Tag Archives: Christendom

Zarathustra’s Abyss

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Fragment 187, word count: 392.

Tags: Nietzsche, values, aristocracy, Christendom, patriarchy, Stoicism, Nihilism, hierarchy, will.

Nietzsche didn’t do anything like revalue all values, and it is revealing to consider what values he did not question: namely aristocratic superiority within the social hierarchy of wealth and power. Nietzsche was retreating into a strong cultural current from feudal Christendom, namely the ‘feudal’ current: aristocratic crime-family culture, derived originally from patriarchal dominance in herding culture: men with weapons on horses. Nietzsche loathed and worked to discredit the other cultural current from Christendom, namely Christianity, because it promoted an otherworldly (heavenly) focus that gave priority to “selfless” values. He dismissed altruism, selflessness, meekness, and turning the other cheek, which he thought of as slave values, feminine values, and nihilistic, in favour of ancient and traditional masculine dominance values, as exemplified in ancient Greek warriors: hardness, strength, endurance, courage, dominance, self-promotion, and disregard for weaker beings. Nietzsche despised and blamed the victims of conquest and oppression. He gazed upon the same European history as Rousseau and Marx but did not fault the crime family aristocracy for being parasites on the subsisting majority, but instead accepted their claims of nobility (projecting onto them the nobility he experienced in his own creativity) and admired their viciousness. He blamed the oppressed for being weak. Their weakness made them deserve whatever oppression they experienced. Nietzsche gave the crime family class credit for whatever he found positive in European culture. As historical fact, European aristocracy could not have established the wealth and power it did without the senior partnership of the Church of Rome promoting its elaborate religious ideologies. In a superstitious age, it was the religious culture of desperate fear and hope that utterly subdued resistance and solidified mass resignation. Yet, Nietzsche blamed the Church for proclaiming a set of values that persuaded the weak and oppressed to find meaning in their oppression and de-valued the manly military values of aristocracy.

Within the legacy of Zarathustra, to which Nietzsche was drawn, the world where we humans live is irredeemably abysmal as the creation of an evil god, the lesser of the duality of high gods. Rejecting any heavenly escape, Nietzsche found himself faced with a choice between utter nihilism or the Stoic (and Romantic) determination to prove personal transcendence by a supreme act of will to accept existence as whatever it is, and even to will its eternal recurrence in every ugly detail.

Embedded links:

Fragment 99, November 2, 2016, What is Patriarchy? (word count: 3,700)

Fragment 84, June 17, 2015, Errors and Allegories in Gnosticism (word count: 1,869)

Copyright © 2022 Sandy MacDonald.

The Thrill of It

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Fragment 182, word count: 335.

tags: romanticism, science, spirituality, embodiment, history, privilege, enchantment, Christendom, magic, 

With the explosion of mathematical science as an effective and prestigious ideology radiating from the Republic of Letters in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, there emerged among culture-pods with long-established privilege and dominance, both religion based and military/ property based, a sharp sense of loss and nostalgia for the thrilling fear and wonder of pre-modern Christendom: a culture gripped in the drama of intervention by gods, angels, demons, witches, and sorcerers, all cashing out as supernatural justifications for established privilege and dominance. Romanticism was one expression of that sense of loss and nostalgia, an heroic effort to re-enchant the modernizing world by conflating deity and nature. It was an effort to rescue the concept of nature from scientific mechanization, insisting that nature is a single living divinity with foresight, memory, discretionary will, aesthetic judgments, and powers far beyond those commonly perceived, power to overcome its own normal regularity.

Those efforts at re-enchantment, reviving the fear and thrill of Christendom, were futile and misdirected. Even in the absence of magic, deities, demons, or personified nature, the fact of any living subjectivity always enchants existence as a whole. The fact that spirituality is structured as a distinct body among other animate individuals with whom each fashions an apparently ordinary life does not erase its wonder and transcendence. Embodiment is the foundational structuring principle of spirituality. Sensation, so perception, is structured in the shape of the body. Deliberate personal interventions into a given exterior surroundings, making objective markings, are movements of a person’s body. The capabilities of body movements and their range of forces impose a shape on personal intentions to mark the objective world. Still, any subjectivity is a gaze from inside unique dreams at the spring of a personal self-injection into exterior surroundings. Enchantment radiates in that gaze itself, from the interiority at the source of every outward reach. Spirituality, the desperate living will, the knowing, questioning, learning, and creating will, is the enchantment, the mystery and wonder of existence.

