Gab@StFerdinandIII - Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion....a nice variety for the human-hater, amoral, anti-rationalist to choose from. It is so much fun mocking them isn't it ?
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
Kenneth B. McIntyre is a professor of political and social sciences at Sam Houston University and modern philosopher. His most celebrated work was ‘After Virtue’, a critique of the immoral chaos sweeping the Western world. He does not base his belief system necessarily on Christian ideals, but more prosaically on the incoherence and abstract vulgarity of ‘Enlightenment’ ‘rationalism’ which has led to social and moral convulsions in every state in the Western world.
K. McIntyre’s ire toward ‘rationalism’, is not necessarily based on the falsities and corruption of science or ‘scientism’, though he has little patience for the debasement of real scientific inquiry by money, fraud and philosophical statements untethered to experimental or observational reality. McIntyre is critical of ‘rationalism’ for the incoherence of its underlying philosophy and morality, and its impact on modern society’s conceptions of the same.
In McIntyre’s view, morality, an ethical source of agreement and boundaries of activity, is now fragmented and destroyed. Abortion, ‘Just Wars’, capital punishment, open borders, climate ‘crises’, trans-genderism, are some examples of what he means. The destruction of cultural morality, or an agreed upon set of doctrines leads to:
“…disagreements (which) are expressed in their interminable character…such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one…against another.”
The presuppositions of those who uphold one view, versus the ‘other side’ is so different and the gaps so great, that no ethical compromise can be reached. Starting points, details and end objectives are often-times not even understood. Different groups can include those who believe in natural law rights and the rationality of humans, juxtaposed against those who see humans as irrational, or with a corrupted reason, situated in a natural world without natural law, or human-centred rights. For McIntyre, this means that for most people the starting point of their ‘morality’ can be quite arbitrary, even unknown, and their ‘ethical belief’ is more likely to be that of self-interest or a desire, not premised on a defendable philosophical premise, he terms this the ‘emotivist’ position. The ‘emotivist’ modern belief is simply an ‘expression of preference’, though the holder believes usually quite passionately, that they hold a moral absolute and doctrine of righteousness.
For McIntyre the decadence of modern moral philosophy is that the conception of the use of moral language, diverges significantly from the conceptual meaning of moral language. This leads to a desiccated moral vocabulary which no longer objectively describes the moral world we live in. Standardised morality ceases to exist and is replaced by desires or preferences parading as moral absolutes.
The pathos of modern thought and philosophy can be trace to the ‘diremption’ of 400 years ago, when philosophy, according to McIntyre and many other historians, took a new and radically different route in trying to explain the world around us, in both natural sciences and theological morality. This diremption reached a crescendo during the ‘Enlightenment’ leading to moral confusion and the modern pathologies that now afflict Western civilisation.
McIntyre writes that highly functional conceptions about human nature and flourishing were replaced with abstract, vague, universalisms, about behaviour, nature and science. This splits the unity of the Western church into two parts; and elevated ‘reason’ to the ex-cathedra position of dominance. However, the failure of the ‘Enlightenment’ to build a morality based on tradition, history, and virtues has now led inevitably, to the current malaise in Western society, when desires are now ‘moralities’.
For McIntyre, the failure of the Enlightenment project in producing a coherent morality is reflected in Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard. For Hume morality is simply a set of rules based on desires, happiness, the ‘greatest good’, or not doing ‘harm’ to others. None of these terms are properly defined nor is there any attempt to assess how they are derived. Morality for Kant is simply a set of rules based on ‘reason’ and reason alone according to the general welfare, and universal principles discovered by reason. This is abstract and meaningless, with the obvious objection that universal reason is unknown and does not in itself exist. For Kierkegaard, the choice to lead a moral or unethical life is based at least in part on irrational emotions and beliefs. This creates a contingent morality, localised, specific, individual, directly opposing the vague universalism of Kant. For McIntyre none of these claims is sensible and have led to moral decay and fracture.
For McIntyre morality is based on the neo-Aristotelian and Catholic idea of participation in the wide range of institutions humans have built up over time. Morality and moral philosophy are not just a set of rules, or some vague incantation of universal reason. They are premised on participating in the practices of life, including church, sports, school, charity, farming, work, building, music, art and all the activities that crowd a person’s existence. In these endeavours one learns virtue (as opposed to quite useless and transient ‘values’) and internal goods or the build of good moral character.
