the next step, the unleashing of real human potential, exceeds politics and, indeed, the mind itself. It's unscripted and cultural, dependent on woke individuals – those actually in touch with reality – to co-author their own narratives, on the way to that place where all our paths meet. Hence the Beltway hijinks and Deneen's description of liberalism as "a taunt rather than a promise." The crisis is in our neurotic heads, the faux battles between science and religion, the hyper-partisan posturing of victimhood politics, little more than a dialectical diversion from a challenging truth: Western democracy has hit the wall because the only way forward now is Jesus-like transcendence of our own personal suffering.

We in the West can have the kind of world we want as soon as we choose to take responsibility for wanting it enough, unreliant on political ideology and Godlike power. This is what we signed up for. This is classic liberalism, the final test of Man's perfectibility.

And, unsurprisingly, it's in keeping with what the Nazarene said two millennia ago. Which is still true today, as it will be tomorrow.

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This article was first published in Ethika Politika.



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About the Author

Mark is a social and political commentator, with a background in economics. He also has an abiding interest in philosophy and theology, and is trying to write a book on the nature of reality. He blogs here.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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