Also:

Fragment 121, January 12, 2018, Welcome to Metaphysics (word count: 1,312).

Fragment 124, February 19, 2018, The World that Doesn’t Matter (word count: 750).

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189).

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Nietzsche’s Drama

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Fragment 176, word count: 895.

Tags: embodiment, spirituality, nihilism, Christendom, Copernicus, Darwin, creativity, culture, individuality.

Christianity taught, and European Christendom accepted for centuries, that the human spiritual drama, our unique opportunity for ethical elevation by coming to know and align with the transcendent deity, is the purpose of all existence. Humans were thought to be the primary achievement of the all-creating God. Born as an exile into an initial state of disgrace within the lusts, pains, and thrills of a mortal body, each human is capable of recognizing its existence as more authentically one of transcendent spirituality and changing its way of life to express that spirituality. The worldly society of Christendom, controlled at all levels by the hierarchy and laws of the Roman Church in partnership with the secular military aristocracy, was accepted as the means by which individuals were guided to the spiritual life, a state of grace whose reward was blissful immortality. In the sixteenth century, within a broad advance of science, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered and revealed that the human home planet was not the centre of God’s cosmos, suggesting a more marginal status for human being. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin presented findings suggesting that humans are indistinguishable from animals, just naked apes, driven by instinctive drives and passions beyond individual control, with no qualitative specialness placing us in a uniquely elevated category. For much of the educated stratum of nineteenth century Europe, this apparent loss of human standing in the great scheme of things was a revelation of nihilism, a catastrophic loss of purpose and value. This was the context in which Nietzsche conceived his mission of thinking.

With God removed from the human situation, the Christian drama of existence faded out and with it the sense of meaning and purpose derived from that drama. Reflecting on human history soon reveals that no eventual outcome of biological evolution can give value and meaning to human existence, since it is unknowable, nor can the historical progress of human civilization do it since that reveals no verifiable arc toward a fulfillment. In the absence of these large structures as navigational guides the problem of meaning and purpose becomes entirely the individual’s problem and actually defines, on Nietzsche’s view, the monadic singularity of the human individual, the loneliest loneliness. As it happens, however, the fundamental nature or quality of individual spirit, the will to power, contains within itself a dramatic dynamic capable of achieving happiness, and so defeating nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the universal ethical and existential imperative for every individual is self-perfection, though that achievement is possible only for strong domineering spirits. Only the strongest spirits are capable of the happiness of self-perfection because only the strongest are capable of self-domination or self-overcoming by sublimating the instinctive animal impulses (Dionysian) into products of a dominant personal rationality (Apollonian), imposing a unifying form and style on all expressions of that sublimated energy. This Dionysian – Apollonian dialectic is the intrinsic dynamic of the will to power, the fundamental living force. Culture that is elevating to behold and appropriate is created from the sublimation of bestial impulses and instincts. Even though those impulses and instincts originate in and always declare the body, without them there is no energy to be sublimated into high art and culture. Strong and passionate impulses require an even stronger force of rationality to impose form and style on them. Artists and philosophers, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Socrates, are typically the people who discipline themselves to sublimate their great passions into creative activities. Nietzsche calls such spirits ubermensch, higher men, the only people of value in his estimation because in the ecstasy of their original creation they uniquely manifest authentic individuality. Specimens of higher men are rare and occur unpredictably in various times, societies, races, and ethnic groups, and it seems that for Nietzsche they are “The Elect”, forever predetermined for blessedness. The rest of us are a herd of doomed beasts of no interest or value, sometimes spiritualized to some extent by encountering the achievements of the higher ones.