McIntyre’s common social practices can only be shared and promulgated from within a common cultural and historical framework. In the modern world today, our elites, the endless array of government agencies and trans-national organisations, the deconstruction of Christianity and faith; the elevation of scientism premised on corruption and fraud; the ending of moral absolutes and certainties, and the debasement of Western culture through open-borders, pornography and immorality in the guise of gender confusion and child-abuse, have led to the inevitable end point of the ‘Enlightenment’ which is social chaos.
This work by Edmund Burke (1729-1797) gives important insights into the man and his life-long dedication to the principles of freedom, faith and culture. Written as a young man around the age of 24, with no obvious occupation or future, it is an ironic riposte to Lord Bolingbroke the leader of the Tory party during the middle third of 18th century, who opposed the Whigs and the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole and his political machinery of corruption and graft. This work rejects the anti-traditionalist, anti-Christian, small empire and limited view of life espoused by Bolingbroke.
In this, his first book, Burke esteems and supports true religious faith, institutions built on representation, heritage, the culture of medieval England and Europe, and highlights the limitations and unreason of the ‘Age of Reason’, rightly believing that the immaterial, the emotional, the habitual are the real agents which shape civilised life. Burke writes from the perspective of Bolingbroke using satire (much in vogue in the 18th century) and irony to dispel Bolingbroke’s own belief system. Many readers then and now do not understand the irony and wit of the work, wrongly believing that Burke is the narrator. As Burke writes in his preface in 1776, “Do they imagine they shall increase our piety, and our reliance on God, by exploding his providence, and insisting that he is neither just nor good?”
Bolingbroke, Jefferson, Paine and the ‘Enlightenment’ viewed themselves as Gods and acted accordingly.
From the book some witticisms and ironic aspersions from Burke who takes the Age of ‘Reason’ and its worship of ‘natural reason’, ‘natural theology’ and ‘natural goodness’ to task are below. He does this by impugning ancient and modern states, their governments, their constitutions, by pointing out the wars, the dead, the suffering, the slavery of every form of government, including despotism, aristocratic rule and ‘democracy’. Bolingbroke and his ilk wanted a ‘clean break’ with the past, viewing any social construction pre-1650 as ‘dark’. Burke with his sardonic, ironic wit, purports to support this view by recounting the horrors of government throughout the ages and calls for the deconstruction of ‘artificial religion’, ‘artificial reason’ and ‘artificial governance’, of the ignorant, ill-formed civilisations of the past. The only ‘rational’ governance was that of ‘reason’, never defined, but taken by the ‘Enlightenment’ to mean ‘natural reason’ or intelligence possessed by all humans.
God is confused:
(Written with irony) He (the Creator) has mixed in his cups a number of natural evils…(religion) It finds out imaginary beings prescribing imaginary terrors to support a belief in the beings, and an obedience to the laws.
The miseries derived to mankind from superstition under the name of religion, and of ecclesiastical tyranny under the name of church governments, have been clearly and usefully exposed.
Virtue is unnatural, necessitating a totalitarian state:
A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine, that war was the state of nature, and truly, if a man judged of the individuals of our race by their conduct…he might imagine that every sort of virtue was unnatural and foreign to the mind of man.
Ancient civilisations were uncivilised:
The Babylonian, Assyrian, Median and Persian monarchies must have poured out seas of blood in their formation, and in their destruction….(Persia) in its wars against the Greeks and Scythians, threw away at least four millions of its subjects..
Greeks….we cannot judge that their intestine divisions, and their foreign wars, consumed less than three millions of their inhabitants…
Constitutions lead to war and destruction:
From the earliest dawnings policy to this day, the invention of men has been sharpening and improving the mystery of murder…
These evils are not accidental. Whoever will take the pains to consider the nature of society will find that they result directly from its constitution.
….an aristocracy, and a despotism, differ but in name; and that a people who are in general excluded from any share of the legislative, are, to all intents and purposes, as much slaves…
(Athens) was the city which banished Themistocles, starved Aristides, forced into exile Militiades, drove out Anaxagora, and poisoned Socrates….
