One thing that renders it heretical is that it can only be imposed by force, because ultimately it is force. Christianity has the force of truth, whereas leftism must always force its truth, beginning with the young and immature. We certainly teach our son about the left, but I would never force it (or any other ideology) on him. In other words, we homeschool him.
The left is always at war with freedom and truth (each being unthinkable in the absence of the other) because it is at war with transcendence. When this war goes from symbolic to literal -- as we are seeing in our streets -- this is fascism (now unironically referred to as antifascism).
For fascism is the violent resistance to transcendence. For example, to recognize the transcendent greatness of a Washington or Lincoln, let alone Jesus and Mary, is to understand the reasons for the left's antipathy toward their symbolic representations. In the words of the Aphorist, The progressive travels around among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: with hammer in hand. On the other hand -- the hammerless one -- symbols of immanent terror such as Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Che won't be touched.
In an essay called The Gospel and Culture, Voegelin asks,
Why could the gospel be victorious in the Hellenistic-Roman environment of its origin? Why did it attract an intellectual elite who restated the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy and, by this procedure, created a Christian doctrine? Why could this doctrine become become the state religion of the Roman Empire?How could the church, having gone through this process of acculturation, survive the Roman Empire and become the chrysalis, as Toynbee called it, of Western civilization? -- And what has blighted this triumphant cultural force, so that today the churches are on the defensive against the dominant intellectual movements of the time... ?
That's a lot of questions, and the questions could scarcely be deeper, because they go to the very foundations of everything and everyone. Moreover, we still live in the light of the reality that engenders these questions. And as we know, there is far more Light in a good question than a bad answer.
As to the latter, much of the contemporary crisis of culture consists of bad answers to poorly formulated questions. Nevertheless, the questions arise out of Christian civilization and could only arise out of Christian civilization.
(BTW, in order to comprehend the Christian west, we must properly speak of the Judeo-Christian stream that begins with Abraham's Yes to God; prior to this -- or between Abraham and Genesis -- is a general typological/mythopoetic sketch that applies to mankind as such, or to HCE [Here Comes Everybody].)
After all, only a Christian can logically affirm that black lives matter, because saying so is rooted in the deeper principle that all lives matter. And all lives matter because human beings are uniquely individual persons created in the image of God.
To insist that black lives matter merely because they are black is to sacrifice a universal principle to a concrete and contingent attribute. There's a name for the ideology that privileges the particularity of race over universal principle: Nazism.
Unlike in the Christian west, there is no principle in Chinese Marxism -- or any other form of Marxism -- affirming the inviolable dignity of Uighurs, let alone the Christians whom they presumably marytred just yesterday because they do so pretty much everyday.
Nor in Islam is there anything about Jews and Christians -- the kaffir -- being equal to the ummah. Rather, these vertical distinctions of human beings are built into their heretical teaching. I myself live in California, where conservatives are routinely persecuted and silenced for their wrongthink by the Caliban. I can't blame them, given their twisted assumptions and post-Christian superstitions: garbage in, Gavin out.
Ramblin' again, and now we're out of transcendent timelessness. To be continued for sure...
8 comments:
Ideologies are always absolute truths for the ideological.
Meanwhile, truth is always open to being not-truth.
Correct you are.
Suffice it to say that there are plenty of excellent books on the subject, and that leftism is just another boring and stupid Christian heresy.
Reading leftists talk about White Fragility, the woke leftist bible, the comparisons are obvious: "whiteness" as original sin, the insistence that people confess their sins of white racism, the expectation that something must be sacrificed in order to expiate those sins, and yet at the same time there is no salvation from the taint of whiteness. It's a religion stripped of mercy, justice, love or hope, which asks everything of its adherents and gives them nothing but a brief feeling of superiority that at least one isn't like those other whites.
Yup. No God but numberless demons.
Note also that the whole madness is mainly driven by sick white liberals, not blacks. Blacks are merely a psychic placeholder for the purification rituals of affluent white leftists.
And since it doesn't work, it becomes a compulsion, the purpose of a compulsion being to discharge anxiety.
Lileks has a good rant today about the moron determined to silence classical music:
Maybe it's just sloppy writing. Hell, I know it's sloppy writing. All these dreary banal orthodoxical substitutions for insight. But: if he said "It serves the specious belief that whiteness has a culture that is superior to all others," you would have one point. He makes two: whiteness does not have a culture, and to make it even worse, the whitenes brigage thinks the culture they do not have is superior.
One of the purposes of ideology is to provide morons with opinions. It's working.
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