There are striking similarities between Nietzsche’s conception of the drama and tragedy of existence and the previously dominant one from Christendom. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and the apple didn’t fall very far from the tree. Separation of people into The Elect and the damned is one similarity. Both dramas involve a tension or dialectic between animal embodiment and some version of a transcendent spirituality which exerts itself against animality and offers a happier and more authentically meaningful life. In Nietzsche’s version, however, the impulses of the body are never left behind but always remain the source of life’s energy. In addition, Nietzsche’s spiritualizing, sublimating, force is militant rationality, giver of expressive form, stability, and style, replacing the poor Christian spirit of meek obedient submission, self-denial, mortification of the flesh, and altruism.

Such was Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values. It is philosophically unusual in recasting the Christian drama by eliminate a commanding and controlling deity while still finding a way to divide blessed from damned. That vision clearly doesn’t defeat nihilism for everyone, only for the precious few his message was apparently designed to reach. However, if we discount Nietzsche’s peculiar aristocratic exclusivity, we can appreciate his “Yes” to embodiment as inseparable from the ecstasy of personal creativity, his close attention to the interior experience of creativity and its independence from any conformist herd mind.

Sources and Inspirations

Walter Kaufmann’s book was the source for the sketch of Nietzsche’s philosophy included in this posting.

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, written by Walter Kaufmann, published by Princeton University Press (1950), foreword by Alexander Nehamas (2013), ISBN 978-0-691-16026-9.

Zarathustra’s Secret, written by Joachim Kohler, translated from German by Ronald Taylor, Published by Yale University Press (English edition June 2002), ISBN-10: 0300092784, ISBN-13: 978-0300092783.

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.

Time-Scapes of Ideality

14 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Culture, Embodiment, Freedom, Political Power, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Posting 133, Word count: 1,601.

The global culture of intellectual inquiry is proud and happy to have finished the main task, content now with a post-heroic and workmanlike mopping up of loose ends and filling in little gaps. Any re-conceptualization of fundamental reality as a whole is next to unimaginable. The intellectual certainty of this era comes from faith in the comprehensive explaining power of science, universally celebrated. However, there is a problem, and the problem is politics in which ever increasing inequality warps and rips human interconnectedness, and violent conflict is threatening new extremes of catastrophic destruction and suffering because of weapons conceived and supplied by the community of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Science has proven itself unable to help in the creation of workable political systems that are able to treat everyone decently by cultivating everyone’s freedom.

The conceptual system of science excludes freedom from fundamental reality by excluding teleological ideality, which is to say, by excluding personality from fundamental reality, but without understanding personalities as points of freedom it is impossible to take politics beyond forms of imperialism and vicious factional conflict. The modern consensus still rests on the Hobbesian thesis, which asserts a rational need to submit to any effective sovereignty as the only way to dampen the war of all against all which lurks inherently in human nature as conceived since feudal Christendom.

Feudal Christendom

Euro-American modernity evolved from, and is still firmly in the cultural grip of a conservative longing for, feudal Christendom. Political conservatism is the surviving cultural remnant of, and nostalgia for, both the political ideology (patriarchy) and the religious metaphysics of feudal Christendom. The conservative devotion to symbols and pageantry of territorial states, along with the metaphysical assumptions of human nature as a continual grasping for definition and standing through competitions for property, are again remnants of feudal Christendom. Feudalism was a fundamentalist patriarchy, institutionalized sovereign rights of the father, expressing the principle that the strongest has sovereign rights over everyone else, rights to the property of the weaker, rights to the lives of the weaker, generally the right to be comprehensively parasitic on the weaker. Those assumptions grew out of the traditional family in which the father was the strongest and women and children were assumed to lack even a minimum competence. Implicit in the conservative world view is a belief that feudal patriarchy is the social and political structure predetermined by God or nature. Science has defined itself and directed its questions in such a way as to avoid confrontation with either the political ideology of patriarchy, including its conception of human nature, or its sanctifying religious ideology featuring a supernatural force of angry patriarchal will and consciousness (personality) at large in the cosmos, appeased only by submissive flattery, just like embodied patriarchs only on a grander scale.

Most scientific investigators have some family background of religious affiliation and so have a culture-based tendency to think about transcendence in terms of cosmic intelligence, cosmic personality. Some reject that kind of transcendence as absurd, which it is, but on that basis dismiss the very idea of transcendence and of personality as a fundamental principle of reality. Others accept cosmic personality as the truth of transcendence, a supernatural reality distinct from the one described by science, and knowable only through unquestioning religious faith.