(In Rome), the same confusion, the same factions, which subsisted at Athens, the same tumults, the same revolutions, and, in fine, the same slavery….
In Athens there were usually from ten to thirty thousand freemen; this was the utmost. But the slaves usually amounted to four hundred thousand, and sometimes to a great deal more.
Natural religion and natural reason need to be erected:
I have defended natural religion against a confederacy of atheists and divines. I now plead for natural society against politicians, and for natural reason against all three.
Near the end of his work, Burke offers a counter-point to Bolingbroke, “But a worse and more perplexing difficulty arises how to be defended against the governors?” A very good question indeed. In tearing down heritage and tradition, and erecting the Church and Society of ‘Reason’ what set of governance, constitutions, institutions, laws and morality will improve society bereft of past learning and tradition? Wouldn’t men like Bolingbroke simply become another Walpole or Robespierre? How then to view the past with its successes and failures, with its beauty and deformity, with its evil and goodness, with its progress and regressions?
Burke saw through the charade of the Age of ‘Reason’ with its demands to burn the past and create a new rational-Utopia. Such ideals led of course to the carnage of the French and Russian revolutions and the cultural morass, decay and totalitarianism we see in our own modern world right now.
Over 10 years ago Melanie Philips wrote a relevant tract, 'The World Turned Upside Down'. In the age of Corona, vaccinations are ‘safe and effective’, ‘Climate change’ (yes the 4 seasons do exist), abiogenesis, materialism, Muhammandanism-is-peace, open borders, sexual deviance and mental illness, we indeed live in clown-world, an upside demolition of civilisation and proper society. Oddly Phillips is a cult member of Corona unable to apply her own insights into media propaganda, political criminality or the transnational agenda of a Great Reset or New World Order, run by the Americans and a One World Governance. ‘Scientism’ and dialecticism, including medical Nazism has always been an excuse to reorganise society.
Yet her book still stands. Phillips rightly demolishes the bastard ideologies which were birthed out of the poorly named 'Enlightenment'. Cults, cults everywhere. All supported by really smart people and progressives. One thing to admire about Melanie Phillips is her usually consistent, precise and apposite non Politically-Correct writing. She eschews PC Fascism for reality, trading in cults for rationality, and supine prostration for independence and enquiry. She is quite similar to Orianna Fallaci, the former lioness of Italian truth-telling who set the record straight in many books about what Islam truly represents. It is no exaggeration to state that from Hume and Rousseau, through Hegel and Darwin, we come to Eco-Fascism, the multi-cult cult, and irrational ideas about life, humans and society [see here for a review of her book and her detailed destruction of the Eco-Fascist cult].
The Enlightenment of course was not monolithic. There are various strains and national variances during the 17th and 18th centuries at work – the French, Scottish and English being the most notable and all focused on different aspects of 'liberating' man and installing reason. Even though many good concepts flowed out of the Enlightenment it was at its core a movement which was obsessed with demonizing medieval Christianity and divorcing man from metaphysics. That was the thrust of the effort. Most if not all of the Enlightenment 'thinkers' felt that reason was the new religion, and that any form of faith in a higher divine essence, or in the mysteries of life or the soul, had to be expunged. This is simply neo-paganism, wrapped up in a theological certitude that science can explain everything – when we all know that it can't. As Phillips states:
“What Darwinism and environmentalism also derive from the vision laid down by Comte and Bacon, who reduced everything to a materialist worldview, is their ruthless subordination of evidence to a prior unchallengeable idea. All are ideologies, and as such they block the path to true enlightenment. Environmentalism uses science to betray science....Darwinism, meanwhile, is not so much science as materialism applied to biology....As Karl Popper has argued, Marxist theory of history and Freudian psychoanalysis are not science at all but pseudoscience....People who refused to see these verifications were unbelievers.”