The conception of personality in feudal Christendom contains a stark contrast between divine personality and human personalty. Divine personality is transcendently creative and free, the one and only instance of transcendent free agency, whereas human nature, human personality, is a meagre and degraded imitation of that divinity, hardly comparable at all, inviting a reductionist interpretation in which human personality is merely the working out of mechanistic and ‘pre-set’ appetites, drives, and responses to stimuli. That interpretation is easily compatible with scientific principles. Although science stipulates a single fundamental principle of reality, namely the physical ‘nature’ of actuality, the need for two principles of reality is demonstrated by straightforward considerations, as presented in The World that Doesn’t Matter. The principles could be described as ‘the world that matters’ and ‘the world that doesn’t matter’. The world that matters becomes something that matters only because it includes personalities with free agency. Without them, with only the physical nature of actuality, nothing matters in the least. It has often been asserted that removing belief in the supernatural force of divine will and consciousness (personality) in the cosmos would eliminate meaning and purpose from the lives of humans. As stated, it is a false claim, but what is clearly true is that without some personalities in the world for whom the living of a life matters, meaning really does disappear utterly from reality. The world with personalities is fundamentally and essentially different from the world without us, and the presence of personality is what makes the difference. That is the first datum of metaphysics.

Feudal patriarchy was and is a construct of metaphysical ideas: a bleak conception of human nature, a sharply contrasting idea of divinity, earthly trophies interpreted as markers of standing in the divine consciousness, rights of the strongest to sovereign immunity. Getting past the dystopian political systems built from those conceptions will follow only from better metaphysics, and science is unable to touch such issues.

Time-Scapes of Ideality

It is clear from these considerations that improvement in metaphysics is the only hope for building workable political arrangements because metaphysics can engage teleology and abstraction as fundamental reality, and teleology and abstraction are crucial to understanding freedom. (Teleology is what Aristotle called final cause.) Teleology is ideality (abstraction), rather than concrete materiality or actuality, because it anticipates conditions and objects which do not exist, but which might possibly be made to exist if certain actions are taken, if a certain agency is exercised through an increasingly remote and improbable future. This teleological ideality constitutes the special existence of, the living of, personality, subjectivity. In the brute actuality of nature, time is just inevitability, but for teleological personality time is a construct of opportunity for effective creation, free agency, because personality creates a time-scape of ideality from personal judgements about continuities and instabilities in the brute actuality of nature, judgments of probability and possibility, questions, negations, interests in certain pleasures and gratifications, in making an original mark, in making things right, empathic attachment to other personalities, impulses to nurture, to learn, to think, to teach, to arrange a sustainable life in the world. Within that time-scape of ideality which is a personality’s orientation and bearing in the world, the subject exercises agency by actively imposing (not always perfectly) its personal ideality on actuality, a power of embodiment. This recognition of human nature is opposed to, and far more realistic than, the conservative conception of a drive for self-definition through conflict. Everyone knows from the most immediate personal experience that the ideality of teleology exists in agency. This recognition of personality also removes the Christian/ Hobbesian absolute need for sovereignty. It means that individuals don’t need to submit to a sovereign or any other supervision to build stable human interconnections within which to develop mutually supportive free expression.

It is always problematic to bleed qualities of either side of the ideal/ actual dualism into the other side, to think of ideality as some kind of substance or thing, for example, no matter how ethereal. To sever personality from embodiment is to conceive it as a substance, a body, which it is not. Also, problems arise from attributing qualities of personal ideality, such as caring and planning, to the concrete world of brute actuality, to inanimate objects or nature at large. Such manoeuvres always create metaphysical monstrosities such as the idea of divinity as an omniscient cosmic consciousness, claims of divine favour for some particular political faction, for some established sovereignty or for a claimant to sovereignty, always resulting in dystopian political arrangements. For any hope of workable political systems able to treat everyone decently, it is crucial to have a strong metaphysics of freedom, to acknowledge both sides of the dualism and to keep the boundaries of the duality clear and distinct, with personality embodied in beings who breathe and have an individual voice.

Science banished personality entirely from basic reality, but personality is the transcendent fountain of freedom. The existence of personality, the being of a personal consciousness with expectations, aspirations, and agency, is the only reason anything matters, and ideality is the existence of personality. Science directs attention to predictability, and unfree materiality is absolutely predictable whereas the creative ideality of personality is not. Science cannot conceptualize freedom, creative unpredictability, and so cannot conceptualize the transcendence of ideality, spirituality. The scientific attitude fits perfectly with the politically conservative effort to stifle any evolutionary process of culture that might disrupt the feudal justifications for social hierarchy dominated by sovereign immunity, evolutionary processes that most certainly spring from the unpredictable creativity of ideality and override what may seem like the dictates of nature. This being the case, there is urgent need for another re-conceptualization of fundamental reality as a whole to upgrade, restore, and re-locate personality (spirituality, ideality) in the process of reality. Neither politics nor reality can be understood without the time-scapes of ideality which are personalities. Reality has a temporal dimension of ideality that transcends brute actuality. It is a growing, a building, a choosing to become, a moment by moment self-creation, as much as it is a falling or a pre-determined inevitability. However, there is no institutional preparation for any such thinking, certainly not in corporate, academic, or scholarly discourse.

Copyright © 2018 Sandy MacDonald.

Social Contract as Hive Mind (2)

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Leadership, Narrative, Political Power

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tags: western history, hive mind, Christendom, Roman Empire, social construction, spooks, mass media, legacy culture, dystopia, romanticism

The social construction of hive mind is not new. The historical background of our modern hive minds is Christendom, the way European society conceived itself from, say, the year 800 until Henry VIII’s break from Roman authority in 1534. Christendom was a strenuous and effective attempt at constructing hive mind, based on collective terror of spooky spirit-world angels and demons. Europe was a largely rural-agrarian and illiterate society dominated by a centrally organized Church and a de-centralized military/ propertied aristocracy from the ranks of which emerged regional dynastic monarchies. The Church altar and pulpit were the mass media of Christendom and gave the Vatican an edge over other social elements in arranging uniformity of attitudes and loyalty across vast territories, in fact, a theocracy. The thoroughness of the hive mind engineered throughout Europe by ideologues and agents of Christendom, mainly within institutions connected to the Vatican, established an historically new standard of monumental collective commitment, uniformity, cohesion, and rigidity; a romanticized idea of hive solidarity that continues to plague subsequent societies. Roman Church orthodoxy was a superlatively elaborate and uniform message, having appropriated useful chunks of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism. Unquestioning assertion of the resulting construct was policed viciously by the inquisition from around 1184 and by military crusades for larger outbreaks of dissent, offering crusaders complete immunity, forgiveness of sins, and all the loot they could manage. The ongoing use of Latin as the language of Church institutions, including universities, is an indication of the small “r” romanticism at the foundation of that hive mind. As far as the Vatican was concerned, Christendom was still the Roman Empire, with all the traditional authority of the Roman Imperium, carrying the weight of Rome’s entire historical imprint on the world: material, military, intellectual, institutional, legal, and spiritual. Prior to Christendom, the Roman Empire was arguably the most effective hive mind in all of human experience, for centuries imposing a heavily armed Roman peace over the Mediterranean world system. The medieval Roman Church did its best to expand the ancient Imperial legacy. A case could be made that it was the grotesque scope and intensity of Christendom’s hive mind that gave Europe its aggressive edge in subsequent encounters with other world cultures.

In the transfiguration from Medieval Christendom to modernity, the centralization of social supervision characteristic of the theocratic hive mind was not demolished but merely fragmented into a number of less all-embracing hierarchies, which learned to cooperate and compliment one another. There is a fundamental identity between old-time religious hive mind construction and the mind control managed by supervising institutions in contemporary societies. Spooks continue to be useful in the form of awesome personified abstractions commanding patriotism and fear such as the U.S.A., the British Crown and Commonwealth, China, the Dear Leader, Capitalism, Islam, IBM, Microsoft, or even the Free World. Modern societies are largely a landscape of mountainous commercial organizations producing profits for investors. Every corporation is a mini-Vatican with its own brand-myth and corporate culture which includes company-spirit and a star-system of corporate celebrities. Every employer expecting brand loyalty and competitive spirit is creating a hive that is structured as a cell within the superstructure of city, nation state, and international capitalism. Indeed, every high school is a training mini-Vatican with its religion of school spirit and sport team troops, its heroes and enemies; patterns downloaded from university collegiate culture. We are trained to hive mind from an early age.