The Enlightenment was a reductionist set of theories centred around natural materialism, or the physical world of the 5 senses. There is much that is good about such a theory. But not everything in life is either materialist or reductionist. Science cannot explain everything. Huge gaps exist in the theology of Darwinism. The origins of life and of the universe cannot be explained by scientists. The first causations of what constitutes our natural 'laws' have not been discerned nor proven by the scientific method. The belief that only rationality is important, and that only reason can exist to explain our world and thus be used to organize our society is rather ironically, completely irrational and even mystical. It is thus more of an act of faith to believe the 'Big Bang' theory, than it is that a divine essence originated both the universe and life – the great clockmaker to paraphrase Newton. As Phillips points out:
“The mathematician David Berlinski has written...that physicists were so alarmed by the theological implications of the Big Bang that they immediately tried to block off this dangerous line of thought altogether by suggesting that although the universe had a beginning, there was no beginner...'Quantum cosmology is a branch of mathematical metaphysics. It provides no cause for the emergence of the universe and so does not answer the first cosmological question, and it offers no reason for the existence of the universe, and so does not address the second.'”
Cause and effect. If you don't recognise both you don't have science but mysticism. Islam is an intellectual and social disaster precisely because it denies free will, enquiry and the linkages of cause and effect. Everything is done because Allah wills it. You have no impact on cosmic, natural, or social order. Only Allah does. This denial of rationality is also rampant in modern 'progressive' theologies such as atheism which is itself a religious order, Corona and Vaccinations, Eco-Fascism, Marxism and Statism. All of these deny rationality, free will and robust methods of debate and enquiry.
“Atheism, by contrast, holds that the world comes from a random and therefore irrational source, so that reason is an accidental by product....To a scientific naturalist by contrast, the cosmos can be understood by a rational mind only if it was not created by a rational mind.”
Materialism must be reductionist. It must deflate all ideas down to a simple, dialectical paradigm. It must develop a theory which excludes all else. In doing this it must by nature be intolerant and despotic. Thus, Darwinism must of course completely exclude a primary cause for the effect and creation of life, and cover the glaring holes in evolutionary theory with a belief that eventually science will find an answer, or that the chance combination of molecules over millions of years had to create life without offering any empirical or experiential proof. Likewise Eco-Marxist reductionism focuses on one natural chemical Co2, and completely ignores the 1 million other variables of climate generation. Co2 is coincidentally linked to modernization and Western man; and in order to remake society in a neo-pagan guise, the Warmists demand a reduction of the modern world, and the imposition of an irrational cult – headed by an elite – in order to appease the materialist and quite impersonal force of Mother Earth. This is quite similar to Islam which elevates the unknowable power of Allah as the only cause and effect of existence. The Eco Fascists have simply substituted Gaia for Allah.
As Phillips laments, the world is decidedly turned upside down. Atheistic irrationality is now classified as secular reason and progression. Divorcing Church from the State is an important exercise in creating a modern, innovative and rational society. But the Enlightenment did not divorce the Church from the State. It simply replaced the Catholic Church with the cult of dialectical materialism. The effects have been profound.
Secular atheism does not lead to reason. It promotes the opposite. Even scientists, who see first-hand that rational logic cannot explain everything, are turning to theological explanations:
“These discoveries have led an increasing number of scientists and other thinkers to believe that matter could have arisen only through a governing intelligence. Sir Roger Penrose, professor of mathematics at Oxford, says that the balance of nature's laws is so perfect and so unlikely to have occurred by chance that an intelligent Creator must have chosen them.”
We can have intelligent debate on the interstition between science and theological cosmology. Life, the beginning of time, human creation, the 'perfect balance' of nature's laws should be open to both theological and scientific elaborations. What the Enlightenment and its offspring of reductionist materialism have promoted however, is the supremacist role of 'reason' and 'science' over all else. But as Phillips so eloquently writes, both of these concepts are manipulated, abused, and tortured to give ideologies, politicians and cults the 'scientific' validity they so ardently crave.
As Phillips convincingly details, reason was developed in the West as a by-product of Judeo-Christianity premised in part on elements of Greek rationalism. When you surgically remove the main animating force for reason in our world – namely J-C culture – you are in effect neutering reason and elevating neo-pagan atheism as the cult which is now merged with the state. Secular progressivism is neither intelligent, coherent or even moral. Phillips' work is an excellent compendium of why destroying the basis of our civilization has turned our world 'upside down'.