As presented in part 1, the context of these observations is this: There are some clearly positive consequences to predictability and stability in cooperative effort. The question is, are there also negative consequences to this way of creating stability, and is it possible to do anything about them if there are? How might it even be possible to re-orient outside the influence of an ambient hive mind?

… continues.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Canadian Values

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative

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Posting 105

Tags: politics, history, Greco-European philosophy, spirituality, Enlightenment, literacy, Christendom, Islam, monotheism, property rights, conservatism

There certainly was a long history of conflict and animosity between European Christendom and the ‘empire’ of Islam. That history of conflict included the Christian crusades beginning in the eleventh century, as well as both the Islamic Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the “reconquest” of Spain by Christian armies in the fifteenth century. Christendom’s fear of being encircled by Islam at that time inspired its push westward across the Atlantic, and so in part, inspired its subsequent global imperialism. However, since then, an historical singularity has occurred, and almost incredibly, the western cultural system has moved beyond its Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, so that the twenty-first century situation is nothing like a replay of the pre-modern “clash of civilizations”.

It is simply not true, for example, that gender equality is a Judeo-Christian value. Neither Jewish nor Christian culture treats women as equal to men, and that is a glaring dystopian feature of the patriarchal legacy of father-god monotheism. Democracy isn’t a Judeo-Christian idea either, but rather an idea from ancient Greece, long before the Christian era and independent of ancient Judaic influence. The Greek idea of democracy was associated with a concept of political equality with strict limitations but with potential for expansion. That potential had to wait a long time as a weak minority report within Christendom, in remnants of a Stoic, humanist influence, sometimes buried in monastic libraries. It was given some significant boosts in a number of subsequent European cultural developments: the movement for universal literacy in vernacular languages from around the time of Wycliffe (1380’s), violently resisted by the Church; again, in the context of the Renaissance fascination with ancient Greco-Roman paganism came the launch of the printing press in the fifteenth century; and once again in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on mass literacy, and the subsequent development of the Republic of Letters outside the reach of institutions. It was dissident philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment who built on all that deep groundwork and used philosophical ideas of innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy to launch a world-changing critique of their Christian society, until then dominated by dynastic monarchies in alliance with hierarchies of Christian clergy and military aristocracy already well along in looting the world in their brutal imperialism. So, the Enlightenment did not appear out of nothing, like a bolt from the blue, but was another step in an enduring dance entangling cultural legacies with the emerging experience of new generations of humans. The values of modern urban democracies (often still aspirational) should be described as radical Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian values. The Enlightenment assertion of equality, based on the universal dignity merited by inherent rationality (related to linguistic competence and literacy), was in dramatic opposition to the prevailing Christian norms based on the dark myth of inherent evil, original sin. Given this history, the cultural conflict we are living through now features remnants of the monotheist religions of the Middle East, all adorations of patriarchal inequality, on one side, against more recent developments of an individualistic humanism from ancient Greek philosophy on the other. This isn’t just a clash between Greco-Roman vs Judaic cultural legacies. This goes deeper. The ancient Greek rationalist philosophers found the portal beyond culture into elemental spirituality, which turned out to be individual as defined by the individual human body, so these different ideas cannot dovetail into a symbiotic coexistence. They are fundamentally incompatible and opposed to one another, founding the unbridgeable cultural divide between conservative and progressive political forces.

Conservatism and Property

Proponents of political conservatism, heirs of patriarchal monotheism, claim to champion individualism, but in conservative ideology, property rights take the place of individual human rights. Ownership of property, frequently including people made into property by being entirely deprived of rights, was the crucial marker of value and status in the hierarchical social order of pre-Enlightenment Christendom. Individuals with the most property have the most rights in the patriarchal worldview, and distribution of the world’s property was mostly completed long ago, establishing “facts on the ground” that conservatives strive to preserve. Property possession brings with it not only an obsession with guns and protection by violence, but also the “us against them” package of emotional triggers. The conservative claim to individualism comes down to placing supreme value on ownership of property, which has an inherent male bias from the long history of patriarchal dominance. Property rights are so dominant in conservative ideology that the holding of legal title to property by corporations confers on them the status of individual persons. This whole property rights focus creates an entirely bogus individualism because holding possession of property is absolutely dependant on a vast organizational support of laws, courts, lawyers, and weaponized enforcement. Conservatism is mainly about preventing or at least minimizing redistribution of property (wealth) by sovereign institutions. Sovereign institutions are otherwise very dear to the hearts of property hoarders because such institutions have the armed power to protect and defend property possession. However, there is a vulnerability in that sovereign power because if it falls under certain influences and ideas of justice, it also has the innate potential to enforce the redistribution of property. When sovereign governments come under the influence of people and ideologies in favour of material equality, then the forces of conservatism push for the limitation of sovereign power.

Andrew Coyne, for example (in the National Post, November 6, 2015), has claimed that the essence of conservatism is the limitation of power, but such a claim is true only in the context of cultural pressures for enhancing material equality. The reality is that property rights are so central to conservatism that on that view the institutions of sovereignty must be restrained when exposed to democracy, because broadly based electorates might not be unreservedly dedicated to protecting property rights. In this context, the conservative rhetoric of limiting the power of elites is also misleading. Conservatives have no problems with lethal military elites (special forces), with sporting elites glorifying masculinity, investor elites symbolizing success, religious elites policing conformity, or elites of heroic patriots as universal role models. The rhetoric against “elites” is mainly resistance to the rationally based individualism accomplished by education, and as such a form of nostalgia for the pre-Enlightenment world ruled by religious supervision, fervent nationalism, and patriarchal family culture. The adulation of pretty much all elites is core conservatism, called “celebrating excellence” or “appreciating exceptional success”. It is practically the state religion of the U.S.A., although actualized in such a way as not to disrupt the traditional hierarchy of wealth and power. Conservative adulation of excellence and exceptional success excludes only those founded on advanced literacy and education, and that is a crucial lens for seeing into the heart of conservatism. Intellectual achievement is the portal to the spirituality beneath Enlightenment individualism, emphasizing spiritual qualities and competencies inherent in every individual, independent of possession of trophy properties, and as such tending toward a universal sociability in conflict with the “us against them” essentials of conservatism.

The current mass displacements of people from wars visited upon mainly Muslim countries by the Euro-American military/ political system is providing a pretext for anti-Enlightenment movements in the west to launch campaigns invoking the pre-modern “clash of civilizations” based on false claims that western culture is still Judeo-Christian and as such threatened by Muslim migration. This historical falsehood is presumably intended to resuscitate the appearance of relevance in outmoded Judeo-Christian beliefs, and inspire a resurgence of loyalty to the Christian legacy of authoritarian patriarchal society, fervent patriotism as a surrogate religion, communal adulation of warlike masculine virtues such as strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action, restoring females as property, and reverting to attitudes that are anti-abortion and anti-gay. Such is conservatism. However, in the modern urban community such values are all widely and deeply contested by the legacies of Greek and European philosophical Enlightenment. The philosophic revolution, the rising prestige and urban spread of the kind of secular spiritual autonomy modelled in ancient philosophical thinking, is still advancing. Although the commanding heights, the institutions which structure the society, are all bastions of patriarchal culture, and we still live within that nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. Very slowly the historical singularity of Enlightenment individualism, and the kind of freedom and equality it carries, is dissolving the cultures inclined to be anti-Enlightenment. There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to dissolve the legacy cultures of any immigrant proponents of patriarchy. An irony of the current anti-Muslim campaign by conservative groups is that they share many core values with this culture they purport to oppose, because both are remnants of the patriarchal monotheist religions of the Middle East. Conservative groups are despising their own mirror image.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.